Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, has announced a $1 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in support of a collective digital history project.

The Freedom on the Move (FOTM) project will bring together multiple institutions, including Howard University’s Department of History, to build a free and open archive of all existing “runaway slave” advertisements published in North American newspapers in the 18th and 19th centuries, estimated to total between 100,000 and 200,000 ads. The collection currently contains approximately 32,500 items.

To that end, FOTM will employ a cohort of graduate students and postdoctoral researchers who will be recruited and supported through a partnership with Howard and other institutions. In addition, the grant will fund a postdoctoral researcher and six academic year-long graduate research assistantships for Cornell and Howard graduate students.

“Freedom on the Move may become the world’s most extensive collection of runaway slave ads,” said Ed Baptist, FOTM co-founder and professor of history in Cornell’s College of Arts and Sciences. “But this grant will allow us to increase the depth, richness, and accessibility of the data, and quality is if anything even more important than the quantitative scale of sources available.” 

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