The "Enslaved People in the African American National Biography, 1508-1865" dataset builds on the complete print and online collection of the African American National Biography (AANB), edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham. The full collection contains over 6,000 biographical entries of named historical individuals, including 1,304 for subjects born before 1865 and the abolition of slavery in the United States. In making a subset of biographical entries from the multivolume work, the goal was to extract life details from those biographies into an easy-to-view database form that details whether a subject was enslaved for some or all of their lives and to provide the main biographical details of each subject for contextual analysis and comparison. 52 fields covering location data; gender; names, alternate names and suffixes; dates and places of birth and death; and up to 8 occupations were included. We also added 13 unique fields that provide biographical details on each subject: Free born in North America; Free before 13th Amendment; Ever Enslaved; How was freedom attained; Other/uncertain status; African born; Parent information; Runaways and rebels; Education/literacy; Religion; Slave narrative or memoir author; Notes; and Images.

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.

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.

A “runaway slave record,” or as it is officially titled, “Runaway and Escaped Slaves Records, 1794, 1806-1863,” include accounts, correspondence, receipts, and reports concerning expenses incurred by localities related to the capture of enslaved people attempting to escape bondage to pursue freedom. The collection also includes records with information related to enslaved people from multiple localities who escaped to United States military forces during the Civil War. While many independent businesses bought and sold human beings, local and state governments such as the state of Virginia also participated in and profited from human trafficking. Localities were reimbursed for the expenses of confining, feeding, and selling of self-emancipated people, and likewise, the state established procedures to compensate enslavers for their financial loss when enslaved people ran away or were imprisoned or executed. If a person was captured and their enslaver could not be identified, they became the property of the state and were sold. The proceeds from these sales went to the state treasury, and often, records of those sales can be found in the Public Claims records from the Auditor of Public Accounts. The net proceeds were deposited into the Commonwealth of Virginia’s Literary Fund for the public education of poor white children.

The data in this collection is drawn directly from the historical documents and may contain language that is now deemed offensive.

This dataset is based on digital copies of British National Archives item T 71/379: Register of Plantation Slaves, St. Lucia, 1815. The original register is retained in the National Archives of the United Kingdom and photographs of each page are available through ancestry.com. The register contains 745 pages, handwritten in English or French according to the language of the plantation owner, that collectively furnish demographic and kinship information about 12,727 individuals enslaved on plantations in the island, as well as information about the size, location, and type of production of each plantation, and basic information about the plantation’s owner or manager. A combination of verbatim transcriptions and engineered columns allow us provide information about the size, location, and type of production of plantations in one of the last Caribbean islands to be colonized by Great Britain, while also offering demographic data, biographical and genealogical information about people who were enslaved in this little-studied colony. The dataset has tremendous potential for expanding current understandings of slavery and plantation production in St. Lucia, facilitating comparisons with better-known colonies such as Jamaica or Barbados, and for centering the experiences of enslaved people and families in the island. Users can use available information to generate individual biographies and genealogies of people who did not have an opportunity to leave written or oral records of their lives, or to provide a basis for comparing the experiences of enslaved people in St. Lucia with those of people enslaved elsewhere. The team also hopes to facilitate genealogical research, allowing members of descendant communities to locate their ancestors.

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.

This dataset documents the records of mainly Black people incarcerated in the Tennessee State Penitentiary in the period directly before, during, and after the Civil War, from 1850-1870. It includes a staggering amount of formerly enslaved Civil War soldiers and veterans who had enlisted in the segregated regiments of the United States Military, the U.S.C.T. This demographic information of over 1,400 inmates incarcerated in an occupied border state allows us to examine trends, patterns, and relationships that speak to the historic ties between the US military and the TN State Penitentiary, and more broadly, the role of enslavement’s legacies in the development of punitive federal systems. Further analysis of this dataset reveals the genesis of many modern trends in incarceration and law. The dataset of this article and its historiographical implications will be of interest to scholars who study the regional dynamics of antebellum and post-Civil War prison systems, convict leasing and the development of the modern carceral state, Black resistance in the forms of fugitivity and participation in the Civil War, and pre-war era incarceration of free Black men and women and non-Black people convicted of crimes related to enslavement.

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.

Petition: Slave trade Original: http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:FHCL:13906000 Date of creation: 17530000 Top signatures:William Bollan Total signatures: 1 Legal voter signatures (males not identified as non-legal): 1 Identifications of signatories: agent for his Majesty's Province of Massachusetts Bay in New England Prayer format was printed vs. manuscript: Manuscript Additional archivist notes: rum, sugar, molasses, Great Britain, British Northern Colonies, fisheries, fish, Indian and Guinea trade, British woolen [wool, cotton], manufacturers, European markets, French, English, King Charles, Newfoundland, France, fishermen, seamen, expedition, Cape Breton, shalloway, fishing vessel Acknowledgements: Supported by the National Endowment f or the Humanities (PW-5105612), Massachusetts Archives of the Commonwealth, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, Center for American Political Studies at Harvard University, Institutional Development Initiative at Harvard University, and Harvard University Library.