Southern Historical Association Annual Meeting,  New Orleans, LA.

Session Title: Researching Black New Orleans

Research New Orleans explores the worlds within and beyond Blassingame’s Black New Orleans. Through the creation of datasets, digital media, and primary documents from this pivotal work, we chart the locations of Blassingame’s extensive archive. Beyond this archive, Digital Blassingame also studies his experiences researching in the U.S. South during the 1960s and 1970s. Central questions to our work include: What does his archive look like? Where were these archives located fifty years ago? Who organized and preserved the archives? And what was it like for a Black scholar to study in these spaces?  

Led by a team of graduate students from Johns Hopkins University (JHU) and Harvard University, Digital Blassingame comprises one of three projects withins Keywords for Black Louisiana—a digital initiative of LifexCode, launched and directed by Jessica Marie Johnson, Assistant Professor of History at JHU. This session is a digital exploration and presentation of Research New Orleans.