HIS300 American Beginnings Research Guide

This program explores the global experiences that created the African-American people. Beginning a century before the first documented "20-and-odd" slaves who arrived at Jamestown, Virginia, the episode portrays the earliest Africans, slave and free, who arrived on these shores. The transatlantic slave trade soon became a vast empire connecting three continents. Through stories of individuals caught in its web, the episode traces the emergence of plantation slavery in the American South and examines what the late 18th-century era of revolutions-American, French and Haitian-would mean for African Americans and slavery in America? (60 minutes)

In an investigation of the transatlantic slave trade, this program travels from the "Door of No Return" in the House of Slaves on Goree Island off the coast of Dakar, Senegal, to the village of Jufurreh on the Gambia River via interviews, slave narratives, and dramatization. Distributed by PBS Distribution. (58 minutes)

Written by ex-slave Equiano, the autobiography vividly described the horrors of being kidnapped from Africa, the Middle Passage, and life in captivity, and fueled the growing abolitionist movement. This program employs dramatic reconstructions of this slave narrative, archival material, and interviews with scholars such as Stuart Hall and Ian Duffield to explain the social and economic context of the 18th-century slave trade. (28 minutes)