Petitioning For Freedom
This project “is a relational database of habeas petitions from county, state, and federal courts in Arizona, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, New Mexico, Oregon, and Washington between 1812 and 1924.” The collection of habeas corpus petitions offers a detailed image of how ordinary people, specifically marginalized communities, utilized the law in the 19th century to challenge inequality and injustice.
Why is this important?
For history, it exemplifies how digital archives can preserve and humanize the lives of vulnerable groups of people who are often erased from official records, and history in general
From a Digital Humanities perspective, it shows ethical data curation, accessibility, and ethical representation.
Scope of Project
The Petitioning for Freedom project is a database of thousands of unpublished and majority unindexed habeas petitions from many jurisdictions in the American West from the 19th century.
The collection includes 4 main sections
People
The individual people who argued for, and against institutional and interpersonal confinement in positions filed in county and district courts.
With over 6900 individuals catalogued, people can be searched by name, demographic, characteristics, case role, or relationship described in each petition
Cases
The individual habeas petitions filed for various reasons, including but not limited to: demanding due process, resisting enslavement, avoiding deportation, and protesting child marriage
With over 2200 cases in the database, petitions can be searched and browsed by petition background and party background information
Locations
Currently incomplete, but when it’s done it will feature all available petitions from 8 Western American States (and more) to represent a diverse group and their regional histories to reflect legal concerns of United States residents of the time.
21 states have at least 1 location within the project, and 282 locations all over the United States total have been catalogued.
Locations can be filtered by location type (court, site of significance, repository) or individual county.
Stories
The smallest section includes 8 stories pertaining to cases, people, or locations that can be found within the site’s main pages. These stories elaborate further on individual pieces of data that can be found while browsing the website.
The 4 Ws
Funded by the National Science Foundation, the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation, and University of Nebraska – Lincoln
The project was put together by dozens of student researchers, and faculty at the University of Nebraska from the Center for Digital Research and the Department of History, led by Dr. Katrina Jagodinsky.
This project began in 2017 and is still being updated to this day as the dataset is still being populated.
Click here to view every contributor
