NEW BOOK: MEDALLIC HISTORY OF SLAVERY

In remembrance of the four hundredth anniversary of the first enslaved Africans brought to the shores of America and to add to our recognition of African American History Month, I offer your readers, free of charge, a book I just finished writing. It is titled, MEDALLIC HISTORY OF SLAVERY: Racial Oppression as Chronicled by Historical and Commemorative Medals.

A brief summary of this work follows:

During the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, millions of black men, women and children were captured in their ancestral homelands, often deep in the interior of sub-Saharan Africa, forcibly marched to West-African coastal embarkation points, chained inside the hold of a cargo ship, transported thousands of miles away to a foreign land where they did not even know the language, and then, frequently separated from their families, were sold like cattle and kept enslaved for the remainder of their lives. What follows is a brief account of this period, using historical and commemorative medals to illustrate this sordid epoch.

We will follow the slave trade from its origins in Africa to the plantations of the Americas. We explore the early efforts to abolish the trade of enslaved peoples in England and investigate the causes and subsequent consequences of their emancipation in the United States. These latter sections include chapters on the Enslaved People's Attempts to Escape Bondage and touch upon the causes of the American Civil War as they relate to the issue of slavery, the Reconstruction Era, and the Twentieth Century Advances in the Civil Rights of African Americans, again using commemorative medals to serve as primary sources and contemporary media to document these events.

During our journey we will consider a few of those individuals who have made a significant impact on the liberation of enslaved and racially oppressed people. We will touch upon not only those whose names roll off our tongues — like William Wilberforce, John Brown, Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King, and Abraham Lincoln — but also some of those ordinary people whose lives have made an extraordinary impact in moving our society forward towards justice — such as William Knibb, Robert Smalls, Sojourner Truth, and Rosa Parks — again using commemorative medals to chronicle their historic contributions toward racial justice.

I have included (below) a link to the entire book (consisting of 265 pages and 186 figures) which readers may download free of charge.
To read the complete article, see:
http://www.historicalartmedals.com/MEDALLIC%20HISTORY%20OF%20SLAVERY.pdf

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