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...
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...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.
In the beginning of the book, William Moraley starts by talking about what it was like to be a part of the upper class in England. His father had money and he thought he was going to inherit it someday rather than working for it. He was born in London in 1699 and was trained in law but saw his legal education interrupted by a financial crisis. His family moved to Newcastle where he was apprenticed to his father, a watchmaker. However, when his father died, things changed because nothing was willed to him by his father. His mother remarried and refused to give him any of the money that he was supposed to inherit. He had limited resources and ran into debt rather than getting imprisoned he made a plan to set out to America to become an indenture servant for four years as a clock maker. For most, signing an indenture and leaving one’s home and family was a last resort. Like William Moraley, many were influenced by rough circumstances. “I might have expected a better fate than to be forc’d to leave my Native country; But adverse fortunes is become familiar to me, by a series of misfortunes...” (50, 52). Indentured servants from England arrived in North America by ship. The passage was long and arduous; most ships made many stops alo...
In conclusion to all these articles, Mary Rowlandson and John Smith set the perception for Native Americans due to their Captivity Narratives. Puritans already had an evil view of Indians and these stories adding to their belief of how they were in cahoots with the Devil.
In her account, A Narrative of the Captivity and Restauration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, Rowlandson
Rowlandson watches as her family members are killed and kidnapped by Indians. At the beginning of her story she says she used to think she would rather be killed than taken captive by Indians, but when the time comes, she changes her mind and is taken by the “ravenous beasts,” (238). Rowlandson has never been around Indians. She knows only what she has been told about Indians, which is to fear and hate them, because they are savages. She feels she is being taken from civilization into the wilderness.
In a lively account filled that is with personal accounts and the voices of people that were in the past left out of the historical armament, Ronald Takaki proffers us a new perspective of America’s envisioned past. Mr. Takaki confronts and disputes the Anglo-centric historical point of view. This dispute and confrontation is started in the within the seventeenth-century arrival of the colonists from England as witnessed by the Powhatan Indians of Virginia and the Wamapanoag Indians from the Massachusetts area. From there, Mr. Takaki turns our attention to several different cultures and how they had been affected by North America. The English colonists had brought the African people with force to the Atlantic coasts of America. The Irish women that sought to facilitate their need to work in factory settings and maids for our towns. The Chinese who migrated with ideas of a golden mountain and the Japanese who came and labored in the cane fields of Hawaii and on the farms of California. The Jewish people that fled from shtetls of Russia and created new urban communities here. The Latinos who crossed the border had come in search of the mythic and fabulous life El Norte.
“The Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson”, arguably the most famous captivity tale of the American Indian-English genre, is considered a common illustration of the thematic style and purpose of the English captivity narrative. As “the captivity genre leant itself to nationalist agendas” (Snader 66), Rowlandson’s narrative seems to echo other captivity narratives in its bias in favor of English colonial power. Rowlandson’s tale is easy propaganda; her depiction of Native American brutality and violence in the mid-1600s is eloquent and moving, and her writing is infused with rich imagery and apt testimony that defines her religious interpretation of the thirteen-week captivity. Yet can a more comprehensive understanding of Rowlandson’s relationship to Indians exist in a closer reading of her narrative? As “captivity materials . . . are notorious for blending the real and the highly fictive” (Namias 23), can we infer the real colonial relationships of this captivity in applying a modern understanding of economic, political and cultural transformations of American Indians?
One struggle that indentured servants faced was adjusting to the unfamiliar physical conditions they met upon arriving in America. William Moraley, an indentured servant in Burlington, wrote a memoir about his many experiences throughout his servitude. One thing he remembered was the way civil leaders ignored his complaints against his master regarding the contract he signed in England. Moraley recalled, “The condition of bought servants is very hard, notwithstanding their indentures were made in England, wherein it is expressly stipulated, that they shall have, at thei...
Rowlandson, Mary. “A Narrative of the Captivity and Restauration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson." The Heath Anthology of American Literature. Ed. Paul Lauter. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1983. 343-366.
The argument of slavery portrayed as a “slow poison” can be seen throughout the three narratives that are the basis for this paper. The “slow poison” being that slavery is a slow poison that effects not only blacks and whites but everyone around and subjected to slavery. The most obvious people that are effected by slavery are the slaves but there are many examples of whites and their families being effected by slavery also. The Epps family from Twelve Years a Slave is a good example of how slavery can tear apart a family. Mr. and Mrs. Epps were happily married until their marriage became challenged by Mr. Epp’s liking to a slave girl named Patsey. Mrs. Epps became jealous over their relationship and over time their marriage became broken and Mr. Epps became an alcoholic to deal with his marriage and his near constant whipping of his slaves. Mrs. Epp’s jealousy and hatred for Patsey c...
Settling into the “New World” was a burden on not only the Pilgrims, but on the adapting Natives as well. In “The Mayflower and the Pilgrims’ New World,” Nathaniel Philbrick writes about much of the Pilgrims history arguing that the basic story does not illustrate the complexity of the relationship between the Native Americans and the Pilgrims. Although, the Pilgrims struggled in the beginning, much of the burden was lifted by the help of the Natives. However, the breaking of the alliance, that aided the Pilgrims in their first years, causes me to point fingers towards the Pilgrims. The Pilgrims’ disrespectful, threatening, and harsh manner puts them to blame for the break down on the good relations between the Natives and the Pilgrims.
In Frethorne's letter home to his parents, he draws a revealing picture of the deteriorating relations between the English settlers and the Indians that is consistent with the history of Jamestown in the period between the two attacks on the colony by the Powhatan chief Openchancanough. Both attacks were in retaliation for specific incidents of murder and depredation on the part of the English, but were responses, more generally, to English expansion into native lands and the resulting erosion of native life ways. The writer's candor about his own experience is compelling. He used vivid details to describe his discontent, deprivation, and discomfort. The small specifics of daily life (quantities and kinds of food, items of clothing, catalogs of implements) and the data of survival and death (lists of deceased colonists, trade and barter statistics, numerical estimates of enemy Indians and their military strength, itemized accounts of provisions, and rations...
Both Douglass and Rowlandson express great contempt for the Non Christian that surround them. Rowlandson uses these words to describe the Indians, “Barbarous creatures,” “murderous wretches,” “heathens,” “ravenous beasts,” and even “hell-hounds,” This fear and revulsion she expressed during captivity, the punishments and retributions, darkness and light, good and evil. The usage of scripture throughout the narrative is a source of strength and solace for Rowlandson (Colley).
The Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson is a personal account, written by Mary Rowlandson in 1682, of what life in captivity was like. Her narrative of her captivity by Indians became popular in both American and English literature. Mary Rowlandson basically lost everything by an Indian attack on her town Lancaster, Massachusetts in 1675; where she is then held prisoner and spends eleven weeks with the Wampanoag Indians as they travel to safety. What made this piece so popular in both England and America was not only because of the great narrative skill used be Mary Rowlandson, but also the intriguing personality shown by the complicated character who has a struggle in recognizing her identity. The reoccurring idea of food and the word remove, used as metaphors throughout the narrative, could be observed to lead to Mary Rowlandson’s repression of anger, depression, and realization of change throughout her journey and more so at the end of it.
As a typical Puritan writer would, Rowlandson chose to write about God, religious beliefs, and her hardships. After the death of her child Rowlandson thanked God for, "preserving me". This statement clearly reveals her faith in fate and God's will. In the narrative she also describes her daily life as a capture. Rowlandson writes that she was "calling for my pay," after she made a shirt for one of the Indians. After that, she was called again to perform the same task and was paid a knife.
Traditions are practices/beliefs that are passed down from generation to generation. In traditional African societies, a kinship ties people through birth or marriage. There are two kinds of relationships in customary African tradition; those bound by blood, which are called consanguine, and those constructed by marriage, called affilial. There are four key descents that determine inheritance and marriage. However, the most common descent is patrilineal, which traces ancestry through one's father. While in America, we are vary tolerant of tracing our descent from both parents.