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Slaveholding, 1860 Non-slaveholders 76.1 percent 1-9 slaves 17.2 percent 10-99 6.6 percent over 100 0.1 percent Distribution of Slaves Number of slaves held 0 1-6 7-39 40+ Percent of white families 75 15 9 1 Percent of slaves held 0...
Study Aid: Slavery Fact Sheet
Geography Enslaved Africans came primarily from a region stretching from the Senegal River in northern Africa to Angola in the south. Europeans divided this stretch of land into five coasts: Upper Guinea Coast: The area delineated by...
Study Aid: Slavery and the Law in Seventeenth-Century Virginia
1662 General Assembly determines “Negro women’s children to serve according to the condition of the mother.” 1667 General Assembly passes “An act declaring the baptisme of slaves doth not exempt them from bondage.” 1669 Virginia...
Study Aid: Major Slave Rebellions
New York City, 1712 Like many later revolts, this one occurred during a period of social dissension among White colonists following Leisler’s Rebellion. The rebels espoused traditional African religions. Stono Rebellion, 1739 The...
Historical Context: Facts about the Slave Trade and Slavery
TRANS-ATLANTIC SLAVE VOYAGES Over the period of the Atlantic Slave Trade, from approximately 1526 to 1867, some 12.5 million captured men, women, and children were put on ships in Africa, and 10.7 million arrived in the Americas. The...
Study Aid: Cultures of the Americas, 1200 BC–AD 1600
Mound Builders (Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi River) Key Groups : Adena (500 BC), Hopewell (100 BC) Religion and Culture : Known as mound builders because they buried the dead in large earth mounds, these groups lived in small...
Infographic: Life in Colonial America: Climate, Commerce, and Culture
Click here to learn more about the New England Colonies. Click here to learn more about the Middle Colonies. Click here to learn more about the Southern Colonies.
"Ona Judge Outwits the Washingtons"
Soon after American colonists had won independence from Great Britain, Ona Judge was fighting for her own freedom from one of America’s most famous founding fathers, George Washington. George and Martha Washington valued Ona as one...
The Cousins’ Wars: Religion, Politics and the Triumph of Anglo-America
Kevin Phillips is the author of eight books, a journalist and a national elections commentator for CBS News during l988, 1992 and 96 presidential elections In the Cousins’ Wars, Phillips poses the question, how did Anglo-America ...
In the Image of God: Religion, Moral Values, and Our Heritage of Slavery
David Brion Davis is Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University and former director of Yale's Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. He is the author of award-winning works that...
The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin
Gordon Wood is Alva O. Way University Professor and Professor of History at Brown University and the author of The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin. Wood presents an unusual portrait of this celebrated American folk hero, tracing...
The African Slave Trade, 1500–1800
Historian Philip D. Morgan, Harry C. Black Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University, explores the core experiences of slavery itself, including life on the African coast and on sugar plantations in the New World.
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Guns, Horses, and the Grass Revolution
In this lecture Elliott West, a professor of history at the University of Arkansas, describes how the introduction of Old World phenomena such as guns, horses, and new diseases affected the Native peoples of the New World. Those who...
Early American Slave Culture
In this lecture, historian Philip D. Morgan compares the Lowcountry and Chesapeake slave cultures and reveals much about the way of life of some of the earliest African Americans. Although South Carolina in the eighteenth century was...
Benjamin Franklin: An American Life
Walter Isaacson, president of the Aspen Institute and author of Kissinger: A Biography, traces Benjamin Franklin’s life from runaway apprentice to Founding Father, exploring the breadth of his passions and accomplishments as writer,...
Slavery and the Making of America
James Oliver Horton, the Benjamin Banneker Professor of American Studies and History at George Washington University, and Lois E. Horton, Professor of Sociology at George Mason University, have collaborated on several books,...
The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity
Jill Lepore, Professor of Early American History at Harvard University, draws on scholarship from her book, The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity, to trace how the meanings attached to this brutally...
His Excellency George Washington
Joseph J. Ellis, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation and the National Book Award for American Sphinx , examines George Washington’s career as a general and the challenges he faced as the...
The Real American Dream: A Meditation on Hope
Julian Clarence Levi Professor in the Humanities and Director of the American Studies Program at Columbia University, Andrew Delbanco examines the evolution of the American Dream--the idea that anyone may rise above his or her...
The Age of Homespun: Family Labor in the Colonial Economy
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich is James Duncan Professor of History and director of the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University. Professor Ulrich won the Pulitzer Prize for her first book, A Midwife’s Tale...
In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692
Mary Beth Norton, Mary Donlon Alger Professor of American History at Cornell University, examines the Salem witchcraft crisis from a seventeenth-century perspective, drawing not only on court records, but also on correspondence and...
American History and the World
NYU Professor of the Humanities Thomas Bender argues that the idea of American exceptionalism has hobbled the study of American history. Bender traces the study of history from the "men of letters" historians of the nineteenth...
Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America
Ira Berlin is a professor of history at the University of Maryland and winner of the 1999 Bancroft Prize in American History. His talk draws upon Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America in tandem with...
Generations in Captivity: Slavery in America
Ira Berlin, Distinguished University Professor of History at the University of Maryland, describes how the complex interplay of regional and generational factors shaped the development of slavery in the antebellum United States.
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Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World
Pulitzer Prize–winner and Yale historian David Brion Davis discusses his 2006 book, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World. In his opening remarks, delivered at the New-York Historical Society in January 2007,...
Taxation and Representation: The Imperial Debate between Britain and the Americans
Brown University historian Gordon Wood describes the British and American conceptions of representation during the eighteenth century, widely diverging points of view that were forged by radically different experiences with...
The Formation of Slave Culture
Historian Ira Berlin briefly discusses the evolution of slave culture based on African and American experiences of the enslaved.
Teaching the Topic of Slavery
Historian Ira Berlin briefly discusses ways to address slavery in the classroom and teach students how to engage in historical argument.
Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin
Historian Jill Lepore of Harvard University discusses her book, Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin, a finalist for the 2013 National Book Award, with James G. Basker, president of the Gilder Lehrman Institute.
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The Idea of America: Reflections on the Birth of the United States
Bancroft and Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Gordon S. Wood, the Alva O. Way University Professor and Professor of History Emeritus at Brown University, discusses his 2011 essay collection, The Idea of America: Reflections on the...
Cultural Encounters: Teaching Exploration and Encounter to Students
Some 40,000 years from now, give or take a few millennia, someone, somewhere in the universe may find and listen to the Golden Record, NASA’s attempt to describe Earth and its peoples to anyone out there who might be interested. There...
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