In this course we will examine individual lives as a means of exploring the broad spectrum of what it meant to be enslaved in America. We will rely on a range of sources including historical documents, quilts, paintings, dance, recorded interviews, and photographs to peer into the past, and to think about forced labor, literacy, rebellion, family, and religion among enslaved people.
Heather Williams
Heather Andrea Williams is Presidential Term Professor and Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She previously taught in the Department of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Williams received her B.A. and J.D. degrees from Harvard University, and her Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University. She is the author of Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom, and Help Me to Find My People: The African American Search for Family Lost in Slavery, both published by University of North Carolina Press, and American Slavery: A Very Short Introduction, published by Oxford University Press. Supported by a New Directions Fellowship from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Williams is currently at work on a documentary film based on interviews she conducted with Jamaicans who migrated to the United States in the1950s and 60s. She teaches courses on African American History with an emphasis on slavery and the aftermath of the American Civil War.