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This painting depicts the deadly Middle Passage, where ships carrying hundreds of slaves crossed the Atlantic from Africa to the Americas. With foul conditions and often few provisions, many slaves died and were thrown overboard (1840). (Photo Credit: Burstein Collection/CORBIS)
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In 1844, Joseph Goodrich built this inn in Milton, Wisconsin and hand dug a tunnel from the inn's basement to a cellar 40 ft away to hide slaves as part of the Underground Railroad. (Photo Credit: Louie Psihoyos/CORBIS)
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A map of the United States from 1854, with shaded regions indicating slave states, free states and states open to slavery as a result of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of the same year. (Photo Credit: Bettmann/CORBIS)
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When slave ships reached the Americas, the slaves were off-loaded and sold in slave markets, like the one pictured here in Atlanta (1860s). (Photo Credit: Bettmann/CORBIS)
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A slave family standing next to baskets of recently-picked cotton near Savannah, Georgia in the 1860s. (Photo Credit: Bettmann/CORBIS)
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A reward poster circulated in Ripley County, Missouri after March 2, 1860 when an African American slave ran away from his owner. (Photo Credit: Bettmann/CORBIS)
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This illustration shows a slave auction taking place in Virginia, 1861. (Photo Credit: CORBIS)
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Wilson Chinn, a freed slave from Louisiana, poses with equipment used to punish slaves. Such images fueled Northern resolve against slaveholders during the American Civil War (photographed in 1863). (Photo Credit: CORBIS)
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This replica of the interior of a slave cabin displays the squalid living conditions of these forced laborers (Baton Rouge, c. 1999). (Photo Credit: Richard Cummins/CORBIS)
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A harvest-stage cotton field in Tennessee, 1999. (Photo Credit: AgStock Images/Corbis)