News: Freedom and Liberty - Archive Awareness Campaign 2007

Enjoy a fun event this autumn with the Archive Awareness Campaign and find out what lies inside your local archive. Led by The National Archives, the National Council on Archives and the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council, Archive Awareness Campaign runs right through the autumn. Hundreds of archives across the UK are throwing open their doors and inviting everyone in to take part in some fantastic events and discover a little bit of their own history.

As part of the Archive Awareness Campaign 2007, archives across the UK and Ireland plan special events to commemorate the history of human rights. More than a hundred archives are planning showcases, open days, workshops and many other activities to celebrate their holdings of original documents and tell stories of freedom to new audiences in the most inspiring ways possible.

The theme of the 2007 campaign is 'Freedom and Liberty', looking at the struggle for rights in history, including the Chartists, the Suffragettes and the struggle to abolish slavery. The National Archives of Scotland (NAS) has produced several online resources which relate to the theme.

To commemorate the bicentenary of the Act to abolish the slave trade in the British Empire, the NAS website is featuring the records of court cases which challenged the legal status of slavery in Scotland in the eighteenth century. Find out more about the Montgomery case of 1756 and subsequent cases in which runaway slaves attempted to prove the illegality and immorality of slavery in the Court of Session and obtain their freedom.

Read about George Dale, a native of Africa and former slave, whose life story was used as evidence by the Society for the Purpose of Effecting the Abolition of the African Slave Trade.

Images of records and illustrations relating to the slave trade from Scottish archives and libraries can be found on the exhibition 'Slavery and Glasgow' on the Scottish Archive Network (SCAN) website, which has an education module on the Women's Suffrage movement in Scotland.

'For Freedom Alone' is the title of one of the resources on the Scottish Archives for Schools website, telling the story of William Wallace, Robert the Bruce and the Scottish Wars of Independence, 1286-1329.

To look for more events on the theme of 'Freedom and Liberty' visit the Archive Awareness Campaign website.