Research

Enslaved.org: Peoples of the Historic Slave Trade is an online database compiling records of over 600,000 people who were enslaved, owned slaves or participated in the historical trade. The database was created in partnership with Matrix: MSU Center for Digital Humanities & Social Sciences, MSU Department of History, UMD College of Arts and Humanities, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and scholars at multiple institutions of education, research, and public exhibition.

Christopher Bonner's book "Remaking the Republic: Black Politics and the Creation of American Citizenship" chronicles the various ways African Americans from a wide range of social positions throughout the North attempted to give meaning to American citizenship over the course of the nineteenth century. 

Sarah Cameron’s book, "The Hungry Steppe: Famine, Violence, and the Making of Kazakhstan" uses new Russian and Kazakh language sources to tell the story of one of the most abominable crimes of the Stalin years—and one that’s gone largely untold. Between 1930 and 1933, more than 1.5 million people—a quarter of Kazakhstan's population—perished as a result of a state-driven campaign that forced a rural, nomadic population into collective farms and factories and confiscated their livestock. Although elements of nomadic culture continued to influence Kazakh life in the post-famine years, the effort effectively eradicated nomadism as an economic practice. 

Robyn Muncy, professor of history, is a guest curator of "Rightfully Hers: American Women and the Vote," an exhibit to commemorate the centenary of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment at the National Archives in Washington, DC. The exhibit opened in March and will run through September 2020. 

The exhibition is part of a nationwide initiative exploring the generations-long fight for universal woman suffrage. Despite decades of marches, petitions, and public debate to enshrine a woman’s right to vote in the Constitution, the 19th Amendment – while an enormous milestone – did not grant voting rights for all. The challenges of its passage reverberate to the ongoing fight for gender equity today. 

What is now considered a key component of citizenship - the right to vote - is often taken for granted, and is not afforded to all through the Constitution. Through this initiative, the National Archives will not only highlight the hard-won victories that stemmed from the Women’s Suffrage movement, but also remind modern-day citizens of their responsibilities associated with the right to vote.

Read more about the exhibition on the National Archives website.

"Suspect Freedoms" chronicles more than a hundred years of Cuban diasporic history in New York. One of the few studies to examine the early history of Afro-Cuban migration and politics, it employs a rich cache of primary sources, archival documents, literary texts, club records, newspapers, photographs, and oral histories to produce what Michel Rolph Trouillot calls an "unthinkable history."