Slavery, Memory, and Reconciliation at Lauinger Library

Colored Conventions Project

Between 1830 and 1900, free, freed, and self-emancipated Blacks met regularly in state and annual conventions to formulate strategies to achieve educational, legal, and labor justice. This digital collection brings together documents that reveal the Black political response to violent mobs, exclusion laws, civil rights laws, and the emergence of Jim Crow. The project headed by Dr. Gabrielle Foreman and Jim Casey is housed at the Center for Digital Projects at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries. They have also compiled a rich companion site that includes digital exhibits, teacher lesson plans, interpretive videos.

Enslaved: Peoples of the Historical Slave Trade

This site brings together datasets created to help organize and make sense of the disparate records of historical enslavement. The site provides search tools making it possible to find individuals across more than 600,000 (and growing) records. The data can be used for computational analysis, individual biographies, and community histories.

Freedom on the Move

A crowd-sourced digital collection that documents the movement of enslaved people seeking to emancipate themselves, this project has catalogued advertisements placed by slave owners seeking their human property and jailers trying to match the freedom seekers held by them with their owners. The database is searchable by place, names of enslavers, place, and date. The project is a joint effort of Cornell University, Cornell Institute for Social and Economic Research, Cornell University Library, the University of Alabama, the University of New Orleans, University of Kentucky, and Ohio State University. The University of North Carolina Greensboro contributed data from its “North Carolina Runaway Slave Advertisements Project.”

Last Seen: Finding Family after Slavery

A crowd-source site, “Last Seen” brings together digitized reproductions and transcripts of advertisements placed by formerly enslaved people in search of family members separated by the slave trade or dislocations caused by the Civil War. Placed in major newspapers between 1861-1900, these advertisements provide powerful evidence of enduring connection Black people felt to their separated family members. Organized by Dr. Judy Giesburg, Professor of History at Villanova, this project was also sponsored by the Mother Bethel AME Church.

Slave Societies Digital Archive

A digital collection that preserves and provides access to ecclesiastical and secular documents related to Africans and African-descended peoples in slave societies. Comprised of 700,000 images from more than 2,000 volumes dating from the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries, the SSDA provides transcripts and resources from the following locations: Benin, Colombia, Cuba, Florida, Brazil, Angola, Uruguay, and Mexico. Launched by Jane Landers, professor of History at Vanderbilt University, in 2005, the SSDA still accepts materials from contributing scholars and partners.

Slave Voyages 2.0

The Trans-Atlantic and Intra-American slave trade databases are the culmination of several decades of independent and collaborative research by scholars drawing upon data in libraries and archives around the Atlantic world. By bringing together information on each Atlantic slave voyage, it is possible to find information about each ship, the numbers of captives on each ship, and ports involved in the trade. In addition, the site also includes names of Africans derived from court records. The institutional sponsors of this project are the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship, University of California Irvine, University of California Santa Cruz, and Harvard University Hutchins Center.

Stolen Relations: Recovering Stories of Indigenous Enslavement in the Americas

A community-centered database project that seeks to illuminate and understand the enslavement of indigenous peoples by European colonial settlers between 1492 and 1900. Scholars estimate that between 2.5 and 5 million Native Americans were enslaved throughout the Americas. The project acknowledges the value of archival records, but seeks to overcome their biases by using oral histories and other sources provided by Native Americans. In partnership with thirteen regional tribes, nations, and communities, the project seeks to reconstruct social networks and create biographies. The focus of this project is currently New England, although the project intends to expand its scope to include the entire western hemisphere. The Center for Digital Scholarship and the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice of Brown University host this project.

Visualizing Emancipation

The first map to visualize the emancipation of four million slaves in the Civil War, this site enables scholars, students and the public to connect the experience of emancipation to local communities. “Visualizing Emancipation” maps the places where the U.S. government and military either protected slavery or enabled the escape of enslaved people and where "emancipation events” occurred. Based at the Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Richmond, this project is headed by Dr. Scott Nesbit, assistant professor of Digital Humanities at University of Georgia, and Dr. Edward Ayers, president emeritus of the University of Richmond.