“I was setting here thinking the other night ‘bout the talk of them kind of white folks going to Heaven. Lord God, they’d turn Heaven wrong side out and have the angels working to make them something they could take away from them.”
- Jack Maddox, ex-slave. Library of Congress
The trans-Atlantic slave trade is, perhaps, one of the most hotly-contested areas of history today. Mythic images compete with slave testimony and scholarly investigation to produce an alarming mixture of fact and fiction. It is a complex and multi-faceted subject and almost every aspect is a battleground of conflicting information and opinion that has generated and continues to generate a huge amount of scholarly research and writing.
