Cuffee's Trial: A Digital Graphic History

FAIN: MT-268897-20

Historic Hudson Valley (Tarrytown, NY 10591-1203)
Elizabeth L. Bradley (Project Director: June 2019 to October 2022)

Prototyping of an interactive digital history on the New York Conspiracy trials (1741), in which both enslaved people and poor white New Yorkers stood accused of plotting to burn the city and murder its white inhabitants.

Historic Hudson Valley (HHV) requests funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to develop a prototype of a digital graphic history provisionally titled Cuffee’s Trial. This product will depict the trial of Cuffee, an enslaved man accused of conspiracy to commit arson and insurrection in colonial New York. Cuffee, who was among the first of 37 men and women to be tried, convicted, and sentenced to death for what became known as the New York Conspiracy, was the property of Adolph Philipse, the proprietor of Philipsburg Manor, a provisioning plantation that HHV now maintains as a National Historic Landmark in Sleepy Hollow, New York. Cuffee’s Trial represents both HHV’s deep expertise in relaying the history of northern colonial slavery, and our commitment to sharing this knowledge extensively through dynamic digital storytelling. The digital graphic history will become part of our constellation of “Slavery in the Colonial North” digital products.