Day 1 – The American/Rhode Island Slave Trade. 

After a welcome and introduction to the institute by the co-directors, teachers will hear a lecture entitled “That Unrighteous Traffick: Rhode Island and the Atlantic Slave System” on the trans-Atlantic slave trade and Rhode Island’s central role in it by Dr. James T. Campbell, Professor of Africana Studies and American Civilization at Brown University and former chair of Brown’s Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice.  Dr. Campbell will explain the institutional context for this summer institute by introducing the teachers to the archival and historical work of the Brown Steering Committee and the collection of web-based resources Brown has made available for the use of educators.  His talk will be followed by a screening of Katrina Browne’s film, Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North (a Sundance Film Festival selection), which chronicles her family’s investigation of their descent from the most notorious slave trader in American history, James DeWolfe. Ms. Browne will give a short talk to introduce her film. In the afternoon, teachers will tour Linden Place , the spectacular 1810 federal mansion built on slave trading profits by James DeWolfe in Bristol , Rhode Island .  Upon returning to Providence, the afternoon will end with a demonstration of a classroom activity called “Middle Passage,” in which students (in this case, teachers) draw roles as captains, crew members, and captives on a slave ship and make decisions on how to respond to a variety of events and circumstances.

Day 2 – Provisioning the West Indies .

In the morning, teachers will hear two lectures.  First, Dr. Joseph Inikori, Professor of History at the University of Rochester , and author of The Atlantic Slave Trade: Effects on Economies, Societies, and Peoples in Africa, the Americas , and Europe , will deliver a lecture entitled, “Slavery and the Atlantic System.” Following this, Dr. Eric Kimball, an Assistant Professor of History at Utah State University, will give a lecture, “New England and the West Indies Trade,” on the embeddedness of the colonial New England economy in the Atlantic slave system, the topic of the dissertation he is currently completing.   Before embarking on the institute’s first field excursion this afternoon, Dr. Joanne Pope Melish will lecture on the regimes of enslaved labor in southern Rhode Island and parts of Connecticut that produced agricultural products for the West Indies trade.  The lecture will be entitled, “The Plantation Economies of Southern New England.” Teachers will be bused to Smith’s Castle, also called Cocumscussoc, an original “Narragansett country” plantation house and trading post that is a National Historic Landmark.