Joshua Strayhorn is a scholar of the U.S. South, a public historian and a digital humanities specialist. His book project, Freedom’s Promise: Black Mobility and Migration in North Carolina, 1860 -1898, chronicles the history of enslaved and freed people’s communities and cultures in Eastern North Carolina, where its topography, ecology, and local people’s spirituality, helped shape the course of freed people’s migration to the U.S. Midwest, Deep South, and abroad during Reconstruction. He is currently an Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies and History at the University of Minnesota.