Thinking About Slavery

Given the 2014 Academy Award for "12 Years a Slave," it’s a good time to build up the knowledge of the history of slavery in the America's.

"Scholars say the scale of the slave trade here was staggering. Brazil received about 4.9 million slaves through the Atlantic trade, while mainland North America imported about 389,000 during the same period, according to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, a project at Emory University."

The total population in the United States in 1860  included 3,953,761 slaves, representing 12.7% of the total population.  The natural increase in the U. S. slave population (the overseas slave trade ended in 1808) has been an important fact in the fruitful research and arguments among historians of slavery
for over fifty years.  Do these numbers mean slaves in the U. S. were treated "better" than those in Latin America?

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Rio’s Race to Future Intersects Slave Past