Atlantic Slave Trade

Dutch Government Announces Study of Slavery Apology Fund

While other European nations have made payments in atonement for massacres in their overseas colonial possessions, this initiative would be the first effort at reparations for participation in the transatlantic slave trade itself. 

Biographies of Women and Emancipation in the Americas

by Vanessa M. Holden

Historian Vanessa Holden reviews a new book edited by Erica L. Ball, Tatiana Seijas and Terri L. Snyder which draws on the stories of women of African descent in the Americas to argue that such women helped bring freedom into being and defined what freedom in the world actually means. 

The Slave Trade Continued Long After It Was Illegal — With Lessons For Today

by Manuel Barcia and John Harris

The persistence of the oceanic slave trade to the United States long after it was outlawed shows the power of financial gain to overwhelm the law, and should warn us today not to ignore injustices. 

A Massive New Effort to Name Millions Sold into Bondage during the Transatlantic Slave Trade

Historians Daryle Williams, Walter Hawthorne, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall and David Eltis, along with Henry Louis Gates, are part of an interdisciplinary collaboration to create access to biographical and genealogical information about individual people enslaved in the United States. 

Atlantic Slavery: An Eternal War (Review)

by Julia Gaffield

Historian of Haiti Julia Gaffield reviews two new books examining the Atlantic Slave Trade through the lenses of war against slave rebellion and disease. 

Finding the Last Ship Known to have Brought Enslaved Africans to America and the Descendants of its Survivors

"The Clotilda was burned and sunk in an Alabama River after bringing 110 imprisoned people across the Atlantic in 1860. Two years ago, its remains were found."

How Saidiya Hartman Retells the History of Black Life

The literary scholar Saidiya Hartman's studies of the aftermath of slavery and the African diaspora point to the limits of archival records for understanding historical Black experience. Some historians question whether her methods fill archival gaps too creatively.

Black Scuba Divers Document Slave Shipwrecks Forgotten For Generations

Columbia University professor Christopher Brown says the number of slave shipwrecks that researchers have been able to confirm are the absolute minimum, and that the true number of shipwrecked slave ships are likely much higher. The work of a Florida diving group hopes to change that. 

Liverpool, Site of Last Surrender in US Civil War, Grapples with its Confederate Links

"Just because we are in England … that's not an excuse to be able to commemorate individuals who were involved in keeping other people in chains," said historian Laurence Westgaph.

Underwater: Global Warming to Flood the Former Ports of the Transatlantic Slave Trade

by Daniel B. Domingues da Silva

How will the inundation of historic seaports as climate change progresses affect historical memory of the Atlantic slave trade? 

A Forgotten Stage of the Atlantic Slave Trade

by Gregory E. O’Malley

Port records, merchant papers, and imperial correspondence all suggest that a thriving intercolonial slave trade dispersed as many as a quarter of the African people who arrived in the New World, extending their dangerous journeys to American plantations.