SlaveVoyages, a groundbreaking tool for data on history’s largest slave trades, is getting a new home.
Word of the project’s upcoming move was shared recently by Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and director of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research. “I’m pleased to tell you today that the SlaveVoyages site, with all of its databases, will live in perpetuity here at Harvard University,” Gates announced at a conference dedicated to celebrating the open-access resource.
SlaveVoyages was the result of nearly four decades of scholarly contributions, with researchers from multiple institutions working painstakingly to digitize handwritten records from archives worldwide.
Gates opened one of the afternoon sessions with a surprise for SlaveVoyages originator David Eltis, an emeritus professor of history at Emory University and the University of British Columbia, bestowing on him the W.E.B. Du Bois Medal “in recognition of his unyielding vision that brought to life a resource that has transformed our understanding of one of the most cataclysmic and consequential economic, social, and cultural forces unleashed in the history of humanity.”
The medal is “especially fitting” for Eltis, Gates added, given the fact that Du Bois, the first Black American to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard University, wrote his 1895 dissertation on efforts to suppress the trade of enslaved Africans in the U.S.
