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New Orleans Public History and the Domestic Slave Trade

In February 2013 theHistoric NewOrleans Collection received an e-mail query from Mark Howell, then programs and education manager at the Library of Virginia. The library dreamed of putting together a multisite, daylong, interactive symposium featuring leading experts on the subject of the domestic slave trade. The library’s staff also hoped to initiate a collaborative effort between cultural centers and universities to produce a program notable not only for the sterling reputations of its featured scholars but also for the level of engagement and accessibility the program offered to the general public. The topic—the forcedmigration and sale of more than one million enslaved men, women, and children from the Upper South to the Lower South in the fifty-seven-year period between the United States 1808 abolition of the international slave trade and the close of the Civil War—was one with a rich historiographical tradition, but one whose findings had been relatively slow to trickle down into public history narratives on view in historic house and history museums. Out of Howell’s initial e-mail, the March 2015 symposium “To Be Sold: The American Slave Trade from Virginia to New Orleans” was born. A collaborative effort of the Historic New Orleans Collection (HNOC), the Library of Virginia, and the Midlo Center for New Orleans Studies at the University of New