{"id":2489,"date":"2018-06-12T09:30:27","date_gmt":"2018-06-12T13:30:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/aadhum.umd.edu\/?p=2489"},"modified":"2018-07-09T15:55:11","modified_gmt":"2018-07-09T19:55:11","slug":"sharing-the-lost-boys","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aadhum.umd.edu\/2018\/06\/sharing-the-lost-boys\/","title":{"rendered":"Sharing “The Lost Boys”: Making a Marriage Between a Book and a Website"},"content":{"rendered":"

I recently built a new professional website on squarespace. The website is a place for me to share details about upcoming talks that I\u2019m giving, and a place for visitors to find information about my research and teaching than I cannot easily display on my standard history department faculty profile page<\/a>. The squarespace site has been live since August 2017 and, according to its back-end analytics functions, is not exactly inundated with web traffic. It receives, on average, one visitor per day. On its busiest day, May 12, 2018, twelve people checked it out\u2014and that was on a day when one of my lectures at the Smithsonian was being broadcast on CSPAN. As one of this year\u2019s class of AADHum Scholars<\/a>, my goal this summer is to overhaul this easily overlooked website to equip it with the sorts of black digital humanities tools<\/strong> that could improve its functionality and visibility, as well as to support the rollout of my new book.<\/p>\n

That book, The Lost Boys: A Story of Slavery and Justice on the Reverse Underground Railroad<\/em>, is due for release by Simon & Schuster in February 2019. It\u2019s a fast-paced, adventure narrative that tells the little-known but true story of five free black boys who fell into the clutches of this country\u2019s most fearsome gang of kidnappers and enslavers in 1825. That summer, a spate of brazen abductions in Philadelphia perpetrated by a professional kidnapping crew led by Patty Cannon<\/a> and her son-in-law Joseph Johnson sent these boys\u2014Sam Scomp, Enos Tilghman, Alex Manlove, Cornelius Sinclair, and a six-year-old sweep known to us only as \u2018Joe\u2019\u2014on an odyssey across America.<\/p>\n

The Lost Boys<\/em> is a history book aimed at a general audience. It is plot-driven and character-focused, and aspires to build on the unprecedented attention to the abduction, enslavement, and sale of free African Americans stirred by director Steve McQueen\u2019s recent Oscar-winning film treatment of Solomon Northup\u2019s memoir, Twelve Years a Slave<\/em><\/a> (1853). At the same time, I hope it will furnish a revisionist new account of the role of kidnapping in the domestic slave trade that will persuade readers that the kidnapping of free black children into slavery in the decades before the Civil War was vastly more frequent, pernicious, and politically significant than we have previously supposed.<\/p>\n

But to reach and engage these readers, The Lost Boys<\/em> is going to need a supporting website that can foreground its historical Black actors and spotlight its arguments.<\/strong> During a workshop<\/a> this spring, I sought feedback from the AADHum community and MITH<\/a> staff. We critiqued some existing author websites that support comparable popular history books like Never Caught<\/em><\/a> and Barons of the Sea<\/em><\/a> and talked frankly about how my existing website might transform to showcase new content, tools, and functionality\u2014in short, to become a black digital humanities project.<\/p>\n

It was an energetic discussion and it left me eager to get cracking. I spent the next few weeks identifying web content that I think readers (or prospective readers) of The Lost Boys<\/em> might find appealing and trying to figure out the functionality the site will need if it is to live on as a stand-alone black digital humanities resource<\/strong> after the book\u2019s rollout has come and gone.<\/p>\n

Here are the results. I\u2019ll spend these next few months overhauling my squarespace site in five key ways<\/strong>:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. I\u2019ll use it to introduce and humanize my book\u2019s protagonists following the models I\u2019ve identified on some TV series websites, like those for PBS\u2019s Civil War<\/em><\/a>.<\/li>\n
  2. I\u2019ll post high-resolution and interactive versions of the three custom-built maps that folks at Maryland\u2019s GIS lab<\/a> are building for the book.<\/li>\n
  3. I\u2019ll create a user-friendly timeline<\/a> that spotlights important milestones and sources.<\/li>\n
  4. I\u2019ll create reading guides and discussion questions to help readers in schools and book groups get the most from the project.<\/li>\n
  5. I\u2019ll add some \u2018take action\u2019 tabs<\/a> to connect this historical story about kidnapping and enslavement to the modern campaign against human trafficking<\/a>. I might even design and shoot a book trailer<\/a>, a promotional medium that is becoming increasingly common.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    There\u2019s still time to add a few more things to my digital to-do list. So if you have ideas or can send me links to other projects that might give me inspiration please comment below or send me an email. I\u2019d love to learn what you think.<\/p>\n

    \u2014Richard Bell, AADHum Scholar and Associate Professor of History at the University of\u00a0Maryland, College Park<\/i><\/p>\n<\/div>

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