The NEH Office for Digital Humanities just announced that Digital Scholarship Lab, in conjunction with UR President Edward L. Ayers, has won an 18-month Digital Start-Up Grant for our project, “Landscapes of the American Past: Visualizing Emancipation.” President Ayers and DSL Associate Director Scott Nesbit will direct the project, which will be the first stage of an online atlas of American history. “Visualizing Emancipation,” a map of slavery’s end in the United States, will answer questions about when, where, and how emancipation emerged from the Civil War. In doing so, it will also address a question of increasing interest in the digital humanities: how can we produce maps that rely on and support open resources while at the same time creating effective and elegant visualizations that convey scholarly arguments? We will publish our findings online as a mapping application, in peer-reviewed essays, as freely accessible data and metadata, and in a white paper addressing the methodology of visualizing historical arguments.