A new $750,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities will fund enhanced access to the Freedom on the Move digital database and the development of a range of new tools and materials that will facilitate educational and scholarly uses, researchers say.
Freedom on the Move, housed at Cornell University, is the largest digital collection of newspaper advertisements for people escaping from North American slavery. The ads, placed by enslavers, are culled from 18th- and 19th-century U.S. newspapers and are used to document the lives of people escaping bondage.
University of New Orleans history professor Mary Niall Mitchell is a lead historian for that online database.