• Growth and change in the European colonies during the two centuries following their foundings (e.g., the arrival of Africans in the European colonies in the 17th century, rapid increase of slave importation in the 18th century).
• Elements of African slavery during the colonial period in North America (e.g. relocation of enslaved Africans to the Caribbean and North America, the slave trade and "the middle passage").
• Patterns of indentured servitude and influences on slavery.
• The social, cultural, and political events that shaped African slavery in colonial America.

• The Transatlantic Slave Trade
• Construction paper in three colors
• Markers

1. Direct students to write the current date on a piece of paper and then to jot down a list of five events that have occurred in their lives since they woke up in the morning.
2. Collect their answers and ask them:

   1. Would a historian 100 years from now be able to reconstruct the life of a 21st century student in a U.S. school from just one list?
   2. If the historian had many lists, would the reconstruction be more reliable?
   3. If a historian were to see the same item on multiple lists, would that be significant and why?

3. Discuss if there might be anything on the lists to suggest cause and effect relationships, and explain what that means if students are uncertain.

1. Direct students to read The Transatlantic Slave Trade, focusing on the sections of "Capture and Enslavement," "Development of Trade," and "Suppression of Slave Trade."
2. Divide students into three teams and provide each team with construction paper of a single color. Assign each of the three teams one of the above essay sections.
3. Ask students to review their section for key events and their dates, and then create a single entry for each date and related event. A single piece of construction paper should include a date, a heading identifying the event, and a short description of the event. Once each page has been created, the group will organize all their pages chronologically into a timeline.
4. When all groups have created their entry pages and organized them into a timeline, ask them to combine their timelines, merging the three streams from the three sections into a single timeline. Depending on the physical characteristics of the classroom, this may be done on the wall (or walls) either vertically or horizontally.

1. Once the single timeline has been organized, ask students where there are long breaks in activity. Ask students to determine if some events seem clustered.

2. Ask students to identify instances where there is a cause-effect relationship. Have the class discuss whether there are many cause-effect relationships between the three sections over the entire span of the timeline. Discuss if information contained in one of these streams tended to be the "cause," or if the three interrelated equally.

3. Ask students to write three paragraphs or a journal entry self-evaluating three aspects of the lesson:

Evaluate on a five-point scale (which may be multiplied for weighting) or five letter-grade rubric as follows:

• The Schomburg Center's digital exhibition, The African Presence in America: 1492-1992, includes a general bibliography, children's bibliography, teacher resources, and a timeline (including segments of specific time periods as well as the full timeline) at: http://www.si.umich.edu/CHICO/Schomburg/text/timeline-start.html.
• Many commercially-produced or Internet web sites also include timelines for U.S. and world history. For example, Timelines of History at http://timelines.ws/ includes timelines accessed by chronology, geography, and subject. Donna Campbell's Gonzaga University site includes political, social and literary entries with an abundance of links providing images and detailed information: http://guweb2.gonzaga.edu/faculty/campbell/enl311/timefram.html

• Art/Graphic Design: Students may wish to illustrate many of the timeline events or to create a mural incorporating the dates, events, and related images generated by the essay.
• Social Studies: Students may wish to compare and contrast the timeline(s) they created from the essay with a commercially generated world history timeline of the same era. For a long-range project, students might generate chapter timelines from their textbook on construction paper of a fourth color, looking for overlaps between their text and the essay and additional cause-effect relationships.