Introduction
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On 27 March, 1998 I posted the message which follows on the Slavery List ("The history of slavery, the slave trade, abolition and emancipation" <SLAVERY@LISTSERV.UH.EDU>)
A long and interesting discussion followed.
The Scout Report for Social Sciences -- March 24, 1998 SRSOCSCI@HYPATIA.CS.WISC.EDU contains a pointer to CROSSROADS: A K-16 American History Curriculum, Troy, NY: Council for Citizenship Education, Russell Sage College, 1995 at http://ericir.syr.edu/Virtual/Lessons/crossroads/sec6/
I was interested to see how the Slave Trade would be treated.
Perhaps my search of the site was not sufficiently thorough, but I found nothing on the subject. Would this be typical?
Let me make my question more general. Is the history of the Atlantic Slave Trade included in the school curriculum in the US and other countries in the Americas which have a substantial population of people of African descent? If it is not (a) why isn't it? (b) should it be? (c) why should it be?
Does this matter have any tie-in with President Clinton's present travels in Africa?
Is there anyone out there who could answer similar questions regarding the curricula of schools in Africa?
The contributions under the same head and under the heads `Teaching the Slave Trade' and `Reaching out to a General Audience,' follow, in sequence, reformatted but with the text of the contributions otherwise unedited. I have added an off-list message from Alva Moore Stevenson.
James W. Loewen
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From: "jloewen@zoo.uvm.edu" 27-MAR-1998 05:58:50.75
Manu Herbstein has asked an interesting question which I hope prompts a considerable thread. I would suggest: the Atlantic slave trade should be a considerable portion of the curriculum in American schools, REGARDLESS of whether they have a substantial proportion of students of African descent, because the trade has had major impact on American institutions, foreign policy, ideology, culture, etc., to this day. (Herbstein didn't imply otherwise, but one MIGHT infer from his posting that a/the reason for including it would be to benefit African Americans, while it would benefit all Americans.) Also, every textbook discussion of the Atlantic slave trade that I have read states or implies that it ended in 1808. The ILLEGAL Atlantic slave trade continued until 1861 and had considerable impact on American foreign policy and domestic politics. It should be considered a period of "legal illegal activity," like booze during Prohibition.
James W. Loewen Try the quiz on my website: http://www.uvm.edu/~jloewen/
Jerome S. Handler
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From: "jh3v@virginia.edu" "Jerry Handler" 27-MAR-1998 11:06:47.68
response to James Loewen--check out website http://www.virginia.edu/vfh/roots.nehinst
[Co-moderator's note: I have taken the liberty of reposting the description of the NEH seminar, Roots, The African Background of American Culture Through the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, below
Jerome S. Handler Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and Public Policy e-mail: jh3v@virginia.edu phone: (804) 924--3296 fax: (804) 296-4714
Background: The underlying premise of the Institute is that Africa should figure more prominently than it often does in depictions of the genesis of American culture. The Institute will focus on the African background to American history, and the processes that brought Africans to the British Americas from the seventeenth through the early nineteenth centuries. From the perspectives of history, cultural anthropology, and historical archaeology, the Institute will emphasize what enslaved Africans brought to the creation of American (U.S.) culture by focusing on their social, political , and cultural backgrounds in West and West Central Africa. The Institute will also emphasize the trans-Atlantic slave trade as a major link between the formative American economies and societies and the rest of the world, thus a means to integrate the early American experience into world historical patterns of the time, and will consider the experiences of Africans as they settled into several regions of colonial North America.
The Institute will introduce undergraduate teachers from any discipline in American studies (e.g., history, anthropology and archaeology, sociology, literature, and cultural studies) to the lives, times, and experiences of the Africans who came to the British Americas. This Institute will particularly support the current academic trend to the broadening of the content of American studies -- emphasizing multiple perspectives, both personal and social/cultural, rather than homogenizing, implicitly Anglophone, male, white "melting pot." Throughout the Institute, participants will be encouraged to reconstruct enough of the Africans' experiences to sense -- and eventually convey to their students -- the slaves' courage, resilience, and creativity. They will be consistently faced with specifics of time and place so as to distinguish, for example, Asante from Angolans, the 1680s from the 1760s, the demands made of tobacco cultivation from those of sugar cane, as well as Virginia plantations from the Louisiana frontier, and Charleston (South Carolina) from Bridgetown (Barbados).
The context of early American history and culture is increasingly seen as a crucible in which people of exceedingly diverse backgrounds worked out the tense accommodations that became the foundations of American culture. The African presence is more and more emphasized but, owing to the emotional charges that it carries for most Americans, too often taken in through token, superficial endorsement rather than with due academic rigor. Compensatory positive stereotypes thus replace inherited negative stereotypes and inadvertently perpetuate division rather than promoting understanding. When enslaved Africans are taken fully into account, Americanists must come to terms with their backgrounds in Africa and with their experiences across the Atlantic up to the point of their arrival in the New World.
Africans created semi-autonomous "worlds" among themselves throughout the Americas, drawing on their African cultural backgrounds and experiences, and using them as the bases from which they influenced others living around them, even their nominal masters. African-American scholars of the Diaspora, from the late nineteenth century onwards, called for attention to their ancestors' presence and contributions, but they generally failed to influence the established (white) historical profession. Now, "Atlantic World Studies", with particular emphasis on the African trade's contribution to transforming Europe as well as America, is a major field of interdisciplinary research in American academic institutions.
The trans-Atlantic slave trade was the largest migration in history before the nineteenth century, creating black majorities throughout most of the Western Hemisphere. By 1807, when the trade was legally abolished by Britain and the United States, at least 9,000,000 Africans -- of an overall total in the range of 12 to 15 million-- had landed on American soils in South and Central America, the Caribbean, and North America. Few slaves entered North America and the British Caribbean colonies after 1807, but others continued to reach Cuba and Brazil until about 1870. Although the sex ratios and age structure of the Africans fluctuated over time and space, during the close- to- 400 years of the trade, approximately two-thirds were males, mostly youthful. More than a third of the captives taken to the Americas ended up in the Caribbean, and even more found themselves in Brazil; fewer than 600,000--a twentieth or less-- reached North America. Despite these relatively small numbers, Africans and their descendants in the new United States outnumbered Europeans south of the Mason-Dixon line in 1800; in fact, close to 50 percent of all immigrants (including Europeans) to the thirteen American Colonies from 1700 to 1775 came from Africa. A forced migration of these proportions had an enormous impact on societies and cultures throughout the Americas and produced a diasporic community of peoples of African descent.
The trans-Atlantic slave trade also transformed Western and Central Africa--the major regions from which slaves were drawn-- through violence, disease, commercial reorganization, population movements, agricultural reorganization around newly-introduced New World crops, imported material goods, and-- in restricted areas--Christianity. These profound changes in Africa, and the traumatic experience of the slaves who endured their harshest consequences, lie at only one remove from the American experience.
Although recent scholarship and teaching materials on American history and culture have made substantial efforts to include early Africa as "background," most of them inadvertently rely on stereotyped images of an "Africa" presented as culturally and politically homogeneous and sometimes exotically romanticized. Methodologically, these images present seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Africa as static, suspended in an ahistorical equilibrium that naively projects late nineteenth- and twentieth-century ethnographic and travellers' observations back into earlier periods. They thus obscure the intense changes experienced by West and West Central Africans during the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Historical studies of the Africa that the slaves knew now make it possible-- even at an introductory level-- to discuss their experiences with regional and chronological specificity, and in terms that present the Africans' experiences as comparable to those of people elsewhere in the world at that time-- not merely as stereotyped and exotic "others."
Pat Barrett
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From: "PBarr21106@aol.com" "PBarr21106" 29-MAR-1998 14:22:21.85
As a high school teacher, my question is: who would teach this material? The Anglo teachers I know do not want to make Anglos uncomfortable or to be made uncomfortable themselves and the Black teachers are uncomfortable with the material for other reasons. I just do not know who would teach the curriculum, no matter how well designed it was. Our textbooks have a little about the slave trade and one of our teachers reenacts a slave voyage, but all this occurs in an environment where the White viewpoint is the norm and anything that deviates from it is exotic, unorthodox and unimportant. Pat Barrett
Patrick Manning
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From: “ manning@neu.edu" 29-MAR-1998 17:27:22.20
I expect everyone to be uncomfortable when we talk about slavery and slave trade, but it is essential to experience the various sorts of discomfort brought by slavery and to learn from them.
I've had the good fortune to have classes on African history at Northeastern which are cross-listed in History and African-American Studies. The students are always a diverse lot; sometimes most are white, and sometimes most are black.
Aside from lots of reading, the device I have used for addressing slavery and slave trade is a class debate. Four to six students volunteer, and I assign each of them a historical role and a document to work from -- the roles include African kings, merchants, the enslaved (in Africa, on board ship, or in the Americas), those left behind, and European merchants, sailors and planters. (Relevant documents can be found in easily available books.) Each participant begins with a two-minute statement identifying their role, and speaking (within that role in the first person) on the question of whether slavery is necessary. After the initial round of statements, the participants question each other, and the questions soon turn to debate. After a while the remaining students join in the questioning and debate. Then in the last few minutes of class, we leave our characters and discuss the debate and our own interpretations.
Under these circumstances, the idea that there exists "the White viewpoint" or any other consensus quickly evaporates. The range of issues and emphases (gender differences, for instance) causes the development of many more than one or two interpretive positions. I'm sure it makes some kind of difference that I am a white professor, but it makes less and less difference as the debate heats up and the historical issues clarify.
Certainly the voices of black teachers and students need to be heard very clearly, to enunciate their understanding of slavery to their community, and as a universal issue. Just as certainly, we need white teachers and students who enunciate their understanding of slavery to their community, and as a universal issue.
I don't mean to suggest that the difficulties described by Pat Barrett in addressing slave trade are illusory. The dismissal of the issue in some circles as "exotic, unorthodox and unimportant" is a tough nut to crack. But I do think that much is to be gained by circumventing the lecture, and involving the students in identifying themselves with historical protagonists through role-playing and debate.
James W. Loewen
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From: " jloewen@zoo.uvm.edu " 29-MAR-1998 20:36:18.75
Pat Barrett tells why some teachers do NOT teach much about slavery or the slave trade. But Barrett's apparent complacency cannot be considered OK.
If American history is taught from a "white viewpoint," then we cannot complain when Afrocentric scholars demand Afrocentric history for black students -- even irresponsible Afrocentric history. We do not come into the discussion with clean hands.
Worse, Afrocentric history for black students won't help the white (and other non-black) students who still suffer under smug boring Eurocentric history.
History/social studies is THE field where blacks show the greatest gap in performance, relative to whites. Surely this is partly because history as usually taught is more alienating to blacks. If history were taught so as to make whites uncomfortable once in a while, the gap might narrow. More importantly, Americans might be capable of learning something about the past, something that helped them to understand the present and future.
Surely we CANNOT accept more "business as usual" bland history about the slave trade or anything else. PLEASE know that as I go around the US, talking with teachers about the ideas in LIES MY TEACHER TOLD ME, I find that MANY of them are thirsty for new approaches and are already putting them into place in the classroom.
James W. Loewen
Karen Needles
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From: "k_needles@yahoo.com" " Karen Needles" 29-MAR-1998 20:50:04.20
In my classroom, I actually made students lie on the floor in close proximity to the space allotted slaves on the slave ships. I explained a slave auction, but used a white student, instead of a black student, and discussed the difference in slavery in Ancient Greece and Rome, with the American institution of slavery.
We read segments from "Uncle Tom's Cabin" and "The Physical and Moral Justification for Slavery", which I found in the Library of Congress, giving both sides explanations for their beliefs, and then we debated the issue, talked about how the 'peculiar institution' was different, and how it affected our country for over 300 years.
And I am sure that Amistad will be high on the list of videos that I will show to help them visualize this horrible period in our history.
Karen Needles History Teacher/Consultant
Clayton E. Cramer
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From: “clayton_cramer@dlcc.com" " Clayton Cramer" 30-MAR-1998 11:17:29.61
I think the reason that slavery and the slave trade don't get taught much boils down to two reasons:
First, and by far the most important, is that survey courses in American history are getting squeezed by the two semester format. When American history ended in 1930, two semesters made perfect sense. When I first learned American history in 7th grade, the semester broke at the Civil War. In many college classes now, the semester break is at Reconstruction.
Even the Civil War is getting quite abbreviated in college survey classes now. (I shudder to think of what happens in European countries, where they have several times as many years to cover.)
Secondly, I don't think that the powerful influence of slavery on American history has been broadly recognized. Slavery has ended up in what has become a component of two specialized fields: black history or Southern history. I don't think is necessarily race-based -- it's just not been thought about enough. Each of us has a responsibility to show the connections between slavery, race, and other areas of American history if we want to correct this problem.
As an example, my primary specialization has been the history of American weapons control law, which inevitably led me into a study of black history, since fear of armed blacks is one of the three roots of American weapons control law. As I have done radio talk shows around the country promoting my second and third books, this has provided me an opportunity to talk to non-academics who have generally paid no attention to black history and slavery at all--and the results have been interesting. I did a talk show in Lafayette, Louisiana, where the host and the callers had Southern redneck accents that were almost incomprehensible at times. The callers being whites, I wasn't sure how well it was going to come across when I talked about how gun control laws were used to suppress freedmen and their economic and political rights. But once the callers understood the connection, you could hear the gears starting to turn. I think that drawing connections can be an effective way of getting people to realize that slavery and black history aren't just minor interests, but part of the core of American history.
Clayton E. Cramer cramer@dlcc.com
Chris Lowe
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From: " clowe@bu.edu" 31-MAR-1998 13:55:18.94
Hello slavery-listers,
A colleague who is a high school teacher out in Oregon forwarded to me a copy of a piece of a thread from your list that had been forwarded to him, concerning teaching about slavery, which has led me to join you. The piece I got was from last Friday, so if something below is redundant, please forgive me.
Regarding one of Manu Herbstein's questions, why there isn't more on the slave trade in curricula:
From our outreach director here at the African Studies Center at Boston University, Barbara Brown, who works primarily with K-12 teachers, I know that teaching the slave trade appears as a big problem to the teachers she works with. My strong impression is that the main issue may not be Eurocentrism so much as the emotional minefield involved, as the history in question has the potential to provoke feelings of anxiety and shame for students (and teachers) of all racial backgrounds that are hard to cope with, and consequent defensive reactions.
I think teachers tend to feel a special need for heightened competence so as not to be blind-sided and to be able to have a flexibility of response. It is also the sort of thing that is apt to elicit statements from students that other students find hurtful even when not intended that way, so that teachers have to feel confident about the material and the questions themselves so as to be free to help guide students to ways of talking about hard and emotional questions in general as well as the specifics.
Yet they probably haven't studied the issue much and materials aren't easily available, and the difficulty of the issue is also a disincentive to production of materials. There are probably political dimensions to this a la "culture wars" stupidities as well.
Presumably those of us who study and teach about slavery have also faced the difficulty of the issues and come to the conclusion that these are things that have to be faced, as they affect everyone -- I appreciated both James Loewen's and Patrick Manning's remarks on that score. The question is how to explain how we reached that conclusion and how to offer teachers something other than an incredible problem about it.
I like Manning's debate approach as one tactic -- when I was an undergrad I had a teacher who used a similar approach in a South Africa course to excellent effect. The virtue is that by creating an intervening "character" it allows a separation of an idea or perspective from the student who voices it, so the idea can then be examined critically without the student taking it personally or being taken personally; this lowers initial anxieties about "is it really ok to talk about this stuff?" or saying the wrong thing.
I used to teach courses on the comparative history of slavery at Reed College & have an abiding interest in the subject, and look forward to taking part in this list.
Thanks, Chris Lowe
Pamela Shands
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From: "pshands@york.k12.sc.us" " Pamela Shands" 31-MAR-1998 13:56:09.91
Karen, I have shared a similar experience with trying to teach my students about slavery. I was fortunate enough to be able to take a group to see the Henrietta Marie exhibit in Charlotte, NC. I am not sure as to where the exhibit is now or if/when it will return. It was very beneficial as a starting point for trying to explain some aspects of slavery. I have also used the narrative of Olaudah Equiano to add some understanding. It was very difficult trying to teach this subject and I would be appreciative to any input as to how I could approach it differently.
Pamela Shands
David Nathanson
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From: "dave_nathanson@hotmail.com" " David Nathanson" 31-MAR-1998 22:06:08.16
Regarding teaching about the trans-atlantic slave trade:
>teachers have to feel confident about the material and the questions >themselves so as to be free to help guide students to ways of talking >about hard and emotional questions in general as well as the >specifics.
I remember looking at Eric Foner's new pre-college oriented text regarding slavery. However, I don't remember if it addressed the trans-atlantic slave trade.
Have members of the list used this book in class? How have students reacted? Does it sufficiently address the above concern?
I'd be interested to know.
Peace,
Atty. David Nathanson Criminal Appeals, Civil Rights, and Animal Rights
Tom Spencer
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From: "tom@turbonet.com" " Tom Spencer" 2-APR-1998 12:54:44.96
Here are the items that I have my sophomores read in a one-semester history course on the U.S. Civil War
1. Selected passages from The Old and New Testament
2. Excerpts from Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul,
3. Excerpts from an 1858 debate in Philadelphia between W.G. Brownlow and Rev. Pryne
4. Selections from The Slave Narrative Collection
Tom Spencer Logos School 110 Baker St. Moscow, Idaho 83843
Paul Finkelman
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From: “paul-finkelman@utulsa.edu" " Paul Finkelman" 2-APR-1998 15:39:52.14
I second Jim's comments; I have talked to hundreds of high school teachers about slavery and about slavery and the constitution and they always seem to want more. Not just high school. I once taught the narrative of Fred Douglass to a 3rd Grade class; they asked great questions and we had a great discussion.
I also think Jim's point about white students is important; The integration of history matters not just to blacks, but also to whites who need to know about that part of our collective past.
New York State, by the way, has just passed legislation requiring that schools teach about the Underground Railroad. It is an important step.
-- Paul Finkelman, Chapman Distinguished Professor, University of Tulsa College of Law (title and e-mail address up-dated Sept. 2001)
Clayton E. Cramer
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From: "clayton_cramer@dlcc.com" "Clayton Cramer" 2-APR-1998 18:48:02.84
Concerning New York State mandating teaching about the Underground Railroad: Does anyone besides me cringe when they hear that state legislatures are getting into the business of defining such fine details of what is to be taught? California, for example, has mandated teaching about the Holocaust, I guess in the hopes that if kids learn about it, they will be less inclined to vote for the sequel. Has the teaching of history become so fractured that these sort of mandates are required?
Clayton E. Cramer cramer@dlcc.com
Steven Mintz
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From: " Steven Mintz, U. Houston" <SMintz@UH.EDU>
Subject: Reaching out to a general audience
President Clinton's African tour has given specialists in the slave trade an unprecedented opportunity to share their findings with a general audience. My sense is that the interested public is very eager to learn more about the slave trade and its impact on Africa, especially how it altered the nature and scale of African slavery and its political, economic, psychological, and developmental costs.
I wonder if specialists on the slave trade would be willing to share with the list 1) your sense of the challenges that scholars face in translating scholarly research to a general audience; and 2) the key points that you feel that the general public needs to know about the African slave trade and its impact on African development.
I look forward to your thoughts,
Steve Mintz