Freedom on the Move: Advancing a Crowdsourced, Comprehensive Database of North American Runaway Slave Advertisements

FAIN: HAA-256102-17

Cornell University (Ithaca, NY 14850-2820)
Edward E. Baptist (Project Director: January 2017 to November 2022)
William C. Block (Co Project Director: May 2017 to November 2022)

Implementation of Freedom on the Move, a public history resource that will offer a unified access point to 100,000 runaway slave advertisements published in American newspapers through the end of the Civil War. In addition, the project will develop tools for students to engage with primary sources by transcribing the advertisements.

“Freedom on the Move” (FOTM) creates a digital resource from an estimated 100,000 runaway slave advertisements from pre-1865 U.S. newspapers. These ads, placed by enslavers when enslaved people attempted to escape, comprise one of the richest sources of information about enslaved individuals in United States history. The FOTM database, which will be freely available for browsing and research, is the first comprehensive collection of these ads. Using crowdsourcing to parse ad data into a database, FOTM enables new research analyses of the history of U.S. slavery. The prototype interface is already built. We seek funds to complete FOTM as a site for public engagement that supports lessons for K-12, university, and museum education. NEH implementation funding will enable us to build tools for analyzing and visualizing data, managing student interaction, engaging the public, and establishing a prototype for future digital resources.

Associated Products

Freedom on the Move (Database/Archive/Digital Edition)
Title: Freedom on the Move
Author: Baptist, Edward
Author: Block, William
Author: Mitchell, Mary Niall
Author: Rothman, Joshua
Author: Holden, Vanessa
Author: Jeffries, Hasan Kwame
Abstract: Freedom on the Move is a database of fugitives from North American slavery. With the advent of newspapers in the American colonies, enslavers posted “runaway ads” to try to locate fugitives. Additionally, jailers posted ads describing people they had apprehended in search of the enslavers who claimed the fugitives as property. Created to control the movement of enslaved people, the ads ultimately preserved the details of individual lives--their personality, appearance, and life story. Taken collectively, the ads constitute a detailed, concise, and rare source of information about the experiences of enslaved people. Freedom on the Move is compiling thousands of these stories of resistance that have never been accessible in one place.
Year: 2021
Primary URL: https://freedomonthemove.org
Primary URL Description: Freedom on the Move is a database of fugitives from North American slavery.
Access Model: open accèss, free and open to all

Freedom on the Move Educator's Portal (Course or Curricular Material)
Title: Freedom on the Move Educator's Portal
Author: Mitchell, Mary Niall
Author: Shuster, Kate
Author: Baptist, Edward
Author: Holden, Vanessa
Author: Rothman, Joshua
Author: Jeffries, Hasan Kwame
Abstract: Freedom on the Move is a searchable database of fugitives from North American slavery. On our site, students have access to thousands of stories of resistance that have never been accessible in one place. There are endless possibilities for using the database in your classroom, but to make things easy, we’ve created four lessons you can use to bring the ads to life and introduce students to the brave people who resisted slavery by running away.
Year: 2020
Primary URL: https://app.freedomonthemove.org/educators
Primary URL Description: Freedom on the Move Educator's Portal.
Audience: K - 12

Freedom on the Move: A Database of Fugitives from American Slavery, (Article)
Title: Freedom on the Move: A Database of Fugitives from American Slavery,
Author: Downs, Gregory P.
Abstract: By the time you read this review, the collaborative digital collection Freedom on the Move: A Database of Fugitives from American Slavery will almost certainly be larger and even more useful than it was when I reviewed it. The site’s dynamism poses challenges for reviewers in print journals, but also reinforces the project’s immense utility for this and future generations of scholars, writers, and what the site calls “citizen historians.” Already it likely constitutes the single most significant database of runaway slave advertisements ever assembled. As it grows, it surely will produce a nearly unparalleled resource for learning about U.S. slavery, the enslaved people who tried to escape it, and the networks of slave owners and jailers who strove to maintain its regime of surveillance and recapture.
Year: 2020
Primary URL: https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhz718
Primary URL Description: Gregory Downs' review of Freedom on the Move in _The American Historical Review_.
Access Model: subscription only
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: The American Historical Review
Publisher: American Historical Review

Freedom on the Move (Article)
Title: Freedom on the Move
Author: Marks, John Garrison
Abstract: The Journal of American History, in collaboration with the Web site History Matters: The U.S. Survey Course on the Web, http://historymatters.gmu.edu, publishes regular reviews of digital history projects. The reviews appear both in the printed journal and at History Matters. History Matters provides an annotated guide to more than one thousand projects for teaching U.S. history. The goal is to offer a gateway to the works in digital history and to summarize their strengths and weaknesses with particular attention to their utility for teachers.
Year: 2021
Primary URL: https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jaab060
Primary URL Description: John Garrison Marks' review of Freedom on the Move in the _Journal of American History_.
Access Model: subscription only
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Journal of American History
Publisher: Journal of American History

Freedom on the Move: A Digital Archive (Article)
Title: Freedom on the Move: A Digital Archive
Author: Hopwood, Elizabeth
Abstract: A review of Freedom on the Move: A digital archive of runaway slave ads.
Year: 2020
Primary URL: https://doi.org/10.3138/ecf.33.1.145
Primary URL Description: Elizabeth Hopwood's review of Freedom on the Move, a digital archive, in the journal "Eighteenth-Century Fiction."
Access Model: open access
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Eighteen-Century Fiction
Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Freedom on the Move by Sea: Evidence of Maritime Escape Strategies in American Newspaper Runaway Slave Advertisements (Book Section)
Title: Freedom on the Move by Sea: Evidence of Maritime Escape Strategies in American Newspaper Runaway Slave Advertisements
Author: Jeffreys Megan
Editor: Walker, Timothy
Abstract: Recent targeted research analyzing these newspaper advertisements reveals that, to an extent heretofore unappreciated, enslaved people frequently utilized the sea as a viable route to escape bondage, especially from the coastal regions and ports of the Deep South. From the moment of colonization in North America through the beginning of the twentieth century, the use of waterways to establish and maintain commerce increased exponentially. With the rise of maritime commerce, ports expanded to accommodate growing demand. The increased frequency of imported and exported goods and services directly correlates with the rise of runaway slave advertisements that allude to the use of vessels or maritime routes in the suspected escape of fugitives. As fleeing individuals turned towards waterways to escape the bonds of slavery, slaveowners increasingly reflected their fears of fugitive egress by sea in their advertisements, warning the public to be vigilant in ports. What follows, then, is not limited to a discussion of the value of runaway slave advertisements and the necessity of a centralized database, though they do speak to the larger inquiry at hand in this maritime Underground Railroad volume. Instead, this chapter emphasizes the ways that runaway slave advertisements inform discussions about North American slavery while focusing specifically on the prominence of maritime and other waterborne escapes. By deconstructing the advertisements and considering their basic elements, historians and future scholars can better understand the ways in which these advertisements illuminate aspects of slavery that intersect with theories of eco- nomics, culture, law, politics, race, and gender.
Year: 2021
Primary URL: https://www.umasspress.com/9781625345929/sailing-to-freedom/
Primary URL Description: University of Massachusetts Press website listing for the book Sailing to Freedom: Maritime Dimensions of the Underground Railroad.
Access Model: purchase
Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
Book Title: Sailing to Freedom: Maritime Dimensions of the Underground Railroad
ISBN: 9781625345936

Lurking but Working: City Maroons in Antebellum New Orleans (Book Section)
Title: Lurking but Working: City Maroons in Antebellum New Orleans
Author: Mitchell, Mary Niall
Editor: Rediker, Marcus
Editor: Chakraborty, Titas
Editor: van Rossum, Matthias
Abstract: Using New Orleans ads from the Freedom on the Move database, Mitchell traces the routes and strategies of enslaved people who fled their enslavers in antebellum New Orleans but remained in the city. She argues that urban runaways resisted by reclaiming their labor and its profits from their enslavers--"lurking but working" in the city to support themselves. In one of the largest ports in the country, and the largest in the South, both men (often on the levees) and women (in the markets) could sustain themselves while finding brief intervals of freedom.
Year: 2019
Primary URL: https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520304352/a-global-history-of-runaways
Primary URL Description: University of California Press website for the book "A Global History of Runaways: Workers, Mobility, and Capitalism, 1600-1850."
Access Model: purchase
Publisher: University of California Press
Book Title: A Global History of Runaways: Workers, Mobility, and Capitalism, 1600–1850
ISBN: 9780520304352

Imagining and Imagined Sites, Sights, and Sounds of Slavery (Article)
Title: Imagining and Imagined Sites, Sights, and Sounds of Slavery
Author: Naylor, Celia E.
Abstract: WITHIN academia and related publishing venues, we have witnessed the burgeoning fields of digital humanities, digital scholarship, digital pedagogy, and digital liberal arts. The recent launching of the William and Mary Quarterly's first born-digital article published via the OI Reader app constitutes, as Quarterly editor Josh Piker announced, "a significant milestone for the Quarterly." It is also quite telling that the inaugural born-digital article for the journal is Simon P. Newman's essay entitled "Hidden in Plain Sight: Escaped Slaves in Late Eighteenth-and Early Nineteenth-Century Jamaica." In this article Newman employs "sound and video recordings as well as enhanced eighteenth- and nineteenth-century artwork and maps, all in digital format … [to] challenge readers to think about Jamaican society in new ways." He attempts to "explore how white men saw and experienced the island and its population in order to enhance our understanding of how enslaved men, women, and children who attempted long-term escapes were able to achieve varying degrees of liberty and self-determination at the heart of Britain's largest slave society."
Year: 2019
Primary URL: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/715893
Primary URL Description: Project Muse website for Celia Naylor's article in the William and Mary Quarterly entitled "Imagining and Imagined Sites, Sights, and Sounds of Slavery."
Access Model: subscription
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: The William and Mary Quarterly
Publisher: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture

What Happens to Middle School Kids When you Teach Them About Slavery? Here's a Vivid Example. (Article)
Title: What Happens to Middle School Kids When you Teach Them About Slavery? Here's a Vivid Example.
Author: Kate Shuster
Author: Mary Niall Mitchell
Abstract: What Happens to Middle School Kids When You Teach Them About Slavery? Here’s a Vivid Example from Freedom on the Move. The topic is emotional. That’s not a bad thing.
Year: 2022
Primary URL: https://slate.com/human-interest/2022/02/teaching-slavery-schools-kids-emotional-freedom-on-the-move.html
Primary URL Description: Slate article on Freedom on the Move
Access Model: open access
Format: Magazine
Publisher: Slate.com

---