The 1795 Louisiana Slave Conspiracy: A Digital Edition

Bryan Wagner
English
UC Berkeley

The grantees built a comprehensive digital edition of primary materials related to the 1795 Louisiana Slave Conspiracy. The centerpiece of the edition was the testimonies taken from slaves and their allies in the conspiracy. Previously these testimonies, which run to several hundred pages, had only been available to scholars who were able to travel to the Clerk of Court’s office in Pointe Coupee, Louisiana. The grantees transcribed, translated, tagged, and collated these testimonies along with other archival documents related to the conspiracy, including new prints of municipal records from the Archivo General de Indies in Seville. Adapting and extending a platform developed at the University of Virginia’s Center for Digital Editing, their edition allows users to search, browse, and annotate images of the original documents alongside the new transcriptions and translations prepared.