Not since the six­ties and sev­en­ties, with the black pow­er move­ment, flow­er­ing of Afro­cen­tric schol­ar­ship, and debut of Alex Haley’s Roots, nov­el and mini-series, has there been so much pop­u­lar inter­est in the his­to­ry of slav­ery. We have seen Roots remade; award-win­ning books like Edward Baptist’s The Half Has Nev­er Been Told climb best­seller lists; and The Freedman’s Bureau Project’s dig­i­ti­za­tion of 1.5 mil­lion slav­ery-era doc­u­ments gives cit­i­zen-schol­ars the tools to research the his­to­ry on their own.

In addi­tion to these devel­op­ments, Slate mag­a­zine has designed a mul­ti­part, mul­ti­me­dia course, “The His­to­ry of Amer­i­can Slav­ery,” as part of its online edu­ca­tion­al ini­tia­tive, “Slate Acad­e­my.” Host­ed by Slate’s Jamelle Bouie and Rebec­ca Onion and fea­tur­ing guest his­to­ri­ans like Bap­tist, Hen­ry Louis Gates, Jr., Annette Gor­don-Reed, Eric Fon­er and more, this thor­ough sur­vey con­sists of a nine-part pod­cast, with copi­ous sup­ple­men­tary essays, book excerpts, and oth­er resources draw­ing on pri­ma­ry doc­u­ments and arti­facts. One sup­ple­ment, the ani­ma­tion above, shows us the “The Atlantic Slave Trade in Two Min­utes.”

Visu­al­iz­ing 315 years—“from the trade’s begin­ning in the 16th cen­tu­ry to its con­clu­sion in the 19th”—the ani­ma­tion dis­plays slave ships as increas­ing num­bers of black dots zip­ping across the Atlantic to the Amer­i­c­as from the African coasts. The dots “also cor­re­spond to the size of each voy­age. The larg­er the dot, the more enslaved peo­ple on board.” The Youtube video above pro­vides only a par­tial rep­re­sen­ta­tion of this impres­sive graph­ic. The full ani­ma­tion at Slate allows users to pause, click on indi­vid­ual dots, and get detailed infor­ma­tion, when avail­able, about the name of the ship, num­ber of enslaved peo­ple trans­port­ed, and points of ori­gin and entry in the New World.

In all, we see ani­mat­ed “more than 20,000 voy­ages cat­a­logued in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Data­base.” And though we typ­i­cal­ly, with typ­i­cal U.S. solip­sism, think of Amer­i­can slav­ery as a most­ly North Amer­i­can phe­nom­e­non, the truth is quite the con­trary:

Of the more than 10 mil­lion enslaved Africans to even­tu­al­ly reach the West­ern Hemi­sphere, just 388,747—less than 4 per­cent of the total—came to North Amer­i­ca. This was dwarfed by the 1.3 mil­lion brought to Span­ish Cen­tral Amer­i­ca, the 4 mil­lion brought to British, French, Dutch, and Dan­ish hold­ings in the Caribbean, and the 4.8 mil­lion brought to Brazil.

Ear­ly slave expe­di­tions were con­duct­ed by the Span­ish and Por­tuguese. “In the 1700s,” writes Bouie, “Span­ish trans­port dimin­ish­es and is replaced (and exceed­ed) by British, French, Dutch, and—by the end of the century—American activ­i­ty. This hun­dred years—from approx­i­mate­ly 1725 to 1825—is also the high-water mark of the slave trade, as Euro­peans send more than 7.2 mil­lion peo­ple to forced labor, dis­ease and death in the New World.” Sur­pris­ing­ly, Por­tu­gal remained one of the lead­ing nations among enslavers for most of the slave-trade’s his­to­ry.

The ani­ma­tion and short explana­to­ry essay by Bouie show us the stag­ger­ing his­tor­i­cal scope of the immense­ly prof­itable and pro­found­ly inhu­mane enter­prise that shaped not only the Unit­ed States, but also—in many ways more so—Central and South Amer­i­ca and the Caribbean. There is no his­to­ry of the Amer­i­c­as, and no growth of many of the colonies into wealthy, world-his­tor­i­cal nations, with­out slav­ery, nor can the wealth of Europe be in any way divorced from the prof­its of the slave trade and slave indus­try. Bouie and Onion explain in the short video above why they decid­ed to pro­duce the course.

For a sense of how his­to­ri­ans’ and the public’s under­stand­ing of slav­ery have changed over many decades—for all kinds of ide­o­log­i­cal reasons—read this excerpt from Baptist’s ground­break­ing book. As he says in an inter­view with Salon, most his­to­ries and recre­ations of the peri­od of enslave­ment attempt to hide the facts: “The resis­tance to reck­on­ing with the role of slav­ery in the tra­jec­to­ry that makes the U.S. the most pow­er­ful nation on earth, that’s real; that’s very, very deep…. What­ev­er we say about the role of the U.S. in glob­al his­to­ry, it’s absolute­ly clear to me that slav­ery is essen­tial to the rise of U.S. pow­er.” Slate’s series goes a long way toward telling us the true his­to­ry of slav­ery, from the mouths of writ­ers and schol­ars who engage with it dai­ly.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

1.5 Mil­lion Slav­ery Era Doc­u­ments Will Be Dig­i­tized, Help­ing African Amer­i­cans to Learn About Their Lost Ances­tors

The “Slave Bible” Removed Key Bib­li­cal Pas­sages In Order to Legit­imize Slav­ery & Dis­cour­age a Slave Rebel­lion (1807)

Mas­sive New Data­base Will Final­ly Allow Us to Iden­ti­fy Enslaved Peo­ples and Their Descen­dants in the Amer­i­c­as

Crowd­sourced Data­base Will Locate the Bur­ial Sites of For­got­ten US Slaves

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness