Welcome to the #Slaveryarchive Digital Initiative.
The #Slaveryarchive Digital Initiative is led by Ana Lucia Araujo, with the support of INTERNATIONAL ADVISORY BOARD of scholars.
Araujo is a historian of slavery and the transatlantic slave trade and a Full Professor in the Department of History at the historically Black Howard University (Washington DC, United States), where she has taught since 2008. Araujo is the author or editor of fifteen books on the history of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade. Since 2017, she has been a member of the UNESCO International Scientific Committee of the Routes of Enslaved Persons. To know more about her work visit her personal website, and her faculty profile at the Department of History of Howard University, and follow her on social media.
The #Slaveryarchive Digital Initiative is intended to educate academics, students, and the public about the history of slavery and the transatlantic slave trade in Europe, Africa, and the Americas. International and multilingual in its scope, the initiative will promote scholarship in this vast field through blog posts, book talks on video, a podcast, reviews of books, movies, and exhibitions, the creation of syllabi, and the curation of annual book lists.
The #Slaveryarchive already has a history
In 2015, historian Ana Lucia Araujo started using the #slaveryarchive hashtag on Twitter and Facebook to collect news associated with the history of the Atlantic slave trade and slavery. Using an IFTT automated tool, all posts she tweeted or retweeted using the #slaverarchive hashtag were stored on the #Slaveryarchive Tumblr account. Although over the years, Araujo has not always been systematic in collecting news associated with slavery and tweeting them with the #slaveryarchive hashtag, the #Slaveryarchive Tumblr accumulated nearly 10,000 entries, until July 2022, when the automated tool stopped being free.
Over the years other Araujo created other #slaveryarchive channels, including Google + collections in English, French, Portuguese, Spanish, and German. But months later, after gathering dozens of posts, Google discontinued Google +, and the five multilingual collections were lost.
During the global pandemic of COVID-19, Araujo led the #Slaveryarchive Book Club, along with scholars Alex Gil (Yake University), Jessica Marie Johnson (Johns Hopkins University), and Vanessa Holden (University of Kentucky). In 2022, the group also developed The Woman King Syllabus.
In 2023, Araujo created and launched the #Slaveryarchive Digital Initiative.