Are you the next Indiana Jones? Majoring in history teaches students to think critically, communicate effectively, and solve complex problems, while also deepening their understanding of other peoples and cultures. Sample what Cal Poly’s History department has to offer in this World History seminar on the Transatlantic Slave Trade through primary sources.

More than 12 million Africans were enslaved and taken across the Atlantic aboard more than 36,000 slave ships between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. Approximately 1,500 of these ships – containing more than 200,000 African captives – were captured by the British Royal Navy in the nineteenth century. The documents seized aboard these ships and the interrogations of members of their crews produced in trials at Vice Admiralty courts around the British Empire reveal important details about how the slave trade operated.

In this seminar, students will work with archival manuscript sources from the nineteenth century to explore the organization and operation of the slave trade and the efforts of abolitionists and enslaved Africans to resist it.