This digital publication is framed around scholarship about historical slavery and related themes in a global perspective. This digital resource is committed to preserving the stories of enslaved people from Africa and their forced migrations in a respectful framework. Using historical and computational methods, the strategy is to curate the historical experiences of enslaved people in facing oppression and survival in a digital medium.
Historical materials about slavery often render enslaved people nameless and silenced. The abolition and suppression of the African slave trade did the opposite because through involuntary indentures or conscriptions, hundreds of thousands of enslaved people had detailed biographical information documented. Although these primary sources identify the victims, sometimes by name, the primary sources still reflect skewed perspectives embedded within legal precedents related to the abolition of the slave trade.
Transparency in research activities is paramount. International grants and institutional funding support faculty and student salaries, technological logistics, and primary resource acquisitions. Digital training and skills development are integral components to this initiative. This research project monitors and credits individual contributions, especially among students and emerging scholars. Whenever possible, members of this team collaborate with descendent communities, archives, libraries, and other experts.
Copyright
This digital publication operates under the terms and conditions of national granting agencies, which follow “fair use” doctrines of copyright laws and are intended for public consumption and education. All digitized materials displayed and available for download through this website derive from primary sources compiled before 1920 and were obtained from other digital archives with open access content that are by-and-large considered to be in the public domain. Digitized primary sources and historical imagery hosted on this website follow copyright policies of different archives, libraries, and museums, which vary on a case-by-case basis. The Digital Slavery Research Lab compiled all data, which is made available through a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0 International license (CCBY-NC 4.0). This license allows for the reproduction and modification of these data, provided it is cited and acknowledged. All software and associated documentation is protected under the MIT License. Please contact the Project Team if materials are posted without appropriate permissions.
If there are any questions, concerns, and recommendations to improve our ethical principles, to donate materials, or make corrections, please contact the Project Team.