People & Blogs
This comprehensive program chronicles the institution of slavery in North America, beginning with the notorious "middle passage" through Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad, the Civil War, emancipation, and Reconstruction. Expert interviews and archival photographs help to describe family life, religion, resistance to enslavement, the Abolitionist Movement, and post-war difficulties of newly emancipated people, dispelling the myth that slavery was a passive state and highlighting the persistent struggle by African-Americans to end it.
Between 1808, when the United States abolished the transatlantic slave trade and 1865, when it abolished slavery, enslaved peoples toiled on the plantations of Virginia, Those were not their only sites of labor, however. Enslaved people worked in factories in fisheries, in tobacco processing facilities and as transporters of produce. The image of slaves working in the tobacco or cotton fields of Virginia is somewhat misleading.