LAB 00 · The Briefing · Phase 1 of 4
The Question
The research question
How much energy did enslaved Africans expend building the United States?
Historians, economists, and activists have asked this question for decades. No one has ever answered it rigorously — in numbers, using the same physics and math your body follows.
That changes with this class.
246
Years of documented slavery
1619 – 1865
18
States involved
in this project
4M+
People
at peak (1860 Census)
Why kilowatt-hours?
A kilowatt-hour is something you can feel. It powers a refrigerator for 16 hours, charges a phone 80 times, or keeps an LED bulb on for four days. When you translate enslaved labor into kWh, the numbers become undeniable in a way that abstractions like "unpaid wages" often can't match.
Energy is also unit-agnostic. Whether someone was picking cotton, hauling timber, or nursing children — all of it is one formula: a body converting food into mechanical output at some rate, over some amount of time.
A preview of the scale
Virginia, 1850:
472,528 people × 4.76 kWh/person/day × 365 days × 0.82 seasonal factor
= ~820 million kWh
That's one state, one year. Across 18 states, 246 years — the total is in the billions. Your class will compute it.