This article in USA Today is the first attempt by Ray Jayawardhana, Harold Tanner Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and professor of astronomy, to write about his father—his inspiration and most difficult subject.
“My father was always writing, as far back as I can remember,” Jayawardhana writes in the piece. “Whenever he found more than a moment for himself, he was buried in a book or writing longhand on foolscap paper with multiple open tomes and shoeboxes full of notecards scattered on his desk. His writing was eclectic, to say the least, ranging from short stories to children’s books to scholarly articles and general interest volumes on the history and archaeology of Sri Lanka, where I grew up."
Devin Flores/Cornell University
Enslavers posted as many as a quarter-million newspaper ads and flyers before 1865 to locate runaway slaves. Ed Baptist is leading the public crowdsourcing project, Freedom on the Move, that has digitized tens of thousands of these advertisements in an open-source site accessible to the public.
