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Johns Hopkins University historian Jessica Marie Johnson has received a $120,000 planning grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission for her “Kinship and Longing: Keywords for Black Louisiana” project. The grant will support a collaboration of scholars and graduate students toward developing a digital, open-source, searchable edition of some 200,000 French and Spanish colonial records documenting enslaved and free people of African descent in Louisiana between 1714 and 1803.
“I firmly believe that the history of the Gulf Coast, and particularly of Black Louisiana, is a really key piece of understanding American history more broadly,” says Johnson, director and principal investigator of Keywords for Black Louisiana and an assistant professor in the Krieger School’s Department of History. “We don’t talk about it as part of the larger story of American history in part because those French and Spanish documents are not translated, are not transcribed, and are generally accessible only to specialists. There’s something wrong with that.”