Quick Overview of the Freedmen's Bureau:

The Freedmen's Bureau, formally known as the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, was established in 1865 by the U.S. Congress to aid formerly enslaved people in the South during the Reconstruction era following the Civil War. The Bureau's responsibilities included providing food, housing, education, and medical care. Furthermore, it helped formerly enslaved individuals legalize marriages, pursue employment, locate lost family members, and establish schools.

Context of These Historical Documents:

The documents in the dataset represent a range of records created or managed by the Freedmen's Bureau, reflecting its diverse functions and role in the Reconstruction era.

These records provide valuable insights into the social, economic, and political conditions during this transformative era in American history.

Link to Website: Visit the Freedmen's Bureau Online Archive at https://freedmensbureau.info/

Invitation to Collaborate and Explore

Embark on a Journey to Uncover Historical Insights

We are excited to share this rich dataset of historical documents with the Kaggle community and beyond. This collection offers a unique window into a pivotal era, brimming with stories waiting to be discovered and analyzed. Your expertise and curiosity can help unearth new insights and deepen our collective understanding of this Post-Civil War period.

Why Your Contribution Matters

Diverse Perspectives: Each researcher brings a unique perspective to the table. By analyzing this data, you can contribute to a more comprehensive and nuanced understanding of history.

Innovative Analysis: Whether you are a seasoned data scientist, a student of history, a language enthusiast, or someone with a passion for uncovering the past, your analysis can reveal trends, patterns, and stories that might otherwise remain hidden.

Collaborative Discovery: Share your findings with the community. Engage in discussions, compare results, and collaborate to build a richer narrative.

What You Can Do

Conduct Analysis: Use tools in NLP, data visualization, or statistical analysis to explore the dataset.

Share Insights: Publish your findings on Kaggle, in academic journals, or through social media. Engage with others' work and offer constructive feedback.

Build Projects: Employ the dataset as a basis for research projects, educational materials, or innovative applications.

How to Get Started

Download the dataset and start exploring. Share any interesting patterns, anomalies, or insights you discover. If you’re new to NLP or data analysis, seize this opportunity to learn and grow. A supportive community awaits you here.

Together, let's illuminate the past to inform our present and future. We can't wait to see the incredible work you'll do with this dataset!

Summary of Sheets

Contracts

Focused on contracts, this sheet includes agreements related to labor, apprenticeships, and other binding agreements from the Reconstruction era. This is indicated by subcategory entries such as "Apprenticeship Agreement".

Court Records

This section comprises court records, including arrest reports as seen in subcategory. It offers a glimpse into the legal proceedings and judicial matters handled by the Bureau.

Education Records

This sheet includes documents related to education, encompassing school establishment documents, expenses, and other educational matters. These records offer insights into the efforts to educate and uplift newly freed individuals.

Financial Records

In this sheet, financial records range from budgets to expense reports. The subcategory differentiates between general financial records and specific types like cover pages of reports.

Letters & Reports

This sheet contains transcriptions of letters and reports from the Freedman's Bureau.

Personnel Records

This section contains documents related to personnel, potentially including staff or individuals associated with the Freedmen's Bureau. It may include employment records, duty rosters, or personnel reports.

Property Records

This sheet focuses on property-related records, possibly including bonds, contracts, or ownership documents. The sub_category field differentiates between types of property records (e.g., "Bond", "Cover Page"), while the transcription_text provides detailed content.

Rations Records

This sheet details the distribution or requests for food rations. It may include appeals like the provided example, where individuals or families seek assistance. The columns follow the same structure, offering direct insights into the socio-economic conditions of the Post-Civil War era.

Transportation Records

Focused on transportation-related documents, this sheet contains records about the movement of goods and people. The ...

The company known as Franklin & Armfield was the largest slave-trading business in the United States during its years of operation from 1828 to 1836, and it may have been the largest in American history. Partners and agents of the company sold more than 1,600 enslaved people in New Orleans, which housed the largest market for enslaved people in the entire country. The dataset included here contains detailed information about those sales, documenting the names of the enslaved and the individuals who purchased them, some demographic and physical descriptions of the enslaved, the terms of their sales, and other relevant matters. Most information was extracted from records kept by notaries who recorded many of the slave sales in the city.

SLP (Slavery, Law, and Power) is a project dedicated to bringing the many disparate sources that help to explain the long history of slavery and its connection to struggles over power in early America, particularly in the colonies that would become the United States. Going back to the early English Empire, this project traces the rise of the slave trade along with the parallel struggles between monarchical power and early democratic institutions and ideals. We are creating a curated set of documents that help researchers and students to understand the background to the fierce struggles over both slavery and power during the American Revolution, when questions of monarchical power, consent to government, and hereditary slavery were all fiercely debated. After America separated from Britain, the United States was still deeply influenced by this long history, especially up to the Civil War. The colonial legacies of these debates continued to affect the course of politics, law, and justice in American society as a whole.

This dataset covers transcriptions from our 2021 document selection on various curated documents related to slavery, law, and power. The purpose of this set it too make these transcriptions accessible for future scholars as well as store these transcriptions in long term digital storage.

"The Church in the Southern Black Community" collects autobiographies, biographies, church documents, sermons, histories, encyclopedias, and other published materials. These texts present a collected history of the way Southern African Americans experienced and transformed Protestant Christianity into the central institution of community life. Coverage begins with white churches' conversion efforts, especially in the post-Revolutionary period, and depicts the tensions and contradictions between the egalitarian potential of evangelical Christianity and the realities of slavery. It focuses, through slave narratives and observations by other African American authors, on how the black community adapted evangelical Christianity, making it a metaphor for freedom, community, and personal survival.

Context

The North American Slave Narratives collection at the University of North Carolina contains 344 items and is the most extensive collection of such documents in the world.

The physical collection was digitized and transcribed by students and library employees. This means that the text is far more reliable than uncorrected OCR output which is common in digitized archives.

More information about the collection and access to individual page images can be be found here: http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh

The plain text files have been optimized for use in Voyant and can also be used in text mining projects such as topic modeling, sentiment analysis and natural language processing. Please note that the full text contains paratextual elements such as title pages and appendices which will be included in any word counts you perform. You may wish to delete these in order to focus your analysis on just the narratives.

The .csv file acts as a table of contents for the collection and includes Title, Author, Publication Date a url pointing to the digitized version of the text and a unique url pointing to a version of the text in plain text (this is particularly useful for use with Voyant: http://voyant-tools.org/).

Copyright Statement and Acknowledgements

With the exception of "Fields's Observation: The Slave Narrative of a Nineteenth-Century Virginian," which has no known rights, the texts, encoding, and metadata available in Open DocSouth are made available for use under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0:http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Users are free to copy, share, adapt, and re-publish any of the content in Open DocSouth as long as they credit the University Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for making this material available.

If you make use of this data, considering letting the holder of the original collection know how you are using the data and if you have any suggestions for making it even more useful. Send any feedback to wilsonlibrary@unc.edu.

About the DocSouth Data Project

Doc South Data provides access to some of the Documenting The American South collections in formats that work well with common text mining and data analysis tools.

Documenting the American South is one of the longest running digital publishing initiatives at the University of North Carolina. It was designed to give researchers digital access to some of the library’s unique collections in the form of high quality page scans as well as structured, corrected and machine readable text.

Doc South Data is an extension of this original goal and has been designed for researchers who want to use emerging technology to look for patterns across entire texts or compare patterns found in multiple texts. We have made it easy to use tools such as Voyant (http://voyant-tools.org/) to conduct simple word counts and frequency visualizations (such as word clouds) or to use other tools to perform more complex processes such as topic modeling, named-entity recognition or sentiment analysis.

Genomics can reveal essential features about the demographic evolution of a population that may not be apparent from historical elements. In recent years, there has been a significant increase in the number of studies applying genomic epidemiological approaches to understand the genetic structure and diversity of human populations in the context of demographic history and for implementing precision medicine. These efforts have traditionally been applied predominantly to populations of European origin. More recently, initiatives in the United States and Africa are including more diverse populations, establishing new horizons for research in human populations with African and/or Native ancestries. Still, even in the most recent projects, the under-representation of genomic data from Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) is remarkable. In addition, because the region presents the most recent global miscegenation, genomics data from LAC may add relevant information to understand population admixture better. Admixture in LAC started during the colonial period, in the 15th century, with intense miscegenation between European settlers, mainly from Portugal and Spain, with local indigenous and sub-Saharan Africans brought through the slave trade. Since, there are descendants of formerly enslaved and Native American populations in the LAC territory; they are considered vulnerable populations because of their history and current living conditions. In this context, studying LAC Native American and African descendant populations is important for several reasons. First, studying human populations from different origins makes it possible to understand the diversity of the human genome better. Second, it also has an immediate application to these populations, such as empowering communities with the knowledge of their ancestral origins. Furthermore, because knowledge of the population genomic structure is an essential requirement for implementing genomic medicine and precision health practices, population genomics studies may ensure that these communities have access to genomic information for risk assessment, prevention, and the delivery of optimized treatment; thus, helping to reduce inequalities in the Western Hemisphere. Hoping to set the stage for future studies, we review different aspects related to genetic and genomic research in vulnerable populations from LAC countries.

The Freedmen’s Teacher Project (FTP) was initiated more than four decades ago. Its focus was on the people who responded to the overwhelming demand of formerly enslaved southern African Americans for access to literacy. Its temporal scope is from the first weeks of the American Civil War to the end of Reconstruction. The intent was to amass as much information on as many of the teachers as possible in order to, first, answer a number of historical questions about the teachers and, second, to measure the black response to educational opportunity. The project employs prosopography, or collective biography, to reveal commonalities and exceptions among the teachers. Originally imagined as a study of perhaps five thousand teachers, it grew to embrace every identifiable teacher in black schools during the focus time period, numbering now just shy of twelve thousand individuals. The conclusions that have been drawn have surprised, and usually delighted, activists and scholars working in black education, the social history of teachers and teaching, women’s history, social history, and teacher education.

Das Interesse der Wirtschaftsgeschichte in der Interaktion ökonomischer und biologischer Prozesse, insbesondere in Bezug auf ökonomische Entwicklung, ist in der letzten Zeit stetig gestiegen. Individuelle körperliche Indikatoren stehen in einer engen Beziehung zu dem Ernährungszustand und somit den demographischen Variablen einer Gesellschaft wie beispielsweise der Lebenserwartung. Diese Variablen haben wiederum einen Rückkopplungseffekt auf die Wirtschaft durch ihren Einfluss auf die Arbeitsproduktivität. In diesem Kontext zeigt sich die Bedeutung der anthropometrischen Geschichte der Afroamerikaner durch die Debatte um ihren materiellen Lebensstandard und hierbei insbesondere ihre Nahrungsaufnahme während der Gefangenschaft. Diese Datensammlung wurde zusammengestellt, um den Ernährungszustand freier afrikanischer Amerikaner in Maryland während des frühen 19. Jahrhunderts zu ermitteln. Themen:Die Daten liefern Informationen über Alter, Geschlecht, Geburtsjahr, Größe, Bundesstaat der Geburt, Wohnort (bzw. Ort, an dem den ehemaligen Sklaven die Freiheit geschenkt wurde), Hautfarbe der Person sowie darüber, ob die jeweilige Person frei geboren wurde oder nach der Geburt freigelassen wurde. In einigen Fällen ist auch der Landkreis, in dem die Personen aufwuchsen, dokumentiert. The interest of the economic historical researcher in the interaction between economic and biological processes – especially concerning economic development – has increased recently. Individual somatic indicators are in a close relationship with the nutritional status and therefore with the demographic variables of the society, such as the expectation of life. These variables have in turn a feedback effect on economy by their influence on the labour productivity.In this context the meaning of anthropometric history of Afro-American people reveals by the discussions about their material living standard and here especially about the food they got during their captivity. Topics:The data collection was compiled to identify the nutritional status of free African Americans in Maryland during the early 19th century. The data collection gives information about age, sex, birth year, size, federal state of birth, residence (or the place, where the former slaves got their freedom), colour of the skin, and if the person was born in freedom or if the person was given the freedom after the birth. In some cases the administrative district is documentated, in which the person was grown up. Datenquelle: Staatsarchiv Maryland, ´Certificates of Freedom´; Ladungsverzeichnisse der Sklavenschiffe, Stammrollen (muster rolls) des amerikanischen Bürgerkriegs. Sources: Public record office Maryland, „Certificates of Freedom“; manifest of slave ships, register (muster rolls) of the american civil war. Freie Amerikaner afrikanischer Abstammung in Maryland. American citizens of African descent, living in Maryland.