A Digital History of the Suppression of the Slave Trade
The Visualizing Abolition project started in 2014 thanks to the support of an Arts & Humanities Grant, awarded by the University of Missouri Office of Research. The project intended to map the suppression of the African slave trade in the nineteenth century by tracing the correspondence exchanged between the British Foreign Office and British commissioners, ministers, naval officers, as well as representatives of foreign powers located around the world. The Arts & Humanities Grant allowed us to build the structure of the correspondence database and to collect data from 25,953 letters from the Foreign Office Slave Trade Series available in the British Parliamentary Papers, but we still had a lot more ground to cover.
In 2015, a Discovery Fellow from the University of Missouri Honors College joined the project and extended the number of letters listed in the database to 30,963. Although we will never know exactly how many letters were exchanged, that number comprises the totality in the series explored and no doubt the majority of all missives actually swapped. In the following year, we presented some of our preliminary results in papers delivered at the 58th Missouri Conference on History, the 2016 Mid-America Alliance for African Studies, and in a poster exhibited at the Spring 2016 University of Missouri Undergraduate Research and Creative Achievements Forum. We also applied to and received an Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities (ASH) Scholarship from the Honors College and the Office of Undergraduate Research, both at the University of Missouri.
The ASH Scholarship provided us with an expanded team of researchers who not only added data to our database, but also gathered images to provide visual context to the information collected and examined the database as well as other sources in research papers and posters presented at the 59th Missouri Conference on History, the 2017 National Conference on Undergraduate Research, the Spring 2017 University of Missouri Undergraduate Research and Creative Achievements Forum, and the Smithsonian National Museum Day Celebration at the University of Missouri Museum of Art & Archaeology. Further, they created the present website through which we have now the pleasure of sharing the project’s data with other researchers, students, and members of the public. We hope you enjoy our project and, should you like to keep yourself up to date with our research, please follow us on Facebook.
Type of Content | Use Restrictions | Citation Example |
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Data | Historical Data falls under the Public Domain, use restrictions do not apply. | Format: [name of database]. [latest year of publication data]. Visualizing Abolition: A Digital History of the Suppression of the African Slave Trade 1808-1900. [website URL] (Accessed Month, Day, Year) |
Images | Digitized Images: Contact the institution that provided the digital copy and/or holds the original. | Format: [title provided for digital image]. JPG. Visualizing Abolition: A Digital History of the Suppression of the African Slave Trade 1808-1900. [URL] (Accessed Month, Day, Year) |
Text | All text on the site, including essays, acknowledgements, and descriptions are covered by a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License | Format: [author of essay]. [title of essay]. [title of website] [publication date of essay]. See How to Cite below for examples. |
Video | Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License |
Citations vary according to the style users adopt (MLA, APA, Chicago Manual of Style, etc.). To cite the website according to the Chicago Manual of Style, for example, we recommend the following:
“Visualizing Abolition: A Digital History of the Suppression of the African Slave Trade,” 2017. visualizingabolition.org. Accessed April 25, 2017.
To cite a specific essay within the website using the same citation style, users may do so in the following manner:
Cherryhomes, Ellie and Sam Mosher, “The Campaign in The Illustrated London News.” Visualizing Abolition: A Digital History of the Suppression of the African Slave Trade, 2017, visualizingabolition.org. Accessed April 25, 2017.
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This website would not have been possible without the help and support of several people. With apologies for any regrettable omissions, we would like to thank especially the following individuals.
David Amponsah
Anne Barker
Linda Blockus
J.D. Bowers
Rachel Brekhus
Lawrence Celani
Daive Dunkley
Felicity Dykas
Keona Ervin
Mark Jarvis
Theodore Koditschek
Tammy McNiel
Kyle James Miers
Jenifer Pilz-Coulibaly
Jay Sexton
Mike Watson
Richard Winkel
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