Emily James, a Jamaican interpreter at Colonial Williamsburg, talks about the roles she has played over the years, discussing the slave trade and the movement of slaves between the British West Indies and the North American colonies.
The African and African American Historical Museum presents African American history and culture. Exhibit topics include the Middle Passage, African artifacts, the efforts of African-American inventors, the Underground Railroad, African American music, local history, and local sports.
The museum offers exhibits.
This seminar will "enhance participants' knowledge of Africa, the Middle Passage, and the people who arrived here in North America in slavery. They will do so by developing projects of their own choosing involving early Atlantic history, literature, or culture up to and including the early nineteenth century." Topics, week by week, will include "Organization: African Understandings," "More African Meanings," "Embarkation, Exile," "Remembering Africa in America," and "Research Results and Teaching Applications."
Ten teachers from the United States will join teachers from the United Kingdom and Ghana to study the history and legacies of the Transatlantic Slave Trade under the direction of professors James Walvin and Stephanie Smallwood. The seminar will cover the history of African-European contact, the nature of African societies in the 15th to 18th centuries, the existing slave trading practices in Africa, the impact of the slave trade on regions of Africa, the character of the coastal trade in the forts and castles, the experience of the Middle Passage, and the numbers and experience of African arrivals in the Americas. Participants will be introduced to major scholarship as well as to the new online Transatlantic Slave Trade Database. The Middle Passages seminar will focus on both historical content and classroom pedagogy, and will include visits to historical and cultural sites in Ghana. Participating teachers will be expected to develop collaborative teaching units with their international partners.
This iCue Mini-Documentary introduces the triangular trade route, in which 17th-century merchants sailed the Atlantic Ocean in a path between Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Eventually, African slaves became part of this system.
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This iCue Mini-Documentary introduces indentured servitude, which plantation owners offered laborers in order to attract them to the colonies. In exchange for travel expenses, these laborers were expected to work the land for several years.
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This iCue Mini-Documentary describes mercantilism, an economic system which rested on the exchange of raw goods from North America with manufactured goods from England. The practice eventually enraged the colonists, who saw it as England's effort to assert its control over the colonies.
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