New Resource: Freedom on the Move Digital Archive Adds K-12 Lessons

From Cornell University:

The Freedom on the Move project, an online collection devoted to fugitives from slavery in 19th century North America, has developed a series of lesson plans to make its crowdsourced database accessible to K-12 teachers and their students.

The project is a database of tens of thousands of advertisements placed by enslavers who wanted to recapture self-liberating Africans and African Americans.

Housed at Cornell, Freedom on the Move was developed by a team of historians from Cornell, Ohio State University, the University of Alabama, the University of Kentucky and the University of New Orleans. The free, open-source site – a joint project of the Department of History, the Cornell Institute for Social and Economic Research and Cornell University Library – launched in February 2019.

The insights the ads provide into the experiences of enslaved Africans and African-Americans are especially valuable because so little information about them as individuals has been preserved.

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.

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Direct to Freedom on the Move Website

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