... the extraordinary repurposing, reuse, and, most important, reconceptualizing of media represented by American Slavery As It Is entailed a complex negotiation between modes of access to media, expertise, and the imagination and vision to understand that southern newspapers could not only be made to speak against themselves, but also be picked through, tagged, and sorted to create a new mode of understanding information. Like present-day academic researchers who pick through databases for particular uses of words, for authors' names, or for fragments of poetry to place them into new contexts that will yield new interpretative possibilities, Angelina and Sarah Grimké and Theodore Weld reconceived of ads and articles in proslavery papers as items that could be broken free of their surroundings and aggregated, strung along a different thread to yield a damning portrait of slavery written in the slaveholders' own words.