Paging Through History

Researchers in various disciplines at Rice delved into projects in 2021 that looked at the history of the trans-Atlantic and intra-American slave trades. They also created tools for colleagues to explore the topic for years to come. 

SlaveVoyages: SlaveVoyages.org is the world’s largest repository of information about the trans-Atlantic and intra-American slave trades: the routes, the ships, the manifests and the human beings at their core. And now, after nearly 20 years at Emory University, the website and its treasure trove of data have moved to their new home at Rice. Two undergrads found that there were no records in the database for Texas, so these two history majors, Katelyn Landry and Victoria Zabarte, went and tracked down records in Louisiana, Georgia and Alabama that were manifests of enslaved people bound for Galveston. Their contributions to the SlaveVoyages database mark the first time Texas has been part of this international database. Read more about SlaveVoyages in Rice News.

The Red Book: “The Red Book of Houston: A Compendium of Social, Professional, Religious, Educational and Industrial Interests of Houston's Colored Population” — published just once, in 1915 — offers a detailed depiction of Black middle- and upper-class life in the Bayou City at a time of both triumph and trial. Originally printed on glossy stock, “The Red Book” is recognized by researchers as unique in its comprehensive and creative celebration of Black life over a century ago. Now, over 900 of the names and addresses presented in the book have been extracted in an ambitious undertaking by Rice archivists and students. Their work has been made available online for free in the form of geospatial mapping data. Future researchers can use this wealth of data to continue exploring “The Red Book” with geographic information system software and other tools. Read more about “The Red Book” in Rice Magazine.

“Doc Talks”: A series of live webinars and companion podcasts called “Doc Talks” invites audiences to listen in on conversations about Rice’s history that are reshaping how we think about our past, connect to the present and plan for the university’s future. An astonishing variety of documents — handwritten mortgage deeds and business records from the 19th century, formal correspondence and scribbled notes, Rice Thresher articles and photographs from the “Campanile,” and campus blueprints and maps — fueled the conversations hosted weekly by Rice historians Alexander X. Byrd ’90 and Caleb McDaniel during the 2020-2021 academic year. Each of these documents, which also included clips from homemade videos, musical recordings and professional documentaries, reveals new information about Rice’s history, and more often than not, they raise new questions for Byrd and McDaniel to ponder. Read more about “Doc Talks” in Rice Magazine. Listen to the latest “Doc Talks” here.