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The St. Louis Circuit Court Archives has identified close to 300 "freedom suits"--suits by St. Louis slaves seeking their freedom. This rich, un-tapped collection offers not only a new picture of urban slavery in a Western border state, but also of the lives and voices of individual enslaved people heretofore unheard of. This project will use the suits to better understand *how* different individuals talked about slavery and race. Specifically, as the first step toward a book on the rhetoric of slavery and freedom, the stipend will allow the applicant to transcribe representative case files; research biographical, cultural, and other contextual information on cases; articulate a typology for the rhetoric in the suits; and begin to share this work with the public.