enslaved Africans

A new, Pulitzer Prize–winning opera adapts the memoir of Omar ibn Said, an African Muslim who spent much of his life enslaved in North Carolina.

Dean Calbreath’s biography, “The Sergeant,” relates the improbable adventures of a brilliant 19th-century Black man.

The banjo did not exist before it was created by the hands of enslaved people in the New World.

Although most enslaved people worked in the fields, captive workers with strong swimming and diving skills were also exploited by plantation owners.

Scholars have yet to identify the young boy, but new research offers insights on his age and likely background.

Omar ibn Said was captured in Senegal at 37 and enslaved in Charleston. A devout Muslim, he later converted to the Christian faith of his enslavers. Or did he?

Nearly one hundred years before enslaved African arrived in Jamestown, the Spanish brought 100 slaves to the coast of what is now Georgia or South Carolina.

The first Africans who came to America in 1619 were not ‘enslaved’, they were indentured – and this is a crucial difference.

Angela’s arrival in Jamestown in 1619 marked the beginning of a subjugation that left millions in chains.

To convert was not just a matter of belief, but also a claim to power.

In 1931, Zora Neale Hurston recorded the story of Cudjo Lewis, the last living slave-ship survivor. It languished in a vault... until now.

Islam in America dates to the founding fathers, says Smithsonian’s religion curator Peter Manseau.

Buying goods in the Old South revealed the fragile politics at the heart of master-slave relation.

Olaudah Equiano, native of Africa, survivor of the Middle Passage and enslavement, tells his story.

In 1990, scholars found a Sierra Leonean woman who remembered a nearly identical version of a tune passed down by a Georgia woman’s enslaved ancestors

Remembering an exchange between George Washington and the poet Phillis Wheatley.

"African Founders" corrects some of the ideological uses of Black American history.

There's no clear system in place to repatriate remains of captive Africans or objects associated with them.

When I looked at the archives, I found a history hidden in plain sight.

In "American Slavers," Sean M. Kelley surveys the relatively unknown history of Americans who traded in slaves in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.