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UNCG Slave Name Database Ensures The Past Is Not Forgotten

Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library
/
Yale University

A team from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro has been working to identify the names of people who were made slaves in America through documents including wills and bills of sale. The Digital Library on American Slaverylists about 80,000 slaves, and is referenced by tens of thousands of users each month. 

Richard Cox is the digital technology consultant for UNC-Greensboro University Libraries and he heads the digital database initiative. He speaks with host Frank Stasio about the stories within the documents and what they reveal about history and the slave economy.

Cox is joined by Lisa Tolbert, a professor of history at UNC-Greensboro, who has been working with students to digitize runaway slave ads published in North Carolina newspapers. She talks about the importance of putting these remnants of American history in context.

Laura Pellicer is a digital reporter with WUNC’s small but intrepid digital news team.
Longtime NPR correspondent Frank Stasio was named permanent host of The State of Things in June 2006. A native of Buffalo, Frank has been in radio since the age of 19. He began his public radio career at WOI in Ames, Iowa, where he was a magazine show anchor and the station's News Director.
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