Race and Slavery in Yale's Archives
AFAM S173 (CRN: 30335)
Instructors: Edward Rugemer
Dates: Session A, May 26 - June 27, 2025
Course Mode: In-Person
Meeting Times: TTh 9.00-12.15
Distributional Requirements: Humanities
In-person Course. This summer seminar will explore significance of race, slavery, and abolitionism in American History during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The course will also introduce students to archival methods for the study of history. Taught from a classroom in the Beinecke Library, each class meeting will begin with a discussion of historical writings upon a particular theme of this history. Then we will turn to an archival collection from one of Yale’s repositories that sheds light upon this theme. Students will learn to transcribe and analyze historical documents, and then to make meaning of the past from their investigations. Topics include slavery and slaveholding, the transatlantic slave trade, the continental slave trade, the abolitionist movement, the Black experience in northern cities, Yale University, and the afterlives of racial slavery as evident in material culture. 1 Credit. Session A: May 26 – June 27. Tuition: $5270.