Mapping the End of Slavery

Visualizing Emancipation is an interactive map exploring the emancipation of four million slaves during the American Civil War. The map allows users to explore and discover patterns in the end of southern slavery through the use of contemporary documents and primary sources.

The map calls these patterns of emancipation 'event types' and Visualizing Emancipation allows you to view these patterns in any combination or on their own. The patterns include emancipation event types leading from the destruction of slavery in law, through military action and through the impetus and actions of enslaved people throughout the U.S. South.

As well as exploring the map by the patterns of emancipation you can explore the mapped events using a time-line. The time-line allows you to filter the events displayed on the map by any month between 1860 and 1865.


To mark the 200th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in Great Britain the BBC created this Abolition of British Slavery - Interactive Map. The map explores how the slave trade was organized, the history of resistance to slavery and accounts of the number of people taken into slavery. The map also includes a mapped account of one man's capture by slave dealers, his life as a slave and his eventual release from slavery.


Tacky's Rebellion, was an uprising of black African slaves that occurred in Jamaica in May, June and July 1760. The Jamaican Slave Revolt Map tells the story of the revolt, and its brutal suppression by the British Army.

Using contemporary accounts the map animates through the important events and locations in the rebellion and subsequent suppression. A number of eighteenth-century maps were used to create the terrain map and the places map, which form the base maps for the narration.

The Jamaican Slave Revolt map was created by Vincent Brown, Professor of History and African and African-American Studies at Harvard University. Brown says that "the map suggests an argument about the strategies of the rebels and the tactics of counterinsurgency, about the importance of the landscape to the course of the uprising".