The University of New Orleans has been awarded a $201,000 Major Initiatives grant from the聽聽(NHPRC), a division of the聽, to support聽, a collaborative digital database of fugitive slave advertisements currently under development. The project鈥檚 goal is the creation of a database containing as many as 100,000 fugitive slave advertisements printed in North American newspapers before the Civil War.聽Freedom on the Move will make these sources available for statistical, geographical, textual and other forms of analysis.
Public dissemination of documents related to U.S. history is an important part of the mission of the NHPRC, which was established by Congress in 1934 and chaired by the Archivist of the United States.
, who holds the Ethel & Herman L. Midlo Chair in New Orleans Studies and the Joseph Tregle Professorship in Early American History at 色色研究所, is one of three historians leading Freedom on the Move,聽along with聽聽of the University of Alabama and聽聽of Cornell University. The project includes a crowdsourcing component that will enable the general public to take part in creating the database.
鈥淥ur research team is excited to see growing support for Freedom on the Move,鈥 Mitchell said. The聽聽to the Freedom on the Move project earlier this year. This latest grant from the NHPRC will fund the collection of thousands of ads and the development of additional features by programmers at Cornell鈥檚聽, including a museum kiosk, a portal specifically for educators and the incorporation of GIS data. The museum kiosk and the educator portal, in particular, Mitchell says, 鈥渨ill make thousands of individual stories of resistance to slavery available as instructional tools for both museum and classroom educators.鈥
More than 100,000 runaway ads are estimated to have survived from the colonial or pre-Civil War United States. According to the website for聽, where聽Mitchell serves as co-director, such ads provide significant quantities of individual and collective information聽about the economic, demographic, social and cultural history of slavery and the thousands of people who resisted it, but they have never been systematically collected into one digital database. According to the project鈥檚聽, each ad 鈥渟ketches the contours of an individual life, a personality, a story. Taken collectively, the ads constitute a detailed, concentrated and incredibly rare source of information about a population that is notably absent from most official historical records of the time.鈥