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I went to an American school so I was taught about the slave trade. It was part of the curriculum in both elementary school and high school. I don't imagine it is as commonly (or as thoroughly) taught in countries that did not see the impact of slavery that the United States has.
Everybody. The French, the Spanish, the Dutch, the Norwegians, the Danes, the English, and the Portuguese were all active to one degree or another in the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
The first to reintroduce the slave trade to the West were Muslims. Slavery had been exterminated in Christendom by about 1000 AD, but was rekindled around 1400 AD by Muslim slave traders who provided slave labor to Portuguese sugar plantations off the coast of Afirca.
Well, I was taught it in school, with a similar map in the textbook, and that was in the early Sixties, in a blue-collar community not particularly noted for a social conscience.
A few years later, I was also taught that slavery was an issue in the Ancient World, and that its Medieval cousins, serfdom and feudalism, weren't that much of an improvement.
What I was not taught was that slavery and/or exploitation of the Native peoples was an issue in most of the New World, or that the effort to abolish it was a general and prominent feature of what came to be called the Enlightenment.
The continuing "revision" of the treatment of slavery by the educational establishment, led by certain high-placed and high-minded individuals and groups is every bit as much a politicized campaign as everything that has come before it since 1865. Our next generation of statesmen and -women will, hopefully, be able to separate the grain of truth from the bushel of hype, and continue progress under a free and unbiased exchange of human opinion.
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