The Archives

Volunteers from the Bath and Colonialism Archive Project have searched keywords and place names relating to the transatlantic slave trade within digitised copies of the Bath Chronicle from the twenty-year period of 1760-1780. This resulted is over 8000 news articles published in the weekly newspaper focussing on people, place names and the goods and products that were manufactured, exported and imported as a result of the historic slave trade. They offer an insight into how the transatlantic slave trade and slavery were being reported on and discussed in Georgian Bath.

Initial descriptions of these news articles were recorded and during this process, discussions took place around the racist language and distressing content that many of the articles contained. The result was the collaboration with Lisa Kennedy and the creation of Finding the Words guidance document.

The project team are now in the process of editing the initial descriptions using the Finding the Words guidance and we are working on the creation of a searchable on-line database to make the information available. *Note: Searching the archive database is currently not available while data is being edited to bring the content in line with the Guidance on Language that was developed through the development of this project. 

To see the original articles, search the Bath Chronicle on the British Newspaper Archive web site https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/titles/bath-chronicle-and-weekly-gazette.