History Professor Mary Niall Mitchell Collaborates With New Orleans Teachers, Others on Pilot Project Using Freedom on the Move Data uno.edu - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from uno.edu Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Historically, the modern-day police force originated in the American South, from racist roots. Patrols that organized to find and recapture escaped slaves evolved to take on additional responsibilities. The child welfare system was born from similar original sins. “Orphan trains” operated for 50 years until about 1929, transporting children from economically struggling families many of whom still had living parents to wealthier homes, where they often worked as servants, or out West, where they worked on settler farms. In the post-slavery period, Black youth were often sent North, away from their families, to accepting white families to live as indentured servants; they were referred to as “freedom’s children.”
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.