Research and Scholarly Work

Richard Bell was digging through archives in the Library Company of Philadelphia in 2011 when he paused on a 180-year-old newspaper article about a kidnapper who reportedly took her own life while serving time in a Delaware jail.

Bell, an associate professor of history at the University of Maryland, was researching a book about suicide. But he was less captivated by Patty Cannon’s death than by how she made a living: kidnapping free black children and trafficking them into slavery.

Cannon and her band of criminals were the starting point in what became “Stolen: Five Free Boys Kidnapped into Slavery and Their Astonishing Odyssey Home,” Bell’s harrowing, heartbreaking book published today. Lured from their Philadelphia homes in 1825 by the false promise of work, the boys—Sam, Enos, Alex, Joe and Cornelius—spent months at the hands of a black-market network of traffickers that marched them over a thousand miles, from the Eastern Shore of Maryland into the South.

Bell knew little about this horrific slice of American history until he came across Cannon’s record. Since then, the film adaptation of Solomon Northup’s 1853 slave memoir, “Twelve Years a Slave,” brought mainstream attention to what Bell calls the “Reverse Underground Railroad.” Bell spoke with Maryland Today about the arduous process of reconstructing the saga at the heart of “Stolen” and what it adds to the commonly accepted narrative of slavery.

These five boys don’t have memoirs like Solomon Northup. In fact, only one of them could read or write. So how did you piece together this epic tale?
Over eight years working on this project, I went to 35 archives in 14 states and the District of Columbia, from very fancy archives in D.C. and Philly to courthouse attics and dusty archives in the Deep South.

The most significant source I used is coverage from a Philadelphia magazine called The African Observer, which was broadly sympathetic to African American freedom struggles and therefore quite rare. The largest part of the source base is a series of about 30 or so letters either to or from the mayor of Philadelphia when he gets involved in trying to recover these five boys from Alabama and Mississippi to bring them back to Philadelphia. But I also used 100 other small sources—from tax records to medical bills—to build out the story and be able to tell it with a degree of texture and richness and immediacy. I found things that had never been discovered before, like a missing persons ad placed by the father of one of the boys, and letters from one of the kidnappers while he was doing jail time, begging for a pardon or clemency.

The book combines scholarship with storytelling and reads like a novel. Why did you decide to tell this story with literary flair, with narrative?
I wrote this book for as many readers as possible. Many of the academic history books that we write are argument-driven, rather than narrative-driven, and idea-driven rather than character-driven. That sometimes limits their appeal beyond academia or beyond academic courses. So, the hope is to have written a book of interest to general readers because the story of these five boys being kidnapped and trafficked into slavery is representative of a tsunami of similar stories which are harder to recover. And if we can understand one story, we can better understand the contours of the trafficking of thousands, if not tens of thousands, of free black people into slavery between the Revolution and the Civil War. This is an undeniably important scholarly subject, but if scholars are the only people to learn about this, then this is a missed opportunity to help the public grapple with the complex legacy of race and slavery in the U.S.

The state of Maryland played an important role in this saga. Can you explain the importance of its geography?
This story opens in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and takes the reader to Alabama and Mississippi, but along the way the state of Maryland looms pretty large, and a lot of the action in the early part of the story does take place in Maryland. The gang of kidnappers have their headquarters in the middle of the Delmarva Peninsula, right on that Maryland-Delaware state line. They live in buildings there, but they also use them as warehouses or safe houses for the trafficked children they are trying to remove from Philadelphia and get into the legal labor market for slaves in the Deep South. So, the Eastern Shore of Maryland is a staging post of this vast network—what I call “the Reverse Underground Railroad” in the book—that allows thousands of free black adults and children to be kidnapped and trafficked into slavery in the Deep South.

And it’s a very safe place for kidnappers and human traffickers to warehouse the victims of their kidnapping. What’s so striking is that no one in the surrounding community on the Eastern Shore in the 1820s can find the courage and confidence to blow the whistle on the neighbors down the street whom they know to be kidnappers and human traffickers.

What was most revelatory to you in writing this book?
I was startled and dismayed by the scale of how often the kidnapping of free black adults and children went on, and the degree to which children in particular were targeted. I was surprised by the degree to which the people doing the kidnapping tended to be from the margins of rural society, and that some of them were actually African American or mixed race. The role of women in these kidnapping collectives also struck me as surprising. And it struck me as doubly surprising, given all I thought I knew about how slavery worked, that on occasion there were white slaveholding Southerners who would intervene to do something to stop particular kidnapping cases.

What do you hope people take away from reading your book?
That the line between being free and being unfree has never been bright and clear and that freedom in America has often been fragile. And that even being free from slavery is not the same as living free of racial discrimination, for instance. As the families of the boys in Philadelphia would tell you if they were here, they can be legally free but still have no job and no place to live.

I would hope readers come away with the understanding that the security of marginalized Americans has been continually threatened by predators of various sorts looking to exploit them for personal gain and that having freedom papers is not always enough to protect you.

And on the flip side, I hope readers of “Stolen” notice too that its story is also a story full of people who sometimes act against their own interests for the greater good … that ordinary people have made history in America again and again and again.

By Jessica Weiss ’05

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has awarded a $50,000 collaborative research grant to the College of Arts and Humanities’ Center for Global Migration Studies for a project entitled “Immigration and the Making of African America.” Led by Julie Greene, professor of history, the project will explore the largely untold history of immigrants from Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America and how they have influenced African American culture and society during the 20th and 21st centuries. 

The grant will support a conference in April 2020 that will connect humanities scholars across the nation as well as fund the planning of a future publication. Scholars will also engage with curators from the Smithsonian Institute’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. 

“Across the 20th century, and particularly since 1965, immigration from across the African diaspora has profoundly reshaped the African American experience,” said Greene. “Yet only rarely do immigration scholars and African Americanists engage in dialogue with one another. This project aims to bridge that gap, and along the way, illuminate experiences of race and migration in the modern United States.” 

Greene is director of the Center for Global Migration Studies at the University of Maryland. Her particular interests are in the history of labor and immigration. Her most recent book, “The Canal Builders: Making America's Empire at the Panama Canal,” focuses on the tens of thousands of working men and women who traveled across the world to live and labor on the canal project. 

The National Endowment for the Humanities is an independent federal agency that supports research and learning in history, literature, philosophy and other areas of the humanities. Created in 1965, the agency reviews and funds selected proposals from around the country.  The highly competitive Collaborative Research Grant is awarded to approximately 14 percent of all submitted proposals.

For more information on Greene’s NEH grant and others awarded during this grant cycle, visit the NEH website. 

Michigan State University has received a $695,000 grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to fund the Humane Metrics for the Humanities and Social Sciences (HuMetricsHSS) initiative, an international partnership that supports the development and implementation of new methods for assessing the nature and quality of scholarship in the humanities and social sciences over the next 18 months. 

The HuMetricsHSS initiative aims to create and support a values-based framework that enables humanities and social sciences scholars to tell more textured and compelling stories about the impact of their research and the variety of ways it enriches public life. It is led by an international group including Nicky Agate, Assistant Director of Scholarly Communication and Digital Projects at Columbia University; Rebecca Kennison, Executive Director and Principal of the nonprofit K|N Consultants; Christopher P. Long, Dean of the College of Arts & Letters at Michigan State University and Professor of Philosophy; Jason Rhody, Program Director at the Social Science Research Council; Simone Sacchi, Open Science Librarian at the European University Institute; Bonnie Thornton Dill, Dean of the College of Arts and Humanities (ARHU) at the University of Maryland and Professor of Women’s Studies; and Penny Weber, Projects Coordinator at the Social Science Research Council.

At the heart of this work is the recognition that the culture of higher education is shaped by practices of scholarly communication. In an era in which metrics increasingly shape how scholarship is undertaken and evaluated, HuMetricsHSS takes an innovative approach that begins by identifying values that enrich practices of scholarship in order to expand the breadth of what counts as a “scholarly contribution."

By creating a more “humane” metrics framework, the initiative seeks to diminish the broad reliance on metrics that either presupposes value as reflected in “neutral” indicators (such as citations) or that fails to consider the question of value at all in a scholar’s work. Instead, HuMetricsHSS advances a practiced-based approach that is holistic, reflective, and transparent.

“By orienting scholars and institutions toward the values about which they care most deeply and by providing them with structured ways to intentionally embody those values in the practices by which knowledge is created, shared, and evaluated, we hope to help individuals, departments, colleges, and academic institutions reshape the culture of higher education so that it is more humane, supportive, and just,” Long said.

Over the next 18 months, the Mellon grant will fund onsite values-focused workshops at a number of institutions in the US and the EU, research into the current processes of scholarly evaluation, the creation of a values toolkit, and continued development of HuMetricsHSS software.

“The work Dean Long and I are doing to engage our colleagues across the Big 10 Academic Alliance will help the HuMetricsHSS team assess how campuses in the United States and European Union utilize metrics in HSS,” Thornton Dill said. “This work will provide a framework for measuring impact that reflects the values and modes of inquiry in our fields."

By the end of this grant period, the research team anticipates that pilots of the HuMetricsHSS framework will be deployed by several institutions at some level and progress will be made on building a replicable model to advance adoption beyond these pilots. The team also is working on more direct engagement and robust collaborations with other like-minded projects and related institutions and furthering research software infrastructure for scholarly and administrative use.

“Success in achieving these goals will in part be measured by an increase in those using the toolkit and undertaking these critical conversations even without our direct involvement,” Long said. “While we are hopeful that HuMetricsHSS will gain traction during this phase of the work, the next phase — designed to expand and reinforce the work done now — will require considerable additional funding to integrate the values-based HuMetricsHSS approach into all aspects of faculty and staff development at a wide diversity of institutions around the world.”

This is the second Mellon grant received by Michigan State University to support the HuMetricsHSS initiative. The first was for $309,000, which funded an 18-month pilot that included a series of workshops bringing together scholars from a variety of institutions in the US and Europe to identify and define values and practices that enrich scholarship. From these workshops, the HuMetricsHSS team further refined their approach to better recognize, promote, and nurture scholarly practices by creating a small set of use cases for applying the values-based framework and the second round of funding will allow a deeper institutional engagement both in the US and the EU. 

College Park, Md.—The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded a two-year, $800,000 grant to the University of Maryland, College Park (UMD) to develop technology expanding digital access to a vast trove of literature from the pre-modern Persian and Arabic world.

"The Open Islamicate Texts Initiative (OpenITI) Arabic-script OCR Catalyst Project (AOCP)" will support the development of user-friendly, open-source software capable of creating digital texts from Persian and Arabic books. 

Matthew Thomas Miller, assistant professor in the Roshan Institute for Persian Studies in the School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures in UMD's College of Arts and Humanities (ARHU), leads an interdisciplinary team of researchers, including David Smith, associate professor in the College of Computer and Information Sciences at Northeastern University, Sarah Bowen Savant, professor of Islamic history at Aga Khan University (AKU) in London, Maxim Romanovuniversitätassistent für digital humanities at the University of Vienna along with Raffaele Viglianti, research programmer in the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities. 

"We realized that there was work being done separately in different areas to create tools for digitizing Persian and Arabic documents," said Miller, "but there wasn't a lot of communication across fields and these new advances were not making their way into the hands of users." 

To date, the development of digitization software has primarily focused on Latin-script languages, and in many cases requires specialized knowledge to run. Existing Persian and Arabic digitization tools fall short on accuracy and are often prohibitively expensive for academic and public users. 

Through the creation of new digitization tools for Persian and Arabic, the project team hopes to challenge traditional narratives of Islamic cultural history. The staggering number of Persian and Arabic texts produced in the pre-modern period make it humanly impossible to read them all, even in an entire scholarly lifetime.

"These thousands of unread texts are a potential treasure trove," said Miller. "Until we really get into it and begin digitizing and then examining them, we won't know what we might find or what new narratives and histories might unfold."

The grant will also fund two postdoctoral fellows and two graduate fellows in computer science and Middle Eastern studies. 

"Our goal is to grow capacity throughout these fields," Miller said, "which means both training scholars of Persian and Arabic in digital methods and computer scientists in the particularities of Persian and Arabic documents."

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has supported other UMD projects in the intersections of cultural studies and digital humanities, including the African-American Digital Humanities Initiative, Documenting The Now Phase 2 and Books.Files, all led by faculty and staff in ARHU. UMD is a widely-acknowledged leader in not only digital humanities, but also Persian and Arabic studies. The Roshan Institute for Persian Studies, which supported an earlier version of this project, is a premier center for the study and teaching of Persian culture in the U.S.

"Centering the digital humanities through the lens of cultural studies is among the college’s top priorities," said Bonnie Thornton Dill, ARHU dean and professor. "As scholars and teachers, our goal is to offer researchers and students new modes of inquiry that expand and deepen their abilities to understand and interpret our increasingly multicultural, global society."

Image: With the new Mellon Foundation grant, OpenITI’s digitization platform, CorpusBuilder, developed in collaboration with the SHARIAsource project of Harvard Law School, will be transformed into a full digital text production pipeline.

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded two grants totaling $2.8 million to the University of Maryland, College Park (UMD) to encourage research in black digital humanities and to develop technology expanding digital access to books from the pre-modern Persian and Arabic world. 

A $2 million, three-year grant will support the second phase of the African American History, Culture and Digital Humanities (AADHUM) initiative. Housed in the College of Arts and Humanities (ARHU), AADHUUM seeks to expand and institutionalize the field of black digital humanities at UMD and beyond. The first phase of the initiative was also funded by The Mellon Foundation. 
 
"African American history and culture are central to American history and culture," said Bonnie Thornton Dill, dean of the college and professor of women’s studies. "Making this knowledge widely available and giving people the opportunity to have hands-on experiences using digital technology to tell important stories is critical to enhancing our democracy."

She will continue to lead the project with Daryle Williams, associate professor of history and ARHU associate dean for faculty affairs, and Trevor Muñoz, interim director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) and assistant dean for digital humanities research in the University Libraries.

They will establish a long-term home for black digital humanities at UMD by hiring additional faculty, formalizing a competitive graduate research training and professionalization experience, offering mentor-training programs, expanding research partnerships with historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and developing best practices for tenure and promotion in black digital humanities.

Muñoz said AADHum has transformed the practice of digital humanities at MITH.
    
“If MITH offers a workshop on digital mapping, we need to make space for discussing the vulnerability that mapping certain populations, like activists or undocumented immigrants, creates,” he said.

The second Mellon Foundation grant, of $800,000 over two years, will support the development of user-friendly, open-source software capable of creating digital texts from Persian and Arabic books.

Matthew Thomas Miller, assistant professor in the Roshan Institute for Persian Studies in the college’s School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, leads an interdisciplinary team of researchers from Northeastern University, Aga Khan University (AKU) in London and the University of Vienna along with Raffaele Viglianti, research programmer at MITH.

"We realized that there was work being done separately in different areas to create tools for digitizing Persian and Arabic documents," said Miller, "but there wasn't a lot of communication across fields and these new advances were not making their way into the hands of users."

To date, the development of digitization software has primarily focused on Latin-script languages, and in many cases requires specialized knowledge to run. Existing Persian and Arabic digitization tools fall short on accuracy and are often prohibitively expensive for academic and public users.

"These thousands of unread texts are a potential treasure trove," said Miller. "Until we really get into it and begin digitizing and then examining them, we won't know what we might find or what new narratives and histories might unfold."

As part of the research team’s commitment to innovative software development and collaborative, interdisciplinary research, it will foster a community of users by hosting regular training sessions, establishing online user groups and teaching an undergraduate digital humanities class hosted jointly at Maryland and AKU through UMD's Global Classrooms Initiative.

The grant will also fund two postdoctoral fellows and two graduate fellows in computer science and Middle Eastern studies.

"Our goal is to grow capacity throughout these fields," Miller said, "which means both training scholars of Persian and Arabic in digital methods and computer scientists in the particularities of Persian and Arabic documents."

By K. Lorraine Graham