Slave trade research

greekgoddess31

Active Member
In college, I worked for a professor who was researching the slave trade. My job was to make spreadsheets containing property lists of Southern landowners. It was most shocking to me to read people's names on that list with names, ages, acquisition dates and disposition dates. Has anyone else ever really dug into this or found this interesting?
 

Olsen

Member
Well, I took a course in Afro-American literature and culture during my Master's Degree period. I found it absolutely fascinating to read how slaves were treated and how they reacted against their landowners by self-educating themselves and writing their own feelings into poetry and songs. A particularly interesting writing is "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself".
 

fibi ducks

Active Member
hmmm, this is something that i am interested in.
when i was at school ( a state school in north london) i was puzzled that there seemed to be a divide between the dark and light coloured children. maybe i have an idea why it is now. but i need to know more. any thoughts would be welcome...
at some point i heard that when the captives were sold in the new world ports they were seperated from their own people and mixed up with others from different african backgrounds. my idea is this:
no one should be an island - we are full humans by being part of some culture or other. by breaking off each person from their culture the dealers or buyers commited another crime, which is different from slavery. we might say that they killed cultures. in our language we don't have a name for such a crime. that is a sign that we are pretty clueless about what we have done in this case.
we learned at school that we had a past in slavery, but not that it was more than that. If what i said above is true, then it was more than that.
i've looked a bit in the library and online, but there is nothing that i can find on this exact matter. any info/thoughts appreciated.
 

Nadai

Active Member
Well, I took a course in Afro-American literature and culture during my Master's Degree period. I found it absolutely fascinating to read how slaves were treated and how they reacted against their landowners by self-educating themselves and writing their own feelings into poetry and songs. A particularly interesting writing is "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself".
I was assigned this reading my freshman year of college, I thought it was very interesting. It is ver sad to read things like that and sad to think about how one group of people can think themselves so above everyone else that they could treat them so inhumanely. I live in Virginia; I took a trip to a plantaion in... Williamsburg I believe... and saw a list of slaves and their duties, how much they were sold and purchased for, where they were kept, even the 350 year old tree that several slaves were hung from. It would have been a beautiful place were it not for the history that corrupted it-in my opinion.
 
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