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This is a free preview of Reconstruction, a Slate Academy. Learn more at Slate.com/Reconstruction.
Episode 1: Experiments in Land-owning: Davis Bend and Cameron Place
Some freedpeople ended up owning parcels of the land they had worked when enslaved. Some formed intentional communities to farm it. By the end of Reconstruction, most of them had no land to their names.
Amy Murrell Taylor is the author of The Divided Family in Civil War America. -
This is a free full episode preview of The History of American Slavery, our inaugural Slate Academy. To access all features of the Academy and to learn more about enrolling, visit Slate.com/Academy
In Episode 6 of The History of American Slavery, a Slate Academy, hosts Rebecca Onion and Jamelle Bouie explore the rise of the antebellum cotton economy in the early decades of the 19th century.
They discuss how the growth of the cotton industry transformed the American system of slavery and the lives of enslaved people. And they discuss slavery’s relationship with the development of modern American capitalism.
They begin the episode by discussing the life of Charles Ball, who wrote about his experience working on a cotton plantation in his autobiography, Slavery in the United States: A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Charles Ball.
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Join us! Sept. 17, Washington, D.C. How can we get Americans to talk honestly about slavery? As a capstone to the Academy, George Washington University and Slate will host a symposium featuring Jamelle, Rebecca, LeVar Burton, and others. Click here for tickets and more information. And yes—we will podcast a recap of the event.
Our guests in Episode 6:
Edward Baptist, associate professor of history at Cornell University. Read an excerpt of Baptist’s book The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism.
Daina Ramey Berry, associate professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin. Read an essay by Berry about how enslaved persons understood their valuation as commodities.
Here are some of the links discussed in Episode 6:
Watch Key and Peele’s entire take on slave auctions.
Elsewhere in the Slate Academy, a detailed brochure from an 1855 slave auction.
Join us! Sept. 17 at the Jack Morton Auditorium in Washington, D.C., for a symposium on how we can get Americans to talk honestly about slavery. Tickets and more information.
Access all features of the Slate Academy at Slate.com/Academy.
Who was Charles Ball?
Charles Ball was born sometime in the 1780s, on a tobacco plantation in Calvert County, Maryland. When he was 4, the slave owner holding his family died, and Ball was sold away from his mother and siblings.
As a young man he spent two years working as a cook for the U.S. Navy. (His wages went to his owner.) In the Navy he came up with his first plan to escape, which was foiled when he was captured and sold to a slave trader.
Ball walked in a coffle with 51 other people from Maryland to South Carolina, where the trader sold him to a Georgia plantation owner. In Georgia he learned to pick cotton—a grueling experience he later recorded in detail in his autobiography.
When Ball’s owner died in 1809, he was left in the control of the owner’s sons and heirs. Their cruelty—combined with his desire to see his wife and children again—drove him to run away, and he pulled off an epic yearlong walk from Georgia to Maryland.
Reunited with his family in Maryland, Ball managed to live as a fugitive for 20 years—long enough to become well-established and even to own a farm near Baltimore. His wife died in 1816, and he remarried, this time to a formerly enslaved woman. But in 1830, he was caught and sold back south into slavery. Ball ran away again, smuggling himself north on a ship, but by the time he got back to Maryland, his wife and children had been captured and sold—despite being legally free.
Ball moved to Pennsylvania in hopes of staying out of slave catchers’ hands. His autobiography, Slavery in the United States: A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Charles Ball, which Ball dictated, was published in 1836. It was popular; it was republished six times before the Civil War.
Even living in Pennsylvania, Ball was constantly afraid that he’d be captured again. As he wrote in his autobiography: “[I am] fearful at this day to let my place of residence be known, lest, even yet, it may be supposed that as an article of property, I am of sufficient value to be worth pursuing in my old age.”
The time and place of his death are unknown.
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Next time, on Episode 7 of The History of American Slavery, Jamelle and Rebecca remember the life of Anarcha (1828?–unknown). They’ll talk to Deirdre Cooper-Owens and Christopher Willoughby about the disturbing relationship between slavery and 19th-century science and medicine. Your homework, should you choose to accept it: Read this essay by Marie Jenkins Schwartz to learn more about how antebellum enslaver sought to control the sexual health of enslaved women.
You can email us at [email protected]. -
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This is a free full episode preview of The History of American Slavery, our inaugural Slate Academy. Enroll now to access all features of the Academy. Visit Slate.com/Academy to learn more.
In this bonus edition of The History of American Slavery, a Slate Academy, special guest Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr. joins hosts Jamelle Bouie and Rebecca Onion to discuss slave narratives.
Dr. Gates recounts his own experience as a graduate student in the 1970s, when many historians were only beginning to accept the veracity and legitimacy of firsthand accounts of slavery. He also talks about how slave narratives influenced contemporary black literature and about whether using the accounts of exceptional individuals might distort our understanding of what an average enslaved person experienced.
This is the first edition of Office Hours, a series of bonus episodes of The History of American Slavery, a Slate Academy. Jamelle and Rebecca will use these miniepisodes to explore some of the larger, recurrent questions they’ve encountered while making the Academy.
Our guest this episode:
Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr. is an Alphonse Fletcher university professor and director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University.
Here are some of the links discussed in this episode:
The NYT’s Times Topic page about Dr. Gates is a useful place to find links to Gates’ writing and TV work, and to coverage of him as a public intellectual.
When John W. Blassingame published The Slave Community in 1972, many historians criticized his use of antebellum slave narratives.
A Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, one of the earliest autobiographical accounts of slavery.
The Signifying Monkey, published in 1988, is Gates’ pathbreaking study of the origins of African American literature.
Gates on what James Baldwin can and can’t teach America, and Baldwin’s “burden of representation.”
Access all features of the Slate Academy at Slate.com/Academy
Next time, on Episode 5 of The History of American Slavery, Jamelle and Rebecca remember the life of Charles Deslondes (unknown–1811). They’ll talk to Edward Baptist and Joshua Rothman about slavery’s role in the settlement of America’s frontier in the 19th century. Your homework, should you choose to accept it: Read an excerpt from Rothman’s book, Flush Times and Fever Dreams: A Story of Capitalism and Slavery in the Age of Jackson.
Email us at [email protected]. -
This is a free excerpt of The History of American Slavery, our inaugural Slate Academy. To listen to Episode 4 in its entirety, visit the show page.
To access all features of this Slate Academy, and to learn more about enrolling, visit Slate.com/Academy
In episode 4 of The History of American Slavery, a Slate Academy, hosts Rebecca Onion and Jamelle Bouie explore the shape of family life on the slave plantations of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
In this free excerpt, they speak to Heather Andrea Williams about how slavery tore families apart and the emotional history of that trauma.
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Our guests in Ep 4:
Annette Gordon-Reed, professor of legal history at Harvard University. Read an excerpt of Gordon-Reed’s book The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family.
Heather Andrea Williams, presidential professor and professor of Africana studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Read an excerpt of Williams’ book Help Me to Find My People: The African American Search for Family Lost in Slavery.
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Here are some of the links discussed in Episode 4:
· Margaret Biser, who tweets as @AfAmHistFail, recently wrote for Vox about her experiences leading plantation tours.
· Wikipedia is a good starting point for learning more about the slave narratives recorded by the WPA in the 1930s.
· Thomas Jefferson on race, excerpted from Notes on the State of Virgina.
· Learn more about the 1855 trial of Celia.
· Elsewhere in the Slate Academy, check out this haunting animation that maps the journeys of more than 15,000 slave ships.
· Access all features of the Slate Academy at Slate.com/Academy.
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Next time, on Episode 5 of The History of American Slavery, Jamelle and Rebecca remember the life of Charles Deslondes (unknown–1811). They’ll talk to Edward Baptist and Joshua Rothman about slavery’s role in the settlement of America’s frontier in the 19th century. Your homework, should you choose to accept it: Read an excerpt from Rothman’s book, Flush Times and Fever Dreams: A Story of Capitalism and Slavery in the Age of Jackson.
You can email us at [email protected]. -
This is a free excerpt of The History of American Slavery, our inaugural Slate Academy. To listen to Episode 3 in its entirety, visit the show page.
To access all features of this Slate Academy, and to learn more about enrolling, visit Slate.com/Academy.
In episode 3 of The History of American Slavery, a Slate Academy, hosts Rebecca Onion and Jamelle Bouie explore the shape of slavery during America’s Revolutionary War.
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Episode 3 guests:
Douglas R. Egerton, professor of history at Le Moyne College and currently the Merrill Family Visiting Professor of History at Cornell University. Read an excerpt of Egerton’s book, Death or Liberty: African Americans and Revolutionary America.
Emily Blanck, associate professor of history at Rowan University. Read an excerpt of Blanck’s book, Tyrannicide: Forging and American Law of Slavery in Revolutionary South Carolina and Massachusetts.
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In Episode 3, Jamelle and Rebecca discuss how the enlightenment ideas that helped found our government both inhibited and encouraged the spread of American slavery.
They also talk about the divergent ways the early Northern and Southern states handled slavery in their courts. And they begin their conversation by remembering the life of Elizabeth Freeman (1742?-1829), an enslaved servant whose victory in one of the first “freedom suits” helped lead to the abolition of slavery in Massachusetts.
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Next time, on Episode 4 of The History of American Slavery, Jamelle and Rebecca remember the life of Joseph Fossett (1780-1858). They’ll talk to Heather Andrea Williams and Annette Gordon-Reed about slavery in the early republic. Your homework, should you choose to accept it: Read an excerpt from Williams’ book, Help Me to Find My People: The African American Search for Family Lost in Slavery.
Email us at [email protected] -
This episode of The History of American Slavery is free to all as a sample. To join this Slate Academy, listen to all nine episodes of the podcast as they are released, and read supplementary materials, visit slate.com/academy.
In episode two, hosts Rebecca Onion and Jamelle Bouie explore the shape of slavery during the late 18th century. They talk about the heyday of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the birth of the British abolitionist movement. They begin their discussion by remembering the remarkable life of Olaudah Equiano (1745?-1797).
Guests on Ep. 2:
Marcus Rediker, distinguished professor of Atlantic history at the University of Pittsburgh | Read an excerpt from Rediker’s book, “The Slave Ship.”
Adam Hochschild, author | Read an excerpt from Hochschild’s book, “Bury the Chains.”
Here are some of the links discussed in Episode 2:
•You can read Equiano’s entire autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African, on Slate.
•Learn more about Vincent Carretta’s research into Equiano’s birthplace.
• The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database has extensive records and data that were generated by the slave ship industry.
•How large was the trans-Atlantic slave trade? An exhibition about the abolition of the slave trade by the New York Public Library estimates that 12.5 million Africans were forcibly transferred to the Americas.
•View a graphic of the slave ship Brookes.
•The University College London hosts a Legacies of British Slave-ownership Database that you can use to search for bold-faced British names whose family wealth may have benefitted from the slave trade.
•Elsewhere in the Academy, “Caveat Emptor!”, The First Anti-Slavery Pamphlet Published in New England
Next time, on Episode 3, Jamelle and Rebecca talk about slavery during the American Revolutionary War and they remember the life of Elizabeth Freeman. Your homework, should you choose to accept it: Read an excerpt from Emily Blanck’s book, Tyrannicide: Forging an American Law of Slavery in Revolutionary South Carolina and Massachusetts.
You can access all features of the Academy at Slate.com/Academy
Join the discussion on our show page or email feedback to [email protected]
