Libraries Staff Spotlight: David Satten-Lopez

A collaboration between Quaker & Special Collections and Digital Scholarship came to fruition this summer in the form of a new website, “Manumitted: The People Enslaved by Quakers.” This project, led by Anne T. and J. Morris Evans Post-Baccalaureate Fellow David Satten-Lopez, collects and visualizes information found in manumission documents held in our collections. This ongoing project combines archival research and writing with digital scholarship to aid genealogists, community members, and scholars in learning about the history of slavery and Quakerism in the Mid-Atlantic. 

One of the goals of the project is to center the stories of enslaved people, though the documents themselves provide only a snapshot from the perspective of enslavers. In spite of the limitations of what was recorded and by whom, Satten-Lopez and other staff and student colleagues who worked on the project hope that the site can provide streamlined access for researchers that may enable links to other records and information, creating a fuller picture of the many enslaved people whose voices were silenced.

You can visit the site to peruse records, see data visualizations, read contextual information, and view the digitized documents themselves at https://manumissions.haverford.edu.