Social Network Map

African Americans faced enormous obstacles in the emancipation era. How they met these challenges depended in large part on the kinds of relationships they forged, and with whom. Black and white southerners constantly interacted in a variety of circumstances, in the midst of vastly imbalanced and fluctuating power relationships, and in modes more or less circumscribed by social conventions. These social network maps are a first step toward visualizing the complicated social lives of southerners in the postemancipation world.