Mar. 21, 2018—3:00 PM in 201 International Center—Professor Alex Borucki, UC Irvine History Department, “Digital Humanities and African Diaspora Studies: The Intra-American Slave Trade Database”

From the publication of Phillip Curtin’s The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census in 1969 to the launching of the webpage Voyages: The Transatlantic Slave Trade Database in 2008, scholarship on the slave trade has focused primarily on the forced Atlantic crossings of captives from Africa to the Americas. By contrast, the slave trade within the Americas has received scant attention from historians, especially before the abolition of the transatlantic traffic. Yet hundreds of thousands of African survivors of the transatlantic slave trade endured extensive continued journeys on the American side of the Atlantic. “Final Passages: The Intra-American Slave Trade Database” is a project supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and directed by Alex Borucki (UC Irvine) and Greg O’Malley (UC Santa Cruz), which aims to document and make publicly accessible evidence on slave trafficking voyages within the Americas. This new database will be added to the website Voyages, which already charts the transatlantic traffic of captives.