Slavery and Emancipation

3 Credits · Level: Graduate

Today the study of slavery and emancipation is a thoroughly transnational field populated by a diverse array of scholars who have enlivened the field by asking new questions and examining new sources. This class, focused chiefly but not only on slavery and emancipation in the U.S. will take the pulse of this busy, comparative, transnational field. We cannot address every important development in this burgeoning field in a single semester. No one class—no one book, no one article, no one anything—tells us everything. But everything tells us something. So the purpose of this class is not “coverage” of everything you need to know about slavery or emancipation. Rather, this class will focus on a range of current historiographical conversations, training you to identify how each work relates to prior scholarship and changes what we thought we knew.