Thank you to our community for contributing to the Douglass Day project! Over 90 faculty, staff, and students showed up to transcribe Frederick Douglass’ correspondence. Together, with other participating organizations around the world, we transcribed over 6,500 full documents! You can read about the event on the Connecticut College website.
The “Yours Truly, Frederick Douglass” transcription campaign through the Library of Congress will remain open and publicly accessible until every letter has been transcribed and approved. The Frederick Douglass Papers Project, which will ultimately combine our transcription efforts and the Papers published by Yale University Press, is an effort to “make the surviving works by this African American figure accessible to a broad audience, much as similar projects have done for the papers of notable white historical and literary figures.” Although still very much a work in progress, The Frederick Douglass Papers project can be found and searched online.
In terms of contextualizing, understanding, accessing, and interpreting Douglass’ life and work, our library provides a bounty of useful materials, including:
- Nearly 1,000 books in print, including all of the major biographies by Charles W. Chesnutt (1899), Booker T. Washington (1906), Benjamin Quarles (1948), Dickson J. Preston (1980), William McFeely (1990), D. H. Dilbeck (2018), and David W. Blight (2018). Also in print are the Frederick Douglass Papers published by Yale University Press. These contain fascinating and granular information about Douglass’ speaking tours, newspapers, and how his works are being identified and collected. The most concise and authoritative biographies are contained in American National Biography (vol. 6, pp. 816-819) and African American National Biography (vol. 3, pp. 45-49).
- More than 1,500 ebooks that offer a similarly robust record of Douglass’ life and times, including critical collections of his speeches and documentation of his extensive travels, not to mention a record of his role as an employee of the federal government.
- Other material types in the library collection include reference entries, newspaper articles, government publications, dissertations, peer-reviewed journal articles, children’s books, streaming audio and video, and special collections.
In addition, the New London Black Heritage Trail celebrates Frederick Douglass’ visit to and lectures in New London. Frederick Douglass’ newspapers are available through the Library of Congress, and his article about his visit to New London was printed in the May 26 issue of The North Star, 1848, on page 2 of the paper.