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[Coop and Dino singing]

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Honest question – have you ever tricked a sibling or friend into doing your chores for you? [Little sister doing washing chores]

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Maybe it's your night to take out the trash,

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but you swear up and down that it's definitely your brother's? [Boy taking trash outside]

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Or maybe you had your little sister clean up your room by telling her there's hidden treasure somewhere?

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Heh, that one’s actually kind of brilliant…

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Though that doesn’t make it right! Well that’s sort of like what happened at [Ship arrives on shore]

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the beginning of the Americas.

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Except instead of chores, it was working on expeditions, or in mines and plantations.

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And instead of innocent trickery, it was slavery.

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Okay, so maybe it wasn’t that much like tricking your sibling into doing the dishes [Boy with lots of dishes].

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It was a million times worse. First, the Spanish and Portuguese settlers

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enslaved Native Americans to help with their expeditions. [Spanish settler and native american in forest]

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Then they began to bring over African slaves in the early 1500s.

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From then until the mid-1800s, the Spanish and Portuguese brought over half of the

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Africans sold as slaves in the Americas.

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And just keep in mind, the 1500s to the 1800s were not the best time for basic human decency. [Soldiers marching and slaves running]

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If you somehow get your hands on a time machine, we don’t recommend that particular time in the past.

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You know what, just to be safe, maybe you should use your time machine to go to the future…

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check out the iPhone 800S, or something… Unfortunately, the English colonies weren’t [Girl holding an iPhone]

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much better. They brought over about a quarter of the African slaves, but instead of working

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in mines, they worked on tobacco plantations.

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So, yup, the history of cigarettes is just as bad for the soul as actual cigarettes are [Cigarette butts in an ashtray]

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for the body. The Europeans quickly realized that having

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slaves they didn't have to pay made their lives a whole lot easier.

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And we assume their brains just weren’t developed enough to consider what it did to [Slave in a vegetable field]

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the slaves’ lives.

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So the Europeans passed laws that made it so the children of slaves also became slaves,

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and allowed slaves to be bought, sold, and traded.

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Seriously. That’s not something made up for a really horrifying movie. [People watching old movie in theater]

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The slave traders at the time developed such a need for slaves that they would ship them

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from Africa in overcrowded and unsafe cargo ships, causing many of the Africans to die

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before even getting to the New World. [Slaves in a ship cargo block]

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And if they didn't die on the boat, they would often die in the New World, if not from disease,

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then simply from being overworked and mistreated. [Gravestones of slaves]

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So have we convinced you to take your time machine to the future yet?

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And if we have, uh…could we come along? We're excellent road trip buddies. [People driving and alien appears in the back seat]

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Seriously, you can pick all the music.

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