"The bloody Writing is for ever torn" (Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press)

In August 2007, the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture convened an international conference in the Republic of Ghana to consider the consequences of decisions made and implemented by the governments of Denmark, Great Britain, and the United States between 1792 and 1808 to end their participation in the Atlantic slave trade. The first pan-African congress of historians held on that continent since 1961, the four-day conference included 300 scholars, students, and other participants from twenty-three different countries, more than half in sub-Saharan Africa. This two-disc DVD set is drawn from that meeting, which began as an idea for an academic conference and became a transformative experience.

"The bloody Writing is for ever torn" is set in Elmina and Cape Coast castles, two restored sixteenth-century slave trading forts from which 1.8 million enslaved people were transported to the Americas and the Caribbean between 1500 and 1867. In words and through cultural performances, this film captures multiple understandings of a painful, fiercely contested past and the sharing of historical knowledge and lived experience that characterized the conference.

The Abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Origins, Effects, and Legacies combines a distillation of some of the meeting's sharply different scholarly perspectives and interpretations with compelling images and graphics in a format specifically designed for classroom use. The DVD is accompanied by a film text and a teacher's guide.