The British Empire introduced slavery to North America. The economy of the British colonies there depended on slave labor, particularly regarding cotton, sugar and tobacco output. Although it may be hard to relate these two, most forms of popular or “mass” music today are derived in one way or another from practices that appeared within societies organized around slavery (Constant-Martin 2011). This week we will begin to unravel this complicated history.

Read

Chapter 3: The African Diaspora in the United States, from Music on the Move, by Danielle Fosler-Lussier, open access with a CC BY-NC 4.0 license.

Listen

Episode 3 of the 1619 podcast by the New York Times: The Birth of American Music.

Explore

Learn more about the forced relocations of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic World visiting Slave Voyages, a collaborative digital initiative that compiles and makes publicly accessible records of the largest slave trades in history (this content has a GNU General Public License 3.0 and a  Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial 3.0 license).

Focus on one “kind” of information from this database (an image, document, model, map, ship, etc.) to write your weekly response.