Have you ever looked at old photographs or paintings and ask where were the Black people or how they got to the city?

 Do you know about Black people's role in building New York City? And are you curious about the city's involvement with the slave trade?

On the topic of New York City history, people generally do not think much about the city's colonial period and its extensive involvement with the slave trade. And people especially do not think of slavery being the reason for New York's economic growth and power. But where do you even start if you want to learn about this side of New York City's history? This site starts at the New York Slave Revolt of 1712.

As the first recorded moment of an uprising of Black enslaved people in New York City, diving into this event unveils how intrinsically tied the African Slave Trade was to the historical and social context of the city's colonial period. As well as the legacies of that time period impacting the subsequent years towards modern New York City society.

WEBSITE NAVIGATION

In order to explore the website, there are several ways to do so. 

 For a broader historical view on the history of Black New Yorkers in New York's colonial eras, you can check out the Black Life in New Amsterdam, 1609-1664 exhibit in order to focus on the Dutch period. And to learn about the aftermath of the 1712 revolt and the impact it had on the future of the colony, you can click on the British New York, 1664-1783 exhibit. 

By clicking on the Map of Source items' Locations tab on the top navigation bar, it will take you to a current map of New York City. The map is another way to navigate through all the source items included on the website because most items are tagged to a geological point on the map. This is to create a more spatial understanding of important locations and buildings from the city's colonial era displayed in relation to the familiarity of the New York City we know and navigate today. By clicking one tag and it will take you to the source item and its full background information.

This map page includes the option browse by tag, which directs you to a word cloud of all the used tags on the website. Click on one of tags on the word cloud in order to go to everything on the site tagged with the particular word.

Click on the All Source Items tab to explore all of the source items on the site along with the Dublin Core bibliographic information for each item. For a larger view of the source item, you can click on the file that is to the righthand side of the page with the Dublin Core information. Or, click on Collections: Images, Maps, and Written Sources, if you want to see the items in organized in the three categories of images, maps, and written sources. The source items on the site are photos, paintings, screenshots of videos, illustrations, maps, interactive PDFs, and legal documents pertaining to slavery and colonial life for Black New Yorkers. 

As more source items get added over time, this page and instructions to navigate the site will update itself accordingly along with the page, For Further Research....

Visit the Mission Statement page to learn about the creation of this site.

Happy Exploring!