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African history in our country begins more than a century before English accounts of 1619 Jamestown. International teams now race against time to digitally preserve endangered documents that tell a longer and richer history for Africans across the Atlantic World. Jane Landers is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of History at Vanderbilt University. She is Director of the Slave Societies Digital Archive and since 2015 has served as the U.S. member on UNESCO’s International Scientific Committee for the Slave Route Project. Landers’ award-winning monographs include Black Society in Spanish Florida and Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolutions and she is the co-author or editor of five other books dealing with the history of African and Indigenous resistance in Florida and the Atlantic World. Her research has been supported by the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the British Library Endangered Archives Programme, among others. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx