The Transatlantic Slave Trade
Teacher Resources
Lesson Guide
The guide is your first stop for timing, sample answers, and everything else you need to teach this lesson.
PD Event Highlights: Exploring Slave Trade Shipwrecks
Join National Geographic Explorer Tara Roberts as she reveals untold stories of enslaved Africans.
Empires and Enslavement map
Use this map to help students understand the scale of the transatlantic slave trade.
Driving Question: What were the causes and effects of the Atlantic slaving system?
From the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, the transatlantic slave trade enslaved and transported over 12.5 million Africans to the Americas. Millions died on this “Middle Passage.” For those who survived, other horrors awaited as they were sold into slavery to spend their lives working on plantations.
Learning Objectives:
- Understand and critique the motives and justifications for the transatlantic slave trade.
- Practice quick sourcing to assess first-person accounts of those involved in the transatlantic slave trade.
- Use a graphic biography to support, extend, or challenge the overarching narratives from this time period.
This activity is particularly important in this lesson. It helps set a serious tone, framing the lesson as an entry into the human experience of enslavement, while also preparing students to read survivor testimony with care and seriousness.
The horror enslaved people endured in the transatlantic slave trade is beyond imagining. Reading the worlds written by those who survived can help you begin to understand.
This source collection includes primary sources that some students might find difficult to read. Engage in classroom practices that help students learn to understand other people’s perspectives, including active listening and perspective-taking activities. For more support, check out the Teaching Sensitive Topics in Social Studies guide.
In this article and source collection, you’ll see how Europeans became very wealthy—at the expense of societies in Africa and the Americas—and how enslaved people experienced this system.
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Guiding Questions
Accessibility: Make sure closed captions are always on. Closed captions are offered in English and Spanish for most videos hosted on the OER Project platform. However, if you and your students need captions in other languages, we recommend viewing the video on our YouTube page, where you can select from a variety of languages.
Sometimes, when we focus on smaller scales, we can see the big picture more clearly. We’ll adjust our lenses to focus on a region in Africa and the life of one enslaved man to understand how the slave trade affected the entire continent.
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Guiding Questions
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Guiding Questions
Now that you’ve finished the lesson, reflect on what you’ve learned about the transatlantic slave trade and how it informs your life today.