History of Slavery

The study of slavery necessarily implicates a series of other historical approaches: ethnicity and race, legal history, studies of gender, labor history, social history, economic history, material culture. By being about both economy and power, the study of slavery and its aftermaths must engage with some of the largest questions any historian can ask, and draw on some of the widest varieties of evidence possible. In the Corcoran Department, the study of slavery also extends far beyond the North American focus to be expected, and found, at Mr. Jefferson's University; its practitioners study systems of enslavement and manumission from antiquity to the present, from ancient Greece to modern Africa.