THE SECRET LIFE OF SLAVES:
African Americans and the Writing of History
HIST157b
Brandeis University
Schwartz 103
Spring 2016
TF 9:30-10:50
Instructor: Abigail Cooper, Assistant Professor of History
abcooper@brandeis.edu
Office Hours: (Tuesdays 2-4 and by appointment) OS 121
Course Description:
This seminar is to be laboratory for the raw materials of history; it will also explore the ways in which
historians over time have built on each other’s studies and how they have debated each other’s arguments. The
premise of this course is that enslaved people had lives outside of their masters’ knowledge, yet we still aim to
use sources of these masters to tell us about the secret life of slaves. How is that possible? How do we
mediate the mediated slave voice? This course is about strategizing and articulating our historical methods.
How do we find, read, and apply these sources? How do we read against the grain of the writer’s intention?
This course confronts the writing of African American history as both a creative and a scientific endeavor. It
requires innovation in finding new sources and in developing new modes of interpretation and analysis. And
this process is ongoing.
Every week we put at the center of our focus a collection of primary sources that tell us something about the
everyday lives of slaves in the Americas. Accompanying that primary source material is the secondary source
reading of today's historians. We read the primary sources first. We try to make sense of them. We make note
of our questions as well as our assumptions. We seek to put different primary sources in dialogue with each
other. Then we turn to the secondary sources for context and debate. Chronologically, this course extends
from the Middle Passage to Emancipation, but each week’s work will be thematically-driven. We look at
language and time-sense, kinship and work patterns, rituals and beliefs. Each week’s governing theme seeks to
reframe our understanding to give primacy to the slave’s view—and to challenge existing categories. Where
are the boundaries of “religion,” for example, when the African sacred cosmos has no church?
The Research Path Program & The Computer Science Educational Technology Apprenticeship
We are fortunate in this class to have been part of the Computer Science Educational Technology
Apprenticeship pilot program. This means that a team of talented students have created software for this
course in consultation with the professor. We will be using the software at the following website:
digitalhistory157.unet.brandeis.edu. A representative will be with us on the first day of class and possibly
at certain times during the semester. I will update the class on how we will be using this program for
assignments in class, via email, and on LATTE throughout the course of the semester.
***This is a Digital History Intensive course. Please bring a laptop or tablet to every class. There will be
plenty of times when we close the lids and just discuss. But we will also be exploring and experimenting with
digital resources in both planned and improvised ways. Laptops are available for rental at LTS. ***
Course Syllabus_Cooper – HIST 157b
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Requirements:
 Readings: Materials for this course are collected and posted on LATTE. Each assignment is
listed week by week in the outline below.

Participation: We cannot discern the secret lives of slaves without your full, committed
participation. This means reading the assigned work, thinking about it, and preparing in an
organized way those thoughts for discussion with your peers. Because this is a course on just that
subject, we will discuss what that act of reading each week entails and how different approaches
to reading and research, how different ways of processing information, can lead to different
historical methodologies.
o Note: Class participation will also include individual and possibly collaborative
assignments to be prepared in advance of each class. These are not individually graded but
contribute to the overall participation grade.


Project Assignments:
Weekly writings: There is a writing component to this course that is part art, part science. You are
not posting your writing on LATTE. You are posting on Tumblr. Go to
secretlifeofslaves.tumblr.com. We will talk about what you post on the Tumblr in the first few
class sessions.

The first paper is a short essay related to the course. Guidelines to come.
***IT IS LIKELY THAT THE RESEARCH PATH WORK WE WILL BE EXPERIMENTING
WITH @digitalhistory157 WILL BE A BIG PART OF THIS ASSIGNMENT.***
The second paper is a research paper extending from a project begun in class. Guidelines to come.
Papers will be evaluated on your handling of the historical material from the course, on your level
of insight into the document itself, on the plausibility and precision of your argument, and on the
overall thoughtfulness of your discussion.


Course Syllabus_Cooper – HIST 157b
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
Project Deadlines:
Paper One (4-6 pages): MARCH 2
Paper Two (10-12 pages): APRIL 21
Evaluation Method:
Participation & In-Class Projects — 25%
Weekly Writings — 25%
First Project/Paper — 25%
Final Project/Paper — 25%
Academic Accommodations: If you are a student with a documented disability at Brandeis and wish
to request a reasonable accommodation for this class, please see me immediately.
Plagiarism and Academic Integrity: Violations of University policies on academic integrity can
result in failure in the course or on the assignment, or in suspension or dismissal from the University.
If you are in doubt about the instructions for any assignment in this course, it is your responsibility to
ask for clarification. Please read the University’s policies on academic integrity at
http://www.brandeis.edu/studentlife/sdc/ai. I will refer suspected instances of academic dishonesty to
the Office of Student Development and Conduct.
Brandeis University Academic Calendar Highlights:
M-F Feb 15-19 MIDTERM RECESS
F-M Mar 25-28 MARCH RECESS
Th Apr 21 BRANDEIS FRIDAY – last day of class
F-F Apr 22-29 PASSOVER / SPRING RECESS
Course Outline
WEEK ONE: 1/15/2016 - INTRODUCTION TO COURSE
Welcome to “The Secret Life of Slaves: African Americans and the Writing of History.” In this
course you take on the role of the historian in order to sift through the fragmentary materials of
the everyday worlds of the enslaved and to mark how historians have come to construct them.
Today will be an orientation to the course and an opportunity for questions.
WEEK TWO: 1/19/2016 & 1/22/2016 – WARMING UP
We meet elephants and demons and baggage we have inherited, and talk about them with each
other.
Readings:
“Teaching the N-Word,” by Emily Bernard
“The Illusion of Safety/The Safety of Illusion” by Roxanne Gay
Ford Hall 2015 Syllabus by Concerned Students 2015
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WEEK THREE: 1/26/2016 & 1/29/2016 – AFRICA & THE MIDDLE PASSAGE
Can we explore African subjectivity in the early centuries of the slave trade despite a near total
absence of first-person voices from enslaved Africans? Do we view the Middle Passage as a
break or a continuity? This week we look at physical and visual historical materials as possible
venues for reading the past like texts. And we look at scholars of the African American
Diaspora housed in English and History departments of the university to better know differing
methods and directions in the study of slavery at our current moment.
Primary Sources:
“Lest We Forget” Online Museum Exhibit, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture,
New York Public Library – http://digital.nypl.org/lwf/english/site/flash.html
Sweetgrass baskets from the Gullah/Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor of the American South
(in class)
Secondary Sources:
Stephanie Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora
(2007) , Chapter 7 “Life and Death in Diaspora,” pp. 182-208
Saidiya Hartmann, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (2007),
Chapter 8 “Lose Your Mother”
WEEK FOUR: 2/02/2016 & 2/05/2016 – LANGUAGE, SOUND, SONG
What were the sounds that shaped a slave’s day? What was the noise of competing African
dialects hewing a pidgin English? How did a moan become a song and a song become a
spiritual? To get closer to understanding slaves, we must know the rhythm of their daily lives.
This week is an experimentation into that soundscape.
Primary Sources:
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “The Negro Spirituals,” Atlantic Monthly 19 (1867).
Sheet music:
“Sweet Canaan,” “Deep River,” “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,”
“Steal Away to Jesus”
Audio:
“Arwhoolie Holler” (cornfield holler)
“Run Old Jeremiah” (ring shout)
Secondary Sources:
Lawrence Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from
Slavery to Freedom (1977), pp. 3-55.
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Mechal Sobel, Trabelin’ On: The Slave Journey to an Afro-Baptist Faith (1988), Chapter 2
WEEK FIVE: 2/09/2016 & 2/12/2016 – WORK & EXPERTISE, LABOR & VALUE
Slavery is a system of forced labor. Slaves’ labor is the commodity being valued and sold, a
commodity that just happens to be inextricable from their bodies. The trader, the planter—these
men buy slaves for their advertised technologies—“speaks French,” “blacksmith,” “ricegrower.” How do slaves conceive of work? What do they view as their talents? This week we
confront complexity and debate. America was built on slavery. Slaves built America. How do
you make a country and unmake your enslaver?
Primary Sources:
Slave trader advertisements and auction announcements
Slave narrative of Solomon Northrup
WPA interviews, selections
Secondary Sources:
Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (2001), Chapter 7 “Life
in the Shadow of the Slave Market”
Eugene Genovese, Roll Jordan Roll: The World the Slaves Made (1974) (short selections)
*FEBRUARY 15-19 MIDTERM RECESS*
WEEK SIX: 2/23/2016 & 2/26/2016 – PROPERTY & KIN
How can property own property? Slaves did. Slaves themselves were commodities; this much was
true. But they also participated in a lively internal economy in which they could also be owners of
property themselves. We explore this concept and the strange world of tensions between legalities and
daily practices.
Primary Sources:
Southern Claims Commission Records: “Claim of Jane Holmes,” “Claim of Milton Copeland”
Secondary Source:
Dylan Penningroth, Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the NineteenthCentury South (2004) – excerpts
WEEK SEVEN: 3/01/2016 & 3/04/2016 – NEW TECHNOLOGIES IN THE STUDY OF HISTORY:
DIGITAL HISTORY INTENSIVE – See LATTE for details.
WEEK EIGHT: 3/08/2016 & 3/11/2016 – FAMILY
In 1965, Senator Daniel Moynihan published a highly controversial report on the black family in
America. He was trying to enact labor reform in Congress, and in doing so, he drew on the argument
of sociologists who said that slavery's legacy had led to largely female, single-parent households
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disproportionately below the poverty line. The public debate heightened quickly and revolved around
the question—"Was black matriarchy pathological and was slavery responsible?" This week we
grapple with the question of family and slavery, looking to how a society has historically structured its
resources according to ideas of family and how slaves understood their families within a system that
commodified them as individuals.
Primary Sources:
Letters from slaves, in Family and Freedom: A Documentary History of African-American Kinship –
selections
Secondary Sources: *Moynihan Report Summary*
Herbert Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925 (1977), selections
Brenda Stevenson, Life in Black and White Life in Black and White: Family and Community in the
Slave South (1997), selections
Peter Kolchin, Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom (1987), pp. 215-240
WEEK NINE: 3/15/2015 & 3/18/2016 – BELIEF
How do we measure belief? Empiricism seems impossible, but to ignore belief—in the unseen,
in the supernatural—is to miss a vital thrust of the story. In many cases, slaves’ beliefs took
Christian forms, but African traditional practices persisted. In some cases, slaves fiercely
resisted Christianity, as we will see in the autobiography of Omar Ibn Said, a devout Muslim.
Primary Sources:
God Struck Me Dead: Voices of Ex-Slaves, Clifton H. Johnson, ed. (conversion narratives of
former slaves interviewed by scholars at Fisk University in the 1920s) - “Hooked in the Heart,”
“I Am Blessed but You Are Damned”
Omar Ibn Said, Autobiography of Omar Ibn Said, Slave in North Carolina (1831)
Secondary Sources:
Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake
and Lowcountry (1998), pp. 620-631.
WEEK TEN: 3/22/2016 (No Friday 3/25 class) – ARCHIVE VISIT – MASSACHUSETTS
HISTORICAL SOCIETY – See LATTE for details
WEEK ELEVEN: 3/29/2016 & 4/1/2016 – RITUAL
Weddings, funerals, childbirths, burial grounds. Charms, talismans, the details of slave fashion for
Sunday service. These are the materials under consideration. We seek to recognize the symbolic
importance of everyday activities and to understand how slaves created ritualistic ways to structure their
Course Syllabus_Cooper – HIST 157b
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lives, even under systems of domination. This week we also conduct an examination into insider and
outsider testimony. Telling details come from a variety of sources. Can we extract detail from judgment?
Primary Sources:
“Negro Superstitions,” Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine (1891)
Fannie Kemble, Account of a Slave Meeting
WPA Narrative – Nancy Williams
Secondary Sources:
Michael Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the
Colonial and Antebellum South (1998), Chapter 2 “Time and Space” and Chapter 3 “Warriors, Charms,
and Loas”
Betty Wood and Sylvia Frey, Come Shouting to Zion: African American Protestantism in the American
South and British Caribbean to 1830, Chapter 5, “The Great Revival”
*Note: Prof. Cooper will be presenting her research at the Organization of American Historians
conference 4/07 - 4/09, and so will not be able to lead class on 4/08/2016.
WEEK TWELVE: 4/05/2016 & 4/08/2016 – TWELVE YEARS A SLAVE
12 YEARS A SLAVE: Film & Discussion on Solomon Northup, Slave Narratives, and Navigating
Presentations of Slavery in Cinema
Solomon Northup, Twelve Years a Slave: http://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/northup
Read the Table of Contents and choose one chapter to read:
http://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/northup/northup.html
WEEK THIRTEEN: 4/12/2016 & 4/15/2016 – EMANCIPATION
Primary Source:
pick one reading that depicts a slave voice from either the WPA interviews collected in American
Slave: A Composite Autobiography or Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches,
Interviews, and Autobiographies (These are the Google Drive documents I have shared with you.).
You will share your chosen reading with the class.
Secondary Source:
Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to
the Great Migration, Chapter 2: "The Choked Voice of a Race at Last Unloosed”
WEEK FOURTEEN: 4/19/2016 & 4/21/2016 – CONCLUSION
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