Penn Today: Research, context, and community merge at Penn and Slavery Symposium. “This year’s Penn Slavery Project students and Brown presented some of their findings, both from last fall and the current semester. Students addressed economic ties to the slave trade and early fundraising efforts as well as connections between early medical research and the topic of biological racism. The Project will increase access to its research through a new website featuring all of the students’ work.”
United States History
FBI File: Saddam Hussein (Alt Gov 2)
Alt Gov 2: FBI File: Saddam Hussein. “Above you’ll find 1,581 pages of Saddam Hussein’s FBI file. This material has been released in the past but has never been online until now. Another 1,000+ pages of pre-processed material are on their way and will be posted to this page when they arrive.”
The Journal: Shepherd, Loyola Chicago awarded grant to create historical database
The Journal: Shepherd, Loyola Chicago awarded grant to create historical database. “The Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture at the College of William & Mary has awarded Benjamin Bankhurst, assistant professor of history at Shepherd University, and Kyle Roberts, associate professor of public history and new media and director of the Center for Textual Studies and Digital Humanities at Loyola University Chicago, with a $5,000 Lapidus Digital Collections Fellowship for ‘The Maryland Loyalist Project.’ The project is a collaboration between Bankhurst and Roberts, aiming to make the letters and petitions of British loyalists who fled the American Revolution housed in the British National Archives available in a digital archive.”
Atlas Obscura: An Artist, a Shantyboat, and the Lost History of American River Communities
Atlas Obscura: An Artist, a Shantyboat, and the Lost History of American River Communities. “THE RIVERS OF THE UNITED States have a certain lore and mystique within American culture. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, these roaring waterways were home to thousands. Entire communities existed on or near the water in self-made houseboats. The history of these communities has been explored briefly in river memoirs such as Harlan Hubbard’s Shantyboat Journal, but hasn’t been thoroughly examined in a present-day context. That is, until a modern shantyboat came bobbing down the Mississippi in the summer of 2014.”
The Conversation: What Catholic Church records tell us about America’s earliest black history
The Conversation: What Catholic Church records tell us about America’s earliest black history. “In 1513, a free and literate African named Juan Garrido explored Florida with a Spanish conquistador, Juan Ponce de León. In the following decades, Africans, free and enslaved, were part of all the Spanish expeditions exploring the southern region of the United States. In 1565, Africans helped establish the first permanent European settlement in what is St. Augustine, Florida today. The Slave Societies Digital Archive which I direct as a historian at Vanderbilt University includes Catholic Church records from St. Augustine. These records date back to the 1590s and document some of the earliest black history of the U.S.”
Cornell University: Freedom on the Move launches database of fugitives from American slavery
Cornell University: Freedom on the Move launches database of fugitives from American slavery. “Freedom on the Move (FOTM), an online project devoted to fugitives from slavery in North America, is enlisting the help of the public to create a database for tens of thousands of advertisements placed by enslavers who wanted to recapture self-liberating Africans and African-Americans…. The free, open-source site has been designed to be accessible to the public. Users can quickly set up an account and begin working with digitized versions of the advertisements. Users transcribe the text of an advertisement and then answer questions about the ad and the person it describes. They can choose to transcribe ads from a particular state or specific time period, depending on their areas of interest.” I’m sure you’ve heard of this project before – it looks like I mentioned it in RB back in 2016 – but now it has officially launched.
Larry Ferlazzo: The Best Resources For Teaching About Why Blackface Is Racist
Larry Ferlazzo: The Best Resources For Teaching About Why Blackface Is Racist. “This is just a very beginning list of teaching resources that might be useful for teaching about blackface. I know that several of us at our school will using this topic as the focus of some of our lessons, and thought it would be useful to share resources here and invite readers to contribute more.”
