Africana Studies : Researching Enslavement

The report of the Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice draws on a wide array of historical documents, from the records of slaving voyages to personal correspondence to student commencement orations. Working in collaboration with Brown's Center for Digital Initiatives and the Scholarly Technology Group, the committee was able to create a digital archive of these materials, enabling students and interested members of the public to join it in its exploration of the early history of our university, state, and nation.

The Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery has been established at UCL with the generous support of the Hutchins Center at Harvard. The Centre builds on two earlier projects based at UCL tracing the impact of slave-ownership on the formation of modern Britain: the ESRC-funded Legacies of British Slave-ownership project (2009-2012), and the ESRC and AHRC-funded Structure and significance of British Caribbean slave-ownership 1763-1833 (2013-2015).

The Digital Library on American Slavery (DLAS) is an expanding resource compiling independent collections focused upon race and slavery in the American South, made searchable through a single, simple interface. DLAS houses tens of thousands of records relating to all 15 slave states and Washington, D.C. as well as a number of northern states. DLAS contains detailed personal information about over 100 thousand individuals, including enslaved people, enslavers, free people of color, and more.

The SlaveVoyages website is a collaborative digital initiative that compiles and makes publicly accessible records of the largest slave trades in history. Search these records to learn about the broad origins and forced relocations of more than 12 million African people who were sent across the Atlantic in slave ships, and hundreds of thousands more who were trafficked within the Americas. Explore where they were taken, the numerous rebellions that occurred, the horrific loss of life during the voyages, the identities and nationalities of the perpetrators, and much more.

The CUNY DOMINICAN STUDIES INSTITUTE (CUNY DSI), a research unit of the City University of New York housed at The City College of New York, has announced the publication of their online academic and educational platform "First Blacks in the Americas," the first digital bilingual platform devoted to disseminating the history of the early inhabitants of Black-African ancestry of today's Dominican Republic, then a Spanish colony named La Española (Hispaniola, in English) that occupied the entire island of the same name, shared today by the Dominican Republic and the Republic of Haiti.

With the help of scholars, educators, and family historians, Enslaved: Peoples of the Historical Slave Trade (Enslaved.org) is rapidly expanding in 2022. We are building a robust, open-source architecture to discover, connect, and visualize 600,000 (and growing) people records and 5 million data points regarding enslaved people. From archival fragments and spreadsheet entries, we see the lives of the enslaved in richer detail. Explore the data and life stories on Enslaved.org and read articles on data-driven research about the lives of the enslaved in the Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation.