The issue of slavery in America is a vastly documented phenomenon that captivates the interest of nearly everyone with a slight interest in history. It is a dark and fascinating subject yet still an overlooked part of our young nation’s history. Though there are countless books and articles written on the topic, few provide such compelling and brutally truthful accounts of the hardships endured by slaves as Harriett Jacobs in Incidents of a Slave Girl. Within this novel, she attempts to describe her situation under the laws dictating her life as a slave. She writes as to persuade the reader not to judge her as she tells them all she has bared in her life. As a young girl when she became a slave, she was subject to harassment, particularly by sexual means, more so than her male equals. Through the course of her book, Jacobs describes her predicament and attempts to survive and surpass it.…
The study of slavery and race in America highlights the ironic contrast between an Anglo-American and African-American Society. Anglo-Europeans who professed a love for freedom and the importance of virtue deprived African-Americans of humanity and dignity. The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family by Annette Gordon-Reed, Ar’n’t I a Woman: Female Slaves in the Plantation South by Deborah Gray White, and Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake & Lowcountry by Philip D. Morgan examine the systematic removal of power and perceived humanity of enslaved women and contrast the perceived sexual promiscuity of enslaved women with the sexual repression and virtue assigned to white women. Annette Gordon-Reed’s The…
The experience of slavery was equally hard for men, women and children. From the cotton fields of America to the sugar cane plantations of Brazil, slavery still carried an awful implication. Though those enslaved may have had different backgrounds or beliefs they both endured the same oppression. No matter their position on the globe, the common oppression of slavery connected them. They were taken from their native land, families were left behind, and despair was on the rise. Along with these similarities, differences can be found. However, the similarities that these two groups represented, connect them on a supernatural level.…
In the United States, racism had been for several hundred years; it’s aslo been a controversial subject for people for a long period of time. Whenever we talk about this subject, it always reminds me about the book called “Race and Manifest Destiny” by Reginald Horsman. This book is one of the greatest books about the racism in the United States from 1776 to 1865. During the early years of America’s history, society was categorized by class rather than skin color. In the early of colonial period, black and white workers who worked together everywhere. However, the crisis of the Norh American owners in the early of sixteenth century has changed the system. Black enslavement had become necessary for the American agricultural economy. There is the first formed an equal human being between blacks and whites. From the beginning of the United State nation to 1865, there was always a distance which separated the White people and Black people or Indian people due to the racial discrimination in the society at that time.…
Slavery is taught in many, if not all, educational systems in a way that focuses on the maltreatment of Africans by Whites. This concept is usually unanimously understood to be wrong and immoral. However, very few look beyond the beatings into the social structure of the slaves. Frederick Douglass’s, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, does not specifically focus on the slave social structure. Yet, if one were to look deeper into the book, the irony of the prejudices of the slave class can become more apparent.…
For a very long time, slavery has been an accepted element in the human society and such an important factor in the economic development that the interest in the subject seems only natural. There is plenty of proof that condemns what happened in the past. For most Americans, this epoch of the past is an almost tangible object, something with deep roots in the popular culture and constantly nourished by movies and books. In the book entitled Faces at the bottom of the well, Derrick Bell says that: “Black people are the magical faces at the bottom of society’s well.…
Today, many Americans constantly worry about the effect of their eating habits on their weight and health. However, for much of the nineteenth century, most Americans were rarely concerned with the nutritional quality of their meals, and instead focused on eating as much as possible. According to Harvey Levenstein, author of Revolution at the Table: The Transformation of the American Diet, the inception of present-day eating habits has its roots in the “eating revolution,” which occurred between the 1880s and 1930s. At the turn of the twentieth century, the American middle class began to eat much more “economically and healthily,” than they had in the past. Levenstein attributes this change in food habits to both economic and social factors,…
American colonists changed their perspective on liberty, through the coming of the Great Awakening. American colonists endured several obstacles in this period. Some were banished from colonies, and others were even killed because of their beliefs. At the end of the Great Awakening, the American colonists prospered, and were awarded the freedom of religion and beliefs.…
“africanized” the south, and strong willed, rebellious slaves and free blacks decided to not stand for their forced institution by breaking away from their physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual restraints. The “peculiar”institution [1] of southern slavery became the most trivial and horrifying…
The purpose of Gordon-Reed’s book was to see how the families of African Americans were treated during the transitional period of slavery to freedom in America. There were many ways that the mixed slaves were treated differently than other slaves. The author’s thesis is clear throughout the text and provides many pieces of evidence.…
Celia, a slave, was possibly born in Missouri in 1836 and no form of documentation such as her birth date, birthplace, nor parentage had ever been recorded. Her story is actually an example of one remote event that exemplified the regular fear slaves would experience during the antebellum period of the United States. The author, Melton A. McLaurin, chose to tell Celia’s story of her fight as a young slave woman through all the suffering she went through to demonstrate the core of racial complications Americans still encounter in their society today. Even though there have been many events in this day and age that have changed today’s society to what it used to be in the antebellum period of the United States, Americans still remain in a white-male…
The year is 1845; slavery prospers in southern America while southern America prospers through slavery. Thousands upon thousands, innocent people subjugated to slavery are forced to exhaustingly work through the unforgiving heat of the summer through the cold malevolent winds of the winter. All throughout, they face the unmerciful and unfair judgment of overseers and masters. Still, their most challenging and most terrible ordeal was the lack of knowledge and therefore bringing the eventual lack of hope. Through the writings of those few who were fortunate and brave enough to have the knowledge to read and write, we were able to see a narrow glimpse of their hopeless lives and tragic experiences in ante-bellum America.…
1.What is the Glasgow Coma Scale? The Glasgow Coma Scale (GCS). The GCS is an objective assessment that defines the level of consciousness by giving it a numeric value…
This paper presents the life experience of two African-Americans as slaves during the nineteenth century. Henry Bibb was the author of his own narrative, which he published in 1849 with the assistance of Lucius Matlack. The second source was the narrative of W. L. Bost, a slave from North Carolina. He was interviewed as many other enslaved African-Americans by the members of the Federal Writer’s Project around the 1930s. The purpose of these narratives was to describe to the public what it meant to be slave at that period of time. Both authors recalled the difficult and cruel conditions they faced during their journey as slaves. First, they were sold as merchandises on the market. Bost depicted that both men and women were chained and inappropriately…
In Exchanging Our Country Marks, Michael Gomez brings together various strands of the historical record in a stunning fusion that points the way to a definitive history of American Slavery. In this fusion of history, anthropology, and sociology, Gomez has made expert use of primary sources, including newspapers ads for runaway slaves in colonial America. Slave runaway accounts from newspapers are combined with personal diaries, church records, and former slave narratives to provide a firsthand account of the African and African-American experiences during the eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. With this mastery of sources, Gomez challenges many of the prevailing assumptions about slavery-- for example, that "the new condition of slavery superseded all others" (48)-- and he advances intriguing new speculations about the development of a collective African-American identity. In Gomez's words: "It is a study of their efforts to move from ethnicity to race as a basis for such an identity, a movement best understood when the impact of both internal and external forces upon social relations within this community is examined"(4).…