{"href":"https://api.simplecast.com/oembed?url=https%3A%2F%2Fopen-books.simplecast.com%2Fepisodes%2F1-3-maria-montalvo-z4RmD2An","width":444,"version":"1.0","type":"rich","title":"Grappling with the Archive: Maria Montalvo on What Lawsuits Can Tell Us About Life Under Slavery","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_url":"https://image.simplecastcdn.com/images/99dc3b0f-69d1-4b78-bf0e-388740d1e6f7/375e1aa7-e2fb-4072-8ba8-00e455a0db62/openbooks-wordmark.jpg","thumbnail_height":300,"provider_url":"https://simplecast.com","provider_name":"Simplecast","html":"<iframe src=\"https://player.simplecast.com/a364de74-a98c-4ebb-90b9-255d2d0ae56a\" height=\"200\" width=\"100%\" title=\"Grappling with the Archive: Maria Montalvo on What Lawsuits Can Tell Us About Life Under Slavery\" frameborder=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe>","height":200,"description":"Historians of American slavery face a quandary. Much of the surviving documentary evidence was produced by proponents of slavery. Louisiana archives offer an enormous trove of court cases that concern the buying and selling of enslaved people, but what are the risks of using these documents to reconstruct the hidden lives of the enslaved? For this episode of Open Books, Mae Velloso-Lyons is joined by Maria Montalvo, assistant professor of History at Emory University and author of Enslaved Archives: Slavery, Law, and the Production of the Past."}