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NEH Grants to Support History Professors’ Research
5/4/21

By Jessica Weiss ’05

The National Endowment for the Humanities has awarded grants to projects involving two University of Maryland historians to expand a massive digital database on the transatlantic slave trade and investigating the desegregation of mass transit in New York City.

Department of History Professors Daryle Williams and Richard Bell are benefitting from $24 million given last month to support 225 projects at museums, libraries, universities and historic sites across the country.

Williams is part of the multi-institutional team awarded $349,744 to add 10 digital collections to Enslaved: Peoples of the Historical Slave Trade (Enslaved.org), an online portal launched last year with records on hundreds of thousands of individuals involved in the historical slave trade.

Among the new collections are records from the Maryland State Archives’ Legacy of Slavery in Maryland project, which includes primary resources like newspaper ads, committal notices and census records related to Black Marylanders, fugitives and those who assisted slaves on the run in the state. Researchers will work to integrate those records into the Enslaved.org platform, where they can be used by scholars, family historians and the general public.

“This is a great opportunity to know more about slavery right here in Maryland—to know more about ourselves,” said Williams, who is a co-principal investigator at Enslaved.org. “We can’t understand the history of the state without talking about the impact of enslavement here. And these are really rich materials to do that.”  

Other additional data sets, which range from those held at small, local institutions to those at large, university-based special collections in the mid-Atlantic, the Carolinas and the Lower Mississippi, will increase the Enslaved.org linked open data platform to approximately 1.3 million records.

The funding will also go in part toward supporting undergraduate researchers who will work on the project as part of the Summer Research Opportunity Program, a long-standing pipeline collaboration among member institutions of the Big Ten Academic Alliance.

Another $6,000 will support Bell as he works on his next book, “The First Freedom Riders: Streetcars and Street Fights in Jim Crow New York.” It will tell the story of Elizabeth Jennings, a 25-year-old New Yorker who launched the first successful civil disobedience campaign in U.S. history. On July 16, 1854, Jennings stepped onto a ‘whites-only’ streetcar on Third Avenue, becoming the first among a small army of young Black women and men to fight to forcibly desegregate mass transit in New York City.

“Her story got under my skin—not only because it was dramatic and significant, but also because it reminds me that Black women have often been at the center of this country’s most important civil rights fights,” Bell said.

Recently named a 2021 Andrew Carnegie Fellow by the Carnegie Corporation of New York to support his work on the book, Bell will use the new NEH funds to travel to out-of-state archives for research.

“I’m eager to get back into the stacks and reading rooms, where the true riches for a project like this definitely rest,” he said.

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The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded $1.4 million to fund the third phase of Enslaved.org, which will refine the site’s data infrastructure, ensure a dedicated team and continue partnerships with scholars, heritage and cultural organizations and the public.

The Mellon Foundation funded the initial two phases of Enslaved.org—the first beginning in 2018 and the second in 2020—which provided support for both proof-of-concept and implementation. Phase II also saw the launch of the project’s peer-reviewed Journal of Slavery & Data Preservation.

This new round of funding is the latest in a long series of Mellon investments into research projects at the University of Maryland or involving Maryland researchers.

Among them, the foundation has provided over $3 million since 2016 to fund the African American Digital Humanities initiative at Maryland, and a recently announced $4.8 million grant will fund the Digital Inquiry, Speculation, Collaboration, & Optimism (DISCO) network, which includes UMD Assistant Professor of Communication Catherine Knight Steele.

History Professor Specializing in Slavery, Resistance Named Andrew Carnegie Fellow
4/29/21

By Jessica Weiss ’05

University of Maryland Professor of History Richard Bell, an expert of early American history and slavery, abolition and resistance, has been named a 2021 Andrew Carnegie Fellow by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The philanthropic organization awarded the 26 new fellows $200,000 each to fund significant research and writing in the social sciences and humanities that address important and enduring issues confronting society. 

Bell’s stipend will support research for his book, “The First Freedom Riders: Streetcars and Street Fights in Jim Crow New York,” which will tell the story of mid-19th-century Black New Yorkers who campaigned to desegregate public transit with pioneering civil disobedience strategies. 

Richard Bell headshot

“I’m delighted to receive this funding from the Carnegie Corporation,” Bell said. “Support for humanities research is essential, now more than ever, and, frankly, I’m over the moon to have the resources to pursue my work on this aspect of the freedom struggle in America for the next few years.” 

In total, the 26 scholars who make up this year’s class of Carnegie Fellows will focus on research topics including pandemic recovery, climate change, immigration, racial justice and more. They were selected from 311 nominations for the program, started in 2015.

Bell is also the recent recipient of the National Endowment of the Humanities Public Scholar award and has held major research fellowships at Cambridge, Yale and the Library of Congress. He serves as a trustee of the Maryland Center for History and Culture and as a founding member of the University of Maryland’s chapter of the Universities Studying Slavery consortium.

His most recent book, “Stolen: Five Free Boys Kidnapped into Slavery and Their Astonishing Odyssey Home,” was a finalist for the 2020 George Washington Prize and the 2020 Harriet Tubman Prize. “Stolen” shines a glaring spotlight on the Reverse Underground Railroad, a criminal network of human traffickers who stole away thousands of legally free people of color from their families in order to fuel slavery’s rapid expansion in the decades before the Civil War.

A few years ago, Bell stumbled across the story of Elizabeth Jennings, who, in 1854 at age 25, stepped onto a “whites-only” streetcar on Third Avenue, becoming the first among a small army of young Black women and men to fight to forcibly desegregate mass transit in New York City. It was the first successful civil disobedience campaign in U.S. history.

“The First Freedom Riders” argues that the desegregation campaign was unprecedented, radical and highly coordinated. To disrupt and destroy Jim Crow in Gotham City, Black activists developed strategies of civil disobedience—public set-pieces, boycotts, petitions, defense funds and more—that have become the hallmarks of grassroots antiracism protests ever since. 

Bonnie Thornton Dill, professor and dean of the College of Arts and Humanities, said Bell’s current project is especially relevant given the heightened focus on racial justice.

"Professor Bell’s scholarship helps us understand the ways in which historical struggles for freedom in America continue to inform current movements,” said Dill. “I am grateful that the Carnegie Corporation will support his work and look forward to the publication of his new book.”

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