SlaveVoyages.org: Interview with Gregory O'Malley and Nafees M. Khan

Today’s bonus episode features in-depth conversations with Dr. Nafees M. Khan and Dr. Gregory O'Malley, key contributors on the Operational Committee behind the Slave Voyages database. 

We explore the database's journey from inception and collaborative history in the 1970s to a CD ROM to an extensive online resource documenting over 12.5 million African forced migrations during the Transatlantic Slave Trade. 

The discussion continues with an exploration of the database's contribution to documenting over 35,000 transatlantic slave trading voyages, emphasizing its development, the methodology behind data collection, and its significance for understanding the slave trade's scope and impact. Khan and O'Malley explain the transformation of data collection from punch cards to an accessible online platform, underscoring its value for education and research on the African diaspora and slave trade intricacies. The episode broadens into a discussion on race, culture, and the depth of African records within the database, revealing its educational potential through lesson plans, interactive maps, and detailed searches. 

Resources

slavevoyages.org
Find Slave Voyages on Facebook
Find Slave Voyages on X (formerly Twitter)
Slave Voyages Consortium team
Final Passages: The Intercolonial Slave Trade of British America, 1619 - 1807 - Gregory O’Malley
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl - Harriet Ann Jacobs

Transcript

Hema: Hi, Mireille,

Mireille: Hi Hema.

Hema: We have a special bonus episode today. You may have heard us talk about Slave Voyages, which is a database that we use to research for episodes of the podcast.

Today, we are going to be talking to two people on the operational committee of the database.

Mireille: I am so excited for this interview. It is such a great resource and has so much data.

Hema: It does. It, it is a very robust database, and I'm not going to lie, it took me a little bit of time to figure out how to extract the data that I was looking for because there is so much information there. But today, we have two people coming on who are intimately involved with the database. The database who can share a lot more information on where the data came from, why they're working on this and what they hope to get out of this project.

Mireille: To be honest, I still have problems extracting the data. I'm just glad you figured it out. So I mostly use it for the amazing essays that they have from people who are on the ground. I find that just gives me so much insight, you know, into what the situation was on the ground.

Hema: I realized that I didn't say what database that we're talking about, Mireille. It is slavevoyages. org. And today our two guests for this episode are Nafees M. Khan and Greg O'Malley.

Mireille: Yes. So let's talk a little bit about their backgrounds. Nafees M. Khan serves on the operational committee for Slave Voyages Consortium and is a member of the senior leadership team of the African Diaspora Consortium. Nafees holds a PhD in educational studies from Emory University, and a BA in Sociology with a minor in History from Tufts University, and is currently a content developer at Ralph Appelbaum Associates, a museum design firm. his broad research interests incorporate the legacies of slavery as related to education and the experience of the African diaspora communities..

 Greg O'Malley is professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is a co creator of the Intra American Slave Trade Database, an online research tool that documents more than 35, 000 slave trading voyages from one port in the Americas to another. His first book, Final Passages, The Intercolonial Slave Trade of British America, 1619 1807, examines a complex network for distributing enslaved Africans throughout North America and the Caribbean after their survival of the Atlantic Crossing. His second book, The Escape of David George, An Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom in the Revolutionary Era with St. Martin's Press is forthcoming.

Hema: We will add a full bio with additional links in the show notes. If you want to know a little bit more about either Nafees Khan or Greg O'Malley.

Hello, Greg and Nafees thank you for joining us today.

I'm really excited to dive into this conversation, the database, slavevoyages. org. I don't know how I found it, to be honest with you, but in my research, I came across the database, which is super robust, and we use it all the time in researching the episodes for the podcast.

And so we thought we would bring a couple of people on who are experts in the database to help us understand a little bit about the history database, but of the people who arrived in the Caribbean. So before we really dive into the meat and the questions, can you describe for us what this database is for anybody who hasn't seen it.

Nafees: Absolutely. I guess I'll start, and Greg correct me as if I'm wrong, about this earlier, but, so the Slave Voyages website and database is the, the records of the Transatlantic voyages of that carried people forcibly from the continent of Africa to ports throughout the Americas, and so it's actually four databases in one, if you will and we can get why four, but, it's really the, based off of the surviving records around, you know, bill of sales and, those sorts of records, that kind of have that, paper trail of the, the largest force migration of, an estimated over 12 and a half million people, were taken forcibly from, from Africa and, and entered into the trade.

And about, 10 and a half or 10.7 people survived that journey. And so it's the record of that, that, that enterprise, if you will.

Greg: Yeah, and I'll just add to that that sort of the key to understanding the database and how it works is that, each entry, in the database is a single movement of a ship. so if we're talking about the Transatlantic database right now, which is the main, you know, the most popular one that people use, it's a individual, record in the database is a voyage of one ship that picked people up in Africa, transported them forcibly across the Atlantic and delivered them to the Americas. So each entry is one voyage of one ship with, however many people were on board. So, and then we add as much detail to that record as we can. So on the dates on which people boarded the ship, on which they arrived in the Americas, the numbers of people on board, who the owners and investors were in that voyage, any reported mortality on board the voyage, rebellions that occurred on the voyage.

As much detail as we can gather about that one journey across the Atlantic, we include. But that's the unit of entry, sort of. Each entry in the database, and there's more than 35, 000 of them, each entry is a voyage of a single ship across the Atlantic.

Nafees: And that's where the name came from is, is the voyage is the, the vessel, right? The ships.

Hema: I mean, it is so robust and I'm not going to lie. It took me quite a bit of time to figure out how to extract the right data because there's so much information.

But it is super robust. So what I'm interested to learn from the both of you is what is your involvement with the database.

Nafees: Absolutely. Currently, we're, I'm on the, operational committee for the, so the maintenance, the upkeep, the, the day to day kind of database since, 2006, when I was a doctoral student at Emory University where it was initially housed. It had come out as a CD ROM and initially in the late 90s, I think 1999 when it was published and Emory, got a National Endowment for the Humanities grant to take the CD ROM and put it online. And my background and dissertation and doctorate was in education. And so I was brought in as a, sense of, well, how can we help convey this to a wider audience, not just historians who study the slave trade. And so I like to say, you know, my advisor brought me to a meeting one summer and she left after an hour and I'm still there. 18 years later, but,, you know, so I've been, I've worn a lot of hats with the, with the, site as it went from a CD ROM to a, to a website, and in terms of, you know, helping to present it, to, to work with teachers, to develop lesson plans around it, to share it widely with, those who do genealogy research,

And so I've kind of been in a lot of different roles on the project over the years. I like to say I'm tangentially a historian, right? My training was in education and kind of how we tell these stories historically. And so I like to say that I'm, you know, I'm not a true historian. I'm tangentially related to historians like Greg.

Greg: Good segue, Nafees. Yeah. So I'm a, I'm a historian. I'm a professor of history at UC Santa Cruz. And my involvement in the project is, is mainly focused on one of these other databases. You know, Nafees was talking about how it's four databases in one. And the original database is the one we've mainly been talking about the, the Transatlantic slave trade database, which was all voyages that moved people from Africa to the Americas.

My main involvement actually was in bringing in a second database to the project, which is called the Intra American Slave Trade Database. So that's looking at voyages where enslaved people were forced aboard in the Americas and moved somewhere else within the Americas, and, that database also has more than 35, 000 voyage entries in it, and it hasn't been a part of the site for as long, and it's not used as much, but depending on what place we're talking about at any given moment in the Americas, you know, what communities, history one is investigating, that database can be really important to use as well, because many people, you know, we tend to think of that infamous Middle Passage across the Atlantic as the slave trade experience.

The sad truth of it is that many people who survived that Atlantic crossing, the forced migration story was not over for them. And so they might have landed in, say, Kingston, Jamaica, and spent a week or, you know, a few days there only to be forced aboard yet another ship that rerouted them to Cuba or rerouted them to, someplace in the, the, you know, one of the Spanish mainland colonies.

So there's this further, forced migration experience actually after the Middle Passage for many people. And my research focuses

Mireille: Can you tell us what the four databases are?

Nafees: So, yeah, so the, as Greg mentioned this, the, the Transatlantic, the Intra American, the African Origins or, well that kind of led into the broader, one of the people of the Atlantic slave trade. And so there's a, a database, it's based off of the records of the Transatlantic, but it's one is an African origins which are enslaved or liberated Africans. People who were taken on board slave ships, and then those ships were intercepted, by. primarily British, naval vessels, and they were freed and they were liberated. And in the process of doing so, their names were recorded. And even more uniquely, their African names were, was an attempt to write down the, the, their names there in, those records. And it's about 92, 000 records that we have of, of these liberated Africans who were taken to ports primarily, Sierra Leone, in, Freetown Sierra Leone, but another set of records came from Havana, Cuba. And so it is a record of individuals who were, were taken on board slave ships, but then were liberated. and that makes up one of the People of the Atlantic Slave Trade database.

And then there's also one of Enslavers Database, which, are the records of those who were ship owners, captains, investors, which are based in the, the Transatlantic one, but it's kind of called out, as well, as well, as the Images Database, which is a more, it's a smaller one, but it's still a collection of images and lesson plans and Greg, I'm forgetting one of the database, aren't I?

Greg: We put a few databases under this umbrella of the people of the Atlantic slave trade. And instead of being databases organized around voyages of ships, they're these databases that are organized around named individual people, or in a few cases, companies. So there's the people liberated off of slave ships, those are all from late in the slave trade era, sort of in the 19th century after Great Britain abolished the slave trade, having been one of its biggest perpetrators, but then turned against it and used the British Navy to try to intercept the ships of other nations engaged.

And so when they would capture a ship, they would emancipate the people on board and their names were recorded. For the vast majority of voyages, we don't know the names of enslaved people. they're, they're lost to us. The historical records just record numbers of people on board, not their names. but in this rare case where these ships were captured and people were liberated, we have their names.

So yeah, so we have that African origins database that Nafees described of people liberated off of ships. We have a database that tries to, capture all of the names of people who invested in these voyages, for both the Transatlantic and the Intra American databases. So, individual, ship owners, companies that in that own ships in this business.

And then, there's also a small but hopefully growing database of named individuals in the US domestic slave trade as well, because in the 19th century, after the United States abolished the, international slave trade and enslaved people could no longer be brought in from outside the country, there was still a robust domestic slave trade while slavery was still legal within the United States.

And, as part of the enforcement mechanism to prevent the international slave trade from continuing under the guise of being legal domestic trafficking of people, all traffickers who moved people on ships along the coasts of the United States were required to register with port authorities, including the full listing of who the people were that they were transporting the enslaved people aboard those voyages in the domestic slave trade. So that's another rare case where we have names of enslaved people. And so we we've started creating a database of, of those individuals, but that's kind of in its, in its early stages.

Hema: I have about 17 questions based on what you just said, but I,I do have a question, Greg. You mentioned that the British were one of the biggest perpetrators. Who was the biggest?

Greg: So it depends on exactly how you want to phrase the question. So for your, your interests for this podcast in the Caribbean, the answer is the British in terms of transporting people from Africa to the Caribbean. A little more than half of all enslaved people delivered to the Caribbean arrived on British ships, and then France would be almost a quarter of the people who arrived. and that's particularly focused on the French Caribbean colonies, not surprisingly. and then the Netherlands and Spain would be the next two biggest after that. The answer becomes a little different if we look at the whole Transatlantic slave trade, including all of the Americas and all of a sudden Portugal shoots up to the top of the list because Brazil is such an important site of slavery and the slave trade. But for the Caribbean, Portugal has very minor involvement, basically a little bit of, of delivery of enslaved people to some of the Spanish Caribbean colonies, is where Portugal would appear a little bit, especially in the earliest decades of the slave trade. But for, for the Caribbean as a whole, Britain is the biggest player in that trafficking.

Hema: You and Nafees in your conversation about, what your role is, talked about maintenance of the website. And I think based on what both of you have said, the work is ongoing and records are still being uncovered or can you speak about that a little bit?

Nafees: So, as I mentioned before it used to be housed at Emory University for much of its early years, since it launched in 2008 is when the site went public. It was literally in the basement of the library on our server, right? Like it was there and we depended on the coding and kind of technical support from the library, which was tremendous, you know, for, for those years, and the amount of financial resources that goes into that. And realizing over those years that that's not a really sustainable model going forward to depend on one institution, you know, just as, you know, as all institutions grow and people change and people move on, retire, what have you. And so the idea of a consortium of institutions, grew out of that to, to kind of help maintain and disperse that, the, the opportunity of maintaining the site. We established, I think initially it was seven institutions, and I think we're now at nine. . So Emory, Rice University, the University of California, three campuses of the University of California, the, the Hutchins Institute at Harvard University, the National African American Museum in D. C. as part of the Smithsonian, the Omohundro Institute, which is part of the College of William & Mary, then we have, one of the UWI campuses, the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill, I think two years ago they, they joined, or a year and a half ago. and then

Greg: Washington University in St. Louis. is another one of the newer additions to the consortium.

Nafees: So, so now with the consortium, the idea is that there is one host university institution for a designated amount of time, and then that would rotate, among the, the, the different institutions. And so there's both, you know, commitment within, both with money as well as with people and representatives from each institution on these committees to help, you know, kind of, you know, make decisions, in terms of the ongoing maintenance, but then also forward looking of, you know, of potential, additional institutions who may be interested in joining, as well as kind of the different directions that the site has taken and will take going forward.

Greg: Yeah, and I can speak a little more to that, the data itself and the, the sort of, historical records. The belief is that the Transatlantic slave trade database is fairly complete, probably something like 90 percent of voyages, that moved enslaved people across the Atlantic have been documented, and part of where that estimate of the, the percentage of, of how complete it is comes from, when new collections of records are, you know, sort of mined for information by historians, how often do we find new voyages that haven't been documented before, or how often are we just refinding new points of information about the same voyages that are already in there, Basically, at this point, with a few exceptions of geographic areas and time periods for which records aren't as good, we think the coverage is quite robust for the Transatlantic slave trade database, for the Intra American database, which is newer, It's much less complete, actually.

So even though it has now more voyages in it, the most of those voyages move smaller numbers of people. So it's not documenting the movements of quite as many people, not nearly as many people, in fact. and it's definitely more robust for certain parts of the Americas and certain parts of the Caribbean than for others. So we still are working very actively on building that resource.

Mireille: Can you expand a little bit on like, cause you, talked about historians here and there, but how do you collect the data? Like

Greg: Yeah, that's a great question. and, and the truth is it's, it's really tedious work, Nafees mentioned some of the kinds of records that we use. So we look at things like, port records that were kept. So port officials who are responsible for, you know, import taxes and export taxes would monitor the comings and goings of ships for governments. in and out of a particular port, and would record, you know, the names of ships, the captains of ships, and then what was on board, they're usually thinking about cargo, but in the case of the slave trade, of course, who was on board? And so they, because enslaved people were, treated as commodities for trade they appear in these lists of cargo. And one of the bizarre facts that results from that is that we can actually better document the movements of enslaved people in the slave trade era than we can the movements of free people, because this kind of this record keeping of trade, and people being treated as commodities for trade creates this paper trail that actually doesn't exist in an era before people carried passports and had to check in with immigration authorities and things like that.

Free people's migrations we can't really monitor. So we look at those kinds of port records, newspapers reported on the comings and goings of ships and often on, what or who was carried. Some of the letters of merchants and traders who organize these ventures survive so they write to one another to coordinate, these long distance trade efforts.

So there's lots of different kinds of records that leave a trail of these voyages. And so when we go through, you know, if you go to an archive, say the British National Archives, which is one of the archives I've worked in a lot, these reports would get sent back from all these British colonies in the Caribbean and North America, usually quarterly, with a report of all the ships that came in, went from that port and they all end up back in the British National Archives. And they're basically look, they're handwritten, but they look like a big spreadsheet. They have, you know, rows and columns and they'll lists the names of ships, the names of the captains, the dates they arrived, the dates they left, and they report on the cargo of the ships.

And so I read through those and look for references to enslaved people being part of what they consider the cargo in this, you know, really uncomfortable commodified language that they're talking about the trafficking of people, and then step one is simply to search the databases that we already have to see, do we already have a record of this voyage, or is this a new one that we've never encountered before, and then either we try to improve the entry that we already have or create a new entry. And so we just pull out any bits of information on that are there that are useful. Who, who were the owners listed for this ship? Who was the captain of the ship? How many people were on board? And the dates, you know, where were they coming from or where were they going to all that information we try to capture into an entry and we do it one at a time. So each of those 35, 000 plus entries in the database involve some researcher, some historian out there finding a record of this and one at a time documenting each of those voyages. And over time and with a collaboration of, you know, dozens of researchers all around the world working in different archives in different places, it slowly accumulates into this robust resource that is available now. So it's quite, quite painstaking work.

 One of the fascinating things about the site also is the sourcing. I think it's, what is it, 86 percent of the records have at least, I think, three sources of information, of documentation, and that's all available as well. You can see from which archive, which document, which report, the records are drawn from. So if you're interested in kind of doing that level of research, you know where this information is coming from. . But there's, you know, only, there's only a handful of, of ships, of voyages where there's only one record, right? And that's the only record of it. for the most part, it is, there's multiple sources of of confirmation that the ship, occurred, right? That this voyage occurred.

Hema: When you, when you talk about the amount of work, painstaking, I think is the word that you used, work that goes into this, I'm interested to know from each of you, why is this of interest to you? And why is this it's such a big part of your work.

Greg: This is such an interesting question to me because there's, there's, there's a lot that's accidental about it in a certain sense. I was as a graduate student really interested in, looking for a research project for my dissertation that was about the intercultural encounters of in early America and particularly interested in in a cultural sense, how enslaved Africans and European settlers sort of made sense of one another, and created the unique American culture that I see as a hybrid of these influences of all the different people who, who end up settled by choice or against their will in North America.

So in a way it's, it's similar to you all sort of approaching this through the angle of food and then thinking about where does this unique food culture that interests me come from. That was kind of my route towards studying the slave trade in particular, and it simply was born of frustration that I felt like a lot of the work on Europeans and the cultural influences they brought to the Americas was very refined, right?

Talking about these different religious groups, the Anglicans, the Lutherans, the Huguenots. And paying a lot of attention to the Dutch coming into New York and the French and whoever. And then when talking about African American culture and enslaved people, historians talk a lot about Africans as if Africa is not an equally diverse continent with as many nuances as, as Europe is.

So, I got very frustrated thinking about how unsophisticated we were in talking about the enslaved people coming into North America and what their cultural contributions were, and so I was trying to read a lot about the slave trade just to improve my understanding to be able to write something meaningful about culture and this cultural encounter.

And the more I kept running into this frustration that we didn't know enough about how people arrived, to say anything sophisticated about who was arriving and what they might've been bringing with them in a cultural sense, I gradually realized maybe that's what I need to research. I can't do the work that I want to do because we don't know enough about this process of the forced migration and the complicated routes by which people arrive.

And the reason my work is focused particularly on that intra American trafficking after the infamous Middle Passage, is that, for many colonies in North America, and it's true for some of the Caribbean islands as well, basically those Transatlantic traders, the people coming from Africa to the Americas, trafficking people, those ships tended to go to the same ports over and over and over again, where there is a very robust market for enslaved people so they would go back to Kingston, Jamaica.

They would go back to Bridgetown, Barbados, they would go back to Charleston, South Carolina again and again and again. But we also know slavery is in all kinds of places in the Americas as an institution. But many of those places you can't really find much information in the Transatlantic slave trade database and it's because they were sort of secondary ports of the slave trade and they relied on those big hubs like Kingston, Charleston, Bridgetown to reroute people from there to all these other places throughout the Americas. And so I started looking into that to understand better, how did enslaved people end up in North Carolina, right? The ships are going to Charleston over and over again. We don't see many ships going to North Carolina. We don't see many ships going to Georgia. And yet we know slavery was a big institution in these places. So what's happening? That's a very, very long answer, but that was kind of how I ended up, studying the particular aspect of the slave trade that I do. It was just a frustration of not being able to understand well, the kind of cultural origins of enslaved communities in various parts of the Americas.

Mireille: No, but that's very, before you answer, that's just very insightful because, you know, people tend to treat African Americans as a monolith, like they do the Caribbean as well, not knowing, you know, people come from different tribes and those different tribes have different cultures which influence how the different cultures developed in the

Greg: Absolutely.

Nafees: It was kind of a similar in that, so in, in, in the education that I was doing, I was, you know, kind of backed into a doctoral program. I was there just to do a master's in education and then go back to New York was my plan. And, when the opportunity came up to do a doctorate, I took a history class, on race and ethnicity in Brazil.

And actually one of our other colleagues, Alex Borucki, who is a scholar at UC Irvine, he was in that same class and it was there that I realized that, to your early question about who was the biggest perpetrator, that I always knew that Brazil had a large Afro descended population, but I had no sense of the scale, right?

No sense that nearly 5 million people were brought directly to Brazil from Africa. And I think it was around the same time that George W. Bush was asked at the, I think he asked, the Brazilian, President Lula at the time of, did you, did they have, like, Black people there? And there was, you know, mocking of him, you know, kind of appropriately, but then I started, like, reflecting a little bit, I'm like, but I didn't know the scale of that either. Right? And so realizing, you know, yeah, my, my background is from Jamaica. So I had a sense of the Caribbean and growing up in the U. S. I had a very strong sense of, of Black communities in the U. S., but no sense of the rest of it. So my question was, well, how do we teach that? How do we tell these stories in textbooks and in lesson plans in, in our general, kind of the general public, how do we retell the story of slavery? And so that began my interest of looking at, well, how is it done in the U. S. and how is it done in Brazil? So that's what my research for a long time was on, how we study, how we, teach the story of slavery in the U. S. and in Brazil. And, you know, that is then joining the Slave Voyages project was a happy accident. My advisor was just asking, was asked to join a meeting around developing lesson plans. And so she was like, Hey, do you want to go? That's where I met, David Eltis, who was kind of the, the, the organizer who kind of the real head of putting this together, making it, putting it online and just seeing, and still very much involved. And so it was just, you know, happenstance that I joined the meeting, but then really realized how much I didn't know.

And in a, in a good sense of like, there's so much out there, but then how do we convey that to the rest, to, to teachers in a teacher ed program, to students who are going through it, you know, we still use the term Triangle Trade, right? That's the, you know, the term that most people in the U S when they, go through schooling. They remember Middle Passage and Triangle Trade, but Triangle Trade only talks about pretty much half of the trade. It doesn't talk about the southern Atlantic going to Brazil. And so it, it skews our, our perspective. And so that's what I got interested in and it's how we retell these stories, how we continually either perpetuates, you know, inaccuracies or, or mis framings, or, you know, how can we tell these stories in a, in more. honest and more truthful way. And so that's how I kind of stumbled into, working with the database particularly, but it was more, broadly around kind of the, the differing communities and, the differing Black communities around the, the, the diaspora, if you will, right? And really seeing the diaspora writ large, right?

Seeing it across and within the continent, right? As we've mentioned before that the way oftentimes we talk about Africa is as a monolith, right? As a society we tend to just say, Africa, or, or maybe Sub Saharan versus Northern Africa. And that's about it. And not really dive into, you know, the, the full, I mean, diversity doesn't seem to capture the, the real range of differing languages, different traditions, the internal migration within the continent of Africa.

And so that level of detail, really changes how you, how you frame the question, how you frame talking about Africa. And that's what really got me interested in, in this kind of ongoing project, ongoing retelling and sharing of, of, of, of history, of, of, education in general.

Hema: There's so much that you both said, and I think you've given me an indication, to my next question, why was the decision made to take this from a CD and out of sort of the academic and historian only database, and make it available to the public?

Nafees: The CD ROM when it was published in 99, I think it cost about 250 or 300. And, you know, if you remember CD ROMs or CDs, right? You can't update them, once they're printed, they're printed. and you know, so the, between the cost and that, that limitation of just whatever they're, really created a barrier to, to using it.

I mean, many people will still make use of it, but who had 300 or so to, to purchase that? Mainly institutions, universities, things like that. , I think it was about five or so years that then David Eltis moved from, he was at Harvard, I think, at the time, and then moved to Emory in part to then apply for National Endowment for the Humanities, to get that support to then take the CD ROM. And then, and make it freely available. Like that was a, a real, a real driving force to say, this should not stay behind a pay barrier. So when I joined the project in 2006, I think this was like, just a few months after the money had been awarded to Emory, the, there was an initial plan in design to have two different portals of entry into the website. One was going to be for researchers and one was for the general public. And very quickly we scrapped that because we didn't want to create another barrier, an un, an arbitrary barrier to the information. Now you probably, you know, in using the site, I think you mentioned before how robust it is, you know, the first day that David, he handed me the CD ROM that I still have on the shelf, and I put it on the computer, and I looked at it I'm like, oh, this is amazing. I don't know what to do with it, though. Like, I didn't know what to do with it. There's 27, 000 records of voyages on the CD ROM, if I remember correctly, and I remember thinking, like, I don't know what to Like, I know it's important, but I just didn't know how to, what should I do?

What should, what sorts of questions? And so that's where the, the website kind of as, as the accuracy or the, the robustness and making sure the site works and the adding of new information updating is a key part of it, nearly as important is, Well, how are we contextualizing this information? What is the language that we're using to describe enslaved Africans? How are we helping people generate the questions that might be of interest to them, right? To kind of get them into the database. you know, maybe we can have timelines or maps or, or time lapses, and so that, those sorts of, elements or features kind of grew out of the fact of we need to help people make use of this.

 One of the first things we added in, in addition to maps, were lesson plans because we knew teachers of all years were going to make use of this. So let's at least give some, some, structure, some, you know, even if it's just using a map or a timeline from the site, at the very least, they're still using it off of, you're, they're using more up to date information and getting in that habit of research and, historical records and the nature of historical records. So that was kind of the, that driving force of, yes, updatability and sustaining it as a key motivator, but it was also, but we don't, we, this needs to be accessible, right?

It needs to be speaking to a wider audience than just historians and those who have a inkling for, for this type of information.

Greg: Yeah, and I think one of the things that's been really Interesting about this project story is the fact that it, it predates the internet. It even predates the CD ROM version. The CD ROM version was the first published version. but the first version of it was actually on punch cards. If you know the history of computing, there literally was like a, like a physical note card for each voyage with holes punched out and you could feed all of the cards into a mainframe computer that was like as big as a room on a university you know on a university campus and run a single query. So you had set up the computer to be like, okay, how many men and how many women on these voyages?

And then you feed in all the note cards, right? And they go through and then it spits out some results. That was the original version of it. And then it migrated to a CD ROM to be published, in the nineties. I mean, I think that first version was late seventies, right? I mean, so this is way before either Nafees or I were involved in the project.

One of the things that I think is interesting to think about with that is that it was created, the original version of the Transatlantic database was created by a group of historians who basically each realized like they were working on a different piece of the Atlantic world. So maybe somebody's studying the arrivals of enslaved people in Cuba. Somebody else might be looking at the voyages that were being organized in the port of Liverpool to go to Africa and acquire captives to take to the Americas, right?

All these different researchers working on their corner of the Atlantic world, started talking to one another and realizing that they're gathering very similar kinds of information ship by ship.

And if they aggregate that, if all these researchers pool that information together, for the first time ever, we could get a handle on the scale of the African diaspora, right? There wasn't really a consensus on how many people were, were drawn into this trade. Who were the biggest perpetrators of it? You know, where, what were the main roots?

None of that was really known in any kind of definitive way. And so all these researchers pooled their, their knowledge and the research that they had gathered to create that database. But I don't think they, and back when that process started, they could envision the way, like, the two of you use the database to inform this podcast and, and thinking about the cultures of these different Caribbean islands and their food cultures, and all the many different ways that the public uses the, the resource today.

So I sometimes refer to the, the Slave Voyages Project as an accidental public history project. That now, you know, historians undertake efforts and there's a lot of very thoughtful work done on public history, it's called, right? How do you do this kind of research to make it accessible to the public?

And this project started before those conversations were really happening. Those are conversations that are kind of born out of the internet era when it's much easier to share this kind of work with the general public. And so we're kind of retrofitting the project to engage with the public, where it was actually started as a thing of a bunch of, you know, nerdy academics making their database just to answer some questions that were of interest to them.

They couldn't imagine a means of sharing it with the world in the way that it's shared now. And so one of the things, those of us who've kind of inherited the project and are involved with it now, like Nafees and myself are doing, is trying to figure out, how do we catch up to this field of public history.

How do we better engage with the public? How do we change the way we're presenting the material to make it more, humane, for lack of a better word. So we've been working on just like revising some of the terminology used on the site so that it, it is a little more sensitive. And how do we make it easier for people to get in and find what they're looking for?

You know, you talked about the difficulty of using it. it's not, it's not an easy resource to use necessarily. All of that is stuff that we're actively talking about now, but it's a, it's a big ship to try to turn.

Nafees: One, one thing that's really, Greg reminded me was, our, the emails that we get to the site. So including the invitation to come here, but I think over the course of since the site is launched, I would say the K 12 audience has been the most consistent email in addition to kind of, well, the one that goes, a question around, Irish slavery, both students and teachers alike.

And, you know, my favorite email that we ever got was, a sophomore high school student at like 1130 at night on a Tuesday wrote in and said, fix your damn site. I have an assignment due tomorrow. Because the site went down for a few hours that evening. And just the motivation to write that email and to curse us out, rightfully so, but I mean, just to get to a point of like, I need to finish this. I need to let them know that I can't finish this. It like endeared, you know, the site was only down for a few hours. But still, like, it made us realize that, at least for me, that it was, you know, not that it matters, but in the sense that people were using it, that students were using it, that even if they were just trying to get the map down or get the table down that they needed to to complete the assignment to answer the question, it was still being utilized in that way.

And so it really, you know, I love the succinctness of that email, but then, you know, also sad that it, he ran into that frustration for sure.

Mireille: But I think it just proves the point that it's such a valuable resource.

Nafees: Absolutely.

Hema: I for one, I'm very appreciative of all of the nerdy academics who put the work in, because it, it makes it easy or easier, for, to find as much information as we're looking for. Every time I go onto the site, I find something new. You mentioned David Eltis a number of times and he has an article, I'm very much going to paraphrase, where he speaks to, why it was the African continent where most of the people were taken and forced into slavery. And I would love to hear some thoughts around that.

Nafees: My, thoughts in part informed from that article from David and a couple other ones, but if, you know, the way I've viewed the trade and how I've kind of taught about it is it was very much based off of, you know, You know, greed, racism, and violence, right?

That it, that it was a coupling of those elements because, you know, I think the idea of who is eligible, right, to be enslaved, to be targeted in such a way just based off of who they are, you know, we know the trade evolved out of , pre existing networks of prisoners of war and slavery within the continent, and expanded upon it.

But the, the, the insidiousness of it, where it was very intentional, it wasn't an accident. You know, a lot of, you know, school books used to write, and some still do, where you'd say, you know, the, the, the settlers in the Americas needed labor. They had no other choice. They had to turn to Africans because the Indigenous populations had been decimated so much.

So they had no other options, but only to Africans. And that's not really the case, right? That's not, it wasn't like we have no other choice. We have to enslave these other people. And so I think it's this, you know, there's many who've written on like kind of the evolution of racial identities and racism and that kind of language. But I think there was an, an opportunity seized upon and then used race to justify it expanding and accelerating and, and being even more, insidious, right? That, to me, that word is really in, in, incorporates the intentionality that, this wasn't just market forces. Well, it had to be, it would have been cheaper.

I mean, I think if it's not in that article, I thought, I think David and another, and a few other people have argued, the insurance costs alone of ship, of product traveling from Europe to various ports in Africa and then to the Americas was more expensive than if they were to enslave other Europeans and go directly to the Americas. So it's not strictly a financial benefit to do so. There has to be something else to do. at play. and I think the, the justification of, of, of Africans and, you know, the, the view of, of Black folks in general, you know, being somehow less than, I think it's, it's very much embedded, right? It, it can't be divorced from, from the, the, the, the reasonings, right?

But I think, you know, how it evolved is, is another, is a, interesting detail as well, but I think it, it, it is very much based off of racism, greed, and violence, right? That, that those are, those are the means and the, the, the wherewithal of kind of, or the pillars of the trade, if you will, in that way.

Greg: I would add to that just a couple things. I agree with everything Nafees said, that one of the things that made the discovery of the Americas such an exciting and attractive thing for Europeans was this perception of available land, right? That Europe was fairly crowded, fairly densely populated, and the, Americas there's another racism involved in why they saw this land as so available, right?

They're very dismissive of Indigenous Americans claims to the land. But nonetheless, in just terms of number of people, it was a less densely settled place. And so part of the attraction was that land was available. But to make that windfall productive, required not just labor, but also labor that wouldn't leave you as a landowner to go take up some of this available land for themselves, right?

To keep them working for a landowner, it needed to be sort of compulsory labor of some kind. Otherwise they could just go create their own settlement, start their own farm. So there was a desire for a controllable labor force. and so I think that's one key sort of part of it is understanding this weird economy that existed in the Americas where land was an abundant resource and people were a scarce resource basically to make an economy go.

And so they were interested in controllable labor. And then I think another thing that I would want to add to Nafees answer, in terms of the, the why Africa is that I think it's also important to think about it from the, the African perspective. Societies all around the world have had slavery historically and, and West African societies are included in that, but one of the things that I think is interesting to keep in mind about the Atlantic slave trade is that Europeans were trading on the African coast. They were buying enslaved people from African states and African traders to force aboard these ships and take to the Americas. And, one of the reasons why some of those coastal West African communities were interested in engaging in trade with Europeans is that it offered them a new way to access the world economy.

We tend to think about the world as less globalized and more isolated than it was in the pre modern era. There were robust networks of world trade already in this time period going back to say around 15, you know, the 1500s when the Atlantic slave trade is getting started, and a lot of these coastal West African communities were indirectly connected to those networks through, there were inland kingdoms on the southern edge of the Sahara Desert like Songhai and Mali, these big powerful kingdoms that controlled the trans Saharan trade routes that connected West Africa with the wider world and goods coming from Asia and Europe and, and, and whatnot.

Exporting goods to those parts of the world. And for these coastal communities in West Africa, the arrival of European sailing ships on their coast presented a new way to tap into those networks of world trade. And so they were interested in doing Europeans to sort of cut out the middlemen and to have a more direct way to access trade with the rest of the world, rather than dealing with these powerful kingdoms who are sometimes their rivals militarily and geopolitically within West Africa, and so you get the emergence and sort of a shift in the balance of power in West Africa in the era of the slave trade as kingdoms like Ashanti and Dahomey, grew and grew in power partly because they were trading with Europeans, and accessing world trade networks that way.

And unfortunately, one of the things that these European traders wanted was enslaved people. And so there were kingdoms in West Africa that prospered through supplying those enslaved people to them. And we see a shift of balance in the balance of power within Africa from these interior kingdoms towards these societies closer to the coast.

And particularly those ones who were dealing with Europeans had a competitive advantage over their neighbors. So getting into the sort of complexities of African history that Nafees was talking about before and getting away from thinking of Africa monolithically, and instead thinking about all the many different societies, kingdoms, languages, religions within that part of the world is that what you see in that window from, you know, 1500 to 1850, broadly speaking, the era of the Atlantic slave trade is certain societies were actually prospering through the slave trade, and many of their neighbors were being decimated. Because they were being attacked by these societies that are enslaving people and selling them to Europeans.

So it's a real, sort of patchwork story in terms of who prospered and who suffered within the African continent in the era of the slave trade.

Hema: And that's, that's a whole discussion unto itself, I think, in determining who prospered, who participated, and who was enslaved on the continent of Africa. And, you know, as we look at the database, sometimes it's a little bit difficult to pinpoint where, which countries, which region of Africa, the people came from.

And that's one of the things that is of interest to us, because that determines a lot of the cultural influences as it, you know, translates down to current day culture. Can you speak about helping us to maybe pinpoint a little bit?

Nafees: Sure. well, one thing, one attempt was the African names database or African origins database. One of the, potential or potentialities around that database that we hope to come from was because it was their African names, the project was around trying to identify the origins of those names because many African, you know, cultures have very robust naming practices. And for many, it's identifiable which language or which ethnic group or which tribal group a name might belong to. Now, I'm smiling because there was many, many a summer meetings where we had two scholars, both Nigerian, but one Igbo, one Yoruba. And at different moments, they would say the same name belonged to their respective, that was definitely Igbo name, that was definitely Yoruba name. So there, there's some complications, with, with linguistic kind of, you know, exclude mutually exclusive identifications. But by and large, what it started to point to were patterns in, in naming practices.

So you clearly saw the, the, the scale of Islam and Arabic names throughout. So you'd see names like Fatima and Mahmood and Khadijah in among those who were enslaved and, and whose names were recorded. I believe the number was like 10 percent or so. and then you would see, start to see, well, where's the likely origin within the continent that this language group or this individual might've come from, right? And you started to see, you know, some patterns around how far inland were, would someone likely, have, could have been from before being forcibly taken into the trade. And it's hard to, to pinpoint exactly right. I mean, that's, that's the, the challenge. It's giving us a sense of, of the, the, the range or the scale or the, potential or the likely, origins of, of individuals. But we do know that the trade didn't happen, wasn't, you know, hundreds and hundreds of miles over land exclusively, except where there were long rivers, right?

Like the Congo River, people would travel fairly far to the coast, but, there's a sense that most of the people probably came within a few hundred miles of the coast. So it's kind of coordinating the linguistic origins of names with the likely kind of, transport network of trade and to get a sense of where people might have been taken from, where the villages might have been from, you know, cities can, you know, can throw that off because it can be a, an amalgam of different communities all in one city.

But, that was one way of trying to, go deeper. If you will, into the, into the continent, We had another that didn't take hold was around scarification, was a potential because a lot, some of the records had details of the differing scar markings on individuals, which have very, they're culturally significant as well, and that, I think there's still enough there for another researcher to dive into, but, that was another attempt to kind of help to identify more closely, more, more, in detail the potential origins of where people might have been taken from.

Greg: Yeah, and all of those attempts to deal with that one particular database of people in the abolition era, right after Britain had abolished the slave trade, where people were liberated off of ships that the British Navy captured, which I think points to a sort of more general piece of advice I would give in terms of using the database to think about different different islands or different colonies or territories or modern nations.

And where did people come from who ended up in this place and shaped the culture in this place is that it's important to think about, time and when the slave trade was actually active to a place as much as it's important to think about just like, where were people coming from according to the database?

Because over time, people coming from say, the Bight of Biafra is one of these regions and more or less maps towards modern Nigeria as a region of embarkation that will show up a lot in the databases where people were coming from. Over time,. who was being brought to those ports in that region of Africa might change.

 In the 17th century, it might've been one interior region that was the source where many people were being enslaved and brought to the coast. And then a century later, it might be people are coming to those same ports on the coast, but coming from a different direction to get to those ports.

And so culturally that might mean something different in terms of language and culture. So one of the real challenges with piecing this story together is, that it requires understanding something about the slave trade, which the ship movements of the slave trade, which the database can help with, but it also requires digging into African history in some detail to think about what were the wars going on in a given decade or given century, that was made that an active site of enslavement within the African continent. It requires digging into that history a lot to understand who might have been coming to this port in the era that I'm seeing people arriving in Jamaica from that port. It gets really complicated, so there's no easy answers, unfortunately.

Hema: I feel like you're going to turn Mireille and I into historians and accidentally fall into the same research that you did, because

Mireille: It's so true.

Hema: many more questions,

Nafees: One thing that, that reminds me of is the internal trade within the, I think it was within Brazil over, over a million people were, were carried inland from the sugar producing region of the northeast of Brazil to the coffee, primarily coffee and other regions of the southeastern where I think it was in the mid 19th century or so and a similar right within the U. S. of, from the Chesapeake area to the Deep South, right? With into, Louisiana and out Mississippi and Eastern Texas. And so you have this internal movement of people that isn't tracked in the same, in the same way, right? That isn't, doesn't have the same number of clerks to say, how are you moving people across state lines in the same way, right?

And it's, but that work is there. I think it's one of the areas that Washington University, are studying that internal, that internal, trade, to try to get at, you know, a fuller picture, a more comprehensive picture of this internal movement of people because that that, also tells, following what people bring with them or what, what, not just cultural traditions, but, responses that they have to their new circumstances, right. And how that creates, new cultures or, or modified cultures in those new areas. we see that play out in, in those areas, in across the, the, across the Americas.

Greg: Yeah. We tend to think of enslaved people as confined to these labor camps or plantations. And I think that is an important part of understanding the, the experience of slavery, but I think it's also important to keep in mind that mobility was an important aspect of what made slavery so profitable for slaveholders and so painful and damaging to enslave people in their communities was that when the economic needs changed, people could be uprooted and moved again to someplace else where their work would be more profitable. And so we see that in, in that parallel story that Nafees is talking about in the 19th century, that with the decline of the sugar economy and the rise of the coffee economy in Brazil, all of these people, hundreds of thousands of people uprooted from one region of the country and moved to another. And of course, as that happens, one, there's the risks of travel, but two, there's the uprooting of communities, families torn apart as certain members of a community are sold into this new area and others are left behind. And you have the exact same thing in the United States with the rise of cotton, and the sort of Gulf South as the United States expanded westward. People are uprooted from these older communities on the Atlantic coast and moved into the Gulf South to work on cotton plantations as that took over from tobacco and rice and some of the things that have been important staples earlier. and it's both very profitable for the slaveholders to be able to reassign people and it's incredibly traumatizing to these enslaved communities as people are sold away from their loved ones and, and the communities that they've been a part of.

Hema: Mireille and I will be speaking to somebody who's doing some work, and research into indentured servants and how they got to the Caribbean, which is a little bit harder to track down, but that's another big piece of the puzzle that influences, culture, and food. So we're excited for that.

But before we wrap up, I'd love to have you talk about what's coming up next for you. And if people are interested in diving a little bit more into the history and into the database, any tips that you may have for them?

Nafees: One of the exciting things with the site, you know, or to kind of get interested or is just viewing the, the time lapse, right? It keeps getting a reaction every time I've showed it. And every time I watch it, right, you watch the dots move across the different colors and you see, you start to notice different patterns of which, colonial powers transporting people from which area, and you start to pick up on the scale of this. You can pause it at any moment and click on a circle and kind of dive in a little deeper if you want to, or you can kind of take it in, and I think that is one of the, almost like, you know, as a lesson plan, right at the beginning of a class or the beginning of a lesson to get people to reflect and think inwardly as they're watching this, this movement and each circle is representing hundreds, if not thousands of lives right in, in the moment. And to kind of merge and reflect on just that this wasn't just an accident, right? That this movement, forced movement of people across an ocean had left indelible marks across the, the, the regions. And so just to, as watching that, you know, two and a half minute or three minutes, depending how slow you go, time lapse, I think is one way of just as a point of entry into it, of getting a sense of, yes, the site can be overwhelming. There's a lot of data, a lot of names, a lot of ship names, right? Maybe you look, you're curious about the ones you might've heard of like the Amistad or something like that, but you want to dive in, you know, deeper, You know, I think getting those questions or unearthing those questions for yourself is really important too of what are you wanting? What do you want to know? What are you curious about? to help learn more about the site and how to make use of the site in that way. And, you know, you can follow the site

Greg: I think

Nafees: have a, you know, a Twitter handle @Slave  Voyages. But I think that is one way, one way to engage with the site and, with the history.

Mireille: I think you mean X, right?

Nafees: Oh, yes, I just say, wow, I really dated myself on that one, didn't I?

Greg: Yeah, I'll echo Nafees the time lapse feature is a great entry point to the site. It's an animated map that each dot moving across the map is one of those voyages. So each, each entry in the database. And you. can, as Nafees was saying, you can pause it at any moment and click on any of those dots and it will open up the voyage entry so you can get the details on that voyage, Seeing the thousands of them move across, you see a lot of patterns and where people are going that I think it, it does a great job of, you know, of raising questions, it gets you curious about why are so many people going here, why does the trafficking slow down in this particular time period?

I like to play that for students and just ask them what they notice, what, what jumps out at you, what gets you intrigued.

And then just as advice on, on how to use it. I think one thing that can be really helpful is knowing that in the upper left hand corner, there's sort of two rows of menus, and the top one allows you. So you can limit it to a certain date range. You can use the itinerary dropdown menu to choose, a particular destination for enslaved people or a particular origin point for enslaved people, things like that. So you have choices about how you limit the data so that you're only looking at what's most interesting to you.

And then right below that, the second row of options, after you run a search, it allows you to visualize the results. So one of the choices there is the time lapse. You can look at a sort of animated map of whatever voyages come up in your search within your parameters. But you can also create tables or charts or timelines or things like that to just visualize the, the data that the database sees spits out for whatever your search is. So sort of realizing that those are kind of two separate rows that serve a different function. One allows you to search, allows you to tell the database, this is what information I want. I want all the voyages that came to Jamaica and I'm only interested in, these two decades for some reason, whatever it is, you can limit the search in that way.

And then the second, of options allows you to then say, I want to see that data on a map, or I want to see a pie chart of where were people coming from in Africa who ended up in Jamaica in those decades, right? It's that second row is all about how you visualize the results, so that you can see what you want to see in the

Hema: Those are great tips. I didn't know about sort of the two different ways.

Greg, you have a book coming up.

Greg: Yeah. thank you for, for bringing that up. Yeah. It's a little bit of a, a departure for me, in that, the, the, the new book, you know, my my first book was about that intra American trafficking of people. It's a book called Final passages. But this one is, is a bit of a departure and in some ways I think of it as the antidote to that first project for me as a, as a, scholar. And that one of the things that was. I mean more in like the emotional sense than in the doing the work sense, about that first project was that the enslaved people at the heart of that story of the slave trade remained so frustratingly anonymous.

We already talked about how for the vast majority of these voyage entries, we don't know the names of the people and it's hard to know much about them and how they experienced this traumatizing trafficking in the slave trade.

And so the whole time I was finishing that project, writing that book, I was sort of fantasizing about a next project that I would do that was more, had more of a human face and was more, individual centered and, eventually stumbled on a really interesting source.

And I'm writing a book about a man named David George, who was born enslaved in colonial Virginia, and then just had a remarkable odyssey of a life through attempts to escape enslavement that took him many different places, never back to the plantation that he left, but his first several escape attempts were kind of these out of the frying pan, into the fire experiences of captivity and re enslavement in different circumstances. He's taken captive by the Creek Indians in what's now Georgia at one point, he is then sold to a fur trader, and works in the fur trade for a period of years. He ends up on a plantation in South Carolina. And finally, he, at that point he, he converts and becomes a Baptist and becomes a preacher and, and leads an enslaved congregation. one of, it's arguably the first black Baptist church in North America.

During the Revolutionary War, he runs away to the British Army with his family and a bunch of members of his congregation in tow, and they make this mass escape during the Revolutionary War, using the opportunity of war, to escape. And so one of the ironies of the story is that he has to escape the United States to find liberty during the revolution when of course white people are fighting for what they call freedom and liberty from Great Britain, he's running to the British to get liberty from Britain. So it's, the, sort of life history focused on David George, but trying to illuminate a lot of things about the history of slavery and its significance in early America and the era of the American Revolution. So the Escapes of David George is the title and it's due out, well it's due in to the publisher by the end of this year and due out probably a year after that.

Mireille: Wow. Actually, you talking about that just reminded me of a book I read in college. I believe it's the first ever firsthand account of a, of a slave. It's called The Incidents, the Life of a Slave Girl by Linda Brent.

Greg: Yeah, Incidents in the Girl, yeah.

Mireille: Thank you. I was actually assigned reading for a cultural anthropology class I was taking.

Greg: So that's, it's very interesting that that, that you. read it as, as by Linda Brent, because that was a pseudonym under which she published it, and it's, so it's, the account is now usually published under the Harriet Jacobs name.

It's it's an interesting sort of evolution of that, of that, account, and how it's presented, and more recently they've identified who the slaveholder was who owned her, which, she used pseudonyms because she was a runaway slave and she ran to the north.

She was from North Carolina, and. this is this is a few decades later than the David George story I was just talking about, so this is the antebellum era, and the, the tensions, building up towards the Civil War. And under fugitive slave law, she could have been captured and returned, because legally she was captured. of the slaveholders who she has escaped in North Carolina.

So that's why she published under a pseudonym and used fake names for the slaveholder and other people, you know, family members and community members who she describes in the account. And it was only after the end of slavery that it became safe, to use her, her own name, and so now the account is usually published under, under, the Harriet Jacobs name. But they, if you look at the original versions of it, it's, it's under the name Linda Brent. So it's interesting that you read one of those versions.

Hema: This has been a really great conversation and I really do appreciate, both of you taking the time. I have many more questions. If we had infinite amount of time, I would love to know what your thoughts are on the call for reparations, but we're not going to go there right now because we don't have the time.

Mireille: It was such a pleasure and thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us today. I think we learned so much and it's such a valuable tool.

Nafees: Thank you.

Greg: Yeah. Thank you. both for having us. It was a pleasure to talk with you.

Nafees: Absolutely.

Hema: Have a great day.

Mireille, what an episode, that conversation with Greg and Nafees was so chock full of information.

Mireille: It was, you know, things like race, culture, ethnicity have always been so interesting to me and just learning how deep the African records go was just so enlightening.

Hema: For anybody who doesn't remember, it is slavevoyages. org. There are student lesson plans, there are interactive maps, databases, searches that you can do. And it is a super resource if you're looking at a little bit more information about the slave trade.

So that is it for this episode. You can find us on Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok at The Moreish Podcast. Keep an eye on all of those platforms for more bonus episodes and details on Season two.