Revisiting the Sally: Innovation, Change, and Institutional History

At the John Carter Brown Library, we balance tradition and innovation, preserving the principles of conservation, cataloging, academic work, and more while expanding our understanding of the library’s focus on the early Americas. In important ways, little has changed at the JCB since the building originally opened 120 years ago. Fellows and other researchers continue to settle into the same chairs in the Reading Room. They pore over texts and images and maps at the same tables, by the light of lamps that have been there forever; indeed, we relish these continuities. The shade of green used in some of the JCB’s communications materials matches the glass in those reading lamps. Patrons who come into the building walk through the same carved wooden doors that were hung in 1904, enhanced now by glass exterior doors. We are treated to the same view of Brown University's main green.

And yet things are also always changing, as we explore new ways to meet our mission of serving scholars and scholarship and enhancing public access to the histories our collections can reveal. In 2026, we find ourselves facing a host of challenges and opportunities that make it imperative to understand and implement our mission, including reflecting on our institutional history as a research library and as part of Brown University’s campus. We wanted to share with you more about how we’ve been investing in this area.

In 2021, we launched our Welcome and Access Plan, adjusting the main entrance to the building and launching Americana, a platform that serves as our digital front door. When we reopened our physical doors on that May day in 2023, we also opened an exhibition on our history (that you can now visit online): 1846: Inventing Americana at the John Carter Brown Library. As the curators observed, because John Carter Brown was interested in the full hemisphere during European colonialism, ‘Americana’ for him invoked an ethos and practice of collecting books about the Americas. The meanings and resonances of the term raise questions about inclusion and exclusion, culture and power, that are echoed in our exploration of the JCB’s own history and the histories it helped to create.

Since then, the Library has been working to develop a series of tools — websites, finding aids, and more — that will leverage advanced technology, institutional partnerships, and our own world-leading collection to continue to explore questions that arise from our work in new ways. Some of those questions center on the key role that the JCB has played in efforts at Brown University to recognize that institution’s relationship to historical slavery. Over the last several years, building as we always do on the work of generations of JCB staff, we have focused on better and richer access to the JCB materials foundational to the university’s report on slavery and justice released in 2006 and updated in a new edition in 2021. This comes in addition to our partnership with the Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice, which includes research opportunities and programming, notably a jointly hosted postdoctoral fellowship.

We look forward to continuing to share updates with you about this work in three specific areas:

First, we have been working to develop a new website, “Enslaved on the Sally,” which will focus on the slave ship owned by Nicholas Brown and Company that was featured in the 2006 (and then 2021) university report. That ship’s voyage, catastrophic even in the context of the slave trade, is currently documented with links to a host of primary materials on the website from the original report and can still be accessed here: The Voyage of the Sally. Created nearly 20 years ago as a collaborative project developed by the Brown University Scholarly Technology Group, the Center for Digital Initiatives, the John Carter Brown Library, and Professor James Campbell, the initial goal of this innovative (and still sturdy!) 2006 project was to represent historical documents related to the Sally and “make them available to the general public, through an interface that encourages exploration of the historical, economic, and social context.”

Our goal with the new website is to highlight the JCB’s materials, which are the majority of the Sally documents, and of course we’ll provide links back to the original site and to digitized documents still held in Brown University Library’s digital repository. The JCB site will provide digital access to the JCB’s materials, digitized and presented to the same standards as materials in Americana, and will situate the story of the people enslaved on the ship within the context of ongoing research and scholarship. Over the last few years, we have worked on the concept and assets for the site, and over the next year, we will move into active development.

Our second focus is a precondition to the above, and one that we’ve discussed in a previous blog post: the necessary work that the JCB’s team has been doing on the full corpus of Brown Family Business Records, which span the 18th to the 20th centuries across 1,345 boxes of files, letters, and ledgers. We are currently engaged in an ambitious effort to add finding aids to RIAMCO, the Rhode Island Archival and Manuscript Collections Online. This work has extended to other related manuscript collections, including the Arnold Family Business Records.

Third, we will continue to support research in our collection on these and related topics, taking advantage of enhanced access to the manuscript materials, and sharing that work in a variety of venues. Our staff did a full panel at the African American Intellectual History Society meeting in 2025 about the different dimensions of our work on the Sally, including the ethical issues around conservation for objects of historical violence. You can read short reflections, based on those presentations, from Associate Librarian for Research and Reference Kim Nusco and Head of Libraries Conservation Roger Shaw Williams here and here.

Of course, we will also continue to support fellows and other scholars focusing on this subject area from a variety of perspectives. Two years ago, for example, the JCB sponsored independent researcher Traci Picard for a year, exploring the lives and experiences of people of color in eighteenth-century Providence and Rhode Island as well as the Sally and the Brown Family Business Records generally. We co-sponsor the Simmons Center/JCB Joint Postdoctoral Research Associates in Slavery and Justice. Chris Baldwin, who was the 2024-2025 Research Associate, focused on intersections of war, law, and enslavement in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. Our current post-doc, Arielle Alterwaite, has been working on slavery, emancipation, and political economy in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Europe with a particular focus on France and its empire. We will announce our latest Simmons Center/JCB Postdoctoral Fellow in the coming weeks. Additionally, for 2026-27 we are delighted to welcome new JCB fellows whose work will focus in this area, including Dr. Tara Bynum, a leading scholar of the Black experience in Rhode Island during this period.

These and other efforts, including much more scholarship by JCB fellows and Brown faculty, recognize the depth and breadth of research on slavery in New England, including work on Indigenous slavery. All of this contributes to our efforts to explore our own archival responsibility, mission, and institutional relationships as they relate to the complex issues around the slave trade, local and global histories, and access to scholarly materials related to some of the most difficult periods in our nation’s history. We are keenly aware that the work that we do today contributes to ongoing efforts to expand access to JCB materials and the use of our materials, allowing researchers to elucidate forgotten or silenced features of the past. And we invite you to be part of this critical process, helping us to balance innovation and conservation, tradition and change.

Text by Katherine Goldman, Communications Manager