Jane Landers
Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of History | Vanderbilt University
Nashville, TN, UNITED STATES
Expert on digital archives and the history of Colonial Latin America, slavery, early American black history.
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Biography
Jane Landers is an historian of Colonial Latin America and the Atlantic World specializing in the history of Africans and their descendants in those worlds. She is the author of Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolutions (Cambridge, Mass., 2010) which was awarded the Rembert Patrick Book Award and honorary mention for the Conference on Latin American History’s 2011 Bolton Johnson Prize. Her first monograph Black Society in Spanish Florida (Urbana, 1999, 2001, 2002, 2005) was awarded the Frances B. Simkins Prize for Distinguished First Book in Southern History and was a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title. Landers co-authored the college textbook, The Atlantic World: A History, 1400-1888 (Harlan Davidson, 2007) and edited Slavery and Abolition in the Atlantic World: New Sources and New Findings (Oxfordshire, England, 2017), Colonial Plantations and Economy in Florida (Gainesville, 2000, 2001) and Against the Odds: Free Blacks in the Slave Societies of the Americas (London, 1996).
Landers directs the Slave Societies Digital Archive hosted by the Jean and Alexander Heard Library at Vanderbilt which is preserving endangered ecclesiastical and secular documents related to slavery in the Atlantic World. With grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council for Learned Societies, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the British Library Endangered Archives Programme, The Historic St. Augustine Research Institute, and the Diocese of St. Augustine, and with the help of her graduate students, Landers and her international teams have preserved records in Cuba, Brazil, Colombia, Spanish Florida, and Cape Verde, the oldest dating from the 16th century. She also directs the Black Atlantic Speakers Series supported by the History Department, the Center for Latin American, Caribbean and LatinX Studies, the Jean & Alexander Heard Libraries, the Department of African American and Diaspora Studies, and the Robert Penn Warren Center.
Areas of Expertise (10)
Africa
Colonial Latin America
Caribbean History
Comparative Slave Systems
The Atlantic World
Slave Societies Digital Archive
America's Early Black History
UNESCO
Slavery
Women and Gender
Accomplishments (3)
Caroline P. Rosseter Award for Outstanding Woman in Florida History (professional)
2018, Florida Historical Society
Tennessee State University Distinguished Scholar in African Diaspora Studies Award (professional)
2019
Graduate Mentoring Award (professional)
2016, College of Arts & Sciences, Vanderbilt University
Education (3)
University of Florida: Ph.D., Latin American Colonial History 1988
University of Miami: M.A., Inter-American Studies 1974
University of Miami: B.A., Hispanic American Studies 1968
cum laude
Affiliations (3)
- International Scientific Committee of the UNESCO Slave Route Project : Member
- Esclavages & post~esclavages – Slaveries & Post~slaveries : International Scientific Committee
- Atlantic World : Editorial Board
Links (4)
Selected Media Appearances (7)
They're uncovering their ancestry — and questioning their families' racial narratives
NBC News online
2024-09-29
To help preserve these histories, Jane Landers, a historian at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, co-founded the Slave Societies Digital Archive in 2003. Today, SlaveSocieties.org offers free access to more than 3,900 digitized volumes of church and business records, totaling more than 750,000 images.
First free Black settlement in U.S., long buried, is being resurrected
The Washington Post online
2024-05-12
Spanish settlers enslaved Black and Indigenous people, but they also offered a path out of slavery, said Jane Landers, a historian of Fort Mose and a professor at Vanderbilt University. For centuries, there were free Black people in Spain, and Spanish settlers brought this possibility across the ocean, unlike English settlers, who instituted a permanent, race-based system of slavery. About 10 percent of St. Augustine’s population consisted of free and enslaved African people, many of whom came from West Africa.
Fort Mose: The first free Black town in the US
BBC online
2024-02-23
"They went to present themselves to the governor of St Augustine," said Jane Landers, a professor of history at Vanderbilt University and a director of Slave Societies Digital Archive, which documents the history of enslaved Africans and their descendants. "They explained that they are asking for his protection, and that they wanted to become Catholics."
A Massive New Database Will Connect Billions of Historic Records to Tell the Full Story of American Slavery
Smithsonian online
2020-01-01
Historians, of course, have long made good use of various records, from plantation inventories and escaped slave advertisements to personal narratives collected by obscure abolition societies. But those details are housed at far-flung institutions, and not consistently organized. Jane Landers, a historian at Vanderbilt University, set out in 2003 to change that. Since that time, the project called the “Slave Societies Digital Archive” has digitized some 700,000 pages of religious and other documents from colonial Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, Florida and Angola. Unlike in the English colonies, where enslaved people were treated almost exclusively as property, in Spanish and Portuguese America, they “were considered fully human, with souls to be saved,” Landers says. Their life events were faithfully recorded, often by the Catholic church. The earliest of these archives date to the 16th century.
Nashville Civil War fort gets 'slave route' designation
National Post online
2019-05-22
A fort built by African Americans during the Civil War in Nashville has received an international designation for its significance to the history of slavery. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization has named Fort Negley a “Site of Memory,” as part of its Slave Route Project.
What Catholic Church records tell us about America’s earliest black history
The Conversation online
2019-02-22
For most Americans, black history begins in 1619, when a Dutch ship brought some “20 and odd Negroes” as slaves to the English colony of Jamestown, in Virginia. Many are not aware that black history in the United States goes back at least a century before this date.
I dig through archives to unearth hidden stories from African-American history
The Conversation online
2018-12-04
Many years ago, as a graduate student searching in the archives of Spanish Florida, I discovered the first “underground railroad” of enslaved Africans escaping from Protestant Carolina to find religious sanctuary in Catholic Florida. In 1738, these runaways formed Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose, the first free black settlement in what became the U.S.
Selected Articles (4)
Franco/Spanish Entanglements in Florida and the Circumatlantic
Journal of Transnational American StudiesJane Landers
2017 This essay analyzes the entangled histories of France and Spain in Florida and the circum-Atlantic and is based on little-utilized primary sources from Spain, Florida, the Dominican Republic and Mexico. The French and the Spaniards crossed paths, often violently, through war, piracy and revolutions, from the period when the French contested the Spanish territorial claims in the New World in the 16th century to the late 18th century when the French through Genêt, tried to revolutionize Florida.
Catholic Conspirators? Religious Rebels in Nineteenth-Century Cuba
Slavery & AbolitionJane Landers
2015 Previously untapped, Catholic Church records document historic networks among free black communities in Havana, Matanzas and other Atlantic ports. In earlier centuries, membership in overlapping religious and military corporations advanced their interests and gained them status in Spanish society.
The Geopolitics of Seventeenth-Century Florida
The Florida Historical QuarterlyJane Landers
2014 Disastrous droughts and epidemics (1597-1602, 1640s and 1680s) followed by famines severely strained Spain's financial and administrative resources. The general crisis was exacerbated by declines in American silver revenues caused by the demographic collapse of the native labor pools in New Spain and Peru.
FOUNDING MOTHERS: FEMALE REBELS IN COLONIAL NEW GRANADA AND SPANISH FLORIDA
Journal of African American HistoryJane Landers
2013 Spain was the first European nation to bring enslaved Africans into the Americas and the basic formula it employed, and which was later emulated by other slave trading nations, was to bring over one female for every three males.
