Introduction
In 1984, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, at the time Professor of History at Rutgers University, stumbled upon a trove of historic data in a courthouse in Pointe Coupee Parish, near Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Over the next 15 years, she painstakingly uncovered the background of over 100,000 enslaved Africans who were brought to Louisiana in the 18th and early 19th centuries who made fortunes for their owners.
Poring through documents from all over Louisiana, as well as archives in France, Spain and Texas, Hall designed and created a database that recorded the African slave names, gender, ages, ethnicities, places of origin, occupations, illnesses, family relationships, prices paid by slave owners, testimonies and in many cases their emancipations. In March 2000, Louisiana State University Press published Hall's database on a CD-ROM. It was then published online by the University of North Carolina via www.ibiblio.org.
The data have amazed genealogists and historians of slavery with the breadth of documentation. Because Louisiana was controlled by Spain, then France and finally the United States, the surviving sources are recorded in Spanish, French, and English. The proprietors of the enslaved in Louisiana kept detailed records with valuable historical information that historians thought was lost or could never be collected. The database is a once-unimaginable prize.
Hall's Afro-Louisiana History and Genealogy is far-reaching and is readily accessible to historians, genealogists, anthropologists, geneticists, linguists, and anyone seeking keys to the past. Hall was one of the first scholars to enable her research to reach the broadest possible audience. Initially, her database was made available through the Center for the Public Domain and ibiblio.org and more recently through Walk With Web Inc. (www.walkwithweb.org). Now the Afro-Louisiana History and Genealogy 1699 - 1820 Database is a user-friendly, searchable, online database that can be freely used by the public.
About Gwendolyn Midlo Hall
Dr. Gwendolyn Hall
History Professor at Rutgers University
"Gwendolyn Midlo-Hall is Professor Emerita of Latin America and Caribbean History at Rutgers University. Born in 1929, Midlo-Hall has been lifelong civil rights and Black Power essayist and activist, multi-award-winning historian, digital humanities pioneer and outstanding public intellectual still writing pioneering works as she reaches her 92nd year."
Dr. Gwendolyn Hall is professor emerita of history at Rutgers University, where she taught Latin American and Caribbean history. A noted writer and historian, Dr. Hall’s award-winning scholarship include ground-breaking endeavours in digital history, including the development of the CD-ROM Database Afro-Louisiana History and Genealogy, 1699 - 1860 (2000) and its digital format, Afro-Louisiana History and Genealogy, 1719–1820, from which this search engine is built. Dr. Hall has received numerous awards, regularly speaks on Afro-American history, and is an elder of the African Heritage Studies Society and a Guggenheim Fellow. Dr. Hall was born in Louisiana and currently resides in Guanajuato, Mexico.
She is the author of extraordinary books that have had an enduring impact on the field of humanities. Her books include Social Control in Slave Plantation Societies: A Comparison of St. Domingue and Cuba (1971), her prize-winning book, Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (1992), Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas: Restoring the Links (2005), and her most recent work, Haunted by Slavery: A Memoir of a Southern White Woman (2021), in which she narrates her life story in an attempt to share her journey on finding the essence of the abstract word liberty and which actions can be taken to promote its real significance.
Professor Hall is the daughter of Ethel and Herman Lazard Midlo, of Jewish heritage. Her father was involved in supporting the Black community in Louisiana, which had an enormous influence on Dr. Hall’s perception of freedom, justice, and human rights. Since her teenage years in the Jim Crow south, Dr. Hall has taken an active stand in confronting racism and its status quo. Her activism has guided her academic path.
Team
The visual identity of the project was developed to best represent the seriousness of the problem of terrorist movements in Africa while providing a clean and fluid layout accessible to researchers and the general public. The logo and visual concept for the project was designed by Dr. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall (professor emerita of history at Rutgers University). The color pallet of the site mirrors the logo following a monochromatic scheme with minimal elements. The reliance on black and white photography is also important to the identity of the site as it highlights the stark reality of this global issue. The website is open-source and database-driven. The user front-end of the website is developed in HTML5 using bootstrap 4.0 framework that provides pre-written Javascript and CSS classes. The backed database is developed in MySQL and PHP interface.
- Directors
- Collaborators
- Technical
Gwendolyn Midlo Hall
Rutgers University
Paul E. Lovejoy
York University
Walter Hawthorne
History Department, Michigan State University
Ibraima Seck
Whitney Plantation
Kathe Hambrick
River Road African-American Museum
Amgelique Bergeron
West Baton Rouge Museum
Kartikay Chadha
Walk With Web Inc.
Fahad Qayyum
York University
Fernanda Sierra
Walk With Web Inc.Contact
If you have any questions or queries, a member of staff will be happy to help. Feel free to contact us by telephone or email and we will be sure to get back to you as soon as possible.