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UNCG Historian Receives Grants for Slavery Research

GREENSBORO--Dr. Loren Schweninger, a professor of history at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, has received grants totaling more than $320,000 from a national foundation and two federal agencies to continue his research on slavery.

The grants came from the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, $180,000; the National Endowment for the Humanities, $120,000; and the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, $22,235.

Schweninger’s project is titled "Race, Slavery and Free Blacks: Petitions to Southern Legislatures and County Courts, 1776-1867.” For his research, Schweninger collected copies of more than 17,000 old court records dating from the Revolutionary War to the Civil War. He visited archives and courthouses in 15 Southern states to collect the documents, most of which were sealed up, covered in dust and had not been seen or used for many years. The documents involve legal transactions concerning slaves and provide detailed information on slavery and the economic and cultural systems of plantations in Southern states.

The new grants will enable Schweninger to further organize and edit the vast amount of data. At present, he is editing the second and third volumes of a letterpress edition, being released by the University of Illinois Press. Approximately 3,000 of the petitions have been microfilmed and released by University Publications of America.

Schweninger’s project also is making the documents available online to historians for additional research. The Website is http://history.uncg.edu/slaverypetitions/.
A specialist in American and African-American history, Schweninger has written several books on the topic, including "Black Property Owners in the South, 1790-1915," which received the Rudwick Award from the University of Illinois Press. With historian John Hope Franklin, he wrote the book, “Plantation Rebels: Runaway Slaves, 1790-1860,” which was published by Oxford Press. His slavery research has received national exposure in the Atlanta Journal and Constitution, New York Times and in numerous other newspapers.

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