This course introduces students to some major issues and important figures in the early history of slavery and emancipation in North America. The course begins with the transatlantic slave trade and considers the range of experiences of the enslaved in North America. We then examine the efforts of rebels, abolitionists, and activists to secure the freedom of enslaved people -- and efforts that continued after emancipation. Topics include: race and mercantilism in the world of the transatlantic trade, sex and race in colonial slave society, and the charismatic leadership of Denmark Vesey, Gabriel Prosser, David Walker, Nat Turner, Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, and Ida B. Wells.
Kathleen Brown
David Boies Professor of History
Kathleen Brown is a historian of gender, and race in early America and the Atlantic World. Educated at Wesleyan and the University of Wisconsin, Madison, she is the author of Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill, 1996), which won the Dunning Prize of the American Historical Association for best book by a junior scholar. Her most recent book, Foul Bodies: Cleanliness in Early American (Yale, 2009), explores the relationships among health, domestic labor, and ideals for beauty, civilization, and spiritual purity during the period between Europe's Atlantic encounters and the American Civil War. Brown is also author of numerous articles and essays. She has been a fellow at the Omohundro Institute for Early American Studies at William and Mary, at the American Antiquarian Society, and a summer fellow at the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College. Her current research focuses on the exchange of goods, materials, and ideas about health, sexuality, and the body in the early modern Atlantic. Brown offers a wide range of courses on such topics as comparative slavery, colonial America, women in American history, gender and sex in early America, and cultures and contact in the Atlantic World.