This iCue Mini-Documentary describes the early 1500s in New Spain, when the issue of slavery became controversial. Dominican priest Bartolome de Las Casas issued reports of brutal savagery by the conquistadors against the Native Americans.
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This iCue Mini-Documentary describes the departure of a group of Puritan Separatists from England aboard the Mayflower to settle a colony in America. In Plymouth, MA, they signed the Mayflower Compact, promising that all decisions of the new colony would be made by the majority.
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This iCue Mini-Documentary describes how the Wampanoag Indians helped the English Puritans survive at their new colony at Plymouth, MA. Chief Massasoit and Plymouth Governor William Bradford signed a treaty of peace that lasts more than 50 years and resulted in the first Thanksgiving.
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This iCue Mini-Documentary describes the establishment of Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in the Americas, in 1607. The first years were extremely difficult for the colonists, under the leadership of John Smith. Food was scarce and relations with the Native Americans were tense.
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Dr. Karen Kupperman of New York University looks at contact between Native Americans and English colonists at Jamestown, focusing on what is known about either side's perceptions of the other.
To view this podcast, select "Podcast" under the September 7th listing.
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This iCue Mini-documentary introduces the Spanish explorers Vasco Nunez del Balboa, Hernán Cortés and Francisco Pizarro's, who ventured across the Atlantic two decades after Columbus's famous voyages. The Spanish often used savage tactics to subdue Indian tribes and steal their wealth.
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This iCue Mini-Documentary introduces the first years of exploration of the New World, when Spain and Portugal emerged as the biggest colonizing powers. To avoid open war, the Pope Alexander VI drew a line of demarcation that divided the Americas in half.
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The ratification of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution in December 1865 abolished slavery in the United States, formally, officially, and legally. A century and a half after Emancipation, however, the question of slavery still roils the waters of American life. This seminar, led by Ira Berlin, will view the development of chattel bondage in mainland North America from the perspective of the larger Atlantic world. Topics include the nature of the slave trade, the distinction between societies with slaves and slave societies, the evolution of plantation slavery, the transforming face of the Age of Revolutions, the remaking of slavery in the 19th century, and the contemporary debate about the meaning of slavery for American life.
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 search for a Northwest Passage, which began in earnest following Christopher Columbus's first journey to the Americas in 1492. Many Europeans hoped that a waterway existed in the Americas that would link Europe with Asia.
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