Slavery Adverts 250 Project Featured on Detroit Public Radio

Professor Carl Robert Keyes, Ph.D., was featured on WDET’s “Detroit Today with Stephen Henderson,” an NPR-affiliated current events program. Prof. Keyes, associate professor of history and director of the Women’s Studies Program at Assumption, discussed the history of newspaper advertisements for enslaved men, women, and children as well as his Slavery Adverts 250 Project, which enlists Assumption undergraduate students as guest curators as part of their coursework.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO THE INTERVIEW

The Slavery Adverts 250 Project, a division of the Adverts 250 Project, chronicles the role of newspaper advertising in perpetuating slavery in the era of the American Revolution by republishing advertisements from 18th-century America. Each day, the project republishes every known advertisement mentioning slaves published 250 years ago that day.  The project is currently working its way through 1768. At that time, colonists deprived enslaved people of freedom while simultaneously clamoring for their own liberty from taxes imposed by Parliament. “Many people don’t realize,” Prof. Keyes explains, “that slavery was a part of American culture and commerce from New England to Georgia. These advertisements demonstrate that enslaved people were bought and sold, or made their own attempts to gain their freedom by running away, throughout all the colonies.”

Prof. Keyes and student guest curators analyze some of the advertisements in detail, providing historical context as well as identifying methodological issues related to research and accessibility. The analysis also offers a glimpse into early marketing strategies already in use by advertisers in colonial and revolutionary America.

In addition to posting to the website, the curators also republish all of the advertisements via a highly successful Twitter account, @SlaveAdverts250. “We’re using modern media to circulate these advertisements,” Prof. Keyes remarks. “We’re replicating for 21st-century audiences what it might have been like to encounter advertisements for slaves in 18th-century newspapers. They were not confined to a specific section. Instead, they could appear anywhere in an issue, just as tweets featuring these advertisements appear among all other sorts of content. This helps to communicate that slavery was enmeshed in daily life in the era of the American Revolution.”

WDET’s website hosts a live stream of its programs, including “Detroit Today with Stephen Henderson.”