15th-19th Centuries

Enslavement and the trade of Enslaved People

Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, an estimated 12.5 million people were forcibly enslaved and transported from Africa to the Americas during the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. As one of the largest human migrations to date, this shaped global development culturally, socially, and economically, the effects of which are still visible today. 

In many countries of the Americas, there were more Africans than there were Europeans. The effects of the slave trade still impacts today’s society; in some countries there are still more Africans than Europeans, and in many countries the lingering effects of slavery still impact the social hierarchy of society. As a result of the slave trade, everyone who lived or came to live in the Americas was impacted one way or the other by this history. It affected race relations, culture, foods, architecture, religion and much more. Africans were able to bring some of their home cultures with them, because culture is carried in the heart and mind.

This curated resource list contains lesson plans, visuals, teaching materials, and informational website links for teaching about and studying slavery and the slave trade.

  • Slave Trade: Africa (Recommended Children Books)
  • Slavery (BBC – The Story of Africa)
  • Shomburg Center for Research on Black Cultures
    • a website from the Schomburg Library, on the African diasporas, past & present, including the Caribbean and Latin America diasporas
    • For more on African Diasporas, see the following Cape Verdean museums/exhibits in MA:
  • Abina and the Important Men – a powerful graphic novel, the first of its kind, is a “graphic history” based on an 1876 court transcript of a West African woman named Abina, who was wrongfully enslaved and took her case to court. The book is a microhistory that does much more than simply depict an event in the past; it uses the power of illustration to convey important themes in world history and to reveal the processes by which history is made.
  • See our new page of resources on Indian Ocean enslavement and resistances here.