"History is a story we tell ourselves about who we are." I love this definition for two reasons. First, it emphasizes the story-telling inherent in all histories. That is, histories are invented and crafted to engage particular audiences. That doesn't mean that they are entirely fictive -- indeed, professional historians go to great length to argue and prove the truth of their stories -- but at the heart of a good history are great characters and plot.Second, the emphasis on we asks us about the boundaries of identity. Who are the "we" in our histories and who are the "they"? How do the stories that we tell implicate us in our relationships to humanity and the rest of the planet?

Sue Peabody is a professor at Washington State University Vancouver and president of the French Colonial Historical Society. She is an internationally renowned historian whose dynamic work examines the historical origins and intersections of gender, race, and slavery in the French Atlantic. Dr. Peabody has received numerous awards and invitations to present her work at Harvard University’s Atlantic History Seminar, Yale University’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the History Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, and the upcoming Stanford Program in History and Philosophy of Science and Technology Colloquia.

She has gathered and maintained this resource as an aid to researcheers and those with interest in slavery, its roots, and its remedies.