Posts Categorized: Background Material

One of the ideas this book engages with, tangentially, is the “Back to Africa” movement (sometimes called the “Liberian Movement”) in 19th-century America and earlier. As a scholar of early American literature, I’ve long been intrigued by mentions of this movement in late 18th-century and 19th-century literature—books like Olaudah Equiano’s memoir of his enslavement and… Read more »

Some background to the Zong story in A CRACK IN THE SEA: To get some sense of how active the Middle Passage was—and how massive the slave trade—take a look at this interactive video. In about two minutes, it will show you the ship routes for over 200 years of slave trade; you can click… Read more »