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Bearing Witness to Enslaved Women and Their Future Issue and Increase in the Massie Family’s 18th- and 19th-Century Reproductive Labor Systems,” a project funded by CLIR’s Digitizing Hidden Special Collections & Archives program, seeks 2-3 Graduate Assistants (GA). GAs will assist with - review of scanned documents; and
- development of the Enslaved Persons Database and public dataset.
GAs will be supervised by Duke Libraries’ Digital Humanities Consultant, one of the project’s co-Principal Investigators. Compensation is set at $18.00 per hour for either 5 or 10 hours per week beginning Tuesday, September 1, 2026. Applicants will be asked to specify which amount of time they would like to work. Some work will be remote, and other work will be conducted on campus. The student will be provided with any available equipment and software needed to complete specialized tasks. All workflows, platforms, and skills will be taught/learned as part of the work. Applications are being reviewed on a rolling basis. GAs and their supervisor, in carrying out their tasks, will uphold Duke University’s commitment to the principles of excellence, fairness, and respect for all people. As part of this commitment, Duke actively values diversity in the workplace, and seeks to take advantage of the rich backgrounds and abilities of everyone. Learn more. About Bearing Witness Enslaved people were commodities that were bought, sold, traded, exchanged, gifted, willed, and transferred. Their black bodies were assigned monetary values subject to appreciation and depreciation. Strategic business processes, such as systematic tracking and bookkeeping ledgers, allowed slaveholders to count and control bodies, organize them for labor, and claim them as property. By adapting legacy accounting practices to the unique needs of slave breeding the Massie family converted enslaved women into mothers, mothers into birth records, and birth records into a self-sustaining reproducing labor system that yielded wealth-building dividends. Through these practices the Massie family’s sophisticated reproductive labor enterprise was sustained for more than a century. The project “Bearing Witness to Enslaved Women and Their Future Issue and Increase in the Massie Family’s 18th- and 19th-Century Reproductive Labor Systems” shares knowledge about the reproductive labor of enslaved women with descendants, the public, and scholars. The Bearing Witness project explores the century-spanning reproductive labor of enslaved women at the Massie family’s Pharsalia Plantation in Virginia. Documentation of reproductive labor and slave breeding processes in the Massie records are not graphic or sexually explicit accounts of conception. They are bookkeeping entries in the form of birth records of enslaved children. In the birth records an enslaved person was identified and tracked by name, mother’s name, birthdate (day, month, year), and family separation events (e.g., death, sale). The Massie birth records and other slave journals tracked characteristics about children and women they deemed valuable and profitable to their family and its legacy of wealth. More than 1,300 births of enslaved children were documented in the Massie slave inventories. Bearing Witness exposes the hidden lives of these enslaved children and mothers exploited for reproductive labor by the Massie family along with the thousands of other individuals held in bondage under the institution of slavery. A significant outcome of the Bearing Witness project is the Enslaved Persons Database. The Enslaved Persons Database and Website The Enslaved Persons Database will be shared with the public as is a downloadable spreadsheet with fields to identify the enslaved people documented in the digitized records. In the Massie records enslaved individuals were typically identified by name, gender, occupation, or a combination of. Supplemental information about individuals will also be included in the dataset. Each entry in the dataset will contain citation information that includes the collection information, digital page number and/or scan number, and a URI linking to the digitized document. The Enslaved Persons Database will be housed within a public-facing website that will provide context and access to the multiple institutional repositories containing the Massie Family Papers. The website will include institutional repository information and browsing options and finding aid links alongside the dataset. It will also include the Guide to the Massie Family Archive, which will serve as the online finding aid to the holistic Massie collection. The accompanying dataset will allow users to search for enslaved people across all collections simultaneously. The Massie Family Papers The Massie family papers that will be reviewed for the Enslaved Persons Database are written in cursive English and date from 1698-1880s. The Massie collections are housed at the Briscoe Center for American History at The University of Texas at Austin (UTA); the Virginia Museum of History & Culture (VMHC); the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book Manuscript Library at Duke University; the Special Collections Research Center at The College of William and Mary (W&M); and the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library at The University of Virginia (UVA). |