The materials below can be used to explain and demonstrate how students can research and write histories of individual freedom seekers, enabling instructors to make the research and writing of freedom seeker into a class assignment. The MS Word and PowerPoint documents can be edited by instructors.
The documents include:
Two PowerPoints with case studies illustrating the research process
A document detailing where to locate freedom seeker newspaper advertisements
A bibliography of resources related to freedom seekers and the regions from which they escaped
A bibliography of online resources for historical maps
A downloadable Word version of our language guide to language use when writing about slavery
This assignment can be adapted for upper-level undergraduates and for graduate students. If instructors think any of the final essays are good enough, we encourage them to submit these for possible publication on this website. However, because we anticipate receiving a large number of submissions, we ask that instructors submit only those essays that are sufficiently well researched and written to be close to publishable quality. We have only limited resources for editing submitted essays, and we will be forced to return any submissions that require a significant amount of editorial work. Please do not submit any essays in which authors appear to have used AI generated text.