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John Harris Profile picture
John Harris
@drjohnaeharris
Historian and author of The Last Slave Ships: New York and the End of the Middle Passage (Yale University Press).
May 11, 2023 • 11 tweets • 6 min read
I wrote a new piece for History (formerly The History Channel) about the transatlantic slave trade.

My aim was to bring historians' new / new-ish findings to a broader audience.

A short 🧵with key takeaways:

history.com/news/transatla… 1/ The transatlantic slave trade was the largest oceanic forced migration in history.

By latest estimates, slave traders forced 12,521,337 men, women, and children aboard slave ships along African coasts.

The image below, from slavevoyages.org, shows regional breakdown Image
Dec 10, 2020 • 11 tweets • 5 min read
What was Walt Whitman doing on a slave ship in 1856? /Thread Whitman had recently published the first edition of Leaves of Grass. Reviews were mixed. He was struggling financially. He returned to journalism in New York. /2
Nov 30, 2020 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
As we wait for CBS's 60 Minutes to begin let me mention really good work that historians have done on the illegal voyage of the #Clotilda, 1860 /1 Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo" edited by Deborah Plant is interviews conducted by Zora Neale Hurston in the early 1900s with Oluale Kossola (Cudjoe Lewis), a survivor of the voyage. An incredible resource and very effective for teaching harpercollins.com/products/barra…
Nov 29, 2020 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Lots of new followers so a brief intro: I'm a Northern Irish immigrant to the U.S., a husband, dad/foster dad, historian of the U.S. and slavery, and a prof in South Carolina /1 I will always miss Baltimore, though, where I spent 6 years before my current gig and got a proper education in every way /2
Nov 28, 2020 • 13 tweets • 5 min read
Emilio Sanchez is one of the most interesting and important abolitionists you've never heard of. He was an anti-slave trade spy in #NewYorkCity in the 1850s and 1860s //THREAD Born in Cuba, Sanchez was a merchant in New York by the 1850s, when the illegal slave trade to the island had become rampant. Hundreds of ships left Manhattan for Africa in these years, bringing 164,000 captives to Cuba. /2