Past Research Efforts
Black Periodical Literature Project
Managing Editor: Hollis Robbins
The Black Periodical Literature Project (BPLP) is devoted to the study of black newspapers published in America between 1827 and 1940. The BPLP is in the process of preparing for publication and for on-line access to nearly ten thousand pages and items, including not only news and articles, but also commercial, church, and personal advertisements; commentary on contemporary political debates; reviews of cultural events; reprints of addresses to scientific and political societies; controversies concerning church matters; and educational, historical, and travel articles.
In an earlier phase of the project, a team collected the fiction, poetry, editorials, and art criticism published in these newspapers; this archive has been collected on microfiche and an index to these items on CD-ROM has been available in most university libraries for a decade. Last year the archive was transferred to PDF files. The balance of the database is being collated and organized for publication with an academic press for researchers, scholars, genealogists, and students.
Timbuktu Library Project
In 1998, the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute launched the Timbuktu Library Project whose purpose is the preservation and restoration of the lost Library of Timbuktu. The approximately 50,000 volumes contained in that library have been held and protected by approximately fifteen families since the late sixteenth century. Under the auspices of the Timbuktu Library Project, those manuscripts are being catalogued. As that work progresses, the Institute is seeking funding to photograph and digitize the contents of the 50,000 titles, and, in the case of especially important works, to have them translated.
Harvard Guide to African American History
Senior Editors: Professors Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Darlene Clark Hine, and Leon Litwack
Published in 2001, this project is a comprehensive guide to primary and secondary sources for African American Studies and will become a basic research tool for students at all levels by providing access to the whole spectrum of African American history
Modeled on the classic Harvard Guide to American History, which appeared more than forty years ago and has influenced research in American history ever since, this project will help define the field of African American history itself.
In cooperation with a team of senior editors led by Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham (Harvard University), Darlene Clark Hine (Michigan State University), and Leon Litwack (University of California, Berkeley), the project staff assembled a team of twenty-five eminent scholars in the field, each of whom assumed responsibility for the chronological or thematic area for which he or she is among the leading interpreters. The new Guide was published in an 800-page book by Harvard University Press, and the text, which contains more than 150,000 citations, is also available on CD-ROM.
Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue
Founder and Artistic Director: Anna Deavere Smith
Begun in 1997, the Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue was a joint project of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research and the American Repertory Theatre. The mission of the Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue was to cultivate the development of professional artists representing a broad range of disciplines including theatre, music, dance, the visual and literary arts, film and video, whose work addresses issues of race, identity, diversity and community. The Institute also explored how these works can engage new audiences whose members cross traditional social, economic, and ethnic boundaries.
The Institute was a three-year, inclusive, multi-disciplinary program to create new artistic works that tackle the key social concerns of our time. At its heart was a six-week summer residency program that brought artists together with scholars, civic leaders, and diverse new audiences. Challenging work on contemporary social issues by artists of the highest caliber was enriched by these intense interactions with intellectuals and community leaders whose work grappled with the same issues. Among the artists who participated in the IACD were Donald Byrd, Dread Scott, Art Spiegelman, Carrie Mae Weems, and Patricia Williams. By fusing the intellectual and artistic resources of Harvard University with the resources of Boston's cultural and community organizations, the Institute aimed to create art that breaks new ground in engaging the citizens of our democracy in vital civic discourse.
Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database
Editors: David Eltis (Queen’s University) and G. Ugo Nwokeji (University of Connecticut)
Between the summer of 1993 and the autumn of 1997, a team of scholars centered at the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research created a data set of detailed information on 27,227 transatlantic slave trading voyages that occurred between 1650 and 1867. Under the direction of Barbara Solow (Boston University) and David Eltis (Queen’s University) and with the collaboration of Stephen D. Behrendt and David Richardson, the work of this team resulted in the largest uniform, consolidated database of its kind in the world. The authors estimate that the assembled data cover at least two-thirds of the slaving voyages that ever sailed. The data detail not only basic demographic characteristics of the African slaves’ mortality, age, and gender but also precise information on crew membership, conditions on slave ships, duration of voyages, the nature of slave resistance, business organization of slave traders, and the age and physical characteristics of vessels. Cambridge University Press published a CD-ROM comprising the totality of these data and maps in 1999.
A new phase of this research focuses on measuring the composition of African groups forced into the New World between 1819 and 1850, after the abolition of slavery by Great Britain and the United States in 1807. During those years, naval cruisers intercepted slave ships off the coast of Africa and liberated the captives on board. Before doing so, however, records were made by commissions in Sierra Leone, Capetown, Liberia, Rio de Janeiro, Havana, and St. Helena indicating the name, age, place of habitation, height, gender, and obvious cicatrisation of each captured individual. With field work and the considerable help of Africa-based scholars in several disciplines, the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database Project expects, in this new phase, to be able to provide hard evidence of the African origins of the transatlantic slave trade and to extract from anonymity thousands of Africans who were captured and shipped into slavery.
Top Down, Bottoms Up: U. S. Television
Director: Dr. Octavia Hudson
The purpose of the Top Down, Bottoms Up Project is to develop a catalogue of people and media resources that can be harnessed to create a television network committed to socially responsible programming. In order to ensure that such programming is relevant to as broad an audience as possible, the project seeks to identify the elements necessary to effectuate real change in the media environment of the United States, not only at the national television network level (Top Down), but also in the communities across the country (Bottoms Up).
Among Top Down, Bottoms Up’s aims are the following:
- Integrate new and old media to address social concerns respecting the strengths of different media
- Brand a network of programs with a Universal Needs philosophy so that viewers know where to find more information and broader social perspectives
- Add choices of research-based information to the entertaining opinions that dominate talk television, radio, and Internet chat rooms
- Create a grassroots community-based advertising model that brings people together around common interests
Top Down, Bottoms Up uses entertainment as a catalyst to more information. It links individual and community know-how, television, the Internet, and whatever emerging technologies that work to address common social concerns. It is an infrastructure that:
- Links programs on the Together Media network to social action in communities
- Links niche markets to a broad Universal Needs program philosophy
- Delivers life-changing information and data to individuals
- Mobilizes communities to act on issues such as education, childcare, and the environment