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Slavery

Map of Africa with colored points
Review

African Studies Center

The Center hosts or links to resources on just about every African topic an educator might want to focus on in the classroom.
Boats and people on a Ghanian river
Review

Exploring Africa

Its goal is to provide high quality resources about Africa and its nations for K-12 educators. Teachers and students can learn about themes relating to African history and information about specific countries in a well-researched, easily digestible format.
Painting of The Batavia Castle seen from the Kali Besar West
Teaching

Short Teaching Module: Spatial Histories of Law, Race and Empire

Law is not only to be found in doctrine and documents, but also in structures and materials, in buildings and in cloth, in paintings and in photos.

Painting of The Batavia Castle seen from the Kali Besar West
Source

The Batavia Castle

Seventeenth-century market in the city Batavia (nowadays Jakarta, Indonesia), the central node of Dutch imperial activities in the Indian Ocean region. The Batavia Castle is visible in the background and to its right the Council of Justice with the gallows and whipping post in front of it.

Ad for auction of ship's cargo. Description at link.
Teaching

Short Teaching Module: Nineteenth-Century American Trade on Zanzibar

Although American merchants often fade from historical narratives after the eighteenth century, they remained influential actors in the United States and abroad.

List of items in several columns. Explanation in annotation.
Source

Outward Cargo Manifest of the Rowena, 1841

Cargo manifests and other shipping records offer a tangible glimpse into expansive commercial networks, reminding observers of the physical goods underwriting long distance trade.

Title page of Memoirs and Poems of Phillis Wheatley, with the subtitle "A Native African and a Slave" and dedicated to the friends of the Africans.
Source

Memoirs and Poems of Phillis Wheatley

Phillis Wheatley (c.1753-1784) was an enslaved African American poet and author. Despite this, the work Memoirs and Poems of Phillis Wheatley was compiled and the memoirs themselves written by Margaretta Matilda Odell, a supposed "collateral descendent of Mrs.

Image of a list written in script. Explanation in source annotation.
Teaching

Short Teaching Module: Global Approaches to Maritime Trade in Colonial North America

Traditional narratives in American history, especially in colonial history, tend to focus primarily on British policy and British trade networks. Taking a global approach to the maritime trade of British America in the colonial era provides a better understanding of the actual economy, however.

The first page of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, titled An Act to Organize the Territories of Nebraska and Kansas and passed by the thirty-third Congress of the United States
Source

Kansas-Nebraska Act, 1854

By the 1850s, tensions in the United States were falling in around a major issue: slavery. As the country expanded relentlessly westward and more territories and states were coming into existence, the question of slave states versus free states grew in its intensity.

View of the Coffee Plantation Marienbosch in Surinam
Source

View of the Coffee Plantation Marienbosch in Surinam

This painting is a view of the Marienbosch coffee plantation along the banks of the Commewijne River in the Dutch colony of Surinam (present-day Suriname). Alongside coffee, the plantation also produced cotton and cocoa. The artist, Willem de Klerk, never visited Surinam.