Terror at Sea

College to host state conference on Atlantic slave trade

March 31, 2009

Conference organizer Jeremy Ball speaks to students in his class, The Atlantic Slave Trade and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1450-1850.

The woman who tried jumping overboard was tied with rope under her armpits and lowered into the ocean until half of her body was submerged. Sailors raised her only after she stopped shrieking and the water around her turned red—her lower half eaten by sharks.

The man's limbs were severed and thrown into the cargo holds where people, in chains, were forced to live. He served as an example to others who believed that death, by jumping overboard, would transport their bodies and souls to the homeland.

Such were the terror-filled living—and dying—conditions for the 12 million people transported across the Atlantic Ocean in floating dungeons during the slave trade from the late 1400s to the late 1800s.

Acclaimed author

Marcus Rediker, who vividly recounts the misery of the individuals who represent those staggering numbers in his book The Slave Ship: A Human History, will be the keynote speaker at the Central Pennsylvania Consortium Africana Studies Conference at Dickinson College. Rediker will speak on Saturday, April 4, at 10:30 a.m. in room 235 of the Weiss Center for the Arts. The theme of the conference, which opens Thursday, April 2, is Teaching the Atlantic Slave Trade.

"The purpose is to share pedagogical methods and ideas for sources to teach a complex period in Atlantic, African, European and American history," said conference organizer Jeremy Ball, assistant professor of history. "Most middle- and high-school curricula do not provide much guidance in the rich primary and secondary source materials of the Atlantic slave trade. We also aim to educate Dickinson students and the Carlisle community about the facts and legacy of the Atlantic slave trade and the American realities enslaved Africans helped to create, from the labor they performed across the Americas to the music and religion they brought with them from West Africa."

Films, exhibits

Though many of the conference sessions are designed for teachers, Rediker's address is open to the public, as is the presentation of two related films: Tamango on Thursday, April 2 and Traces of the Trade on Friday, April 3. Both films will be shown in room 235 of the Weiss Center starting at 8 p.m.

The conference also will feature Tunnel of Oppression multimedia exhibits in the Holland Union Building (HUB) side rooms 201-203 on Friday, April 3, from 4:30 to 6:30 p.m., and Saturday, April 4, from 11:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.

High-school and middle-school teachers from across the state are expected to participate in the conference, and Dickinson students in history courses will help with the presentations. Students in Associate Professor of History Matthew Pinsker's class will present a break-out session, The Atlantic Slave Trade Database as a Teaching Tool. This semester Ball is teaching The Atlantic Slave Trade and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1450-1850, a course designed to help students understand the crucial and lasting contributions of Africans on both sides of the Atlantic.

Rediker, professor and chairman in the department of history at the University of Pittsburgh, is a dynamic speaker who should appeal to instructors, students and members of the community, Ball said.

"Marcus Rediker writes a vital type of history, drawing extensively from primary sources and making the experience of real people come alive on the page," Ball said. "He is an inspiration to generations of historians."

'Inhuman ordeal'

Rediker, whose path-setting book was published in 2007, is "like the incomparable Herman Melville," in understanding "both the immediate human drama and the sweeping global context of life aboard a cramped ocean vessel in the age of sail," said Peter Wood, author of Diversity: The Invention of a Concept, in a review of The Slave Ship. "Now Rediker brings his informed passion, energetic research, rich storytelling, and stark analysis to perhaps the most wrenching, important and neglected topic in the early modern Atlantic World …. Two centuries after the abolition of the English and North American slave trade, he uses his unique gifts to take us below decks, giving a human face to the inhuman ordeal of the Middle Passage."