History of slavery
The study of slavery across societies and periods, including systems of enslavement and trade, resistance, abolition, and slavery’s enduring effects.
Atlantic slave trade: The forced transportation of millions of Africans across the Atlantic for enslavement in the Americas. It linked African captives, European empires, and plantation economies across the Atlantic.
Chattel slavery: A form of slavery in which people are treated as transferable property, often with status inherited by their children. It became a defining legal form in Atlantic plantation societies.
Olaudah Equiano: An eighteenth-century writer and abolitionist who published an influential account of enslavement and the Atlantic crossing. His autobiography challenged the slave trade through testimony and argument.
Abolitionism: A movement to end slavery and the slave trade. Its campaigns challenged slave systems through organizing, testimony, revolt, and legislation.
Slave narratives: First-person accounts by formerly enslaved people describing their lives, enslavement, and pursuit of freedom. These texts preserve testimony while raising questions about authorship, editing, and audience.
Trans-Saharan slave trade: A network of routes that transported enslaved people across the Sahara and into North Africa and the Middle East. It demonstrates that African slave trading networks extended beyond the Atlantic system.
Slave market: A place or institution where enslaved people are bought and sold. Markets converted coercive capture and inherited status into commercial transactions.
Frederick Douglass: An American abolitionist, writer, and orator who escaped slavery and became a leading advocate for emancipation. His speeches and writings made formerly enslaved people’s testimony central to abolitionism.
Emancipation Proclamation: An 1863 U.S. presidential proclamation declaring enslaved people free in designated areas under rebellion. It made emancipation a stated Union war aim without immediately ending slavery everywhere.
Historical memory of slavery: The ways societies represent, debate, and commemorate slavery’s past. Public memory influences which histories are honored, contested, or left out.