Justene Hill Edwards
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
Yeah, I mean, I'm teaching this class right now, and it's a lecture course on American slavery, and it's the course that I've taught the most here at UVA.
And the ideas that resonate with my students most are really connecting the history of slavery to kind of what they see all around them.
We are at Thomas Jefferson's University, and so a lot of what I do is try to connect the
the history of the university, the history of the founding of the nation, the history of slavery in Virginia specifically, but the colonies and the country writ large to kind of everything that they see.
And so it is such a fascinating place to do this history and to teach it because everything that we talk about and they look at around them in some ways relates interestingly to the history of American slavery.
Yeah, well, the history of American slavery does not actually start in the colonies that would become the United States of America.
We actually have to go across to Atlantic Africa, to regions like modern day Ghana, Nigeria, Angola.
to really understand the origins of American slavery and really the origins, the beginnings of the transatlantic slave trade.
And we're talking about not in 1619, but we're talking about really in the 1440s with Portuguese explorers really making these kind of first economic and political contacts with Atlantic African nations in the 1440s.
Well, they began to develop fairly sophisticated naval technologies in terms of understanding wind, understanding water.
how to build and construct ships.
And so we are seeing them kind of use this technological advantage to exploring regions of the South Atlantic, which kind of brings them into contact with these highly developed, highly kind of militarized and politicized Atlantic African elites and nations.
Or what was the initial spark?
Well, when we talk about kind of modern conceptions of the transatlantic slave trade, I think the popular idea is that we have kind of European traders and explorers and merchants going in and kind of ravaging Europe.
regions of Atlantic Africa.
But that was not at all the case.
We are talking about diplomatic relationships and connections between Atlantic African rulers and European traders and merchants.