Humanities Homework Help

Please address the following scenario in 300-500 words:

You are going back to your former high school as a visiting instructor to discuss the transatlantic slave trade. Your former high school assigned the book Saltwater Slavery and you’re visiting to discuss it with students in class. To help you prepare for such a visit, list and elaborate 3-5 points that you would want to discuss with students about the book’s effectiveness in highlighting African perspectives on the transatlantic slave trade. Some questions you might want to address include: How does Smallwood humanize African experiences in the book? What sources did she use in crafting her narrative and arguments? To connect better with students, you might think back to what you learned in high school about the transatlantic slave trade, how does the book compare (or contrast) with what you learned previously? What would you want students to take away from your discussion of the book with them?

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Reply to at least two people’s initial posts. Your response could be about something you learned from their post, a point of similarity or agreement, or even a point of contrast with your approach that you found intriguing nonetheless.

student 1 :

None of us will ever truly understand the experiences of slaves mentioned in Saltwater Slavery, we are fortunate enough to live in these times. But, we can still learn about them and give ourselves perspective on the historical impacts and how the transatlantic slave trade changed the world, for some, it was a profitable business, for others, it was a nightmare. There are a few things I would like to talk about and elaborate on today. One being how African slaves were looked at by the rest of the world, they were not seen as human, but as tools and commodities, they were captured whether to be prizes and trophies or to be tools for the benefit of someone from a higher socioeconomic standing. Could you imagine someone looking at you surface-level and pricing you? They didn’t have to imagine, they were cargo, and as such, they were treated as cargo. In chapter 2, Smallwood goes into great detail about how dehumanizing the transatlantic slave trade was. My favorite part about the book is in chapter 4 when Smallwood goes on to how the diaspora of the African people led to the creation of group identity and efforts to keep every possible tradition with them. You have to realize that every single slave was an individual with a life before all of this, they had families and friends with whom they interacted with, but during the slave trade, who did they have other than the people next to them? Other than the people with shared experiences? My last point talking about Saltwater Slavery is how the book makes you personally feel, what do you take away from this? The purpose of this book is to give insight and perspective into what really happened, this is exemplified through the story of Olaudah Equiano and his experience.

student 2 :

I really consider myself to be somewhat of a history fanatic and have been interested in it since I was a child. I took multiple college level history classes in my high school, even one that was specifically about the history of the Americas . Unfortunately all of these classes and teachers chose to skim over the transatlantic slave trade, so I actually learned a lot from the passages that we had to read this week. If I were to teach a high school about the slave trade then I would make sure it goes at least fairly in depth. The first point I would bring up to them is telling them where a large amount of the slaves in the Americas and carribean territoties came from and how they went to a lot more places than just the US colonies.. I feel that the Gold coast is not talked about at all in most history courses, and it is important to know where the slaves were being transported from. The Gold coast has a rich history and it would let students know why certain african tribes and people would trade people away to the portugese and the spainards. I also feel that most people don’t know that slaves went all around the world. We tend to think of only the US colonies but slavery really expanded to all of the new world and some of the old world. The next point I would bring up is how the slaves lived on the ship. The saltwater slavery book does a very good job in giving an account on how slaves were living on these ships. The dark descriptions of life on the ships really humanizes what it was like to be a slave on a ship in the middle of the transatlantic passage. The last point I would like to bring up is the chapter in the book in which the author talk about the mental struggles that these slaves had to go through. We usually only think about the physical toll, not the mental toll, that these human beings had to go through. Adding mental emotion to these things also helps humanize them. I would hope from these points that the students will get a deeper understanding than most people on what really happened during the slave trade.