Carla Peterson's Black Gotham Digital Archive

Professor Peterson, with the support of a MITH fellowship last year, created a digital archive drawing on the research material for her book, Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City. 

The Black Gotham Archive collects digital exhibits from Professor Peterson's story of African American elites in New York during the nineteenth century, including primary documents about her family, schools for black children, portraits of leading black figures and narratives of the 1863 draft riots.  Professor Peterson also blogs about the process of researching and writing Black Gotham, and expects to supplement the archive as more materials are digitized, including stories about white New Yorkers who interacted on a regular basis with blacks; about the literary and cultural activities of the black elite; about their political activism, most especially their work on the Underground Railroad, and the inevitable white backlash; and of course about the role black women played in all of these events.