Session Abstract

Throughout the Americas in the 18th and 19th centuries, newspapers often included as a regular feature advertisements and other notices seeking to locate runaway slaves. From the 1780s to 1834, newspapers in the British Caribbean also generally included long lists of runaways who had been captured and confined in parish work houses; in the U.S. South, antebellum newspapers also often included similar county jailer's notices as well as paid advertisements. These advertisements and notices are significant documentary sources for understanding slavery and slave resistance, the manifold realities of enslaved people (including the material consequences of the essential violence of slavery on the bodies of the enslaved), and are especially useful for recapturing the variety of individual life experiences and how slave cultures and communities changed over time. Documenting runaway slaves has already yielded a wealth of information on the “lives, places, stories” of the enslaved, and offers numerous opportunities—and some challenges—for interpreting African American history throughout the Atlantic world. This panel will consider how these sources and methods for documenting runaways contributes to more nuanced, and even more personal, views of slavery and the experiences of enslaved Africans and African Americans in the British Caribbean and the U.S. South.