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

The Harriet Tubman Prize is awarded annually to a distinguished nonfiction book published in the United States on the slave trade, slavery, and anti-slavery in the…

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

Black Music Month in Argentina and Uruguay

Wednesday, June 14, 2017 @ 6:30pm In celebration of Black Music Month, the Lapidus Center presented the documentary film Tango Negro: The…

Black Colonists: The African History of the Early Spanish Caribbean

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

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

Slavery and Globalization in Arabia

Enslaved Women and the Ethical Practice of History

Slavery, Universities, Inner Cities

From Our Blog

African Descendants in India

By Sylviane A. Diouf, Director, Lapidus Center. May is Asian-Pacific American Heritage Month. Let’s stretch it a bit and discover or learn more…

Databases : Research Made (Almost) Easy

Remembering the Women of Slavery

Online Exhibitions

The African Diaspora in the Indian Ocean World

Over the course of nearly 20 centuries, millions of East Africans crossed the Indian Ocean and its several seas and adjoining bodies…

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.