enslaved

By Jessica Weiss ’05

As an Indian American, Joshua John has long sought to know more about other South Asian figures in U.S. history and politics. So John, a rising junior and double major in economics and Politics, Philosophy and Economics (PPE), decided to focus a research project this summer on former U.S. Representative Dalip Singh Saund, the first-ever Indian American in Congress.

John scoured the archives of the Congressional Record to locate a 1957 speech given by Saund on the House floor advocating for passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957. In it, Saund cited his own experience as an immigrant as he underscored the absurdity of denying Black Americans voting rights. 

John is now preparing an entry about that speech to appear on the website of the “Recovering Democracy Archives” (RDA), a project sponsored by the Rosenker Center for Political Communication & Civic Leadership in the Department of Communication that seeks to create a digital archive of lesser-known but important public speeches throughout U.S. history. The entry will include the transcribed and authenticated speech, a heavily researched “contextualization” paper, photos and more. 

John was among the researchers in the seven-week residential Big Ten Academic Alliance Summer Research Opportunities Program (SROP), which seeks to increase the number of underrepresented students who pursue graduate study and research careers through intensive research experiences with faculty mentors and enrichment activities. A total of 10 undergraduates from across the country took part in the SROP at ARHU—three participated in the RDA project, while seven worked on “Enslaved: Peoples of the Historic Slave Trade,” a database containing records on hundreds of thousands of individuals living in the era of the historical slave trade, led in part by UMD researchers. 

“This has been an incredible opportunity,” John said. “Learning to do historical research, making a strong historical argument with clear writing—these are new challenges that I have not approached in my academic experience until now and I can feel myself growing through this experience.” 

After locating Saund’s speech, John accessed dozens of books, archival and historical documents, political records, news stories and more to be able to prepare a comprehensive historical contextualization. John tells of Saund’s immigration story, the trajectory of his political career and the importance of the speech, as well as a number of personal details about Saund’s life. His research is currently being peer-reviewed before publication on the RDA website. 

John’s research mentor Shawn Parry-Giles, professor and chair in the Department of Communication and co-editor of the RDA project, said the three students working on the RDA project “showed great tenacity in deepening their archival research skills.” The two other students focused on speeches delivered by women's rights activist Emma Guffey Miller promoting the Equal Rights Amendment and by American Indian activist Ruth Muskrat Bronson opposing fishing and timber industries exploiting indigenous land in Alaska.  

The students “recovered speeches by people who advanced civil rights for all Americans,” Parry-Giles said. “Most importantly, they experienced the excitement that can come from researching topics they care deeply about.” 

Funded by the Mellon Foundation, the open-access site Enslaved.org is led by faculty at UMD, Michigan State University and the University of California, Riverside. It links data collections drawn from multiple universities, archives, museums and family history centers to reconstruct stories and biographies of the lives of the enslaved and their families and communities.

The seven undergraduates who worked on the project this summer developed a dataset of a "slaves for hire" list belonging to the estate of Thomas Cramphin, a wealthy Maryland planter, judge and relative by marriage to the Calvert family. The document—the original which is on loan at the Riversdale House Museum in Riverdale, Maryland—is a record of 32 enslaved persons believed to have been owned and hired out to other individuals by Cramphin or his estate executors after his death. 

Using a wide range of primary and secondary sources, including census documents, ancestry records, newspaper articles, historical maps and images and more, they sought to tell the untold stories of the lives of the enslaved individuals. 

Ousmane Diop, a Senegalese first-generation American and rising senior at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, double majoring in history and political science with a minor in Africana studies, said the SROP experience underscored the importance of uplifting the stories of the enslaved, who are sometimes forgotten or ignored.  

“Our goal was to decenter the Cramphins and other enslavers while centering the lives of the enslaved individuals in Maryland,” he said. “History is supposed to be diverse and inclusive.” 

A data article outlining the students’ research and methodology has been submitted for peer review and publication in the Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation.

Co-Principal Investigator Kristina Poznan, assistant clinical professor in the Department of History, said the students “worked collaboratively and expanded their skills in historical detective work and in using data and digital tools in the humanities.” 

Diop added that the SROP affirmed his desire to continue doing research post-graduation: “As an undergraduate, to have your name out there in the ‘dataverse’ where people can see you was really unique and gave me and my peers a lot of momentum,” he said. 

Top image: Martenet and Bond's map of Montgomery County, Maryland [1865]. Learn more.

By Jessica Weiss ’05

The National Endowment for the Humanities has awarded grants to projects involving two University of Maryland historians to expand a massive digital database on the transatlantic slave trade and investigating the desegregation of mass transit in New York City.

Department of History Professors Daryle Williams and Richard Bell are benefitting from $24 million given last month to support 225 projects at museums, libraries, universities and historic sites across the country.

Williams is part of the multi-institutional team awarded $349,744 to add 10 digital collections to Enslaved: Peoples of the Historical Slave Trade (Enslaved.org), an online portal launched last year with records on hundreds of thousands of individuals involved in the historical slave trade.

Among the new collections are records from the Maryland State Archives’ Legacy of Slavery in Maryland project, which includes primary resources like newspaper ads, committal notices and census records related to Black Marylanders, fugitives and those who assisted slaves on the run in the state. Researchers will work to integrate those records into the Enslaved.org platform, where they can be used by scholars, family historians and the general public.

“This is a great opportunity to know more about slavery right here in Maryland—to know more about ourselves,” said Williams, who is a co-principal investigator at Enslaved.org. “We can’t understand the history of the state without talking about the impact of enslavement here. And these are really rich materials to do that.”  

Other additional data sets, which range from those held at small, local institutions to those at large, university-based special collections in the mid-Atlantic, the Carolinas and the Lower Mississippi, will increase the Enslaved.org linked open data platform to approximately 1.3 million records.

The funding will also go in part toward supporting undergraduate researchers who will work on the project as part of the Summer Research Opportunity Program, a long-standing pipeline collaboration among member institutions of the Big Ten Academic Alliance.

Another $6,000 will support Bell as he works on his next book, “The First Freedom Riders: Streetcars and Street Fights in Jim Crow New York.” It will tell the story of Elizabeth Jennings, a 25-year-old New Yorker who launched the first successful civil disobedience campaign in U.S. history. On July 16, 1854, Jennings stepped onto a ‘whites-only’ streetcar on Third Avenue, becoming the first among a small army of young Black women and men to fight to forcibly desegregate mass transit in New York City.

“Her story got under my skin—not only because it was dramatic and significant, but also because it reminds me that Black women have often been at the center of this country’s most important civil rights fights,” Bell said.

Recently named a 2021 Andrew Carnegie Fellow by the Carnegie Corporation of New York to support his work on the book, Bell will use the new NEH funds to travel to out-of-state archives for research.

“I’m eager to get back into the stacks and reading rooms, where the true riches for a project like this definitely rest,” he said.

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The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded $1.4 million to fund the third phase of Enslaved.org, which will refine the site’s data infrastructure, ensure a dedicated team and continue partnerships with scholars, heritage and cultural organizations and the public.

The Mellon Foundation funded the initial two phases of Enslaved.org—the first beginning in 2018 and the second in 2020—which provided support for both proof-of-concept and implementation. Phase II also saw the launch of the project’s peer-reviewed Journal of Slavery & Data Preservation.

This new round of funding is the latest in a long series of Mellon investments into research projects at the University of Maryland or involving Maryland researchers.

Among them, the foundation has provided over $3 million since 2016 to fund the African American Digital Humanities initiative at Maryland, and a recently announced $4.8 million grant will fund the Digital Inquiry, Speculation, Collaboration, & Optimism (DISCO) network, which includes UMD Assistant Professor of Communication Catherine Knight Steele.