Raw statistics and data of Early American History. This is where you can find the number of enslaved people in a certain county, trade data, tax rolls, deeds, freight income
Colonel William Byrd on Slavery and Indented Se...
In this 1739 from a aristocratic slave owner to a Trustee of the colony of Georgia, teachers and students can look into the complexity of slavery in the 1730s. How can a plantation owner who profits from slavery complain about the system and wish that Britain would end slavery in the colonies? How can a slaveowner express such disgust for slave traders (who, he claims, would paint their wives and children's faces black if they could get away with selling them)? If you look close enough, you can see his prediction of John Brown's dream of a slave insurrection in the mountains.
New York Slavery Records Index – Records of Enslaved Persons and Slave Holders in New York from 1525 though the Civil War
Search more than 35,000 records of slavery within the State of New York from 1525 through the Civil War. The data come from census records, slave trade transactions, cemetery records, birth certifications, manumissions, ship inventories, newspaper accounts, private narratives, legal documents and many other sources
4 minute narrated video describes in detail the design of an 18th century slave ship. The tour of the trip describes how the slave ship was built for the sole purpose of transporting enslaved Africans. The animation and description is based on a specific French boat.
This is a compendium of colonial, state and federal fugitive slave laws. Available for research, or quick skimming to reveal the nature of slavery this resource shows how quickly runaway slave laws came to the colonies right after the Pilgrims. It also shows the overlapping of indentured servant law and slave law and how the system of slavery evolved over 250 years
Prevalence of Slavery in New Jersey | Truehart Productions
"New Jersey, the Garden State, is known for its produce, but not for the enslaved people who tilled the soil. In this two-part documentary, descendants and historians tell their stories and why it was the last northern state to end the institution of slavery."
Encyclopedia Virginia: An Act directing the trial of Slaves, committing capital crimes; and for the more effectual punishing conspiracies and insurrections of them; and for the better government of Negros, Mulattos, and Indians, bond or free
Instead of giving students excerpts from a set of documents and asking them to analyze and interpret them, you could ask them to just comb through one giant document and find what they could find. This would be the document, and slavery in the colonies would be the topic. Here they'll find explicit punishments that include getting ears nailed for giving false testimony and death for conspiracy. Students will also see how difficult it is to free slaves under this 1723 law
The Middle Passage | Stanford History Education Group
Simply a "must-do" lesson in which students read well-selected, edited and presented documents (Portuguese text book from 1994, ship captain, ship doctor and slave autobiography) to corroborate their information and test their reliability. Excellent lesson from SHEG
Animated interactive of the history of the Atlantic slave trade.
20, 528 slave voyages are shown moving across this map, tracing each trip from Africa to North and South America. Notice when the volume of slaves is at its highest - notice also where more of them go. What's happening to all of the slaves going to Latin America? Why aren't more going to North America?
Native American slavery: Historians uncover a chilling chapter in U.S. history.
This article explains how recent scholarship has found a much closer connection between the history of Native Americans, African Americans and slavery than was ever thought before. Should the teaching of the Pequot War include mention of its unique role in evolution of slavery in North America? Students are often taught of the first recorded shipment first shipment of African slaves to Virginia. Why are they not taught about the first recorded law regarding slavery in Massachusetts in 1641?
Ground Zero for any teacher or student investigation of slavery and the slave trade. This database aggregates the statistics of the slave trade from Africa. Teachers can simply let student loose in this site and let them craft their own understandings. Then their peers and teachers could subject those conclusions to critical thinking questions and analysis.
The Geography of Slavery in Virginia: Virginia Runaways, Slave Advertisements, Runaway Advertisements
This collection of advertisements, documents and court records is drawn from Lathan Algerna Windley's collection Runaway Slave Advertisements : a Documentary History from the 1730's to 1790.
The record of one voyage of one slave ship in 1693. Students can see in this record that 700 slaves were loaded onto the ship at the start of the journey and only 372 survived the voyage.
HSI: Historical Scene Investigation - Finding Aaron (Escaped slave; 1767)
In this case, students follow the life and escape attempts of an enslaved man named Aaron of the course of four years. Students utilize runaway slave advertisements from the Virginia Gazette from 1767 to 1771 to track multiple escapes by Aaron and the quest of his masters to recapture him. Although the evidence paints only a partial picture of Aaron's life, students are challenged to a plausible explanation of what happened to Aaron between December, 1767 and January, 1771
Slavery by the Numbers (redux) | Encyclopedia Virginia, The Blog
This list of 15 or 20 different statistics could be used as a prompt for discussion or even a "Do now" introductory activity. Each includes a source. "Basic" statistics like the total number of Africans transported to the western hemisphere and % that did not survive the journey are included - but also the ratio of white indentured servants to slaves in colonial Virginia or chance that an African living in NY in 1776 was a slave ( 1 in 7).
The Misguided Focus on 1619 as the Beginning of Slavery in the U.S. Damages Our Understanding of American History | History | Smithsonian
Teachers of the US History narrative canon would be
As historian <a href="https://www.bu.edu/afam/faculty/john-thornton/" target="_blank">John Thornton</a> has shown us, the African men and women who appeared almost as if by chance in Virginia in 1619 were there because of a chain of events involving Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands and England. Virginia was part of the story, but it was a blip on the radar screen.
Several documents in a lesson that focuses on three escaped Indentured Servants in 1640 Virginia and the different sentences they received when they were caught. This lesson can be combined with others to highlight the early system of slavery in the colonies
Legislating Reproduction and Racial Difference in Virginia - Women & the American Story
Shepherding students through colonial slave laws with a source that provides the side-by-side text and explanation in plain language shows them how to decipher the text while also showing them the pervasiveness of the system. This source comes with discussion questions - easy to use in a pinch by just posting the link, or as part of a more developed lesson sequence
Rhode Island Dominates North American Slave Trade in 18th Century - Online Review of Rhode Island History
Nowhere in the taught narrative canon of American colonial history is the fact that Newport Rhode Island played a prominent role in the slave trade of the 1700s. The fact can be demonstrably proven through primary source evidence, though it is simply ignored
July 21, 1656: Elizabeth Key Wins Her Freedom - Zinn Education Project
The story of Elizabeth Key could easily be included in a lesson which follows the evolution of slavery laws in the 1600s.
Cases like Elizabeth Key’s help highlight the ways in which justifications for discriminatory practices were built over time, and the fluidity of status and freedom for people of African descent in early colonial Virginia. She initially lost her case because she and her son were classified by the court as “Negroes,” but was able to win by highlighting her father’s whiteness and her Christian faith.
Inventory of Robert Carter's Estate, November 1733
What did one of the richest men in British North American own? This answers that question. Students can be asked what they would think about looking through the personal inventory of Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk? Here they get to do just that. This provides insight into the material culture of the wealthy colonists but a truly detailed look into slavery. Just click on the locations and look at the names and ages of the persons he enslaved.
The Project uses an online digital repository of autobiographical testimonies and biographical data of Atlantic Africans to analyze patterns in the slave trade of West Africa, specifically in terms of where individuals came from, why they were enslaved, and what happened to them. Freedom Narratives focuses on people born in Africa and hence in most cases had been born free rather than on those who were born into slavery in the Americas or elsewhere.
Milking sacred cows: Christy Coleman at TEDxGraceStreet - YouTube
Christy Coleman was the first president of the merged White House of the Confederacy and Civil War Museum, her path to history scholarship is interesting - as is her perspective on the depiction of slavery at Colonial Williamsburg, which she did as a teenager and as a college intern. This is a view of how history is told through public places
Royal African Company Networks – Current Research in Digital History
Maps and informational graphics based on a collection of over 3,000 individual letters that the RAC sent from one place to another on the West African coast reveals more than the taught narrative canon ever can. By using computational text analysis combined with insights from GIS, this challenges some basic assumptions about the way the English monopoly operated on the African coast
We can also
demonstrate that slaves were more prevalent in the company’s
discussions on the coast than gold in the late seventeenth century, even
though the trade in non-human commodities was more valuable than the trade in people throughout the seventeenth century.<sup id="fnref:9" role="doc-noteref"><a href="#fn:9" class="footnote" rel="footnote">9</a></sup>
