Excavating an African Burial Ground: Lack of Funding Could Mean Loss of Information Forever
As children growing up in the United States, educated through our public schools, we learned about the institution of slavery, which was an integral part of life in our country for nearly 300 years. We do not usually question the historical facts we learned about slavery or ask how we know so much about the history of these people (the enslaved Africans in America) who left behind so little written record. In the classroom, archeologists do not receive much credit, but it is largely through their work and research that we have been able to learn about “America’s diverse ethnic heritage” (Singleton 155). In the 1960’s, excavations of slave cabins inspired a new area of research. Today’s field of African-American Archaeology was born from these first digs, only three decades ago. Archaeologists carefully and skillfully collect artifacts, which are “tangible material remains and by-products of behavior” (Singleton 156). Through historical and ethnographic analysis and interpretation, archeologists are able to put together pieces of the daily lives and living conditions of the first African-Americans.
One such African-American archaeological dig, called the African Burial Ground Project, is currently taking place in New York City. In 1991, the construction crew for a new, $276 million federal office building stumbled across the skeletons of what are now known to be early African slaves. The United States General Services Administration (GSA), the government agency that handles the funding and administration of all federal property, began further exploration of the site. Today we know that this “plot of land is just a sliver of the 18th ...
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...es 21 Mar. 1999: Sec. 14, pg. 6.
Gaines, Patrice. “Bones of Forebears; Howard U. Study Stirs Ghanaian Chiefs to Honor Ages-Old Link to U.S. Blacks.” The Washington Post 3 Aug. 1995: B01.
LaFee, Scott. “Grave Injustice; Archaeologists are Beginning to Unearth the Buried, Tragic Secrets of America’s First Slaves.” The San Diego Union-Tribune 15 Sep. 1999: E-1.
“New Chief of African Burial Ground Project.” The New York Beacon 16 June 1999: 12.
Satchell, Michael. “Only Remember Us.” U.S. News & World Report 28 July 1997: 51-52.
Singleton, Theresa A. “The Archaeology of Slave Life.” Before Freedom Came: African-American Life I the Antebellum South. Ed. Edward D.C. Campbell, Jr. and Kym S. Rice. Charlottesville: The University Press of Virginia, 1991. 155-175.
Staples, Brent. “Manhattan’s African Dead.” Editorial. The New York Times 22 May 1995: A14.
African American slavery was used to grow economies in the North and South before the Civil War. Although the North and South had different styles of slavery, they still had an owner/slave relationship that remained demeaning when a person owns a person. Narratives of interviews with Charlie Smith and Fountain Hughes are discussed as the slaves share their memories of their life as a slave.
Writing around the same time period as Phillips, though from the obverse vantage, was Richard Wright. Wright’s essay, “The Inheritors of Slavery,” was not presented at the American Historical Society’s annual meeting. His piece is not festooned with foot-notes or carefully sourced. It was written only about a decade after Phillips’s, and meant to be published as a complement to a series of Farm Credit Administration photographs of black Americans. Wright was not an academic writing for an audience of his peers; he was a novelist acceding to a request from a publisher. His essay is naturally of a more literary bent than Phillips’s, and, because he was a black man writing ...
When one thinks of slavery, they may consider chains holding captives, beaten into submission, and forced to work indefinitely for no money. The other thing that often comes to mind? Stereotypical African slaves, shipped to America in the seventeenth century. The kind of slavery that was outlawed by the 18th amendment, nearly a century and a half ago. As author of Modern Slavery: The Secret World of 27 Million People, Kevin Bales, states, the stereotypes surrounding slavery often confuse and blur the reality of slavery. Although slavery surely consists of physical chains, beatings, and forced labor, there is much more depth to the issue, making slavery much more complex today than ever before.
Slavery was an intrinsic part of North American history from the founding of the Jamestown colony in 1607 to the legal abolition of servitude in 1865. But our nation continues to grapple with the economic, political, social, and cultural impact of that peculiar institution to this day. Over seventy years after the end of the Civil War, the WPA Federal Writer’s Project sought to understand the impact which slavery had on the lives of African Americans who once lived under its yoke. In 1936-38, the Writer’s Project sent out-of-work writers to seventeen states to record the personal narratives of former slaves; the result was an outpouring of nearly 3,000 stories from men and women who were born into bondage and released into uncertain freedom early in their lives. The relatively small collection of 26 narratives gathered in Mississippi in these years reveals the complexities of African American life before and after emancipation. While this sample should not be read as indicative of the memory and experience of former slaves at large, it does raise important questions about the meaning of freedom, the failures of Reconstruction, and the perceived quality of life for blacks during and after slavery. A careful reading of the Mississippi narratives reveals nostalgia for the security and stability of slavery and an overwhelming dissatisfaction with the failed promises of freedom: “turned … loose, … lak a passel o’ cattle,” former slaves struggled to realize the concrete benefits of an abstract freedom and longed for better days;[1] This weary nostalgia must be recognized not as a rejection of freedom, but as a denunciation of the powers, which declared them fr...
Fred West addresses the fact of Iago misrepresentation, “It is not sufficient to simply drape Iago in allegorical trappings and proclaim him Mister Evil or a Machiavel or a Vice. Such a limited view of Iago is an injustice to the complexity of his character, since Shakespeare’s studies in personality are acclaimed by psychologists for their accuracy and profundity” (27). West seems to be reminding us that just seeing Iago as the representation of evil within the play of “Othello” is the wrong way to paint him. Iago is a man wronged by Othello in the fact that he was not chosen to be Othello’s lieutenant, which is what put the dastardly idea into Iago’s head to trick them all and bring them to their knees. As Iago tells Roderigo within the first act and scene of “Othello”,
In “The View from the Bottom Rail”, the authors, James Davidson and Mark Lytle, proposed, “For several reasons, that debased position has made it unusually difficult for historians to recover the freedman’s point of view.” Within the article, Davidson and Lytle cycled through different aspects as to why it is hard for historians to determine the “view from the bottom rail”. They questioned the validity of many sources that, if accurate, would have contained the perspective of an ex-slave. These sources included both white and black testimony.
Phillips' book is an attempt to provide an overview of the practice and institutions of slavery in the Americas from its beginnings to the 19th century. Writing in 1918, Phillips hoped to provide an account of slavery based upon historical evidence and modern methods of research, rather than ideological motivations. He drew his evidence from the plantation records and letters of slave owners; contemporary travel accounts; court records and legal documents; newspaper articles; and in some instances, the recordings of slaves themselves, rather than what he viewed as more biased sources such as abolitionist writings. While this approach was not systematic and led him to base many of his conclusions upon subjective evidence and an over reliance upon particular chroniclers of the South, the bulk of his findings are supported by subsequent scholarship.
In From Slavery to Freedom (2007), it was said that “the transition from slavery to freedom represents one of the major themes in the history of African Diaspora in the Americas” (para. 1). African American history plays an important role in American history not only because the Civil Rights Movement, but because of the strength and courage of Afro-Americans struggling to live a good life in America. Afro-Americans have been present in this country since the early 1600’s, and have been making history since. We as Americans have studied American history all throughout school, and took one Month out of the year to studied African American history. Of course we learn some things about the important people and events in African American history, but some of the most important things remain untold which will take more than a month to learn about.
To understand the desperation of wanting to obtain freedom at any cost, it is necessary to take a look into what the conditions and lives were like of slaves. It is no secret that African-American slaves received cruel and inhumane treatment. Although she wrote of the horrific afflictions experienced by slaves, Linda Brent said, “No pen can give adequate description of the all-pervading corruption produced by slavery." The life of a slave was never a satisfactory one, but it all depended on the plantation that one lived on and the mast...
The core principle of history is primary factor of African-American Studies. History is the struggle and record of humans in the process of humanizing the world i.e. shaping it in their own image and interests (Karenga, 70). By studying history in African-American Studies, history is allowed to be reconstructed. Reconstruction is vital, for over time, African-American history has been misleading. Similarly, the reconstruction of African-American history demands intervention not only in the academic process to rede...
Many African American men and women have been characterized as a group of significant individuals who help to exemplify the importance of the black community. They have illustrated their optimistic views and aspects in a various amount of ways contributing to the reconstruction of African Americans with desire and integrity. Though many allegations may have derived against a large amount of these individuals, Crystal Bird Fauset, Jacob Lawrence, and Mary Lucinda Dawson opportunistic actions conveys their demonstration to improve not only themselves but also their ancestors too. Throughout their marvelous journeys, they intend to garnish economic, political, and social conditions with dignity and devotion while witnessing the rise of African Americans. The objective of this research paper is to demonstrate the lives of a selected group of African American people and their attributions to the black community.
Northup, Solomon, Sue L. Eakin, and Joseph Logsdon. Twelve years a slave. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1968. Print.
Parliament, the supreme law-making body, has an unrestricted legislative power, and the laws it passes cannot be set aside by the courts. The role of judges, in relation to laws enacted by Parliament, is to interpret and apply them, rather than to pass judgment on whether they are good or bad laws. However, evidence has shown that they have a tendency to deviate from their ‘real roles’ and instead formulate laws on their own terms. Thus the real role of a judge in any legal system continues to be a phenomenon questioned by many. We must consider whether they are “authoritarian law-makers, or if their profession makes them mere declarers of the law” . In this essay, I will argue the ways that judges do make law as well as discussing the contrary.
United Kingdom is a country with a distinctive set of legal system. It is fairly different from other countries having civil law based legal systems. The legal system in the United Kingdom consists of various sources of law, where other civil law based countries rely only on a written set of law. European influences on the English Legal System came much later in near decades. This essay will aim to examine the development of the English Legal System by reviewing applications of various sources of law in the English Legal System furthermore to discuss the recent European influences on the law of England.
Firstly in this report, I will be giving the different definitions of rule of law by different philosophers; secondly, I will be applying the rule of law to the English Legal system and thirdly I will be explaining separation of powers with a focus on the impartial judiciary. Finally, I will be using cases to support every detailed point given.