Teaching about slavery entails teaching about the archive. Punctuated with silences, scattered with compelling details, and laden with descriptions that oscillate between racist, harrowing, and heartbreaking, runaway ads provide a glimpse into the lives of enslaved people. The details embedded within them--or omitted from them--can also provide springboards for undergraduate research projects. As a result, in "Slavery in the Atlantic World," the author tasked her students with writing an eight- to ten-page biography of an enslaved person living in the early modern Atlantic world. The only record they had of that individual was the text of a runaway ad printed in an eighteenth-century newspaper. Throughout their research, students followed every detail as they attempted to reconstruct the life of one of the millions of people who endured and resisted their enslavement in the Atlantic world. One of the pedagogical goals was to devise an assignment that encouraged students to analyze the lives and experiences of enslaved people, rather than those of enslavers. The assignment asks students to think critically and empathetically about the experiences of an enslaved individual through thoughtful analysis of primary and secondary sources. It also leaves room for students to reflect on the limits of these sources and the nature of the archive. The author explores runaway advertisements as sources, discussing how to introduce students to their contents and prepare them for out-of-class research. Next, she surveys the digital archives that make such an assignment possible. Finally, she reflects on the narratives of Atlantic slavery. The author offers suggestions for secondary sources--from trade paperback books to academic monographs--that can provide students with models of this type of biographical scholarship. She additionally highlights the narratives her students produced. By writing this paper, the author hopes that educators of all levels will be able to integrate runaway advertisements into their classrooms, engage students in conversations about the archive of slavery, and develop assignments that center the lives of enslaved people.