Michigan State University has built a website, Enslaved: Peoples of the Historical Slave Trade, for people to discover and explore nearly a half million people records and five million data points.
The database explores or reconstructs the lives of individuals who were enslaved, owned slaves, or participated in the historical trade.
The Center for Digital Humanities & Social Sciences at Michigan State University (MSU) in partnership with the MSU Department of History, University of Maryland, and scholars at multiple institutions, developed the website and database.
The primary focus of the site is people — individuals who were enslaved, owned slaves, or participated in slave trading.
According to an article in the Washington Post, the website will “for the first time allow anyone from academic historians to amateur family genealogists to search for individual enslaved people around the globe in one central online location.”
With the help of scholars, educators, and family historians, the website will be expanded in 2021.
One of the objectives of the site is to build an interconnected system of services and tools that would:
- Allow individuals involved in the slave trade to be identified and recognized across all participating project databases
- Allow those identified and recognized individuals to be searched, explored and visualized in the Enslaved.org Hub
- Connect those individuals to particular events and places with a Disambiguation Tool in Enslaved.org; and
- Create at least 25 interactive biographies of people of the slave trade as exemplary models.
It’s a site worth developing and exploring.
