Slave trade database moving to Harvard — Harvard Gazette

"SlaveVoyages, a groundbreaking tool for data on history’s largest slave trades, is getting a new home.

Word of the project’s upcoming move was shared recently by Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and director of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research. “I’m pleased to tell you today that the SlaveVoyages site, with all of its databases, will live in perpetuity here at Harvard University,” Gates announced at a conference dedicated to celebrating the open-access resource.

SlaveVoyages was the result of nearly four decades of scholarly contributions, with researchers from multiple institutions working painstakingly to digitize handwritten records from archives worldwide.

Today, its multisource dataset, currently housed at Rice University, features information on more than 30,000 slaving vessels that traversed the Atlantic between the 16th and 19th centuries. Also documented are details on nearly 221,000 individuals involved with the trans-Atlantic slave trade, including ship captains and the humans they trafficked...."