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The Killing Floor
Frank Custer leaves his young family in rural Mississippi in pursuit of industrial employment in the northern “Promised Land” of Chicago, Illinois. Little did he know about the true extent of the journey he was about to embark on. Initially a move to secure work and improve upon the conditions which surrounded him and his family; Frank was about to change more in his life then just his economical status.
Immediately upon arriving in the bustling city, Frank and his close friend Thomas gravitate towards other working class African-Americans with similar backgrounds. Unable to read or write, the two men enlist the aide of their local YMCA in finding jobs at a local meat packing plant. Frank’s first encounters at the packinghouse set the tone for what is to entail. Racial tensions combined with aggressions concerning class associated positions boil just barely beneath the surface on the “killing floor.”
Conditions at the meatpacking plant are considerably less then favorable. The hours are long, the work is backbreaking, and the position in which he works does not pay very well. However, Frank’s compensation for these conditions are his relationships with the other men whom he lives near and works around. Spending his evenings playing cards and talking with the men introduces Frank to more then just a little relaxation; issues about politics, race relations, and especially the “white man’s union” dominate the colorful conversations. During this time I’m amazed at how Frank refuses to let himself get dragged into blindly believing the popular opinions in which his peers hold. He lives an honest life and pursues in finding the whole story beneath the surface of the current topics.
Frank consistently demonstrates that he will not settle with “keeping his place” as is expected of him. It appears as if the people he encounters from day to day are trying to keep segregation and the “Old South” alive. His peers along with members of the community are dissatisfied with the decisions and alliances with which Frank is making. They feel that the strides he is taking to improve himself i.e., saving money and purchasing a butcher knife, exhibiting real enthusiasm in learning the tricks of new trades, and joining the “white man’s union”, are unnecessary and a blatant demonstration of selling out to the white community.
Panzeri, Peter. 1995. Little Big Horn 1876: Custer's Last Stand. 8th Ed. New York, NY: Osprey Publishing.
Epple J. C. (1970). Custer’s battle of the Washita and A history of the Plains Indian Tribes
A number of ideas, suggestions, and points can be extracted from “Illinois Bus Ride,” a passage from Aldo Leopold’s collection of essays entitled A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There. However, there must be one main thesis that the author is attempting to get through to his audience. Leopold argues that we Americans have manipulated the landscape and ecosystem of the prairie so that it seems to be nothing more that a tool at our disposal. All aspects of what was once a beautiful, untamed frontier have been driven back further and further, until they were trapped in the ditches.
A major theme in the novel is exposing Wall Streets greed and brutality. The Story begins with Solomon Brothers chairman John Gutfreund challenging board member John Meriwether to a game of Liars Poker, a card game, with one million dollars at stake. Meriwether raises his bet to ten million, setting the scene for the brutish and greed filled novel. Once at Solomon, Lewis is first placed in the training program on the forty-first floor. The training program, as well as the rest of the floor, is mostly comprised of white men in perpetual competition with each other. In the front row of the program are the attentive, nerdier trainees while the back row is described as rowdy and mischievous. The forty first floor was ruled by “The Law of the Jungle” where the traders beat down on the trainees, the back row trainees always stirred up trouble and the only focus was money. Good, bad or evil didn’t matter as long as it made the firm, and the traders, rich. The trading floor at Solomon Brot...
...to Americans: if their prospects in the East were poor, then they could perhaps start over in the West as a farmer, rancher, or even miner. The frontier was also romanticized not only for its various opportunities but also for its greatly diverse landscape, seen in the work of different art schools, like the “Rocky Mountain School” and Hudson River School, and the literature of the Transcendentalists or those celebrating the cowboy. However, for all of this economic possibility and artistic growth, there was political turmoil that arose with the question of slavery in the West as seen with the Compromise of 1850 and Kansas-Nebraska Act. As Frederick Jackson Turner wrote in his paper “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” to the American Historical Association, “the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.”
In a country full of inequities and discrimination, numerous books were written to depict our unjust societies. One of the many books is an autobiography by Richard Wright. In Black Boy, Wright shares these many life-changing experiences he faced, which include the discovery of racism at a young age, the fights he put up against discrimination and hunger, and finally his decision to move Northward to a purported better society. Through these experiences, which eventually led him to success, Wright tells his readers the cause and effect of racism, and hunger. In a way, the novel The Tortilla Curtain by T.C. Boyle illustrates similar experiences.
When looking at the vast lands of Texas after the Civil War, many different people came to the lands in search for new opportunities and new wealth. Many were lured by the large area that Texas occupied for they wanted to become ranchers and cattle herders, of which there was great need for due to the large population of cows and horses. In this essay there are three different people with three different goals in the adventures on the frontier lands of Texas in its earliest days. Here we have a woman's story as she travels from Austin to Fort Davis as we see the first impressions of West Texas. Secondly, there is a very young African American who is trying his hand at being a horse rancher, which he learned from his father. Lastly we have a Mexican cowboy who tries to fight his way at being a ranch hand of a large ranching outfit.
Frank has an interesting view on the way man has progressed morally. I think that he says that we don’t really know our morals until we have them truly questioned. In this he implies that the people who have strong morals, not only will stay true to them, but will survive. An example of this is Randy Bragg. Randy, on the day of nuclear fallout, stopped on the side of the road to help a woman. This shows that he has respect for the human race as a whole. The opposite of this was Edgar Quisenbury. Edgar valued nothing but money. In the end, the absence of money caused Edgar to become an example of Darwin’s “Only the strong” theory as he shot himself.
The West: From Lewis and Clark and Wounded Knee: The Turbulent Story of the Settling of Frontier America.
“Quantie’s weak body shuddered from a blast of cold wind. Still, the proud wife of the Cherokee chief John Ross wrapped a woolen blanket around her shoulders and grabbed the reins.” Leading the final group of Cherokee Indians from their home lands, Chief John Ross thought of an old story that was told by the chiefs before him, of a place where the earth and sky met in the west, this was the place where death awaits. He could not help but fear that this place of death was where his beloved people were being taken after years of persecution and injustice at the hands of white Americans, the proud Indian people were being forced to vacate their lands, leaving behind their homes, businesses and almost everything they owned while traveling to an unknown place and an uncertain future. The Cherokee Indians suffered terrible indignities, sickness and death while being removed to the Indian territories west of the Mississippi, even though they maintained their culture and traditions, rebuilt their numbers and improved their living conditions by developing their own government, economy and social structure, they were never able to return to their previous greatness or escape the injustices of the American people.
In the first section of Frazier’s Black Bourgeoisie, “The World of Reality”, Frazier introduces his discussion of the interplay of class and race. He outlines the historical roots of the social place of most African-Americans in the U.S.A. and that of the black middle class. Frazier asserts the inconsequential place of middle class African-Americans and their resulting inferiority complex. He depicts the black middle class as living in a “no man’s land” in the dominant white culture of America.
The twentieth century was a time of tremendous change that commenced with WWI and the Great Depression. While WWI brought countless deaths, the Great Depression affected both urban and rural Americans. Yet, underlying these devastating events was the abuse of black Americans. Both whites and blacks had to cope with the major occurrences of the time, but blacks also faced strife from whites themselves. During the early part of the twentieth century, white Americans Russell Baker and Mildred Armstrong Kalish gained kindred attributes from their families, especially in comparison to that of Richard Wright, a black American. The key differences between the experience of whites and blacks can be found within the mentality of the family, the extent to which they were influenced by their families in their respective lives, and the shielding from the outside world, or lack thereof, by their families. Through the compelling narrations of these three authors, readers can glimpse into this racially divided world from the perspective of individuals who actually lived through it.
To understand Jackson’s book and why it was written, however, one must first fully comprehend the context of the time period it was published in and understand what was being done to and about Native Americans in the 19th century. From the Native American point of view, the frontier, which settlers viewed as an economic opportunity, was nothin...
Klos, S. (2013, March 11). George Armstrong Custer. Retrieved April 30, 2014, from George Armstrong
Although the work is 40 years old, “Custer Died for Your Sins” is still relevant and valuable in explaining the history and problems that Indians face in the United States. Deloria’s book reveals the White view of Indians as false compared to the reality of how Indians are in real life. The forceful intrusion of the U.S. Government and Christian missionaries have had the most oppressing and damaging affect on Indians. There is hope in Delorias words though. He believes that as more tribes become more politically active and capable, they will be able to become more economically independent for future generations. He feels much hope in the 1960’s generation of college age Indians returning to take ownership of their tribes problems and build a better future for their children.