Olaudah Equiano/Gustavus Vassa: African or American?

Description

There are many ways to read Olaudah Equiano’s  famous autobiographical narrative, and many ways into the story.  One of these is the question of where Equiano was born.  This is a question that matters for a variety of reasons.  For our purposes, it is a question that allows us to understand him as a human and an author, to comprehend his motives and his actions, and along the way, perhaps to learn something about the lives of enslaved Africans more generally. In this module, students  will work with primary sources from Equiano’s life and the era in which he lived, evidence from within Equiano’s own book, and the work of historians and other scholars studying the past who seek to understand Equiano’s motives and writing

With this evidence before us, the question becomes how to make sense of the seemingly contradictory sources and bits of text.  How can we organize our thoughts in such a way as to come to our own conclusions about where Equiano was born?  This is the question facing us, and it’s the question that scholars have faced in recent years.  Students who successfully complete this module will demonstrate the ability to evaluate contradictory evidence in the context of opposing secondary sources, and to produce a convincing original historical argumentative paper assessing this evidence.

In this module, you will:

  • Identify and evaluate perspective and motivation through source analysis.
  • Compare, crosscheck, and verify information across multiple artifacts and accounts (corroboration)
  • Consider the time and place of an event, artifact, or account (contextualization)

The following are the historical competencies of Uncovering History. The bolded ones are specifically in the "Olaudah Equiano/Gustavus Vassa: African or American?" unit.

  • Source Analysis (identifying and evaluating perspective and motivation)
  • Corroboration (comparing, crosschecking, and verifying across multiple artifacts and accounts)
  • Contextualization (considering the time and place of an event, artifact, or account)
  • Cause and Consequence (identifying and analyzing interrelated short and long term causes and consequences that drive historical change)
  • Change and Continuity (identifying and analyzing progress and decline as processes of change over time including use of chronology, turning points, and periodization)

I began a lifelong love of history listening to my grandfather talk about 'the war'.  I thought I wanted to be a military history, then a political historian, and finally found a deep respect for the social and cultural history of African societies.  After I comlpeted my dissertation and actually began to teach, I discovered another passion - history education.   One project that I began as a way to teach my own students to think about issues of voice in history became Abina and the Important Men, a graphic history that won the James Harvey Robinson Prize from the American Historical Association.  I was honored to accept the 2020 Eugene Asher prize Distinguished Teaching Award, and it motivates me to keep working to produce quality material for teachers and students.  When I’m not being a professional historian, I still dabble in other kinds of history: I enjoy building models of RAF fighters, reading speculative fiction, and I play with trains.

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