PROJECT: Freedom on the Move

Freedom on the Move is a database of fugitive slave advertisements that are being compiled by an interdisciplinary and multi-institutional team. The database includes thousands of “runaway ads” from newspapers, which tell thousands of stories through the details provided by the enslavers; “the ads ultimately preserved the details of individual lives–their personality, appearance, and life story. Taken collectively, the ads constitute a detailed, concise, and rare source of information about the experiences of enslaved people.”

This digital humanities project can be used by librarians, scholars and students, as well as citizen historians, to not only find the data they need, but to better understand the lives of people painted so vividly in the text of the advertisements. Of interest to DH practitioners, database users can export search results to JSON and CSV and use with your tool of choice, whether for mapping, text mining, or other DH applications.