In December 2007, the United Nations General Assembly designated March 25th as an annual International Day for the Commemoration of the Two-Hundredth Anniversary of the Abolition of the Transatlantic Slave Trade.
You can research this topic at your University’s Library. A search of the Library Catalog would find materials such as the Congressional committee hearing Legacy of the trans-Atlantic slave trade (2nd-floor US documents collection Y 4.J 89/1:110-63) and Economic growth and the ending of the transatlantic slave trade (3rd-floor Main Collection HT1162 .E48 1987). Search the Library’s article databases to find articles such as “The U.S. transatlantic slave trade, 1644-1867: An assessment” in Civil War History (2008, vol.54, no.4, pp. 347-378). Use Reference Universe to identify reference works to consult, such as The Historical encyclopedia of world slavery (2nd-floor Reference Collection HT861 .H57 1997).
Among web sites of interest are:
- Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database which has “information on almost 35,000 slaving voyages that forcibly embarked over 10 million Africans for transport to the Americas between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries,” and
- The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas:A Visual Record which is a collection of more than a thousand digitized images.
Please ask a librarian for assistance with finding additional materials.
The University Library is a federal depository with many federal, state, local, and international documents on a variety of current and relevant issues available to you in print, microfiche, CD-ROM, and electronically. Come check out your government at the University Library!