Slavery Happened Here

Catalog description

Let’s begin with a set of questions: Where did enslavement happen? When did it happen? Who are its actors? How and when was freedom achieved, and where were the free states? The history of enslavement in New York unsettles any answer we might give to these questions and challenges our fundamental assumptions about how enslavement happened in the US. This history is deeply buried and rendered invisible, not only beneath our city’s streets, but within our national narrative about enslavement. Yes, enslavement did happen here↓—in fact, enslavement was the centerpiece of this city’s economy until its legal end in 1865. Enslaved people were the source of the economic power on which “the Wall Street” was founded, and built the actual wall. With ample engagement with the City itself, this course considers this hidden history and will thus help us reconsider our understanding of the history of enslavement in the United States more broadly. However, we have an even more crucial task even than learning a largely unknown history of a place we all know so well; our most crucial task is to learn what we can of the world that the slaves made. We are striving less to unfold a new history of enslavement than to unfold a history of the enslaved. This class is a stand alone class, but can also be fruitfully paired with ‘The World the Slaves Made' (not required/students can take either or both).