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A drawing of a scuba diver holding a flare, exploring the wreck of a slave ship underwater.

Dredging Up the Ghostly Secrets of Slave Ships

A global network of maritime archeologists is excavating slave shipwrecks—and reconnecting Black communities to the deep.
by Julian Lucas via The New Yorker on February 24, 2025
Sea Captains drinking alcohol

Ships Going Out

In "American Slavers," Sean M. Kelley surveys the relatively unknown history of Americans who traded in slaves in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
by James Oakes via New York Review of Books on August 31, 2023
Divers examine an iron anchor underwater.

What a Spanish Shipwreck Reveals About the Final Years of the Slave Trade

Forty-one of the 561 enslaved Africans on board the "Guerrero" died when the illegal slave ship sank off the Florida Keys in 1827.
by Simcha Jacobovici, Sean Kingsley via Smithsonian on October 17, 2022
Diver holding stone

The Search for Lost Slave Ships Led This Diver On An Extraordinary Journey

Explorer Tara Roberts took up diving to learn about the human side of a tragic era. She wound up connecting with her family’s inspiring past.
by Tara Roberts via National Geographic on February 2, 2022
Lithograph of the waterfront in Alexandria, Virginia 1836.

The Life and Death of an All-American Slave Ship

How 19th century slave traders used, and reused, the brig named Uncas.
by Joshua D. Rothman, Benjamin Skolnik via Slate on December 4, 2021

Infection Hot Spot

Watching disease spread and kill on slave ships.
by Manuel Barcia via Lapham’s Quarterly on April 22, 2020

The 'Clotilda,' the Last Known Slave Ship to Arrive in the U.S., Is Found

The discovery carries intense, personal meaning for an Alabama community of descendants of the ship's survivors.
by Allison Keyes via Smithsonian on May 22, 2019

A Wretched Situation Made Plain on Paper

How an engraving of a slave ship helped the abolition movement.
by Cheryl Finley via Lapham’s Quarterly on July 25, 2018

This Haunting Animation Maps the Journeys of 15,790 Slave Ships in Two Minutes

315 years. 20,528 voyages. Millions of lives.
by Jamelle Bouie, Andrew Kahn via Slate on June 25, 2015

Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade

Nine maps of the transatlantic slave trade between 1500 and 1900.
by David Eltis, David Richardson via The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database on November 18, 2010
An artistic collage juxtiposing a transatlantic slave ship with a tenement in Harlem.

How the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Continues to Impact Modern Life

A new Smithsonian book reckons with the enduring legacies of slavery and capitalism.
by Jennifer L. Morgan via Smithsonian on November 7, 2024
Engraving of the stowage plans of the slave ship Brooks, 1814.

How Transatlantic Slave Trade Shaped Epidemiology Today

Slave ships and colonial plantations created environments that enabled doctors to study how diseases spread.
by Jim Downs via TIME on September 2, 2021
Artist's rendition of Omar ibn Said

A Quest for the True Identity of Omar ibn Said, a Muslim Man Enslaved in the Carolinas

Omar ibn Said was captured in Senegal at 37 and enslaved in Charleston. A devout Muslim, he later converted to the Christian faith of his enslavers. Or did he?
by Jennifer Berry Hawes via Post and Courier on May 27, 2021
engraving of a slave ship

Why Did the Slave Trade Survive So Long?

The history of the Atlantic slave trade after the American Revolution is a story of sustained efforts to suppress it even as demand for slaves increased.
by James Oakes via New York Review of Books on March 25, 2021
New York in 1865, a slave ship, silhouette of Sanchez, and a page from Sanchez's notes.

How a Cuban Spy Sabotaged New York's Thriving, Illicit Slave Trade

Emilio Sanchez and the British government fought the lucrative business as American authorities looked the other way.
by John Harris via Smithsonian on March 8, 2021
A painting of a slave ship.

New York City and the Persistence of the Atlantic Slave Trade

Even after slave trade was banned, the United States and New York City, in particular, were complicit in allowing it to persist.
by Gerald Horne via The Nation on February 24, 2021

Slavery's Explosive Growth, in Charts: How '20 and Odd' Became Millions

A twist of fate brought the first Africans to Virginia in 1619. See how slavery grew in the U.S. over two centuries.
via USA Today on August 22, 2019

Historians Expose Early Scientists’ Debt to the Slave Trade

Key plant and animal specimens arrived in Europe on slavers’ ships
by Sam Kean via Science on April 3, 2019
Cover of "Empire of Necessity" featuring a painting of violence being wrought on enslaved men.

The Bleached Bones of the Dead

What the modern world owes slavery. (It’s more than back wages).
by Greg Grandin via Tom Dispatch on February 23, 2014
A drawing of a slave revolt on a ship.

Rare Portraits Reveal the Humanity of the Slaves Who Revolted on the Amistad

William H. Townsend drew the rebels as they stood trial, leaving behind an invaluable record.
by Kate McMahon via The Conversation on February 3, 2025
Two elderly Black women.

How the Memory of a Song Reunited Two Women Separated by the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade

In 1990, scholars found a Sierra Leonean woman who remembered a nearly identical version of a tune passed down by a Georgia woman’s enslaved ancestors
by Joshua Kagavi via Smithsonian on February 29, 2024
The edifice of the Lazaretto, Philadelphia's old quarantine station.

The Philadelphia Lazaretto

Quarantine at the Lazaretto met many migrants when they arrived in 19th-century Philadelphia.
by David S. Barnes via Perspectives on History on December 8, 2022
An image of red slave shackles.

Tracing the Ancestry of the Earliest Enslaved Ndongo People

A story born in blood.
by Clyde W. Ford via Literary Hub on April 8, 2022
A large federal style brick house, the William Paca House in Annapolis, Md.

I Searched for Answers About My Enslaved Ancestor. I Found Questions About America

'Did slavery make home always somewhere else?'
by Imani Perry via TIME on January 13, 2022
1836 lithograph of a slave trader marching enslaved people to be sold.

Partners in Brutality

New books investigate the brutality of the internal slave trade by focusing on businesses, and examine the role of white women in enslaving Black people.
by Nicholas Guyatt via New York Review of Books on October 18, 2021
Jennifer L. Morgan portrayed beside her book

Black Feminist in Public: Jennifer L. Morgan Reckons with Slavery

On the intersectionality of enslaved women and common misunderstandings about slavery.
by Janell Hobson, Jennifer L. Morgan via Ms. Magazine on June 17, 2021
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

The Poetics of Abolition

For poet Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, as for the Black Romantics, history is the repetition of anti-Black violence that has yet to be abolished.
by Manu Samriti Chander via Public Books on March 16, 2021

Sea Shanties and the Whale Oil Myth

Oil companies like to point to the demise of the whaling industry as an example of market-based energy solutions. The reality is much more complicated.
by Kate Aronoff via The New Republic on January 22, 2021
An illustration of boats in the water.

Capitalism, Slavery, and Economic White Supremacy

On the racial wealth gap.
by Calvin Schermerhorn via CARICOM on December 21, 2020
Monument of a fist holding a broken shackle

Atlantic Slavery: An Eternal War

Julia Gaffield reviews two books that discuss the transatlantic slave trade.
by Julia Gaffield via Public Books on November 30, 2020
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