The international trade in African slaves was something that went on for many years. In different timeframes it, and the struggle to suppress it, manifested itself in very different ways. For instance, in early years, two of the primary ports for such trade were Newport and Bristol, in the Narragansett Bay of Rhode Island, but in later years, after the trade has ostensibly been outlawed, the fitting out of negrero slave vessels became more or less the property of Portland, Maine, Boston, Massachusetts, and the harbor of New York City (especially the harbor of New York City). To find out what the situation was in a particular timeframe, click on the indicated file. If you download this Acrobat PDF file to your home computer, you will be able to add your own notes to your own copy of this file by use of your freebie Acrobat Reader:
The Early Years of the Trade
The Trade from 1700 to 1737
The Trade from 1738 to 1758
The Trade from 1759 to 1774
The Trade during 1775 and 1776
The Trade during 1777 and 1778
The Trade from 1779 to 1782
The Trade during 1783
The Trade from 1784 to 1787
The Trade from 1788 to 1791
The Trade from 1792 to 1799
The Trade during 1800 and 1801
The Trade from 1802 to 1804
The Trade during 1805
The Trade from 1806 to 1813
The Trade from 1814 to 1817
The Trade during 1818 and 1819
The Trade from 1820 to 1824
The Trade from 1825 to 1830
The Trade from 1831 to 1834
The Trade from 1835 to 1839
The Trade during 1840 and 1841
The Trade from 1842 to 1848
The Trade from 1849 to 1856
The Trade during 1857 and 1858
The Trade during 1859 and 1860
The Trade during 1861
The Trade from 1862 to 1863
The Trade from 1864 on
Venture Smith and the International Slave Trade
Read about the life of a person who became entangled in the international slave trade.
Olaudah Equiano and the International Slave Trade
Is part of Olaudah Equiano's excellence as a human being -- that he was able to con his way all the way into human dignity?
"Amazing Grace" and the International Slave Trade
The life of the Reverend John Newton. He wrote this song about his conversion and forgiveness, which was something that had happened before he became an international slave trader. When he retired from the trade, apparently he did so merely for reasons of personal health. Only later did he decide that the slave trade was wrong -- and of course he never offered to give back any of the money he had made by buying and selling human beings.
Friend Thomas Clarkson and the abolition of the International Slave Trade
The life of a Quaker activist.
The Mayflower
At a critical juncture in our Civil War, Nathaniel Hawthorne tried to make out that the Mayflower had been, after it had dropped off the white settlers at Plymouth, a negrero slave vessel. That wasn't true and even beyond that, Hawthorne didn't have any indication that it might be true -- he was just making up this story out of whole cloth. Why would he have attempted to pull a stunt like that at such a critical point in our nation's history? (By the way, in England the "may-flower" is the flower of the hawthorne tree.)
The Mayflower's Bastards
Not all the folks on board the Mayflower were "Brownist" members of the disaffected English congregation that had chartered the vessel. Some of the passengers were children who had been put on board in order to get rid of them, because they were illegitimate -- and it was considered embarrassing, even shameful, to have such kiddies around, in tight little England. Out of sight, out of mind -- so ship them off to a New World, and let the little bastards fend for themselves!
Astronomy
Many people are unaware that besides being interested in a whole bunch of other things, such as birds and plants, Henry David Thoreau was also vitally interested in astronomy. He lived, after all, only a few miles as the crow flies from a world-class center for astronomical research, the Harvard Observatory on Concord Avenue in Cambridge.
John Burroughs
Henry Thoreau was a nature writer, John Burroughs was a nature writer. Nature writer, nature writer. Alla same as, no difference, huh?
Dueling
Does "duellum" have anything to do with "bellum"? --Here's an answer from an expert, Henry David Thoreau.
Some select sea-serpent sightings
Some select sea-serpent sightings -- and what Henry David Thoreau had to say about such observations.
Eagleswood
A utopian social experiment in New Jersey, and how Henry David Thoreau was involved.
The Concord School of Philosophy
What's that funny-looking barnlike building in the back yard of the Louisa May Alcott house in Concord?
Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi
Was this man a source of inspiration for the creation of good schools?
Northampton, Massachusetts in the 19th Century
In the 19th Century Northampton, Massachusetts, and the village of Florence next door, was the home for a great social experiment, specializing in silk manufacture and the growing of decent human beings. This experiment collapsed.
The Reverend Robert Collyer
Why, when Henry David Thoreau visited Chicago, did he go knock on the door of a local Unitarian reverend?
Unitarianism
How did Unitarianism originate?
Adolf Hitler and the Nazis
How did Nazism originate? How far back can we trace "Proto-Nazism"? What were the characteristic racist and antisemitic beliefs of the Proto-Nazi, and what is the cultural soil in which they were nourished? Did these roots extend outside of Germany? Did any of these roots extend even to America? Might we, for instance, if we thought about this hard enough for long enough, be able to trace some of the roots of the Third Reich back to attitudes of individuals who were alive during the lifetime of Henry David Thoreau? -- Who might such individuals have been and what were their prescient 19th-Century attitudes? Were there distant early warning signs which it would have been better if we had heeded? Let's "walk back the cat" on this one!
cholera
There were a number of mass die-offs during Thoreau's lifetime, due to the Asiatic cholera. Nobody could figure it out -- and then they did.
The small pox
The history of the small pox (variola), and of variolation and vaccination. The smallpox is now "extinct" except in military bioweapons labs, and your vaccination has therefore been allowed to get way out of date -- it won't be hard for them to kill you.
Socrates Plato Aristotle
From time to time people compare Bronson Alcott with Plato, and at least once somebody has said "As Plato was to Aristotle, Waldo Emerson was to Henry Thoreau." What does that sort of comparison amount to?
The Famous Quaker Painter, Benjamin West
When is a famous painter not a Quaker?
The "Straw Towns" of New England
When Britain imposed a trade blockade upon Napoleonic Europe, we needed to learn how to make our straw bonnets locally as we could no longer readily import them from such foreign climes as Livorno, Italy. Various stories have sprung up, as to how this copying of foreign straw weavings originated in New England.
"Walking back the cat" on the technologies used here
Just for fun, I've been "walking back the cat," as they say at the NSA, on the various technologies used in the production of the Kouroo Contexture. --What technologies are we using for this, what technologies were necessary preliminaries for these, what infrastructure had previously to be erected, etc... As you will see, I've taken this all the way back to Day One.
Thomas Paine
Tom Pain came to the New World and reinvented himself as Thomas Paine. Fast forward a few centuries and now it is the 4th of July of 2006: despite the fact that nothing much actually happened on July 4, 1776, we've decided to celebrate this day as our national B'day. Well, OK America, here's your birthday present this year, in the form of a bio of our chiefest publicist, Thomas Paine -- a man whose writings we temporarily admired and a man whom we later came to greatly despise. Where are his bones?
Various Declarations of Independency
Campaign finance reform
What can we learn about what is wrong with us today, from Italian Fascism?
Chicago, Illinois
What can you make from three-sevenths of a chicken, two-thirds of a cat, and half a goat?
Ota Benga
Could it be true, that we once exhibited a pygmy in a cage with the monkeys in a zoo?
Alvan Fisher
Alvan Fisher was a landscape painter.
A Semisweet History of Chocolate
What can the history of chocolate teach us about slippery slopes?
If you fall in a vat of chocolate, don't yell "Chocolate!"
John von Neumann
How do you optimize 2+2=5?
Milton Bradley
Through the efforts of the Reverend John Bunyan and the game manufacturer Milton Bradley (with some assistance from Seneca the Younger, Sir Thomas More, Samuel Johnson, Thomas Cole, and Louisa May Alcott), we have become infatuated with the conceit that our lives are like a journey.
Mr. Herbert Spencer
How is it that America went for Social Darwinism the way a chimp dives into a banana split?
Herbert Wendell Gleason
An early visualizer of Thoreau materials.
Edwin Forrest
The John Wayne of Thoreau's generation was an authentic American clown.
Communitarianism
Various attempts to form special social communities (utopias) during Thoreau's generation: Bronson Alcott's "Consocial Family" at Fruitlands, the Northampton Association for Industry and Education, Eagleswood, the Ursuline convent, the Paulist Fathers, The Kingdom, etc.
Paul Revere
Founding father Paul Revere, one of the Huguenots in the history of Concord, Massachusetts.
Dr. William Andrus Alcott
Amos Bronson Alcott's cousin, Dr. William Andrus Alcott, was heavily engaged in the advice business. One of the health things he did was prepare treatises of advice for young people, as to how they should live their lives. Now, I cannot establish that Henry Thoreau ever saw any of this genre of literature, but it was certainly available to him and in fact there has been a school of thought that suggested that Thoreau's didactic writings amount to such treatises of advice as to how people should live their lives. Therefore, we should at least take a look for similarities, if any.
barberry
The plant is now rare, because it conflicts with our cereal crops.
The Parker House
The Parker House in beautiful downtown Boston has become the Omni Parker Hotel.
The Reverend Thomas Chalmers
President George W. Bush
I've been playing the "small world" or "Seven Degrees of Separation from Kevin Bacon" game, and have noticed an intriguing chain of connection between the spiritual life of Henry David Thoreau and President George W. Bush. The chain is by way of Henry's aunts, the Reverend Chalmers of their era, and the Reverend Chambers of our own era.
Mrs W.S. Robinson
A renter at the Thoreau house in the Texas district of Concord had some acerbic remarks to make about Henry Thoreau, and about Concord in general. Should we credit such remarks, on the grounds that since she was a famous feminist she must have understood something or other?
The Woman's Rights movement in the era of Henry Thoreau
Some scholars have dismissed Henry Thoreau as misogynistic. Surely that would have come as news to his mother and his sisters. Perhaps it would also come as news to the feminists of his era whom he encountered from time to time. To carefully evaluate such a charge we need more than the randomly sampled sound byte from Henry's journal, we need a full linear study of the Woman's Rights movement of his era.
The Eugenics Movement
Recently we were contacted by an internet user who was presuming there to be some connection between Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, and Sir Francis Galton's eugenics movement. We proved this file in order to assure this internet user that, although Darwin and Galton were indeed members of the same extended British family, and although sufficient investigation would undoubtedly produce a time and a place in which these two personages happened to be in the same room at the same time, the history of the eugenics movement should be told without any reference whatever to Darwinism.
Governor for Life Thomas Mayhew of Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket Island
Devolution
Biologists presume individual adaptation and survival to be congurent with species adaptation and survival. Which is to say, in the mind of the life scientist, the species success story is merely the individual success story writ large, and individual death without reproduction is merely species extinction writ small. No, that is not the case. Individual adaptation and species adaptation are demonstrably noncongruent: noncongruent, in that success in one may lead directly to failure in the other. --And that, that is the situation which, right now, is staring our overwhelming human species square in the face.
(Much More is Coming!)
