Jane Landers

Media Appearances

• They're uncovering their ancestry — and questioning their families' racial narratives

  To help preserve these histories, Jane Landers, a historian at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, co-founded the Slave Societies Digital Archive in 2003. Today, SlaveSocieties.org offers free access to more than 3,900 digitized volumes of church and business records, totaling more than 750,000 images.

  September 29th, 2024

• First free Black settlement in U.S., long buried, is being resurrected

  Spanish settlers enslaved Black and Indigenous people, but they also offered a path out of slavery, said Jane Landers, a historian of Fort Mose and a professor at Vanderbilt University. For centuries, there were free Black people in Spain, and Spanish settlers brought this possibility across the ocean, unlike English settlers, who instituted a permanent, race-based system of slavery. About 10 percent of St. Augustine’s population consisted of free and enslaved African people, many of whom came from West Africa.

  May 12th, 2024

• Fort Mose: The first free Black town in the US

  "They went to present themselves to the governor of St Augustine," said Jane Landers, a professor of history at Vanderbilt University and a director of Slave Societies Digital Archive, which documents the history of enslaved Africans and their descendants. "They explained that they are asking for his protection, and that they wanted to become Catholics."

  February 23rd, 2024

• A Massive New Database Will Connect Billions of Historic Records to Tell the Full Story of American Slavery

  Historians, of course, have long made good use of various records, from plantation inventories and escaped slave advertisements to personal narratives collected by obscure abolition societies. But those details are housed at far-flung institutions, and not consistently organized. Jane Landers, a historian at Vanderbilt University, set out in 2003 to change that. Since that time, the project called the “Slave Societies Digital Archive” has digitized some 700,000 pages of religious and other documents from colonial Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, Florida and Angola. Unlike in the English colonies, where enslaved people were treated almost exclusively as property, in Spanish and Portuguese America, they “were considered fully human, with souls to be saved,” Landers says. Their life events were faithfully recorded, often by the Catholic church. The earliest of these archives date to the 16th century.

  January 1st, 2020

• Nashville Civil War fort gets 'slave route' designation

  A fort built by African Americans during the Civil War in Nashville has received an international designation for its significance to the history of slavery. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization has named Fort Negley a “Site of Memory,” as part of its Slave Route Project.

  May 22nd, 2019

• What Catholic Church records tell us about America’s earliest black history

  For most Americans, black history begins in 1619, when a Dutch ship brought some “20 and odd Negroes” as slaves to the English colony of Jamestown, in Virginia. Many are not aware that black history in the United States goes back at least a century before this date.

  February 22nd, 2019

• I dig through archives to unearth hidden stories from African-American history

  Many years ago, as a graduate student searching in the archives of Spanish Florida, I discovered the first “underground railroad” of enslaved Africans escaping from Protestant Carolina to find religious sanctuary in Catholic Florida. In 1738, these runaways formed Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose, the first free black settlement in what became the U.S.

  December 4th, 2018