This event will publicly launch a searchable online database of about 3,500 antislavery and antisegregation petitions sent to the Massachusetts colonial and state legislatures from the 1600s to 1870, now housed in the Massachusetts Archives.

Each petition image is annotated with detailed information, and the dataset provides web-based browsing, searching, and filtering, along with images of the digitized documents. These digitized images include documents that date back to antislavery efforts from 1649 but also reflect black Revolutionary War veterans, female abolitionists (...