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This assignment differs from the other papers assigned in this class. Instead of giving you readings and asking you to address a specific question, I want you to locate sources and to formulate a topic of significance on your own. My goal is for you to gain insight into how historians go about their work. How do they research the past? Come to conclusions about it? You will be looking through sources many historians of the colonial South use, a digital database of runaway indentured servant and slave notices from 18th-century Chesapeake newspapers. These are primary sources, works written in the historical period under study.
The Geography of Slavery, is accessed at http://www2.vcdh.virginia.edu/gos/explore.html. (I have also posted the link under External Links on our UBLearns website.) As the website states, the database:
contains more than 4000 advertisements for runaway slaves and indentured servants, drawn from newspapers in Virginia and Maryland, covering the years from 1736 through 1803.
The ads can be accessed in three different ways. First, you can search the ads based on values such as date of publication, place names mentioned, and ad type. Second, you can browse through the ads by date of publication or by place names mentioned. Third, you can perform a full text search of the ads.
So where do you start? You dont even know what youre looking for! First, read a few at random, just to get a sense of whats in these things. Second, start thinking about what kinds of things you could learn from these ads. Heres is a link to a blogpost that addresses just that question. Its briefand well worth a read. http://hsmcwalktogether.org/index.php/what-can-you-learn-from-a-runaway-slave/Third, formulate some kind of topic or question that could be addressed by these ads and formulate a search accordingly. One kind of question is sparked by the content of an ad youve looked at. What catches your eye? Scars? Personality traits? Skin color descriptions? Do you see certain things repeatedly mentioned? In the ad above, placed by Thomas Jefferson, you might note that Jefferson describes Sandy as a shoemaker who will probably try to make a living by plying that trade. You might wonder about runaways who were skilled in trades, as opposed to ordinary field laborers. So you could do a search for blacksmith, carpenter, seamstress, and so on. Another kind of question is sparked by the variables you know can be tracked in the database: the age and sex of the runaway, for example, the dates of running away, whether a servant or a slave, where they lived, and so on. With such variables in mind, you can look for a samplingjust teenagers, for example, or slaves from urban centers like Williamsburg or Baltimore, or servants–and see if you detect any patterns. You might choose to compare two samplesteenagers vs. older people, for example, or rural vs. urban, servants vs. slavesto see if you notice differences.Finally, pull your individual examples together and try to generalize about what youve learned. Dont just quote endlessly or summarize the content of each ad. Ideally, you would use advertisements as evidence to support an interpretive point. Your research might suggest, for example, that enslaved people with skills like Sandy ran away with the expectation that they could sell their skills. You might then suggest that perhaps they were emboldened to run away because of that expectation. Or, your research might suggest that teenagers tended to run away less (or more, or for different reasons, or with different plans, or in exactly the same way as, etc.) than older people. And you might speculate on why that could be true.
Three things to keep in mind: First, you will look throughand rejectmany sources before you select the ones that speak to a question or topic you have identified. Its a messy process, much more so than when the sources and questions are given to you, but this is how historians work. Sources dont jump out on their own and line themselves up neatly for you. Second, while every paper should make a point supported with evidence, dont expect you can prove every point. In the Sandy example, for instance, you might well be able to find many ads in which slaves in skilled trades are expected to survive by marketing skills. But did that ability motivate them to run away in the first place? Enslaved people like Sandy didnt leave a record of their thought processes. Remember: just because you cant prove something doesnt mean it is not true. Basing your speculation on evidence makes it a reasonable interpretation. Third, you will encounter unfamiliar vocabulary. Here is the link to a glossary for help: http://www2.vcdh.virginia.edu/gos/gloss.html.
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