The history of slavery poses a particular set of challenges for historians and for cultural practitioners - how do we document and understand an institution whose practices were, at least partially, rooted in the denial that African people had history or historical importance? This course will give students the opportunity to engage with the economic, social and political history of the slave trade on both sides of the Atlantic. We will explore the history of the trade through a variety of texts, both primary and secondary, and will travel together to some key sites of the slave trade in Ghana - thus grounding this massive historical event in the particulars history of Ghana and the "gold coast" as we ask how the trade is documented and remembered. The archives of slavery are fundamentally incomplete, with only rare testimony from any of those 12 million people who were captured and sold into Atlantic slavery. This means that scholars and artists alike have employed a range of disciplinary strategies to grapple with the history and afterlives of slavery. We will consider public histories, acts of memorial and remembering, films, novels, datasets, and economies.