Howard University Libraries Black History Month Series 2025
Wednesday, February 19, 2025 5pm to 6:30pm
About this Event
As part of the Black History Month Series convened by Howard University Libraries, Professor Ana Lucia Araujo (Department of History), Howard University will lecture on her new book Humans in Shackles: An Atlantic History of Slavery (University of Chicago Press, 2024).
During the era of the Atlantic slave trade, more than twelve million enslaved Africans were forcibly transported to the Americas in cramped, inhumane conditions. Many of them died on the way, and those who survived had to endure further suffering in the violent conditions that met them onshore. Covering more than three hundred years, Humans in Shackles grapples with this history by foregrounding the lived experience of enslaved people in tracing the long, complex history of slavery in the Americas.
Based on twenty years of research, this book not only serves as a comprehensive history; it also expands that history by providing a truly transnational account that emphasizes the central role of Brazil in the Atlantic slave trade. Additionally, it is deeply informed by African history and shows how African practices and traditions survived and persisted in the Americas among communities of enslaved people. Drawing on primary sources including travel accounts, pamphlets, newspaper articles, slave narratives, and visual sources such as artworks and artifacts, Araujo illuminates the social, cultural, and religious lives of enslaved people working in plantations and urban areas, building families and cultivating affective ties, congregating and re-creating their cultures, and organizing rebellions.
Humans in Shackles puts the lived experiences of enslaved peoples at the center of the story and investigates the heavy impact these atrocities have had on the current wealth disparity of the Americas and rampant anti-Black racism.Humans in Shackles was described at Kirkus Reviews as “a sweeping and essential history of the slave trade” and listed as one of the ten “Best Black History Books” by Black Perspectives, the award-winning blog of the African American Intellectual History Society
Ana Lucia Araujo is Professor of History at Howard University. She specializes in the history and memory of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade and is interested in the visual and material culture of slavery. Her recent books are Reparations for Slavery and the Slave Trade: A Transnational and Comparative History (Bloomsbury Academic, 2023, second edition), The Gift: How Objects of Prestige Shaped the Atlantic Slave Trade and Colonialism (Cambridge University Press, 2024), and Humans in Shackles: An Atlantic History of Slavery (University of Chicago Press, 2024). In the United States, her work has been recently supported by fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Institute for Advanced Study, the Getty Research Institute, and the American Philosophical Society. She is a member of the International Scientific Committee of the UNESCO Routes of Enslaved Peoples Project.
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