| PW-269393-20 | Preservation and Access: Humanities Collections and Reference Resources | University of Virginia | Virginia Emigrants to Liberia Project | 6/1/2020 - 5/31/2023 | $126,527.00 | Worthy | N. | Martin | | | | University of Virginia | Charlottesville | VA | 22903-4833 | USA | 2020 | African American History | Humanities Collections and Reference Resources | Preservation and Access | 126527 | 0 | 126527 | 0 | The enhancement of a database that details the
lives of 4,000 enslaved and formerly enslaved African Americans in Virginia who
took part in the colonization and establishment of Liberia in the nineteenth
century and provides data pertaining to 500 facilitators of their emigration. The database would include links to digitized
correspondence and other contextual and bibliographic information.
This project will enable online
access to information about 4,000 African Americans, enslaved and free, who
emigrated from Virginia to Liberia between 1820 and 1866, and about 500 former
enslavers and/or facilitated their migration. Our recent scholarship provides
an authoritative basis for the substantial demographic information that is rare
for African Americans in this period—including enslaved people’s surnames,
ages, and relationships. Most significantly, over 400 letters by and about the
emigrants, written before and after their emigration, will be linked to the
records for emigrants and their former enslavers/facilitators, with sophisticated
online access to these letters (mostly American Colonization Society records
archived by Library of Congress). Virginia Emigrants to Liberia will inform
scholars, researchers and students in a variety of disciplines, as well as the
general public, with regard to life, liberty, race and citizenship on both
sides of the Atlantic. |