The 'Knowing Our History' team at the historic Riversdale House, home of Charles Benedict Calvert, founder of the University of Maryland

Our Final Report is now available to be downloaded!

Welcome to our website, Knowing Our History: African American Slavery and the University of Maryland. Knowing Our History is a year-long course being offered in the academic year 2008-2009 to investigate the University's connections to slavery by placing it in the larger framework of Atlantic history. The course is also introducing students to historical research methodologies.

The overall purpose of the course, which has been divided into two parts, is to explore the University's relation to slavery in the broadest context. History 429I, offered in the fall of 2008, will introduce the best scholarship on the institution of slavery from the standpoint of world history, and from the perspective of slavery's long development from antiquity to the present, emphasizing slavery's unique presence in mainland North America, then the United States, and finally Maryland. The second half of the course, which will be offered in the spring of 2009, will allow students to conduct research and will focus attention on the development of slavery in Prince George's County, the area that became College Park, the Calvert family and neighboring planters who owned the land, and the black men and women, free and slave, who worked it during the late antebellum decades.

The research carried out by the students will form part of a report that will be submitted to the University community on the links between the University and slavery. Students were chosen after a competitive application process, and they come from a cross section of disciplines. Distinguished University Professor Ira Berlin and History Department Lecturer Herbert Brewer are the course instructors.