research post 2026-04-03
"I am suffering from visual deprivation..."
Kinship and Community
Huge congrats and celebration (I will do this over and over) to brilliant scholar, friend, Capricorn kin and writing group comrade for Dr. Ashanté Reese!!! Her new book Gather (Norton, 2026) is out in less than two weeks! And she just announced her book tour. Thrilled to celebrate her and catch her when she’s in Baltimore!
And in case you missed it, beautiful artist and mermaid Julia Mallory caught the office hours on Monday and has allowed me to share some of her animation and collage work honoring and engaging the Black press and nineteenth century data portraits. Grateful for you sis!!! See below…
Last, if you are in Baltimore next weekend, check out this lineup of events in honor of the Toni Cade Bambara documentary making the rounds and coming next weekend to the Maryland Film Fest!
Let the wild rumpus of research start!
Listen
Reads
The Domestic Slave Trade https://www.searchablemuseum.com/domestic-slave-trade/
Herbert George Gutman, Slavery and the Numbers Game: A Critique of Time on the Cross (University of Illinois Press, 2003).
Jarena Lee and the Early AME https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/stories/jarena-lee-and-early-ame-church
Shannon Luders-Manuel, “Jarena Lee, The First Woman African American Autobiographer,” JSTOR Daily, December 15, 2018, https://daily.jstor.org/jarena-lee-the-first-woman-african-american-autobiographer/.
Part 1 – Early Settlement and the Rise of Slavery in Colonial Dutch New Jersey, n.d., accessed March 28, 2026, https://www.montclair.edu/anthropology/research/slavery-in-nj/part-1/.
Vanessa M. Holden, “She Wanted to Be Free: Black Women’s Revolutionary Resistance,” Ms. Magazine, March 26, 2026, https://msmagazine.com/2026/03/26/she-wanted-to-be-free-black-womens-revolutionary-resistance/.
Desarchivar La Mirada: Una Exhibición Para Revisar Las Visualidades Del Arte Puertorriqueño Del Siglo XX. – 90 GRADOS˚, March 16, 2026, https://90grados.com/arte/desarchivar-la-mirada-uprrp.
Documents
Abner Abercrombie, “Inventory of Enslaved People Owned by Abner Abercrombie,” Montgomery County Probate Court (Alabama), April 27, 2022, https://scholarsjunction.msstate.edu/lantern-mcpc/112.
Narrative of William W. Brown, an American Slave. Written by Himself https://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/brownw/brown.html
John Brown Slave Life in Georgia: A Narrative of the Life, Sufferings, and Escape of John Brown, a Fugitive Slave, Now in England https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/jbrown/jbrown.html
Sally Williams, Aunt Sally: or, The Cross the Way of Freedom. A Narrative of the Slave-life and Purchase of the Mother of Rev. Isaac Williams, of Detroit, Michigan: https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/sally/sally.html
James Williams Narrative of James Williams, an American Slave, Who Was for Several Years a Driver on a Cotton Plantation in Alabama: https://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/williams/williams.html
Theodore Dwight Weld (white abolitionist) American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/weld/weld.html
Colored Conventions Project Exhibits https://coloredconventions.org/exhibits/
Maria W. Stewart, Meditations from the Pen of Mrs. Maria W. Stewart: (Widow of the Late James W. Stewart) Now Matron of the Freedman’s Hospital, and Presented in 1832 to the First African Baptist Church and Society of Boston, Mass (Enterprise Publishing Company, 1879).
Watch
SmithsonianNMAI, Nation to Nation, 2015, 04:45,
.Flying Lotus, Never Catch Me
Projects
The Lantern Project
https://scholarsjunction.msstate.edu/lantern/
The Lantern Project is a collaborative project led by Mississippi State University as part of a coalition of institutions located within Mississippi and Alabama, including the University of Mississippi Libraries (Oxford, MS); Delta State University (Cleveland, MS); The Natchez Historical Foundation (Natchez, MS); Columbus-Lowndes County Public Library System (Columbus, MS); and the Montgomery County Archives (Montgomery, AL).The Lantern Project provides, for the first time, centralized and institutionally supported access to information in legal records documenting enslaved persons, including probate records, court records (orphans court, civil court, criminal court, and others), deeds, receipts, bills of sale, and other documents which were or could have been used as evidence in a trial, from across Mississippi and the Deep South.
Critical Data Visualization with Palladio
https://matthewlincoln.net/mapping-knoedler-palladio/
Palladio is a simple but powerful exploratory data visualization tool built at Stanford University. It runs entirely inside your internet browser. You don’t need a user account, and none of the data you visualize ever leaves your computer. Although it is simple and has some limitations especially with large datasets, it has some very useful features for exploring a new data set and finding its oddities and eccentricities. It is a good intro way to look through a dataset and figure out what might be missing before moving on to more comprehensive tools like Tableau, Python, or R.
This walkthrough will take you step by step through several tasks in Palladio that you can do on your own before the class meeting. Each step includes a series of reflection questions, both about what we think the data could be telling us, but also what might be missing or mis-represented in the data. This exercise is more about learning how to use Palladio to critically investigate data generated from historical documents than it is about finding new historical insights. You will also likely come up with questions about the data that don’t seem to be answered by the data documentation in this lesson. This is a real-life situation you’ll find yourself in when working with data produced by others. Figuring out what questions you would like to ask of the original data producers is a crucial part of critical data investigation.
Affirmations and Beatitudes
via muse360 on IG:
via bamy_lupis on IG
via nkyinkyim_museum
Editorial on birthright citizenship by Martha S. Jones and Kate Masur:
Movement for Black Lives responds to the UN’s resolution marking the Atlantic slave trade as the gravest crime against humanity
See you next week!