Digitized Book of the Week

http://hdl.handle.net/10111/UIUCOCA:autobiographyoff00ward
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Samuel Ringgold Ward (1817-1866) was a journalist, abolitionist, lecturer, and contemporary of Frederick Douglass. Born the son of American slaves who escaped to New Jersey in 1820 when he was three years old, Ward and his family settled soon thereafter in New York City where Ward was educated at The African Free School, an institution founded by the New York Manumission Society in1787 to provide education to children of slaves and freemen. In 1839, he joined the American Anti-Slavery Society and soon thereafter the new Anti-Slavery Society of Canada. In April 1853 the Canadian society sent Ward to England to seek funds to help the fugitive slaves then pouring into western Canada. He wrote his Autobiography of a Fugitive Negro while living in England. (Dictionary of Canadian Biography).

http://www.archive.org/details/trumpetoffreedom00oliv
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In anticipation of the 2009 bicentennial celebration of Abraham Lincoln's birth, we recently digitized a small collection of Civil War era sheet music from the University of Illinois Music Library. View the entire collection here.