Featured Podcasts
Bondwoman’s Narrative: Henry Louis Gates,
Jr.
http://www.gilderlehrman.org/wp/?p=38
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University
Professor and Director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute
of African American History at Harvard University, recalls
his thrilling search for the true author of The Bondwoman’s
Narrative, and the real-life Civil War Era counterparts
to the novel’s cast of characters.
Harriet Tubman: Catherine Clinton
http://www.gilderlehrman.org/wp/?p=31
Harriet Tubman was born into slavery in Maryland
in 1820. After her escape to the North in 1849, she
returned to the South more than a dozen times to ferry
other slaves along the Underground Railroad. She later
helped John Brown recruit men for his Harper’s
Ferry raid, and during the Civil War, Tubman served
as a Union spy. In this lecture, historian Catherine
Clinton details not only Tubman’s life but also
the quest to uncover new information on Tubman’s
extraordinary life.
Slave Counterpoint: Philip D. Morgan
http://www.gilderlehrman.org/wp/?p=82
In this lecture, historian Philip D. Morgan compares
the Lowcountry and Chesapeake slave cultures and reveals
much about the way of life of some of the earliest African
Americans. Although South Carolina in the eighteenth
century was built by slave labor, Virginia only began
to “recruit” slaves in large numbers at
the beginning of that century. Consequently, there were
substantial differences in the black cultures that emerged
in the two regions.
Books
Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First
Two Centuries of Slavery in America
Peter Kolchin, American Slavery
Few historical topics have evoked more heated debate than
slavery. Among the central questions that historians have
debated are these:
- Why did slavery come to dominate the economies of
such societies as ancient Greece and Rome, the southern
United States, Brazil, and Britain and France's Caribbean
colonies?
- Why did slavery achieve its greatest strength in
the United States, a society dedicated to freedom
and equality?
- In what ways were slavery and racism connected?
For more than a century, professional historians have
engaged in heated debates over slavery. They have argued
over whether slavery or racism came first; whether the
Constitution was a pro- or anti-slavery document; and
whether slavery was the underlying cause of the American
Civil War.
Click below to learn about two heated historical debates:
What were the origins of slavery?
Was slavery the engine of American economic growth?
Films
Glory
The heroic story of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Regiment,
the first black regiment to fight in the Civil War.
Learn
More
Many influential Hollywood films, from Birth of a
Nation and Gone with the Wind to Glory
and Amistad, have helped shape the way Americans
have thought about slavery.
Web Sites
Recommended Web Site:
Forgotten Heroes of Freedom
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/99nov/9911runaway.htm
Despite formidable odds, many enslaved African Americans
ran away from slavery. Leon Litwack, the Morrison Professor
of American History at the University of California
at Berkeley, assesses the frequency of flight from slavery,
the forms that this took, and the motives that precipitated
flight. Subscription
only.
Related Web Sites:
Denmark Vesey
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/1861jun/higgin.htm
An 1861 account of Denmark Vesey’s attempted insurrection
by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, published in The Atlantic.
Subscription only.
Also see "Denmark Vesey: Forgotten Hero,"
subscription only:
http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/flashbks/vesey.htm.
Taking the Train to Freedom
http://www.nps.gov/undergroundrr/contents.htm
This National Park Service site provides a general overview
of the Underground Railroad, with a brief discussion
of slavery and abolitionism, escape routes used by slaves.
African American Women
http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/collections/african-american-women.html
The slave letters from the Duke University Library’s
Special Collections provide a rare firsthand glimpse
into the lives of slaves and the relationships they
had with their owners.
Africans in America: Judgment Day
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/title.html
This site, a supplement to the PBS series, covers the
years 1831-1865, and provides primary source documents
and commentary from leading historians dealing with
such topics as the material conditions of slave life,
the impact of slavery on the family, abolition, the
Fugitive Slave Law, Bleeding Kansas, John Brown’s
raid on Harpers Ferry, and wartime emancipation.
Exploring Amistad
http://amistad.mysticseaport.org/
This site contains over 500 primary documents including
court documents, journal entries, and newspaper stories
dealing with the Amistad Affair, which began as a shipboard
revolt off the coast of Cuba and resulted in a protracted
legal battle over slavery and the slave trade.
An Introduction to the Slave Narrative
http://docsouth.unc.edu/
An interpretation of the slave narratives by William
L. Andrews, a leading authority on the subject.
North American Slave Narratives
http://docsouth.unc.edu/
This site include all the narratives of fugitive and
former slaves published in broadsides, pamphlets, or
book form in English up to 1920 and many of the biographies
of fugitive and former slaves published in English before
1920.
Third Person, First Person: Slave Voices
http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/slavery/
This site uses documents from the Duke University Library’s
special collections to document the slave trade, slave
labor, the impact of the Revolution on slavery, the
nature of life in the slave community, and slavery’s
collapse.
Spartacus Internet Encyclopedia
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/slavery.htm
First person accounts, essays on the slave system, slave
life, key events, and biographies of abolitionists.
Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database
http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/index.faces
This database has information on almost 35,000 slaving
voyages that forcibly embarked over 10 million Africans
for transport to the Americas between the sixteenth
and nineteenth centuries. It offers researchers, students
and the general public a chance to rediscover the reality
of one of the largest forced movements of peoples in
world history.
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