Working with the Center for Virtual History at the University of Georgia, I am the creator and manager of Arresting Inequality. This digital history project collects arrest records from early 20th century New Orleans, offering visitors an opportunity to explore these remarkable documents in a fully searchable, sortable, and (eventually) mappable format.
Arrest records offer a remarkable portrait of criminal justice (and injustice) in the present and the past. On their face, these records would seem to capture only a single interaction between an officer of the law and one or more city residents — between police and policed. When viewed in the aggregate, however, these moments present researchers with a wealth of legal, criminological, demographic, and geographic information. For the most part, the process of finding and transcribing these records has made them them inaccessible to all but the most devoted of researchers.
Responding to popular interest in race, policing, and mass incarceration, this site aims to put these records in the hands of students of history, both within and beyond the academy.
Click here to explore Arresting Inequality.
Though I am no longer affiliated with the University of South Florida, I created the website Tampa Historical while I was a faculty member in the history department there. The site is an interactive web mapping exhibit featuring student research about the history of Tampa.
Click here to see Tampa Historical.
