Examines the history of Africa from the sixteenth through the nineteenth century, discussing such topics as the different cultures that existed on the continent, the importance of Islam, European colonization, and the slave trade.

Slavery was introduced to North America in the sixteenth century, as Spanish and Portuguese settlers relied on slave labor to extract the resources of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Mexico, Brazil, and other colonies. When the British established North American colonies in the early seventeenth century, slavery gradually became prevalent. This book will examine how slaves were treated in colonial America, and how laws and attitudes about the institution of slavery...

"In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston went to Plateau, Alabama, just outside Mobile, to interview eighty-six-year-old Cudjo Lewis. Of the millions of men, women, and children transported from Africa to America as slaves, Cudjo was then the only person alive to tell the story of this integral part of the nation's history. Hurston was there to record Cudjo's firsthand account of the raid that led to his capture and bondage fifty years after the Atlantic slave...

For more than three centuries, slave ships carried millions of people from the coasts of Africa to the New World. Here, the author creates a detailed history of these vessels and the human drama acted out on their rolling decks. He restores the slave ship to its rightful place alongside the plantation as a formative institution of slavery, as a place where a profound and still haunting history of race, class, and modern capitalism was made.

Of the millions of men, women, and children transported from Africa to America to be enslaved, eighty-six-year-old Cudjo Lewis was the only person alive to tell the story of his capture and bondage, fifty years after the Atlantic human trade was outlawed in the United States.