Juneteenth: From Ledger to Genome: Data and the History of Black Life

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Tuesday, June 16th, 2026 at 5:30 PM ET

For centuries, Black lives have been counted, recorded, and categorized through systems of data. From plantation ledgers and slave ship records to digitized archives and genetic ancestry testing, these forms of documentation have shaped how slavery, race, and freedom are understood. Yet they have also left gaps, distortions, and silences that scholars continue to confront.

This conversation brings together Vincent Brown, Kendra Field, and Evelynn Hammonds to examine how different forms of data have been used to produce knowledge about Black life, and how those records can be reinterpreted to recover history. Brown’s work on slavery and resistance in the Atlantic world reveals how historians reconstruct the movements, networks, and political worlds of enslaved people from fragmentary colonial records. Field’s research and leadership of the 10 Million Names Project demonstrates how genealogical and archival data can reconnect families and restore histories disrupted by slavery. Hammonds’s scholarship on the history of science and the relationship between race and the genome offers a critical perspective on how scientific knowledge has classified, measured, and reshaped ideas about race.

Moving from the ledger to the genome, this panel explores how data has functioned as both a tool of power and a means of historical recovery, and what it means to reconstruct Black life across archives, databases, and scientific knowledge in the present.