Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery

News

Lincoln and the Abolitionists

Pulitzer Prize winner and Lapidus Center Advisor Eric Foner reviews Lincoln and the Abolitionists: John Quincy Adams, Slavery, and the Civil War.…

New Tools for the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database

Stained by Slavery: How Craig Wilder exposed higher education’s past

Muslims Were Banned From the Americas As Early as the 16th Century

Manisha Sinha on “The Underground Railroad”

Beyond The Underground Railroad

Upcoming Programs

Fellowships

The Lapidus Center offers two long-term fellowships to assist scholars whose research on transatlantic slavery can benefit from extended access to the…

Harriet Tubman Prize

2017 Harriet Tubman Prize Finalists

The Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery is pleased to announce the finalists of the 2017 annual Harriet Tubman…

Aisha Finch’s Rethinking Slave Rebellion in Cuba Wins the Lapidus Center’s First Annual Harriet Tubman Prize

2016 Harriet Tubman Prize Finalists

Our Collections

New Lapidus Donations

The Lapidus collection is continuously growing. In addition to his first 2014 gift of over 400 rare books and documents, Sid Lapidus…

The Digital Lapidus Collection

Photographs and Prints Collection

Archive & Manuscript Collections

Podcasts

New ideas, enlightening conversations, cutting-edge research, tomorrow’s trends: it’s all here in the Lapidus Center podcast series. Listen to our visiting scholars as…

Past Programs

Dutch New York Histories

Thursday August 3, 2017 @ 6:30pm Dutch rule in New Amsterdam and New Netherland (1609-1664) was short in comparison to other colonial…

Afro-Iberians in the Spanish Empire, 1500s and 1600s

Slavery, Universities, Inner Cities

Black Music Month in Argentina and Uruguay

Black Colonists: The African History of the Early Spanish Caribbean

Atlantic Slaveries: Native American and African Slavery in New England and the Caribbean

Slavery and Globalization in Arabia

From Our Blog

The Harlem Burial Ground

By Sylviane A. Diouf, Director of the Lapidus Center. Another African Burial Ground was officially “discovered” in New York City in January…

Online Exhibitions

Black New Yorkers

In May or June 1613, Jan Rodrigues, a free sailor from Hispaniola (in what is today the Dominican Republic), who worked for…

The African Diaspora in the Indian Ocean World

In Motion: The African-American Migration Experience

Revisiting Rebellion: Nat Turner in the American Imagination

The Abolition of the Slave Trade: The Forgotten Story

Lest We Forget: The Triumph Over Slavery

The Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery—funded by a generous $2.5 million gift from Ruth and Sid Lapidus matched by The New York Public Library—is the only facility of its kind based in a public research library.

The initial gift also included 400 rare items of printed material, making the Schomburg Center home to one of the world’s premier collections of slavery material. Sid Lapidus continues to donate items as he acquires them.

The Center's mission is to generate and disseminate scholarly knowledge on the slave trade, slavery, and anti-slavery pertaining to the Atlantic World. The Center supports the work of researchers with long-term and short-term fellowships. Given the centrality of Atlantic slavery to the making of the modern world, the Lapidus fellowships ensure that slavery studies are a cornerstone of the Schomburg Center’s broader research community and provide a counterbalance to the contemporary direction of scholarship in African American and African Diaspora studies.

To raise awareness and historical literacy, the Lapidus Center engages the public with a variety of programs, an annual nonfiction prize, exhibitions, conferences, and partnerships with local, national, and international institutions.