This is a free excerpt of The History of American Slavery, our inaugural Slate Academy. To listen to Episode 4 in its entirety, visit the show page. To access all features of this Slate Academy, and to learn more about enrolling, visit Slate.com/Academy In episode 4 of The History of American Slavery, a Slate Academy, hosts Rebecca Onion and Jamelle Bouie explore the shape of family life on the slave plantations of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. In this free excerpt, they speak to Heather Andrea Williams about how slavery tore families apart and the emotional history of that trauma. *** Our guests in Ep 4: Annette Gordon-Reed, professor of legal history at Harvard University. Read an excerpt of Gordon-Reed’s book The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family. Heather Andrea Williams, presidential professor and professor of Africana studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Read an excerpt of Williams’ book Help Me to Find My People: The African American Search for Family Lost in Slavery.  *** Here are some of the links discussed in Episode 4:    ·      Margaret Biser, who tweets as @AfAmHistFail, recently wrote for Vox about her experiences leading plantation tours. ·      Wikipedia is a good starting point for learning more about the slave narratives recorded by the WPA in the 1930s. ·      Thomas Jefferson on race, excerpted from Notes on the State of Virgina. ·      Learn more about the 1855 trial of Celia. ·      Elsewhere in the Slate Academy, check out this haunting animation that maps the journeys of more than 15,000 slave ships. ·      Access all features of the Slate Academy at Slate.com/Academy. *** Next time, on Episode 5 of The History of American Slavery, Jamelle and Rebecca remember the life of Charles Deslondes (unknown–1811). They’ll talk to Edward Baptist and Joshua Rothman about slavery’s role in the settlement of America’s frontier in the 19th century. Your homework, should you choose to accept it: Read an excerpt from Rothman’s book, Flush Times and Fever Dreams: A Story of Capitalism and Slavery in the Age of Jackson. You can email us at historyacademy@slate.com.