Study Group Details
741: History of Atlantic Slavery
Friday9:45 - 11:15
Starting March 06
In-Person
Our country is still grappling with our history of slavery and white supremacy. How did this come to be? The European settlers who first crossed the Atlantic and colonized the Americas did not have a long history of enslaving Africans. How did the age of the great navigators and colonizers come to be the of age of chattel slavery. In this course we will look at Portuguese navigators who opened the slave trade along the west coast of Africa. We will see how other European nations joined Portugal and Spain in trading in human beings. North America was late coming into the slave trade but after 1619 colonizers in North America saw the slave trade as the answer to problem of labor in the new world. In this course we will examine the history of slavery in the new world as it spread from the colonies in Africa to Brazil and other European colonies across the Caribbean to the North American mainland. We will encounter many historical figures you know and maybe some who will be new to you. The course will cover the period of Portuguese exploration of west Africa to the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade in American in 1810.
This study group is new
Class Type: Lecture and Discussion
Class Format: In-Person
Hours of Reading: No required reading
Study Group Leader(s):
Karen Stewart
Karen Stewart has been teaching courses in African American History at OLLI for over seven years. She became interested in the topic as a Peace Corps volunteer in Malawi and Congo. Her intense interest and exploration of the subject came with retirement. Her goals for all her classes is to establish a community of learning and mutual respect where we all learn from the texts, the videos, the lecture, and the discussion.