NEH Awards $300K to UMD Project Chronicling History of Emancipation

Funding supports the next volumes of “Freedom,” a landmark history series 50 years in the making.

By Jessica Weiss ’05

The University of Maryland’s Freedmen and Southern Society Project has received a $300,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support the editing of its landmark documentary book, “Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867.” Chronicling one of the most consequential moments in American history, the emancipation of four million enslaved people, the series preserves the words of those who lived through slavery and its aftermath.

The new funding will allow project staff to complete work on “Family & Kinship,” the ninth volume in the 10-volume series, and to advance work on the final volume, “Church, School, and Community.” Together, these volumes will reveal powerful stories of families torn apart by slavery and reunited after emancipation, the struggles of Black parents to secure custody of their children, and the creation of new religious, educational and civic institutions during Reconstruction.

“This was a moment when a nation united behind the values of individual freedom and democracy, when hundreds of thousands of people sacrificed their lives to make the country more free—including African American men who put on American uniforms and fought for a country they were learning to love for the first time,” said project director James Illingworth, an assistant research scholar in the Department of History. “By making these documents accessible, we hope to deepen public understanding of both the extraordinary struggles and the inspiring achievements that defined emancipation.”

Founded in 1976, the project has been guided by leading historians including the late Distinguished University Professor Ira Berlin, its founding director, and Leslie Rowland, associate professor of history who directed the project for decades until her retirement earlier this year. Under their leadership, “Freedom” became a flagship of African American history and documentary editing. To date, six volumes have been published, presenting letters, affidavits, testimony, petitions, legal records and other firsthand accounts of emancipation drawn from the vast holdings of the National Archives. Each document is paired with interpretive essays that set it in historical context. The project’s website currently provides more than 300 fully annotated transcriptions freely accessible to the public.

Over nearly five decades, the project has been cited hundreds of times each year in scholarship, adopted in college classrooms nationwide and recognized as a model for documentary editing. Looking ahead, the editors plan to expand the project’s digital presence and make even more of this material accessible to researchers, educators, students and the wider public.

“As we move toward the project’s 50th anniversary, we remain committed to telling this story in all its complexity,” Illingworth said. “The history of emancipation is not only central to understanding the past, it continues to shape the nation we are today.”

Image credit: Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1929