The Gail and Stephen Rudin Collection on Slavery in America
This collection includes historical documents that contain deeply disturbing racist imagery and/or painful descriptions of the institution of human chattel enslavement, primarily of Africans and African Americans, as it existed in the United States in the 18th and 19th centuries.
About this collection
The digital collection presents more than 500 documents, letters, and other items about the history of the sale, hire, purchase and debt payment of enslaved people in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America. The items in this online collection were selected from the Gail ’56 and Stephen Rudin Collection on Slavery in America, which includes documents such as estate appraisals, wills, manumissions [deeds of freedom], taxation and insurance records, auction advertisements, engravings, and correspondence providing insight into the operations of the slave trade and the lives of Black Americans, both enslaved and free. The collection preserves important records on the institution of slavery in America from the eighteenth century through the Civil War and beyond.
Historical context
In 2002 Gail Gifford Rudin ’56 and her husband, collector Stephen Rudin, donated their collection on the history of American slavery to Cornell University Library’s Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections to augment Cornell’s deep collections on the Anti-Slavery movement. By building this collection, Mr. Rudin sought to document the structural systems by which slavery was intertwined in the common economic and social practices of everyday American life in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and with the goal of ensuring that this terrible and horrifying aspect of American history will be more fully revealed and understood.
Using the collection
The collection can be browsed in its entirety or searched by keywords such as by document type (e.g. "letter," "manumission," "engraving"), year, location (e.g. "New York", "Virginia") or general subject content. Questions about this digital collection or about access to the larger Rudin collection on Cornell’s campus can be sent to rareref@cornell.edu.
More information
- Collection steward
- Katherine Reagan, Ernest L. Stern '56 Curator of Rare Books & Manuscripts
- Metadata creation
- Jazz Burns, Visual Resources Metadata Librarian, adapting donor supplied data
- Funding
- Gail '56 and Stephen Rudin, 2016
- Credits
- This digital collection overview was prepared by Katherine Reagan, Ernest L. Stern '56 Curator of Rare Books & Manuscripts, July 2018; and last updated in 2024.
- Collection sources