Biographies of the Enslaved at the Hutchins Center at Harvard

Co-Directors Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Steven J. Niven, and Abby Wolf

http://hutchinscenter.fas.harvard.edu/enslaved

With support from the Mellon Foundation and Matrix, the Center for Digital Humanities and Social Sciences at Michigan State University, Biographies of the Enslaved at the Hutchins Center will build on three award winning print biographical dictionaries that have been joint projects of the Hutchins Center and Oxford University Press since 2002: African American National Biography; Dictionary of African Biography; and Dictionary of Caribbean and Afro-Latin American Biography. The three projects include 11,000 biographies of people of African descent from the ancient world to the present day, and from all realms of renown. These may be accessed by subscription on http://www.oxfordaasc.com/public/login.jsp

Biographies of the Enslaved will be a separate site, available for free through the Hutchins Center website in late 2020. It will focus only on biographies of people who were enslaved or connected to the transatlantic slave trade from the 15th to the 19th centuries. The site will provide free access to full biographies of enslaved people, along with images and other multimedia links. It will also make available a downloadable, searchable database containing biographical details of over 2000 people involved in all aspects of slavery and the slave trade in Africa, the Western Hemisphere, and Europe. In December 2020 this database was linked to a wide range of other slave trade databases within Enslaved: Peoples of the Historic Slave Trade, based at Michigan State University and funded by the Mellon Foundation at https://enslaved.org/.