HIST 205-01, The Transatlantic Slave Trade, Spring 2012

Abstract

This course explores what W.E.B. Du Bois called the "most magnificent drama in the last thousand years of human history." The transatlantic slave was the largest migration of people in the early modern Atlantic world and transported millions of Africans away from their native lands. This course will travel back and forth between Africa, the Americas, and Europe to study the politics, economics, and conditions of the trade as well as various slave experiences. One of the most tragic and profitable event of the Western world, we will try to understand how people made sense of the Middle Passage and how it impacted the meaning of race, ethnicity, and gender at the time. Using a combination of biographies, ship logs, and historians’ accounts, we will consider the origins and the expansion of the trade, the development of plantation economy in the Americas, and finish with the abolition of the slave trade.