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In addition to the online catalog, Virgo, the Library offers subject guides as well as in-person help. Our list of databases and journal finder tools can also help you find specific articles, datasets, and more.
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Need to scan a document or simply find a place to study? The Library offers services and consultations for research projects of all kinds, and our thirteen libraries offer a variety of spaces for solitary or group work.
Explore All Services →Exhibitions
The Library's new exhibitions interface features dozens of exhibitions from the mid 1990s to the present. Check back as new exhibitions are added and past exhibitions are updated and republished.
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Spotlight: My Own Master: Resistance to American Slavery
This exhibition explores how enslaved African Americans, helped by their free and freed counterparts, challenged slavery’s governance over their bodies and lives. Some such efforts are widely known, such as ingenious escapes and wide-scale insurrections. Other, more subtle forms of revolt are less familiar, such as cases of free blacks emancipating other blacks, or examples of a slave deftly manipulating her owners’ actions in written correspondence. Published memoirs and manifestoes by free Blacks and escaped slaves alike were themselves wielded as powerful rhetorical weapons in the fight for freedom.
Drawing from the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library’s rich holdings, this exhibition complements our other current exhibition, “Who shall tell the story?: Voices of Civil War Virginia,” extending the story of the defeat of slavery backwards several decades and foregrounding the transformative actions of enslaved individuals and communities.

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