African Immigration to Colonial America
For general background on the history of the slave trade and the evolution
of African American slave societies in the Old South, try these books,
beginning with two excellent studies by Professor Berlin:
Berlin, Ira. Generations Of Captivity: A History of African-American
Slaves (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,
2003).
Berlin, Ira. Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery
in North America (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press, 1998).
Gomez, Michael Angelo. Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation
of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, c1998).
Heuman, Gad, and James Walvin. The Slavery Reader (New York: Routledge,
2003).
Littlefield, Daniel. Rice and Slaves: Ethnicity and the Slave Trade
in
Colonial South Carolina (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,
c1981).
Morgan, Philip D. Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the
Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill: Published
for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg,
Virginia, by the University of North Carolina Press, c1998).
Websites
The Gilder Lehrman Institute website provides teacher resources on many
eras of American history, including a section on slavery:
PBS's "Slavery in America" site continues to provide valuable materials for the study of the slave trade and other aspects of antebellum African American history:
http://www.slaveryinamerica.org/home.htm
Of particular interest is the lesson plan on "The Trans-Atlantic Passage" by Dorothy L.W. Dobson:
http://www.slaveryinamerica.org/history/hs_lp_atlantic.htm
PBS's "Africans in America" website provides excellent teacher resources:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/home.html
A search for "slave trade" on the American Memory website at the Library of Congress will produce plenty of hits, but be warned that most of these are for post-1800 publications:
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/browse/ListSome.php?category= African%20American%20History
For a rare look at images representing pre-colonial Africa, go to "The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas: A Visual Record," a fine website mounted by Jerome S. Handler and Michael L. Tuite, Jr., and sponsored jointly by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and the University of Virginia:
http://hitchcock.itc.virginia.edu/Slavery/return.php?categorynum=2
And for an exceptionally useful timeline of the slave trade that focuses on the history of the African regions that supplied the trade, go to "African Slave Trade and Imperialism," hosted at Central Oregon Community College:
http://web.cocc.edu/cagatucci/classes/hum211/timelines/htimeline3.htm
