Welcome to the Legacies of Slavery & Freedom, a website featuring student blogs from the Massachusetts College of Liberals Arts’ HIST 320: Legacies of Slavery & Freedom in Fall 2020.
Students completed four blog posts and interactive timelines on the history and legacies of enslavement in a region or country of their choosing, starting with a voyage from the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database at SlaveVoyages.org. They created corresponding timelines, created with the KnightLab’s TimelineJS, to visualize the stories they told.
Throughout the class, students learned about colonialism, enslavement, and Black freedom movements. Their blogs used primary and secondary sources to further explore how the experiences of enslaved, free, and freedpeoples shaped and were shaped by systems of enslavement and emancipation. Students completed independent research to consider how archives contribute to understandings of the past. They also asked how the legacies of enslavement and emancipation still affect our world today while learning to write and present historical research for broad, non-academic audiences.
Please contact Dr. Amanda Laury Kleintop with questions or for additional information.