Global Histories of Resistance
Introduction
Kris Manjapra was set to release his first trade book, Black Ghost of Empire: The Long Death of Slavery and the Failure of Emancipation, through Scribner Books / Simon Schuster (U.S.) and Penguin / Random House (UK). However, neither publishing house had a strong strategy for promoting his book to web and social audiences. Kris also expressed interest to create a brand that represented the nuances of his work, not just your typical author’s website.
Following the release of his book, we also built a crowdsourcing platform to repair historical documents featuring names of enslaved peoples.
Approach
Digital Branding
We created Global Histories of Resistance to represent all of Manjapra’s work, including his previous books, articles and video interviews. We also designed the site to be a public resource for themes like resistance, abolition, reparations, community leadership and healing. Every page highlights historical examples of resistances and leads users toward modern organizations that continue to do the work.
In addition to the website, we built a series of shareable content with topics, historical events and authors featured on the site and in the book. The series gives us more options to talk about these subjects on social media without oversaturating the feeds with the same book cover.
Digital Crowdsourcing
Washington D.C. Emancipation Repair Project was a collaborative effort between Arch Analytics and Kris Manjapra. The project aimed to reexamine Washington D.C.’s Emancipation records from 1862 (originally digitized by civilwardc.org) and make the records searchable by the names of enslaved people, not their owners.
Over 1,000 names were pulled and processed by volunteers, all remote. The result are set to be published by the National Archives.
Crowdsourcing Interface for the Washington D.C. Emancipation Repair Project
