{"id":2904,"date":"2015-11-13T19:39:01","date_gmt":"2015-11-13T19:39:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/libnews.binghamton.edu\/news\/specialcollections\/?p=2904"},"modified":"2015-11-13T19:39:01","modified_gmt":"2015-11-13T19:39:01","slug":"browse-hundreds-of-documents-submitted-by-enslaved-people-petitioning-for-freedom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/libnews.binghamton.edu\/specialcollections\/2015\/11\/13\/browse-hundreds-of-documents-submitted-by-enslaved-people-petitioning-for-freedom\/","title":{"rendered":"Browse Hundreds of Documents Submitted by Enslaved People Petitioning for Freedom"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\"><a href=\"http:\/\/libnews.binghamton.edu\/news\/specialcollections\/files\/2015\/11\/SmCertification.jpg.CROP_.original-original.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-2905 aligncenter\" alt=\"SmCertification.jpg.CROP.original-original\" src=\"http:\/\/libnews.binghamton.edu\/news\/specialcollections\/files\/2015\/11\/SmCertification.jpg.CROP_.original-original.jpg\" width=\"600\" height=\"430\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>A redesigned website now offers access to hundreds of freedom petitions brought by enslaved people in Washington, D.C., in the first half of the 19th\u00a0century. The site\u2014<a href=\"http:\/\/earlywashingtondc.org\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">O Say Can You See: Early Washington, D.C. Law and Family<\/a>\u2014showcases the diversity of strategies that black people living in D.C. used to gain freedom through the courts in the antebellum period.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div>\n<p>Many of these freedom cases were previously difficult to access, since a major source used in writing the legal history of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit has been the case reports of\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/encyclopedia.gwu.edu\/index.php?title=Cranch,_Judge_William\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">William Cranch<\/a>, who served as chief justice of that court from 1806 to 1855. &#8220;Cranch excluded the last names of nearly all African-Americans,&#8221; William Thomas, a historian at the University of Nebraska\u2013Lincoln who headed the team that put together the website, explained to me.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div>\n<p>Working at the National Archives a few years ago, Thomas came across an index of court cases called\u00a0<em>Black Washingtonians<\/em>, which had been put together by archivists working from original case documents (rather than Cranch&#8217;s summaries). Looking at the index, Thomas realized how much more information was available.<\/p>\n<div>\n<p>The site offers access to those primary documents.\u00a0Browsers can explore it by looking at a group of<a href=\"http:\/\/earlywashingtondc.org\/cases\/annotated\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u00a0annotated cases<\/a>;\u00a0by checking out<a href=\"http:\/\/earlywashingtondc.org\/families\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u00a0stories of families<\/a>\u00a0who petitioned the court over several generations; or by picking a single person, like lawyer\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/earlywashingtondc.org\/people\/per.000001\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Francis Scott Key<\/a>\u00a0(yes,\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/amhistory.si.edu\/starspangledbanner\/francis-scott-key.aspx\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">that<\/a>\u00a0Francis Scott Key), and looking at their connections to other people in the database.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div>\n<p>People doing genealogical research can search for family names. As the site&#8217;s team adds more documents from civil and criminal cases in the coming year, its usefulness for researchers looking to fill in their family histories will expand.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.slate.com\/blogs\/the_vault\/2015\/09\/11\/history_of_freedom_suits_freedom_petitions_from_dc_courts_available_in_a.html?wpsrc=sh_all_mob_tw_bot\">Read more here<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A redesigned website now offers access to hundreds of freedom petitions brought by enslaved people in Washington, D.C., in the first half of the 19th\u00a0century. The site\u2014O Say Can You See: Early Washington, D.C. Law and Family\u2014showcases the diversity of strategies that black people living in D.C. used to gain freedom through the courts in [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-2904","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-cool-site-of-the-month"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/libnews.binghamton.edu\/specialcollections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2904","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/libnews.binghamton.edu\/specialcollections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/libnews.binghamton.edu\/specialcollections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libnews.binghamton.edu\/specialcollections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libnews.binghamton.edu\/specialcollections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2904"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/libnews.binghamton.edu\/specialcollections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2904\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/libnews.binghamton.edu\/specialcollections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2904"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libnews.binghamton.edu\/specialcollections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2904"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libnews.binghamton.edu\/specialcollections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2904"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}