This study uses historical records from 36 archives in the United States to analyze 8,437 enslaved people’s sale and/or appraisal prices from 1797 to 1865. Demographic information, including name, year, age/age group, gender, state, and trade/skill notations were recorded when applicable. By calculating average appraisal and sale values across cross-sections of gender (male or female) and age group (0-10 years old, 11-22 years old, 23-39 years old, and 40+ years old), a total of sixteen major comparative prices were analyzed (app/male/0-10; app/female/0-10; sale/male/0-10; sale/female/0-10; app/male/11-22; app/female/11-22; sale/male/11-22; sale/female/11-22; app/male/23-39; app/female/23-39; sale/male/23-39; sale/female/23-39; app/male/40+; app/female/40+; sale/male/40+; sale/female/40+). Scholars have the opportunity to use this data set to understand how enslaved people were valued and appraised. The demographic data included will be useful to those who want to explore various aspects of the history of slavery and enslaved people.

In the 1930s, students at Prairie View State Normal & Industrial College, under the direction of the college’s registrar and Arts and Sciences director, John Brother Cade, participated in a project to interview 229 formerly enslaved individuals from 17 states in the United States, as well as Indian Territory and Canada. Nearly early 70 years since the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, many of these individuals experienced the tail end of slavery as an institution in America, and this project aimed to capture their voices, experiences, and the hardships that they faced in the early years of their lives. Students sought out information regarding food, clothing, housing facilities, quality of life, epistemology, family, and treatment, to capture the perspective of formerly enslaved individuals and the institution of slavery. This dataset, whose fields were extracted from the documents in this archival collection housed at Southern University, compiles key pieces of information these ex-slaves shared with Prairie View students.

This dataset is a subset of relevant records drawn from the larger CSI:Dixie (CSI:D) database (https://csidixie.org/), an active digital project seeking to record and analyze causes of death as revealed in coroners’ inquisitions taken in the nineteenth-century American South. The “Database of Coroners’ Inquisitions Taken Over the Bodies of Enslaved, Formerly Enslaved, and Free Black Peoples” comprises the 5,394 cases in the CSI:D dataset in which the decedent's race is coded as “Black.” The vast majority of records were created between 1840 and 1900. CSI:D brings together records from three different archives and digital projects. The records for South Carolina are original to the project and were created by working directly from the original archival documents held at the South Carolina Department of Archives and History. CSI:D’s Virginia records build upon an index of inquests originally created by the Library of Virginia’s “Virginia Untold: The African American Narrative” (http://www.virginiamemory.com/collections/aan/). Finally, the Missouri records build upon an index of inquests originally created by the Missouri Digital Heritage’s “Coroner’s Inquest Database,” which includes records for several Missouri counties but strongly emphasizes the City of St. Louis (https://s1.sos.mo.gov/records/archives/archivesdb/Coroners/). Bringing these three datasets together, CSI:D standardized data conventions and coded every cause of death. Of the 1,199 cases where the deceased was enslaved at the time of death, 462 are recorded as fatal accidents, 341 as homicides, 202 as natural deaths, and 98 as suicides.

This is a dataset that includes information form 596 quotes about the rations enslaves issued to enslaved people in the Southern United States between the 1720s and the 1860s. These quotes come from 568 accounts by 533 formerly enslaved people, enslavers, travelers, and white abolitionists. Supplementary Table 1 contains data on corn rations, Supplementary Table 2 contains data on meat rations, and Supplementary Table 3 data on all other types of food issued to enslaved people. Four main types of sources were used to create this dataset. The first the 32 volumes of transcripts of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) interviews of formerly enslaved people in the 1930s (Library of Congress 2022). These were queried using a standardized set of keywords (beef, fish, flour, herring, meat, milk, molasses, peas, peck, potato, quart, rice, salt, syrup, and yam) and variations of these words (e.g., ’lasses, taters). Corn was only included in the dataset when a specific amount was discussed, so the most common units of measurement (peck and quart) were searched for rather than corn or cornmeal. Only references to foods that were definitively issued as rations were incorporated into the dataset. References to food that was only issued on special occasions or changes to rations during the Civil War were not included. Two accounts in the South Carolina WPA narratives are attributed to Jessie Sparrow (Quotes 341 and 342 in the dataset). The two accounts are different enough to suggest that they are not from the same woman. Therefore, they are listed as separate people in this dataset. The second set of sources is nineteenth-century accounts by formerly enslaved people and white abolitionists. These accounts were searched for the keywords corn and food as these two terms were ubiquitous in discussions of rations issued to enslaved people. The third set of sources is journals, diaries, published memoirs, personal papers, and agricultural journals (including American Cotton Planter and Soil of the South, The American Farmer, DeBows’s Review, Farmer’s Register, Southern Cultivator, and Southern Planter) written by enslavers and travelers. These were searched for the keywords corn, food, slave, and negro. Finally, references to rationing practices that are discussed in secondary sources but were not independently identified in the sources discussed above were included when available.

This dataset was created from a collection of over nine hundred incidents of sexual violence identified in the mainland North American British colonies and early United States from 1700-1820. Gathered from legal, manuscript, and print records in twenty archives, it identifies over four hundred individuals who were enslaved, of African descent, and/or of Native American descent. This collection offers unique historical evidence about individuals who may not appear in any other extant records. Significantly, it reveals how enslaved and free(d) Black and Indigenous people both addressed and were involved in incidents of sexual violence, revealing how communities of color are far more visible in historical records than has been traditionally recognized.

Analysis of ‘Waffles and divorce rates’ provided by Analyst-2 (analyst-2.ai), based on source dataset retrieved from https://www.kaggle.com/tylerbonnell/waffles on 13 February 2022.

--- Dataset description provided by original source is as follows ---

Context

This dataset comes from the book Statistical Rethinking: A Bayesian Course with Examples in R and Stan

Content

Location : State name

Loc : State abbreviation

Population : 2010 population in millions

MedianAgeMarriage: 2005-2010 median age at marriage

Marriage : 2009 marriage rate per 1000 adults

Marriage.SE : Standard error of rate

Divorce : 2009 divorce rate per 1000 adults

Divorce.SE : Standard error of rate

WaffleHouses : Number of diners

South : 1 indicates Southern State

Slaves1860 : Number of slaves in 1860 census

Population1860 : Population from 1860 census

PropSlaves1860 : Proportion of total population that were slaves in 1860

Acknowledgements

All credit should go to Richard McElreath: https://xcelab.net/rm/statistical-rethinking/

--- Original source retains full ownership of the source dataset ---

The Seth Woodroof Account Book, Manuscript 1047, is held at the George M. Jones Memorial Library in Lynchburg, Virginia, and also available digitally. The book is among the collection’s original local history holdings. The account book is believed to have been donated to the library by the Manson family after the library opened in 1908. Data from Manuscript 1047 was transcribed verbatim in 2023 from the original handwritten account book. The dataset includes the first and last names of persons listed in transactions brokered by slave traders Seth Woodroof, John Harris, and Rowan Harris in Lynchburg, Virginia and the Deep South between 1834 and 1840. The dataset includes fields for alternate spellings of first and last names. Within the account book, 206 individuals are listed including 135 sold persons and an additional 33 relocated (presumably enslaved) persons.