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The Brian Lehrer Show / February 14, 2008 / Talking History: Teaching Slavery

Talking History: Teaching Slavery

Thursday, February 14, 2008

Howard Dodson, director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library, joins us on Thursdays in February to talk about African American history. This week: what’s missing from the way we teach about slavery.


Comments

  • [1] hjs from 11211 February 14, 2008 - 10:37AM

    i hope everyone had a chance to check out African American Lives on pbs. it was very interesting.

    what about African American's connecting to specific tribes and parts of Africa
  • [2] Hjo from Jackson Heights February 14, 2008 - 10:40AM

    I remember quite clearly my education in public school in New York City, was no more than a paragraph in a social studies class, and most of my friends had a similar experience through out the New York State.


  • [3] Steve from NYC February 14, 2008 - 10:45AM

    Please Prof. Dodson can you suggest High School American History textbooks that ARE good, that DO cover all of this the history properly.

    Thank you in advance
  • [4] perri February 14, 2008 - 01:06PM

    Re: "i hope everyone had a chance to check out African American Lives on pbs. it was very interesting."

    I watched last week, but only caught an hour of it last night (though I did record it). I am absolutely enjoying it. It is simply AWESOME!
  • [5] Bennett Muraskin from Union, NJ February 15, 2008 - 10:39AM

    Mr. Dodson's information was misleading. It is true that about 10 million

    African slaves arrived on the shores of America, but only 5-6% came to the thirteen British colonies/United States. Therefore the picture he painted that most of the settlers in the New World were slaves was NOT true for the US.

    In the Caribbean, Cuba and Brazil, where most African slaves were sent, they were worked to death and new ones imported to replace them. However slavery in the British colonies/US was different. There the owners considered slaves valuable property and kept them alive as they would livestock or draft animals. Therefore, through natural increase, the 500,000-600,000 African slaves who came to these shores grew to 4 million at the time of the Civil War. Such population growth among the slave population elsewhere was unthinkable.

    On the other side of the ledger, the US was late in abolishing slavery and it took a civil war to do it. Further, there was much less race-mixing and much more racial discrimination in post-slavery US than in the rest of the Americas.

    But if we are talking about numbers, it is important to note that few of the millions of African slaves exported the Americans ended up here.


  • [6] Safiya from Spanish Harlem February 16, 2008 - 04:12PM

    I really enjoyed listening to this segment, but rather than numbers and trading, there are so many more things not taught about slavery. The number one question when I was in school was "Why didn't they rebel?" In fact they indeed DID rebel, all the time! However, those accounts are widely underreported. There is also the Willie Lynch letter that is imperative to understanding the psychological tactics used for keeping slaves obedient. The lack of this teaching leads to the widely held belief that those enslaved can be found partly at fault. For anyone interested check out the book "Lies My Teacher Told Me" by James Loewen.

This thread is closed.


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