Slave Rebellions: Am Reg Hist

Catalog description

What happened when enslaved Africans, African-Americans and other people of African descent used organized armed resistance to fight the institution of slavery? This course will explore six different slave rebellions in the United States, the Caribbean and Latin America using documents, films and different kinds of history text books. Only in the case of the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) did a slave rebellion actually succeed. But all slave uprisings left behind fascinating stories--filled with heroism, tragedy, violence; disputed evidence, and angry historical debate. This seminar-style class will delve into all of these questions mostly through weekly readings in both documents and other texts. The class will also focus significantly on questions of historical evidence: What can historians really know, especially when slave rebels themselves left behind relatively few documents? When Methods Practicum is added, this course fulfills Methods Requirement of the History Major.