The topic I chose for the final project is the Zong massacre. The story is in 1781 the crew of Zong, a slave ship, murdered 133 African slaves in order to collect the insurance. Evidence showed the ship ran low on water and made many navigational errors. These reasons led to the crew throwing living slaves overboard at sea, living them to drown. Because of this action, the remaining slaves on the ship survived and the crew would not lose money due to slaves dying because of not having water. It was common to take out insurance on slaves because they were seen as nothing but cargo.<\/p>\n

The Zong massacre was very important in having a part in abolishing slavery later on. It was highly publicized and made people aware of the terrors enslaved people were forced to endure. It created laws to have less slaves on the ship and culture of arts surrounding it.<\/p>\n

The reason I chose this topic was because I think it is very important for people to be aware of these events, especially an important turning point in history. As historians, we know that slaves were thrown off ships, but to have a case that would later be used to help rid the world of slavery is incredible. I became aware of the Zong massacre when I watched the movie Belle<\/em> and instantly became interested in the topic. I feel it would relate back to many themes we have discussed in class such as slavery, seeing enslaved people as commodities, social hierarchy of races, government, and even economics.<\/p>\n

…read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The topic I chose for the final project is the Zong massacre. The story is in 1781 the crew of Zong, a slave ship, murdered 133 African slaves in order to collect the insurance. Evidence showed the ship ran low on water and made many navigational errors. These reasons led to the crew throwing living […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15998","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist410-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15998","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist410-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist410-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist410-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist410-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15998"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist410-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15998\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":996365,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist410-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15998\/revisions\/996365"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist410-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15998"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist410-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15998"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist410-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15998"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}