Digital Harlem is an element of the project, Black Metropolis: Harlem, 1915-1930, which was supported by an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant. Unlike most studies of Harlem in the early twentieth century, this project focuses not on black artists and the black middle class, but on the lives of ordinary African New Yorkers. It does so primarily by using legal records, which encompass not only hardened criminals but also first offenders, ordinary residents acting out of desperation, poverty or anger, and which reveal all manner of things that would not ordinarily be labeled ‘criminal’– street life, black language, music, family life – as well as evidence of the role of gambling, violence and confidence men in the black community.
