Gateway: Eyewitness to Slavery

Catalog description

How do historians of slavery do their work? Helping students answer this question is the primary goal of this Gateway Seminar. We will study eyewitness accounts of people who lived during the era of slavery and wrote about it to include enslaved people, enslavers, politicians, ministers, physicians, travelers, slave traders, free black people, and merchants. We will read selected seminal books and articles as an introduction to the historiography, that is, what historians have written about slavery and how they differ in their interpretations? Through this work, the seminar helps build students' skills in research and writing.