Emory University Establishes New Online Database of the Atlantic Slave Trade

Emory University in Atlanta has debuted its new online Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database. The database allows scholars to search for information on nearly 35,000 trans-Atlantic voyages between the 16th and 19th centuries.

The database identifies more than 67,000 Africans aboard slave ships. Scholars can search using variables such as name, age, gender, origin, and place of embarkation. Or, researchers can search by the name of the slave ship or can call up listings of voyages that occurred in a specific year or time frame.

Henry Louis Gates Jr., director of the W.E.B Du Bois Institute for African and African-American Research at Harvard University, which provided a grant to help fund the project, stated, “The greatest mystery in the history of the West has always been the Africans who were enslaved and shipped to the New World. Their ancestries, their identities, their stories were lost. This site has done more to reverse the Middle Passage than any other single act of scholarship possibly could.”

Readers who want to access the new Emory database on the Atlantic slave trade can do so by clicking here.