There slavery continues to be a complex and painful reality, rooted in history but still present today. In the digital age, scholars have developed new tools to delve deeper and understand the dramatic experiences of African slaves.
Enslaved.org represents an innovative open-source data collection project, born from an interdisciplinary collaboration between leading US academic institutions, including the University of Michigan, the University of Maryland and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
This database is the result of a joint effort of researchers, historians, archivists, genealogy experts and technology professionals.
The website, launched on 1° December 2020 and freely accessible, it offers anyone the opportunity to explore historical documents and reconstruct the individual stories of slaves involved in transatlantic slavery. Through archive fragments, tabular data and historical references, Enslaved.org allows us to analyze in detail the lives of African slaves and their descendants, victims of the brutal trafficking that extended between Africa, the Americas, the Indian Ocean and Europe between the end of the 16th and the mid-19th century.
$1.4M from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant expands #EnslavedOrg research. Thanks to @MellonFdn for the continued support of the project! https://t.co/0MW3jzl8Do
— Matrix: Digital Humanities & Social Sciences (@Matrix_MSU) April 7, 2021
At the center of this project are, obviously, the people: not only slaves, but also slave owners, all those who were linked to the slave trade (traders and trading companies, traffickers, etc.) or attempted to rescue and free enslaved people.
Enslaved.org it is a notable container of enormous databases containing stories, oral histories, testimonies, historical documents and other elements (ethnic origin, country of origin, places of assignment in trafficking, etc.) relating to over 600 thousand people and includes 5 million records with citations of places (e.g. the plantations where slaves worked) and events that serve to deepen and extend our general level of knowledge of the endemic and unjust phenomenon of slavery.
Yes, an immense wealth of information collected on a local, regional and national scale, which was previously unthinkable to access. Indeed, in the United States African Americans had to deal with the so-called “wall of 1870”. In fact, before 1870, the United States census did not record the personal data of African slaves or former slaves. These subjects were included in the counting of the slave masters’ property, so sex and approximate age were the only distinguishing marks for possible identification.
Today, also thanks to Enslaved.orgretrace those dramatic lives move and excites. The new generations of descendants of African slaves can at least say that a great step has now been taken to focus on and evaluate with a more aware gaze the serious historical injustices generated by the enslavement of Africans.
Sources: Enslaved.org/Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation/National Geographic
