Posted on 06/29/2015 11:47:48 AM PDT by Lorianne
Usually, when we say “American slavery” or the “American slave trade,” we mean the American colonies or, later, the United States. But as we discussed in Episode 2 of Slate’s History of American Slavery Academy, relative to the entire slave trade, North America was a bit player. From the trade’s beginning in the 16th century to its conclusion in the 19th, slave merchants brought the vast majority of enslaved Africans to two places: the Caribbean and Brazil. Of the more than 10 million enslaved Africans to eventually reach the Western Hemisphere, just 388,747—less than 4 percent of the total—came to North America. This was dwarfed by the 1.3 million brought to Spanish Central America, the 4 million brought to British, French, Dutch, and Danish holdings in the Caribbean, and the 4.8 million brought to Brazil.
This interactive, designed and built by Slate’s Andrew Kahn, gives you a sense of the scale of the trans-Atlantic slave trade across time, as well as the flow of transport and eventual destinations. The dots—which represent individual slave ships—also correspond to the size of each voyage. The larger the dot, the more enslaved people on board. And if you pause the map and click on a dot, you’ll learn about the ship’s flag—was it British? Portuguese? French?—its origin point, its destination, and its history in the slave trade. The interactive animates more than 20,000 voyages cataloged in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database. (We excluded voyages for which there is incomplete or vague information in the database.) The graph at the bottom accumulates statistics based on the raw data used in the interactive and, again, only represents a portion of the actual slave trade—about one-half of the number of enslaved Africans who actually were transported away from the continent.
(Excerpt) Read more at slate.com ...
Interbreeding, mostly, a very large ‘mixed’ population
Afaik, the last country to abolish slavery in the Americas, 23 yrs after we did.
BS
I have ancestors who were slaves and my father’s family were Cherokee until a couple of generations ago. Then they intermarriage with whites. I think it’s time to forget the bad things in the past, forgive, move on.....or stay mired in the past and be miserable! People are so invested in being depressed aboutvthings that do not matter at all anymore!
Yup, but that’s the narrative, nonetheless.
Just about everyone has slave ancestors if you go back far enough.
One of the fundamental tragedies of the United States as a nation is that we were unable to address the issue of slavery and it's repercussions in terms of the denial of civil rights to black Americans without distorting and now ultimately abandoning the Constitution and the regime of liberty it embodied.
It's a terrible irony that black Americans became fully enfranchised only when the meaning of citizenship was about to be so completely debased as to become a burden rather than an advantage, just as all the free inhabitants of the Roman Empire became citizens only when the Empire became a thoroughgoing despotism and needed more taxable heads.
They think they've made progress when they have only been repaid in cheapened coin.
A friend asked me about, and I still can’t even see it, the animation showing a ship leaving California and headed west. Did you notice this? Any info on this?
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