RECOMMENDED: Letters from Freedom: New Digital Resource

Last year, the American Antiquarian Society (AAS) received a grant to digitize “655 pages of letters, notebooks, and photographs created by formerly enslaved people.” As part of that initiative, AAS created a new digital resource, “Letters from Freedom,” which features digitized and transcribed letters written between 1863 and 1870 by formerly enslaved students in the American South. According to a post on the American Antiquarian Society’s blog, Past is Present, the central collection is the Chase Family Papers, which focuses on a Massachusetts Quaker family and includes letters from students taught by Lucy and Sarah Chase in freedmen’s schools throughout the South. Each digitized letter in the collection is accompanied by full transcriptions and background contextual information about the letter writer. Materials written by formerly enslaved people from this era are rare, making this collection a valuable primary source for Black history and Reconstruction-era studies.