Narrative It was 2:23 on a Friday afternoon. Normally, at this time, I would have been missing my Computer Science lecture. But by a strange and, dare I call it convenient, twist of fate, the professor?s father died a couple days ago and the class was canceled. Not that it would have made a difference; I was prepared to skip the lecture and attend another given by Ira Berlin, a distinguished Mellon Senior Scholar, entitled Rethinking Slavery: 1800-1861. I walked through the entrance to 213 Gregory Hall, the room in which the lecture was to be given, and entered a completely empty room. To the best of my knowledge, the lecture was supposed to start at 2:30, which puzzled me. I figured that maybe it was rescheduled to a later time, and I?d stick around for a while until I got bored enough to leave. I seized the opportunity to choose my seat wisely. The room was divided into two major groups of seats, oriented in columns. Each column was seven seats wide and 10 seats deep. And there were a few seats lined up along the windows in the back as well, providing an approximate capacity of 150 persons, I estimated. My thought process was that I was here to observe the people more than the lecture. I also analyzed the fact that I don?t like history and concluded that if I sat in front, to see and hear the professor with greater ease, I would either bore myself or I wouldn?t understand. And since both of those were scenarios that eventually resulted in my narrative being terrible, I decided to try my luck in the back. Two minutes passed before two more entered the room. They were two men, young enough to be students. The first had white skin, and wore a T-Shirt, a cap, and a metallic watch similar... ... middle of paper ... ... made my way out. I had sat is that seat for over 2 hours and 10 minutes. My legs needed stretched, and I had a taste for a Big-Mac. What was the point of that lecture? For me, it was for a grade in Rhetoric 105, but I was probably a minority. It puzzled me that the lecture was open to the public, yet the average Joe, unless I have seriously overestimated my intelligence, would have no idea what Berlin was talking about. I go to lectures and classes in order to learn something, but I learned nothing here. Berlin spent a good 45 minutes bombarding me with new information, but he obviously assumed that the audience already knew things that I didn?t, because I comprehended none of the material. The only conclusion I could make was that, in order to understand what Berlin was saying, you had to already be familiar with the material that Berlin was covering.
This had much strength and few weaknesses. The author obtains most of his research from citizens of the Tuskegee community, library and other supporters. It was a great influence and was a contribution to my knowledge of Southern Politics as it depicts a vivid picture how society as a whole was viewed at that time. It showed me how whites kept blacks out of political offices, kept them from voting, and from enjoying their rights as humans.
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 ...
Walking into a lecture hall in Gregory Hall, I really didn’t know what to expect. I dressed as I would any other day; an Abercrombie shirt, a pair of frayed shorts and some casual sandals. I sat towards the front of the room and arrived slightly early to ensure a good seat. The name of this Brown v. Board education discussion was entitled, "Rethinking Slavery: 1800-1861,” and was arranged by the Mellon initiative.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. "Last of the Anti-Slavery Lectures." Ed. Baym, Nina. The Norton Anthology American Literature 6th ed., Vol A. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2003. 1207-1216
Following the enforcement of emancipation and the passage of the thirteenth amendment in 1864, African Americans found themselves in a contradictory position of both newfound freedom and great discrimination. The newly freed slaves of America faced a society that mere years ago, considered them as nothing greater than property. During this period, two leaders of monumentally opposed schools of thought emerged in the African American community. Booker T. Washington, and William Edward Burghardt (W.E.B) Du Bois. These two thinkers were some of the most influential educators, authors, and orators of the American 19th century, and were also frequent critics of the other's methods and ideas. This was due to a sharp disagreement on the ‘right’ strategy for improving the condition of the black community. While they might not have agreed on the means, both of these remarkable men at least shared that common goal, and their efforts are best demonstrated by looking to the long standing success of institutions they founded and worked ( the Tuskegee institute and Atlanta University respectively). That being said, the diametrically opposed philosophies they supported still stand today, and each 'camp' can be identified in many contemporary debates over discrimination, society, and how to end racial and class injustice.
The freedmen and women of the Ante-Bellum South had a thirst and hunger for knowledge known by few; often learning from another freedman who had just learned to read himself, freed...
John Brown could be many things: a heroic leader, a violent troublemaker, a deranged madman. We would not know which or why if historians did not know to look into Brown’s past in order to find the motives behind his radical actions. By divulging into the history of John Brown, historians are able to better understand how Brown forced the entire country to make the decision to support or go against slavery in the United States. Brown made America take a good, hard look at itself in order to both confront Brown’s own views and the internal cultural problems that have been building up throughout the decades.
When reading about the institution of slavery in the United States, it is easy to focus on life for the slaves on the plantations—the places where the millions of people purchased to serve as slaves in the United States lived, made families, and eventually died. Most of the information we seek is about what daily life was like for these people, and what went “wrong” in our country’s collective psyche that allowed us to normalize the practice of keeping human beings as property, no more or less valuable than the machines in the factories which bolstered industrialized economies at the time. Many of us want to find information that assuages our own personal feelings of discomfort or even guilt over the practice which kept Southern life moving
Russell B. Nye: Fettered Freedom: Civil Liberties and the Slavery Controversy, 1830-1860. East Lansing, Mich., 1949
Ira Berlin, Free at Last: A Documentary History of Slavery, Freedom, and the Civil War. p.3
Roark, J.L., Johnson, M.P., Cohen, P.C., Stage, S., Lawson, A., Hartmann, S.M. (2009). The american promise: A history of the united states (4th ed.), The New West and Free North 1840-1860, The slave south, 1820-1860, The house divided 1846-1861 (Vol. 1, pp. 279-354).
American History, though relatively short compared to the history of the rest of the world, is a topic taught during all levels of education. From elementary school to college, educators inundate students with the facts and theories regarding the transformation of this country from the dense wilderness of the 1600s to the bustling cities of today. While there are many events and time periods in this nation’s history that have shaped its culture and society, one of the most thoroughly studied eras in American History is that of slavery in the antebellum south. Every third grader through college senior has taken at least one class in which the teacher or professor throws out facts and figures about the horrors of slavery, or shows pictures of the squalor of slave quarters with the intention of shocking and upsetting the inhabitants of the classroom. Most students, however, are never taught the whole story. They never learn about the lives behind the numbers or the events behind the pictures. Additionally, most of the stories students do learn about are purely negative and typically about the life of a male field hand. Hardly any lectures focus on the few positive aspects of slave life or the characteristics of life as a female slave. In her novel, Kindred, Octavia Butler aims to reveal what life was actually like for slaves, especially female slaves, in the years preceding the Civil War. Though this book is classified as science fiction, Butler’s depiction of slavery is surprisingly accurate, however not entirely complete. Through the course of the novel, Butler investigates every aspect of female slave life from birth through death including the work expected of a bondwoman, treatment of slaves by white owners, marriage and child b...
...ave Exposes Slavery,” in Kennedy, David M. and Thomas A. Bailey. The American Spirit: United States History as Seen by Contemporaries. Vol. I: To 1877. Eleventh Edition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006.
Berlin, Ira. Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998.
Williams, Eric. Capitalism and Slavery. Richmond, Virginia: The University of North Carolina Press, 1944. Print.