Here is a fascinating documentary and a website about the Amistad. Professor Marcus Rediker, who wrote a book about Amistad called "The Amistad Rebellion," produced the documentary.
The Amistad was a slave ship from Sierra Leone headed for Cuba when slaves rebelled and overthrew the captain and crew. They sailed to Long Island where they were arrested and, amazingly, eventually freed.
Professor Rediker wanted to examine the Amistad rebellion from a point of view different from his book, which relied on traditional primary sources. He and his associates traveled to Sierra Leone, where the Amistad slaves came from, in an attempt to "recover a lost history from below."
Early in the documentary, Professor Rediker tells us that he wants to deepen our understanding of the uprising of 1839, especially the Amistad rebels themselves, as makers of history." He notes that he wants to "recapture the essential African side of the story."
The website includes educational resources for teaching about the Amistad Rebellion. These include links to web and primary sources, videos, and additional material from Professor Rediker.
My students and I watched the first 15 minutes of the documentary today. They learned about the Amistad and they also learned how history is written. They watched Professor Rediker move from village to village, trying to find links to descendants of the Amistad slaves. They looked like detectives more than historians.
Thanks to Eric Beckman for tweeting the link.
The Amistad is such a great film and I totally agree that it would be a fantastic documentary to have as apart of a unit on the slave trade as apart of a world history course. I appreciated your link to some educational resources but do wonder how you approach the sensitive nature of this topic with your students? Depending on age and maturity, the content covered in the film can be very dark and traumatizing. What approaches do you take to prepare them for this while also not spoiling the story of the film?
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