District of Columbia, Company E, 4th US Colored Infantry, at Fort Lincoln. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
What insights about emancipation can be gleaned from the records of over 100,000 African Americans in the Civil War era?
| The second phase of a project studying links between Union Army enlistment and the emancipation of slaves is focused on linking African American soldiers to a database of freed people in Civil War refugee camps. |
Practices of Emancipation is a multi-year collaborative research project that is building a linked online database and interactive map containing records of over 100,000 African Americans in the Civil War era. The goal is to deepen our understanding of the agency of enslaved people in their own emancipation, while providing genealogists, students, and scholars with an opportunity to discover the life stories of individuals and families largely absent from the history books. In the first phase of the project, the research team geocoded the enlistment and birth locations of over 100,000 African American Civil War soldiers, allowing them to produce a dynamic map of emancipation as it played out in movements of fugitivity and armed resistance. In the second phase, the researchers intend to link these soldiers to a database of freed people (mostly women, the elderly, and children) in Civil War refugee camps, and to make both databases freely available online. Alisea W. McLeod, a leading expert on so-called “contraband camp” registers, will be in residence as a Visiting Fellow at the Neubauer Collegium in 2020–2021, where she will work with the project's researchers and programmers on exploring and codifying the registers, linking them to African American soldiers, and making them publicly accessible via the web. In 2021-2022 the team will finalize building the tools necessary to publish all the data and organize a final colloquium to explore the broader implications of this research and draw a roadmap for further collaborative work on nineteenth-century black digital history.
Collegiate Assistant Professor, History
University of Chicago
John Clegg is Collegiate Assistant Professor of History at the University of Chicago. He received his PhD in Sociology in 2018 from New York University. His research interests include the political economy of slavery, antebellum capitalism, and mass incarceration and job loss.
Program Manager Curricular Innovation
Institute on the Formation of Knowledge
Alisea Williams McLeod is former Chair of Humanities at Rust College (Mississippi, USA). Her most recent scholarship has been on African American Emancipation. As a 2020-2021 Fellow at the Neubauer Collegium, she has worked with a team of digital humanists to compile names of black soldiers and...
Associate Professor, English Language and Literature
University of Chicago
Christopher Taylor's research and teaching focus on the hemispheric Americas in the nineteenth century. While the British West Indies is his primary area of focus, he is interested in how these islands were linked to worlds beyond the boundaries of the British Empire. Working at the edges of...
Carousel with 3 slides shown at a time. Use the Previous and Next buttons to navigate, or the slide dot buttons at the end to jump to slides.
This conference will facilitate discussion among scholars pursuing digital projects to study the African American experience of the Civil War.
Carousel with 3 slides shown at a time. Use the Previous and Next buttons to navigate, or the slide dot buttons at the end to jump to slides.
This conference will facilitate discussion among scholars pursuing digital projects to study the African American experience of the Civil War.
