59 items
Historian Philip D. Morgan, Harry C. Black Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University, explores the core experiences of slavery itself, including life on the African coast and on sugar plantations in the New World.
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Early American Slave Culture
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...
Slavery and the Making of America
James Oliver Horton, the Benjamin Banneker Professor of American Studies and History at George Washington University, and Lois E. Horton, Professor of Sociology at George Mason University, have collaborated on several books,...
The Age of Homespun: Family Labor in the Colonial Economy
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich is James Duncan Professor of History and director of the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University. Professor Ulrich won the Pulitzer Prize for her first book, A Midwife’s Tale...
In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692
Mary Beth Norton, Mary Donlon Alger Professor of American History at Cornell University, examines the Salem witchcraft crisis from a seventeenth-century perspective, drawing not only on court records, but also on correspondence and...
Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America
Ira Berlin is a professor of history at the University of Maryland and winner of the 1999 Bancroft Prize in American History. His talk draws upon Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America in tandem with...
Generations in Captivity: Slavery in America
Ira Berlin, Distinguished University Professor of History at the University of Maryland, describes how the complex interplay of regional and generational factors shaped the development of slavery in the antebellum United States.
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The Formation of Slave Culture
Historian Ira Berlin briefly discusses the evolution of slave culture based on African and American experiences of the enslaved.
Teaching the Topic of Slavery
Historian Ira Berlin briefly discusses ways to address slavery in the classroom and teach students how to engage in historical argument.
Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin
Historian Jill Lepore of Harvard University discusses her book, Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin, a finalist for the 2013 National Book Award, with James G. Basker, president of the Gilder Lehrman Institute.
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The Discovery of the Americas and the Transatlantic Slave Trade
In the middle of the fifteenth century, Europe, Africa, and the Americas came together, creating—among other things—a new economy. At the center of that economy was the plantation, an enterprise dedicated to the production of exotic...
Cotton Mather’s account of the Salem witch trials, 1693
Most Americans’ knowledge of the seventeenth century comes from heavily mythologized events: the first Thanksgiving at Plymouth, Pocahontas purportedly saving Captain John Smith from execution in early Virginia, and the Salem witch...
The death of enslaved Africans on a voyage, 1725
Slavery in English America underwent profound changes during the first two centuries of settlement. During the early seventeenth century, some Black laborers were enslaved; others, however, were treated like White indentured servants...
A bond for the manumission of a slave, 1757
In 1757, New York tavern keeper Eve Scurlock freed five slaves in her will, citing their fidelity, service, and good behavior. Among them was a woman named Ann, to whom Scurlock also willed money, clothing, and household items. Though...
Olaudah Equiano, 1789
Within ten years of the first North American settlements, Europeans began transporting captured Africans to the colonies as enslaved laborers. Imagine the thoughts and fears of an eleven-year-old boy who was kidnapped from his village...
A View of Savannah, Georgia, 1734
The colony of Georgia was founded in 1732 by James Oglethorpe, a British Member of Parliament. Oglethorpe planned Savannah as a place where the poor could come to make a better life. An attempt to produce a "classless society," this...
Historical Context: American Slavery in Comparative Perspective
Of the ten to sixteen million Africans who survived the voyage to the New World, more than one-third landed in Brazil and between 60 and 70 percent ended up in Brazil or the sugar colonies of the Caribbean. Only 6 percent arrived in...
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