The Trans-Atlanta Slave Trade Database, maintained by Emory University, is expanding through additional funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
The database, known as slavevoyages.org, includes maps, voyage logs, ship manifests, diaries and other records of about 35,000 trans-Atlantic slave ship crossings. The database also includes archival records of about 67,000 slaves, with all of the records available to the public in an interactive database housed at Emory.
The almost $325,000 database grant is one of five NEH humanities project grants awarded to Georgia institutions this week, totalling more than $1 million.
The money will allow the project to add more resources from early Spanish and Dutch records about the Middle Passage, particularly the movement of slaves between the Caribbean and the Americas. The money will also be used to update the coding for the database, which will improve users’ ability to create custom maps from subsections of the database.
The database has received NEH support since 1993 and collects the records, which were previously found in places like Sierra Leone, Cuba, London or Liverpool, in a central location. That availability has allowed significant research, including more information on the economic and political aspects of the slave trade.
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