Institute for American Thought Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis

About the Frederick Douglass Papers Project:
History of the Project

The project began life in 1973 at Yale University under the direction of John Blassingame, professor of history famed for The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (1972). For the next twenty years, the staff at Yale steadily collected copies of all documents by or to Frederick Douglass, and published the entire five-volume Speeches series. In 1994, Blassingame turned over direction of the project to his long-time collaborator on the Douglass Papers, John R. McKivigan, then professor in the Department of History at West Virginia University, who completed work on the first volume of the Autobiographical Writings there. The project made a second move in 1998 when McKivigan accepted the Mary O’Brien Gibson Professorship in American History at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis. There, a staff of McKivigan, an assistant editor, a team of graduate students, and various consultants have worked toward the publication of the first volume of the Correspondence series.  The project has recently completed the second volume of the Autobiographies series, My Bondage and My Freedom, which will be published in November 2003.

Over the past thirty years, the Douglass Papers received various and incidental support, not the least of which was a well-qualified pool of scholars and graduate students, from the various institutions that have housed it. Additionally, the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Goldsmith Foundation contributed funds to the project. The majority of the Douglass Papers’ financial support has come from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Historical Publications and Records Commission. All royalties generated by this project have been committed to the support of one of its sponsoring institutions, the Association for the Study of African American Life and History.