Publications

Book Projects

Oceans of Kinfolk: African American Ancestral History and the Antebellum Coastwise Traffic to New Orleans (forthcoming from UNC Press)

Oceans of Kinfolk uncovers the human history of the United States’ maritime domestic slave trade, tracing the forced movement of enslaved people along the nation’s coasts in the decades before the Civil War. Drawing on thousands of surviving ship manifests—documents that recorded the names and physical descriptions of captives transported between American ports—the book reconstructs the lives, kinship networks, and journeys of tens of thousands of enslaved men, women, and children trafficked to New Orleans. By combining archival research with large-scale data analysis and genealogical reconstruction, Jennie K. Williams reveals how the coastwise trade violently fractured African American families even as enslaved people struggled to preserve kinship across distance and time. The result is both a history of America’s “second Middle Passage” at sea and a meditation on the possibilities and ethics of using data to recover the lives and relationships of enslaved ancestors.

To Meet the Deeds That I Have Done: The FBI and the Civil Rights Movement Through the Life of Fletcher D. Thompson

Based on extensive oral histories as well as archival research, Dr. Williams’s second book project will explore the entangled histories of the Civil Rights Movement and the Federal Bureau of Investigation through the life of her maternal grandfather, Fletcher D. Thompson. An Assistant Director of the FBI, Thompson quietly worked as an ally to civil rights leaders in the Washington, D.C., area, offering a rare vantage point from which to examine the complex and often contradictory relationship between federal law enforcement and the struggle for civil rights.

Articles, Essays, & Reviews

Jennie K. Williams, “When Reparations Meant Paying Enslavers,” review of The Price They Paid: Slavery, Shipwrecks, and Reparations before the Civil War, by Jeffrey R. Forret, American Historical Review, forthcoming.

Jennie K. Williams, “Slavery Studies’ Digital Straw Man,” JKW Blog, July 19, 2025, https://www.jenniekatherinewilliams.com/blog/slavery-studies-digital-straw-man.

Jennie K. Williams, “Open Letter to the Slave Voyages Project,” JKW Blog, October 1, 2024, https://www.jenniekatherinewilliams.com/blog/openlettertotheslavevoyagesproject.

Williams, Jennie K. Review of Street Diplomacy: The Politics of Slavery and Freedom in Philadelphia, 1820–1850, by Elliott Drago. Journal of Southern History 89, no. 4 (2023): 747-748. https://doi.org/10.1353/soh.2023.a909868.

Williams, Jennie K. “Finders Aren’t Keepers: Rethinking and Reconfiguring the Oceans of Kinfolk Database.” Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation 4, no. 3 (2023): 44-61. https://doi.org/10.25971/p79h-e857.

Williams, Jennie K. "The Coastwise Traffic to New Orleans Dataset: Documenting North American Voyages in the IASTD." Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation 4, no. 2 (2023): 27-34. https://doi.org/10.25971/bpz3-0f38.

Jennie Williams, American Slavery at Sea: Complexities of the Coastwise Traffic. Echoes: The SlaveVoyages Blog - American Slavery at Sea. March 16, 2023.

Jennie Williams and Janelle S. Peifer, “White Scholars and Black Spaces,” Diverse: Issues in Higher Ed, June 7, 2022.

Jennie K. Williams (2020) Trouble the water: The Baltimore to New Orleans coastwise slave trade, 1820–1860, Slavery & Abolition, 41:2, 275-303, DOI: 10.1080/0144039X.2019.1660509

Jennie Williams, “JHU, too, must atone for its slavery connection,” The Baltimore Sun, February 15, 2018.