Freedom on the Move

By the time you read this review, the collaborative digital collection Freedom on the Move: A Database of Fugitives from American Slavery will almost certainly be larger and even more useful than it was when I reviewed it. The site’s dynamism poses challenges for reviewers in print journals, but also reinforces the project’s immense utility for this and future generations of scholars, writers, and what the site calls “citizen historians.” Already it likely constitutes the single most significant database of runaway slave advertisements ever assembled. As it grows, it surely will produce a nearly unparalleled resource for learning about U.S. slavery, the enslaved people who tried to escape it, and the networks of slave owners and jailers who strove to maintain its regime of surveillance and recapture. The site’s team of collaborators—Cornell University’s Edward E. Baptist and William C. Block, the University of Kentucky’s Vanessa M. Holden, the Ohio State...

Algorithm · Database · Dynamism · Genealogy · Political science · Resource (disambiguation) · Sociology · State (computer science) · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Computer Science · History · Law · Philosophy · Race, History, and American Society · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies