Enjoy free admission every day. Visit the museum and shop or conduct research at the Williams Research Center.
Immerse yourself in America’s fight for independence in this new exhibition experience designed and produced by French technology firm Histovery. On view until January 17, 2027.
On Friday, May 8, bring your dancing shoes and enjoy classic tunes from the Great American Songbook, including hits by Louis Prima, in HNOC’s historic courtyard at 520 Royal Street.
Dive into the Collection’s holdings with image-rich previews of treasures from New Orleans history.
June 8–12, Curator Camp is a weeklong summer program for teens who get excited by history, artifacts, and storytelling! Daily hands-on workshops and experiences introduce skills that bring history and museums to life.
Captivating true stories that surprise and inspire, written and published by HNOC staff and special guest authors.
On October 29, join us in celebrating six decades of preserving, collecting, and making history. Save the date for music, memories, and more at what is sure to be a fantastic night out in the French Quarter.
Freedom arrived in fits and starts for African Americans once held as human chattel. Abraham Lincoln's 1863 Emancipation Proclamation freed only those slaves residing in the Confederate States. Those held in bondage in states loyal to the Union, including Maryland, Kentucky, Delaware, and Missouri, remained in bondage. And since the Confederacy was at war with the very powers that had issued the Emancipation Proclamation, its effect on the vast majority of slaves, who did not or could not seek shelter behind Union lines, was negligible.
“It seem like it tuck a long time fer freedom to come. Everything just kept on like it was. We heard that lots of slaves was getting land and some mules to set up fer theirselves; I never knowed any what got land or mules nor nothing.”
Mittie Freeman, from Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936–1938
The Thirteenth Amendment, passed on January 31, 1865 (two months prior to Lee's surrender), and ratified on December 6 of the same year, officially abolished slavery throughout the United States. But for many people residing in the South, labor conditions remained remarkably similar to those under slavery. Gone, however, was the system that allowed one group of people to buy and sell another. With the end of the slavery, fathers could no longer be sold away from their children, husbands from their wives, individuals from their communities. For many men, women, and children, freedom brought hope that families torn apart by the slave trade might be reconstituted, that kinfolk and friends might be reunited.
Find out how former slaves found friends and family after the Thirteenth Amendment was passed.
The Lost Friends Database provides access to 2,450 advertisements that appeared in the Southwestern Christian Advocate between November 1879 and November 1896. Visit the site to read more ads.
Messages from the past dispel the benevolent slaveholder myth.
A new novel and a unique genealogical project are bringing fresh attention to the countless stories of separation and struggle in the tragedy of slavery.
A groundbreaking examination of America's perpetuation of the slave trade and New Orleans’s role as a hub of slave trading.
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