A group of international scholars will gather at Emory University Dec. 5-6 to celebrate the debut of “Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database” ( http://www.slavevoyages.org) as it begins its own maiden expedition.
Two years in the making at Emory, the free and interactive Web-based resource documents the slave trade from Africa to the New World between the 16th and 19th centuries, says David Eltis, Robert W. Woodruff Professor of History and one of the scholars who originally published “The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade” as a CD-ROM in 1999. He and Martin Halbert, director of digital innovations for Emory Libraries, directed the work that made the online “Voyages” project expandable, interactive and publicly accessible.
“‘Voyages’ provides searchable information on almost 35,000 trans-Atlantic voyages hauling human cargo, as well as maps, images and data on some individual Africans transported,” says Eltis.
The conference, which also marks the bicentennial of the end of the trans-Atlantic slave trade in 1808, will feature presentations by Eltis’ graduate students who have worked on the database, with leading scholars commenting on their papers.
Other sessions include “The Slave Trade, the Web site and Atlantic History” and “The Slave Trade, the Website and the Classroom.”
David Brion Davis, Sterling Professor of History Emeritus and founding director emeritus of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition at Yale University, will give a keynote lecture on “Camparing the Paths to American and British Slave-Trade Abolition.” Following Davis’ talk will be the formal launch of the “Voyages” database by Rick Luce, director of University Libraries. For more information on the conference, visit http://www.ias.emory.edu/events/SlaveTradeConference.pdf.
Database Establishes Links Between America, Africa
Funded by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and Harvard University’s W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, “Voyages” is based on the seminal 1999 work, “The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade.”
