The transatlantic slave trade was at the heart of an interconnected system of economic and cultural transfer centred on the experiences of enslaved Africans. These lessons look at the Atlantic as a historical site.
Evidence and the Middle Passage
These lessons look at how historians have been able to reconstruct the Middle Passage from a variety of sources. It explores the question of how different types of sources yield different parts of the picture of the past. Lesson 1 looks in detail at the design of slaving ships and shows how these designs encoded particular ideas about men and women. In Lesson 2, pupils look at first hand accounts of captive Africans, while Lesson 3 looks at how practices of resistance differed by gender.
Personal Accounts of the Middle Passage
These lessons also engage with the question of how different sources of evidence provide different parts of the picture. By posing the question of, ‘How can we learn from personal accounts of the Middle Passage?’, it studies first hand accounts before putting these in the wider contest of the trade and asking, ‘Was there a ‘typical’ experience?.’