Dr. Walter Hawthorne, Professor of History at Michigan State University, was recently quoted in the Newport Daily News article: “Newport’s Black history shared in pair of new projects.” Hawthorne partnered with The Newport Historical Society (NHS) on a significant research initiative called “Voices from the NHS Archives.”
As the Project Director for Enslaved.org, Dr. Hawthorne guided the NHS in shaping their project to be modeled on Enslaved.org: Peoples of the Historical Slave Trade. Enslaved.org is a digital project that addresses the urgent call to document the history of people of African descent more fully. Housed at Matrix in the College of Social Science at MSU, the project centers on the Black experience in the history of the Americas. The open-access website publishes datasets with information about the lives of individuals who suffered under slavery and who were part of the transatlantic trade.
Hawthorne’s collaboration with the NHS was made possible by a recent NEH grant Enslaved.org received.
The primary objective of the NHS project is to highlight the narratives of Black and Indigenous individuals by providing searchable digital records and offering the opportunity for researchers to delve into the lives, narratives, and personal connections of people whose records were not previously available.
Read further about the collaboration with Dr. Hawthorne and the NHS here.