After I stepped back from entering data, I thought about our class discussion on surveillance and power. We explored the tension between the power of the slaver and the enslaved. One of our readings suggested that runaway ads are a power-play by slavers because they expose enslaved bodies (Morgan and Rushton). Contrastingly, the other reading held that runaway ads expose white ignorance via their crude, incorrect descriptions of the runaway (Waldstreicher). Our class mostly walked the mid line, acknowledging the influence that media has in shaping ideas of a group of people, but also focusing on the enslaved’s agency by reinterpreting the law as representing slave owners’ fear rather than slave owners’ power.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

By resurrecting runaway slave ads, are were empowering the stories of enslaved persons or are we just following in a long tradition of surveillance? Certainly the historian exerts power in historical writing by inducing particular responses in her audience. I don’t see databasing runaway ads itself as a sinister act of surveillance. Historians’ interpretations of the data will be the step towards empowerment or disempowerment.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

In general, I think the discipline of history is in a moment of lifting up the stories of the \u201ccommon people,\u201d those on the periphery of state politics. That’s why I like Cordelia’s post critiquing<\/a> the particular and contradictory appearance that Ben Franklin cultivated. Runaway ads were born of a situation of ugly power dynamics, but digitizing them gives more people access to the history of enslaved resistance.<\/p>\n

<\/a>  <\/a>  <\/a>  <\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Avery Overall, I like the user interface of the Freedom on the Move database. A few suggestions: Clarify the \u201ccounty\u201d field When the database asks for \u201ccounty\u201d do they mean the county at the time or the county as it exists now? Maybe lines haven’t changed much since the 19th century, but I bet […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1316","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-private","post-preview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1316","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1316"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1316\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1316"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1316"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1316"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}