Read Kathleen Brown’s “re-reading” of Edmund Morgan’s book American Slavery, American Freedom (http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/cp/vol-01/no-04/reviews/brown.shtml)

1			What does Brown view as Morgan’s central argument? How does she believe this argument holds up twenty-five years later? Why?
2			According to Brown, what role does racism play in Morgan’s argument? How does she compare his interpretation of the role of racism to Winthrop Jordan’s interpretation of White Over Black?
3			What weaknesses have subsequent historians noted in Morgan’s work? How have they challenged his interpretations? How have his interpretations shaped the work of his successors?
4			Why would a scholarly journal such as Common Place feel the need to present a “re-reading” of a twenty-five year old book? What does their decision to do so tell us about the role of historiography in the historical profession?

Read the narrative “From Indentured Servitude to Racial Slavery” on the Africans in America website (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part1/1narr3.html).

5			This site is a companion to the PBS documentary of the same name. Which of the interpretations mentioned in the Where Historians Disagree section of the text seem to influence the writer of this narrative. On which side of the debate does this author come down, does he or she see African-American slavery as motivated by economics, racism or both?
6			What role does historiography play in the world outside the historical profession? Does the PBS website provide any reasons why the general public should care about the debates over the origins of slavery within the academic sector?

Other sites with primary and secondary sources about Afro-American slavery and its origins include:

7			Africans in America- the companion website to the PBS series. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/home.html Images of African-American Slavery and Freedom- from the collections of the Library of Congress. http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/list/082_slave.html Phyllis Wheatley- a collection of the poetry of the first known African-American poet. http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~rbear/wheatley.html Seacoast, NH Black History- an investigation of the lives of African-Americans in this region of New England. http://www.seacoastnh.com/blackhistory/index.html