Earlier this week, while discussing ancient Athens and the differnce between slavery in the ancient world and slavery in America (and there were substantive differences), one of the young men in my World History class asked me about the origins of slavery in the United States. I answered as best I could, being put on the spot with no possibility of checking my facts or refreshing my memory, but I've now come to find that some of what I said may not have been entirely accurate, both because of my own faulty memory and new scholarly research on the "twenty and odd" Africans who set foot on American soil at Jamestown in 1619.

I'll be posting this article from the Washington Post in my classroom as a resource for my students.

JAMESTOWN -- They were known as the "20 and odd," the first African slaves to set foot in North America at the English colony settled in 1607.

For nearly 400 years, historians believed they were transported to Virginia from the West Indies on a Dutch warship. Little else was known of the Africans, who left no trace.

Now, new scholarship and transatlantic detective work have solved the puzzle of who they were and where their forced journey across the Atlantic Ocean began.

The slaves were herded onto a Portuguese slave ship in Angola, in Southwest Africa. The ship was seized by British pirates on the high seas -- not brought to Virginia after a period of time in the Caribbean. The slaves represented one ethnic group, not many, as historians first believed.

The discovery has tapped a rich vein of history that will go on public view next month at the Jamestown Settlement. The museum and living history program will commemorate the 400th anniversary of Jamestown's founding by revamping the exhibits and artifacts -- as well as the story of the settlement itself.

Although historians have thoroughly documented the direct slave trade from Africa starting in the 1700s, far less was known of the first blacks who arrived in Virginia and other colonies a century earlier. A story of memory and cultural connections between Africa and the early New World is being unearthed in a state whose plantation economy set the course for the Civil War.

"We went entirely back to the drawing board," said Tom Davidson, senior curator of the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation. "The problem has always been that all of the things that make for a human story [of the Africans] were missing. . . . Now we can talk about the Africans with the same richness we talk about the English and the Powhatans."

Too often, people think of history as old, dead, and stagnant. The reality is that there is always more artifacts to be recovered and more old records to be discovered, and as a result there are new insights into the past that help us understand who we are as a people and how we came to be that way. I'm thankful for this article, and for the work of those at Jamestown who have provided a little insight inot the development of one of the less proud aspects of American history.

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Posted by: Greg at 11:25 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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