The Series is named in honour of Mary Ann Shadd (Cary), feminist and abolitionist editor of the Provincial Freeman (Windsor, Toronto, Chatham, Canada West), 1853-1857. Shadd was born in Wilmington, Delaware in 1823 and moved to Canada in 1851, where she was deeply involved in the anti-slavery movement, publishing A Plea for Emigration; or Notes of Canada West in 1852, and subsequently founding a school in Windsor. After her period with the Provincial Freeman, she returned to the United States to teach school and then to recruit soldiers to fight in the American Civil War. She later attended Howard University and became one of the first women of African descent to earn a law degree. She died in Washington, D.C. in 1893. She personified the motto of the Provincial Freeman – "Self-Reliance is the True Road to Independence." A century later she was designated a Person of National Historic Significance in Canada.
SHADD publishes manuscripts, documents and transcriptions in English, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Arabic, Hausa and other languages relevant to the history of the African diaspora. Original documents may be submitted to the Editorial Collective for inclusion. Documents must be digitized or accessible for digitization, and where permission to publish is required, such permission should be secured in writing. All citations will give full credit to the location of documents; there will be inventories of documents, as appropriate. Internet links to institutions will be included, indicating where additional materials may be found, as well as sources for documents included on the site. Hard copies of digitized documents will be deposited at selected repositories in Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa, as determined by the decision of the Editorial Collective. Wherever appropriate annotations and introductions will be revised as new information is recovered or otherwise made available.
SHADD was established in association with the York/UNESCO “Nigerian Hinterland Project” in 2010 and subsequently was integrated into the Major Collaborative Research Initiative, “Slavery, Memory, Citizenship” and the establishment of the Harriet Tubman Institute for Research on the Global Migrations of African Peoples, renamed the Harriet Tubman Institute for Research on Africa and Its Diasporas. SHADD became home of the SSHRC Insight Project “Testimonies of Enslavement” in 2014 and has since evolved into an umbrella that links various research initiatives, including Freedom Narratives, Proyecto Baquaqua, Equiano’s World, Liberated Africans, Le Marronnage dans le Monde Atlantique, Slave Societies Digital Archive, Slavery Images, the Louisiana Database, and other initiatives associated with Walk With Web, Inc.
