A collaborative digital humanities project supported by the University of Iowa Libraries has launched. A Just and True Return (JTR) is led by Cory Young, assistant professor in the UI Department of History.
Developed with technical support from the Libraries’ Digital Scholarship and Publishing Studio (DSPS), JTR is a publicly accessible database of Pennsylvania’s surviving county slave registrations. The project brings together documents from more than a dozen repositories across three states, highlighting the lived realities of gradual abolition.
The interactive website features essays written by descendants of individuals recorded in the registrations, offering historical context alongside an interactive map that allows users to browse records by county. These elements work together to humanize the data and expand how scholars and the public engage with the history of slavery in the United States.
“People rarely put ‘Pennsylvania’ and ‘slavery’ in the same sentence,” Young said. “Yet these records remind us that in order for a state to become the first to abolish slavery, it had to exist there.”
Young said the project is intended to help students, scholars, and descendants more easily discover the thousands of people whose lives were shaped by Pennsylvania’s system of gradual abolition.
Young received funding from a 2024 Arts and Humanities Initiative standard grant, a competitive, internally reviewed grant program.
View A Just and True Return database.