African American Colonial Ways of Life

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African American Colonial Ways of Life
Introduction:
When the settlement of the new world began, conflict arose among European, African and Native American Cultures, all of these groups faced hardships. Europeans and African Americans did not have any survival skills and soon found that trading with the indians was their means for survival and profit. For the Native Americans this interaction presented them to many diseases that the colonists had brought over from England, these diseases vastly decreased the Native American population. I will analyze the similarities and differences of the sources when it comes to depicting such hardships faced by the groups of people mentioned above but also individuals (women, kids, slaves, and indentured servants). I will also consider the attitudes that the writers exhibit towards the social issues, race, racism, and slavery of the early colonies, focusing on the colonial ways of life of all the settlers.
Analysis:
For every source to analyze: How, Why and to what effect.
From A Captivity Narrative, The author, Mary Rowlandson, describes in detail how she lived the events of 1676. During this time period King Phillip's war was being fought and bands of indians were attacking frontier settlements in Lancaster, Massachusetts. The author was one of the captives, until she was ransomed with money raised by the women of Boston. Early in the beginning of the narrative Rowlandson refers to the indians as “Barbarous creatures.” Her description of the indians being savagely cruel is accurate although later we see that they stopped being as cruel as in the beginning of the captivity. One of her children underwent the suffering close to her, and died in her arms during this captivity. I found odd how...

... middle of paper ...

...ws his place in such society, as he refers to his employer as his “master.” Throughout the piece Moraley compares America to Great Britain. Moraley also goes into depth to compare and contrast indentured servitude to slavery.
The ads for runaways slaves, were a way for masters to try and bring back a runaway slave. From the source, we can gather that successful runaways were uncommon, many were soon caught or voluntarily returned to their masters. From some of the ads it is obvious that the slaves were valuable to their owner's seeing as one of the rewards was thirty pounds, and earlier in Rowlandson's narrative she said that her husband would be willing to pay twenty pounds.
Conclusion:

Works Cited

Shi, David E., and Holly A. Mayer. "Colonial Ways Of Life ." In For the record: A Documentary History of America.. 5th ed. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2013. 44-81.

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