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Exploring Amistad Project Overview
Mystic Seaport's World Wide Web site entitled "Exploring AMISTAD: Race and the Boundaries of Freedom in Antebellum Maritime America" collects historical resources relating to the revolt of enslaved Africans aboard the Schooner Amistad off the coast of Cuba in 1839 and their subsequent struggle for freedom in the courts of the United States. The web site opens electronic access to a substantial body of primary historical source material and offers historical analysis of the episode's racial, social, cultural, political and international dimensions. It includes an educational component that develops sample curricular material using the project's primary materials, and invites and incorporates interactive, organic participation in the project on the part of scholars, museum experts, teachers and learners. This last component of the web site includes tracking a parallel project at Mystic Seaport for which separate grant funding has been secured: the historical reconstruction of the Amistad as an exhibit and learning center.
Project Materials
The nucleus of the project is the digital body of primary sources. The project has assembled and put on-line an electronic archive drawn from the rich historical documentation generated by the revolt and its aftermath in American courts, politics, and society. This electronic manuscript library houses newspaper coverage, court documents and trial testimony, diplomatic correspondence, Congressional and political commentary, and a selection of the contemporary pamphlets, books and other accounts that the revolt stirred up in the U.S. Images of the event, its participants, and settings have also been collected and digitized.
In addition to this primary document collection, the project has construct narrative support materials mapping the Amistad Revolt itself. This dimension of the project includes a basic chronology ordering the complicated sequence of events that led up to and grew out of the revolt, with stages or platforms for jumping into the primary documents. It also offers basic narrative treatments covering the various incidents that made up the larger Amistad affair. Specifically, the project tells the story of the Mendes' illegal enslavement and shipment to Cuba; their revolt on board the Amistad, efforts to sail back to Africa, and seizure by U.S. authorities; their reception in the U.S., where they became spectacles and sensations; the ensuing legal struggle for U.S. recognition of their freedom; the return to Africa (for most of them); and the aftermath in the U.S. and abroad.
The third basic component of "Exploring AMISTAD" is a thematic framework setting the event in its historical contexts. This dimension of the project offers encapsulated background treatments of such pertinent issues as: the middle passage, slave trade, and international efforts at suppression; slave revolts in the U.S. and the Americas; the domestic U.S. politics of slavery circa 1840, both antislavery (the emergence of abolitionism) and pro-slavery (Southern nationalism, expansionism and filibustering); U.S. relations with Spain, Cuba and the Caribbean, and antebellum U.S. imperialism; the various facets of U.S. involvement in Africa, including missionary activity and the colonization movement; and more generally the multicultural nature of the nineteenth century American and Atlantic maritime worlds. The essays examining these issues include links to bibliographies of secondary resources and to related web sites. And, as with the chronology, they are constructed in part as stages or platforms for jumping into suggested materials from the document collection.
All components of the project are manually indexed and full-text searchable. The site is designed to offer multiple paths through the Amistad story. Users can explore and assemble primary materials on their own. They can travel by way of document trails, with signposts indicating links to narrative and thematic points of orientation, or they can enter and move through the history along narrative or thematic lines, with numerous gateways to primary sources along the way.
Educational Development
The project has developed curricular materials promoting educational use of the site, working in conjunction with an advisory panel of four area teachers at the high school level. The advisory panel first met to critique a prototype version of the project, furnishing input on issues like document selection, possible classroom uses, lesson themes, and educational goals. And later, once a substantial body of material had been assembled, the panel met in a second session to create document packets and draft classroom exercises that are incorporated in the web site as samples or models for other teachers. The project director assembled similar materials for use at the college level.Teachers using the site are encouraged to submit lesson plans and document package selections of their own to the site, based on their class experiences with the material.
Extending Dialogue
The site will extend engagement with the Amistad story by setting up an on-line forum promoting scholarly dialogue and facilitating connections between and among users, teachers, scholars, and museum experts. Historians will be invited to answer questions from users, contribute short electronic essays on related topics, or host scheduled on-line "chat sessions" with classes and other learners. These contributions will then be archived as part of the web site, and possibly also woven into the core body of "Exploring AMISTAD" materials via cross-referencing links.
Based at Mystic Seaport, "Exploring AMISTAD" is especially well-placed to cultivate these kinds of connections over the next few years for the Museum in conjunction with Amistad America Inc.,which has received funding to build a historical construction of the Schooner Amistad as both a learning center and exhibit space. Construction of the new Amistad has been underway since March, 1998, and the Amistad America web site tracks the building of the vessel, providing regular reports on the rebuilding. "Exploring AMISTAD" incorporates the material culture of this story into its broader historical contexts. These two web sites together open access to the living knowledge of Mystic Seaport's maritime crafts people, such as shipwrights, sail makers, riggers and other artisans. And as construction becomes a series of issues for exhibition and interpretation for the museum-going public, they will make a rich case study for exploring the ways in which museums contribute to our efforts to "do" and to understand history.
Timing and Duration
The project worked intensively over an initial four month period to select and digitize records, draft narrative and thematic discussions, draw up a project design, and in general assemble the core body of Amistad materials. Initial teacher input occurred early within this development period. "Exploring AMISTAD" now forms a central part of the museum's educational outreach program. Adding new content material beyond the initial phase will depend largely on future funding; but the project will remain on-line, maintaining access to the materials and extending the electronic forum aspects of the project, including ongoing reports on the Amistad reconstruction. And the Museum will sustain the web site's educational presence to invite and incorporate continuing participation by scholars, teachers and students. In other words, the educational component of the project will live and grow as part of the museum's larger program of educational development. The Museum plans in general terms to devote considerable resources to the Amistad story as a result of the reconstruction project, and "Exploring AMISTAD" will form a key part of that program.
Evaluation
Initial or formative evaluation occurred through two mechanisms: consultation (paid) with an outside scholar in the field of African-American history, and the initial critiquing session of the teacher advisory panel. Data for subsequent (or summative) evaluation of the project was generated through the teacher feedback surveys. Near the end of the grant term, the project hired an evaluation team, consisting of two scholar-teachers drawn from outside the project, to assess user feedback (including the teacher feedback surveys). The team produced a formal report on how well, where, and why the project is working.
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