NEH Grants Cornell $750,000 to Develop ‘Freedom on the Move’ Database
From Cornell Chronicle:
Ed Baptist, professor of history in the College of Arts and Sciences, has received a $750,000 digital infrastructure grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support the development of the Freedom on the Move (FOTM) database.
The database collects and compiles fugitive slave advertisements from 18th- and 19th-century U.S. newspapers. Launched in 2014, the database provides essential primary documentation for the study of slavery and the resistance of self-liberating people in the United States. It now includes more than 30,000 advertisements and has engaged more than 10,500 contributors, including scholars, students and “citizen historians.”
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The database is both a scholarly and a public-facing project, Baptist said.
“We can learn more from these ads about individual enslaved people – or lots of individuals, individuals ‘at scale’ – than we can from pretty much any other pre-1861 resource,” he said. “By using the ads as historical documents we help people to engage with slavery in a way that emphasizes the individuality and agency of people who were striving to liberate themselves.”
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Direct to Freedom on the Move (FOTM) Database
About Gary Price
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area. He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit. Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.
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