Slavery in the Americas

Abstract

This course includes modules that AP history and literature teachers can use to introduce students to slavery within a broader hemispheric context. It includes discussions of slave sales, labor, gender, rebellion, and revolution. This course or the individual modules within it could help supplement sections of American studies courses concerned with transatlantic encounters and colonial beginnings, colonial North America, transformation of the economy and society in antebellum America, religion and reform, the union in crisis, and the U.S. Civil War. The course's themes include American diversity, American identity, culture, demographic changes, economic transformations, reform, war and diplomacy, and slavery and its legacies in North America. Literature teachers might use this course to find suggestions for teaching slave narratives, abolitionist writings and novels, and Civil War literature.