Slavery and Anti-Slavery:A Transnational Archive

Slavery and Anti-Slavery: A Transnational Archive is the world’s largest archive on the history of slavery, which is devoted to the scholarly study and understanding of slavery from a multinational perspective. Archival collections were sourced from more than 60 libraries at institutions such as the National Archives, Oxford University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Yale University. This digital collection comprises 5.4 million pages of documents organized into four parts: Debates over Slavery and Abolition; Slave Trade in the Atlantic World; Institution of Slavery; and Age of Emancipation. The archive brings together historical books, legal documents, supreme court records, portraits, maps, manuscripts, monographs, pamphlets, newspapers, and periodicals from different countries; thus, adding depth and context to the study of the history of slavery.  

The site is simply organized, with the menu at the top divided between "Collections," "Publications,” "About," "Research Tools," "Learning Center," and "Search History." Users can also explore each part of a document by clicking the hyperlinks of the collections that are listed on the page. The Age of Emancipation includes numerous rare documents related to emancipation in the United States, as well as Latin America and the Caribbean. These documents include letters and diaries from Euro-American abolitionists, and other items directly related to slavery, such as slave passes, deeds, manumission papers, certificates of registry, political tracts, and sermons. Debates over Slavery and Abolition cover the Abolitionist movement and conflicts within it, anti- and pro-slavery arguments of the period, and the eventual abolition of slavery. The Institution of Slavery retells the story of slavery's emergence, growth, and catastrophe in the Atlantic world across four centuries. Two of the most important documents are the Dred Scott appellate case and the U.S. Senate investigation of John Brown following his raid on Harpers Ferry. Finally, The Slave Trade in the Atlantic World shows the ugly slave trade in a complex, multi-lateral, and interregional way. 

The core section in this archive is the "Collection," which allows users to explore the whole 71 collections in the archive. The collections can also be filtered by archives, document type, language, and source library. The webpage of each collection provides a short overview of the collection, metadata of collection (language, source institution, extent, and date range), and all subcollections of the selected collection. The search bar on the top of the page allows users to choose between two searching opinions: search specific documents within collection or view all documents in the collection. To help users explore each document, the site also provides metadata about the sources to tell users more context about the material, such as document title, document type, language, author, date, collection, archive, publisher, issue or volume number, and manuscript number. Every document has already been digitized as a high-quality pdf file and can be sent, downloaded, or printed. 

Another particularly useful tab was the "Learning Center" which provides students guides on how to generate or refine their research questions, how to find primary sources; and how to cite the documents. Teachers can also ask a series of questions to broaden students' knowledge of these subjects. For example, teachers may direct students to read some narratives written by enslaved people and then ask students to analyze the relationships between enslaved people and their enslavers using evidence from the narratives. By letting students read the documents from different anti-slavery organizations, teachers can have them think about what those organizations had in common and how did they differ in their views on abolition. 

The archive is an excellent teaching tool. It allows students to search across all documents in one interface, and thus can duplicate the researcher’s experience in the original archives without travelling. More importantly, the archive allows students to perceive history through different angles because different sources may have different or even opposing views and perspectives. Students have an opportunity to learn how historians frame historical problems, how historians use evidence, and how historians produce a historical narrative by using SAS.  

Overall, SAS offers a chance to access rare historical manuscript collections from official reports to travel journals, and from petitions of abolition to pro-slavery periodicals. The website supports the efforts of historians, high school and college students, and teachers studying the history of slavery. The result will be important contributions to the scholarly dialogue about American slavery and its local and global ramifications. The pro-slavery and the antislavery struggle can come to be seen in entirely new, more challenging ways. There is no other source on the history of slavery with the breadth of coverage, quality of content, and capabilities for research than Slavery and Anti-Slavery.