Visual and textual materials from the Library Company's African American history collections, 16th-early 20th centuries.

African American History Albums
African Americana Civil War envelope collection [graphic].
Propaganda envelopes published by various publishers predominately utilizing racist caricatures and satires of African Americans in relation to Jefferson Davis, slavery, and secession to promote Union support of the Civil War. Satires utilize themes of inversion of social roles, retribution, and Northern superiority. Includes envelopes with same graphic and variant text or title; sexually explicit illustrations; images originally published in different media such as cartoons; and one Southern imprint promoting a united Confederacy as the safeguard of slavery. Some caricatures portray African Americans with exaggerated features and speaking in the vernacular., Includes images of enslaved people seeking freedom, as living "contraband of war," celebrating, or depicted as the shyster character Jim Crow; depictions of the "peculiar institution" of slavery showing a white enslaver in bed with an enslaved African American woman, her breast visible, and who is breastfeeding a white baby; secession equated to African American freedom seekers, economic destruction of the South, and the moral corruption of people emancipated from enslavement; Jefferson Davis caricatured as a traitor in execution and imprisonment scenes overseen by enslaved people; and views of enslaved people working on plantations with text declaring the end of "King Cotton." During the Civil War, the U.S. government declared African American freedom seekers as “contraband of war.”, Title supplied by cataloger., Date inferred from content., Some copyrighted by Magee and Harbach & Brother., Various publishers including: Philadelphia publishers John Magee, S.C. Upham, Harbarch & Bro., and King & Baird; New York publisher Charles Magnus; and Charleston, S.C. publisher G.W. Falen. Other publishers located in New York, Buffalo, Hartford, Cincinnati, and Lancaster, Pa., See Steven Berry's "When mail was armor: envelopes of the Great Rebellion," Southern culture (Fall 1998)., Probably originally part of a McAllister scrapbook of Civil War envelopes., RVCDC, Description revised 2021., Access points revised 2021., Part of digital collections catalog through a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services as administered by the Pennsylvania Department of Education through the Office of Commonwealth Libraries, and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Tom Corbett, Governor, 2013-2014.
African American History Photographs
African American History Political Cartoons
African American History Prints and Watercolors and Drawings
Fels African Americana Image Project
Collection created through a Samuel S. Fels Community Fellowship Grant in 2003 of over 300 book and periodical illustrations from the 16th - to 19th -centuries depicting all aspects of African American history and life. Images range in date from 1595 (Giralomo Benzoni, Americae Pars Quinta) to 1914 (John Wesley Cromwell, The Negro in American History) and include views from 17th through 19th centuries travel and history texts of the social life and agricultural, industrial, and craft work of African peoples; graphics from the antislavery movements in France, Great Britain, and the United States detailing the brutality of slave life and the violence of slave resistance; and a selection of racist caricatures and cartoons from the 19th century reflecting the growing denigration and dehumanizing of African Americans in the era’s American popular print culture.
Stevens-Cogdell/Sanders-Venning Collection
Album and loose prints compiled by a member of the African American Stevens-Cogdell/Sanders-Venning family containing portrait photographs of family and friends, ca. 1860-ca. 1925.