Pathbreaking historian Dr. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall died on August 29, 2022, at the age of 93. In her 2021 autobiography, she wrote that she became a historian to “create a powerful weapon against racism.”1 Through her scholarship, teaching, mentoring, and activism, she accomplished that goal many times over and along the way transformed how we think about the past and how we approach the study of history.
Hall thought her greatest scholarly contributions were her digital publications. I concur. She pioneered an approach—a philosophy, really—that grew from her commitment to spreading awareness of how African slavery shaped history and the world we have inherited. Her approach centered on data sharing. Working for decades in archives, she created a database by extracting information about named enslaved individuals from primary sources that had been recorded in colonial Louisiana. Each line of her database contains information about one individual—their name and a...
