Reflections on Teaching the History of Colonization, Slavery, and the African Diaspora Using Primary Sources and Historical Fiction

ABSTRACT

New Orleans is a place of living history, a wounded but vibrant place. The shadow of the past is omnipresent, and it confronts the present daily as statues that commemorate the Confederate army are taken down and colonial pottery washes out of roadcuts. Teaching the history of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, which spanned from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries and resulted in millions of Africans becoming enslaved in the New World, was an eye-opening experience. As both college instructors and high school educators in the city, we were fortunate to teach on many topics related to the beginnings of the slave trade, the role of sugar in plantation slavery, and the complicated lives of free people of color and Creoles in French Colonial Louisiana and its western frontier. Here we present a reflection on learning and teaching in a city steeped in the history of slavery.

KEYWORDS:

• Colonization
• slavery
• pedagogy
• teaching
• archives
• fiction

Acknowledgements

The authors express sincere gratitude to three anonymous peer reviewers for their careful comments, suggestions, and feedback. The following individuals deserve recognition for their academic and pedagogical influences on the authors: Parvathy Anantnarayan, Teddy Marks, Christopher B. Rodning, Haley Holt Mehta, Richard A. Marksbury, Jane Boddie, Katy Shannon, Alisha Gaines, Natalie King-Pedroso, Jordan E. Davis, Tara Skipton, Tanya Peres, and James Boyden.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributors

Jayur Madhusudan Mehta is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology, Florida State University, Tallahassee.

Bradley J. Mollmann is a History Lecturer in the Division of Humanities, Saint Louis University in Madrid, Spain.