Historians of American slavery face a quandary. Much of the surviving documentary evidence was produced by proponents of slavery. Louisiana archives offer an enormous trove of court cases that concern the buying and selling of enslaved people, but what are the risks of using these documents to reconstruct the hidden lives of the enslaved? For this episode of Open Books, Mae Velloso-Lyons is joined by Maria Montalvo, assistant professor of History at Emory University and author of Enslaved Archives: Slavery, Law, and the Production of the Past.
This episode discusses Enslaved Archives: Slavery, Law, and the Production of the Past by Maria Montalvo. This book was supported by the Digital Publishing in the Humanities initiative. Read or download the book for free.