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The long-term growth and sustainability of “Freedom of the Move” (FOTM), a database of 27,000 fugitive slave advertisements from eighteenth and nineteenth century North America. This work includes an update of digital code, the improvement of user interfaces, expanded educational and outreach resources, database growth, and data validation.

The Freedom on the Move project (FOTM) is building a database of “runaway slave” ads from U.S. history to allow scholars, teachers, students, and the general public to document and understand the persistent resistance of Africans and African Americans to slavery. This grant will support long-term growth and sustainability through updating of code, expansion of user interfaces, expanded and improved educational and outreach resources, ongoing database growth, and extensive data validation. The work will be supported by intellectual resources of post docs, GRAs, and other students, plus annual conferences with K-20 teachers to form critical infrastructure for ensuring maximum humanities impact. The grant will drive extensive fund raising leveraging Cornell’s extensive alumni and foundation networks. Creating a continually updated FOTM will help shape the ongoing process of reimagining an American history defined by the ongoing struggle to build a nation open to all who seek freedom.

The further design and development of a database of runaway slave advertisements from pre-1865 US newspapers drawing from several historical collections.  The project would also experiment with crowdsourcing approaches to enrich the database records.

'Freedom on the Move' (FOTM) creates a digital resource from an estimated 100,000 runaway slave advertisements from pre-1865 U.S. newspapers. Placed by enslavers when enslaved people attempted to escape, these ads included extensive information about fugitives. They comprise the richest source of information about enslaved individuals in the United States, yet no comprehensive collection of them exists. FOTM will collect these ads and use crowdsourcing to parse their data into a database, enabling sophisticated new analyses of the history of U.S. slavery. A crowdsourcing interface will provide a site for public engagement with an enduring national trauma, supporting lessons for K-12, university, and museum education. The database will be freely available for browsing and exportable for research. NEH start-up funding will enable us to build tools for incorporating large-scale data from contributors, creating a prototype for future expansions of this and similar digital resources.