History Unchained

Faith Wright
HIST111
Match 23, 2015

Slavery was brought to North America in 1619 to aid in the production of tobacco in Jamestown, VA. The invention of the cotton gin in 1793 centralized the importance of slavery. By the 19th century, slavery spread westward which then resulted in the American Civil War. Between 1774 and 1804 all of the northern states outlawed slavery. Congress outlawed slavery completely in 1808, but then the slave trade began to flourish in the south. By the time of 1860 slavery had reached four million people, with half residing in the south.

There have been movies that have told the lives of slavery in America such as Quentin Tarantino's "Django Unchained" and Steven Spielberg's "Lincoln". Both directors depict the life of slavery in the 18th century by telling it through the eyes of a freed slave and our 16th president, Abraham Lincoln. The quality of those films raises questions on if a certain type of person has to be qualified enough to talk about slavery. The eyebrows of American people were reaised when the Disney Corporation sought to build a park based off of the slavery experience and call it "Disney America." The park would have been used to exhibit the lives and struggles of African Americans throughout slavery. However, one writer, William Styron, felt that unlike the holocaust, slavery could never be re-enacted through a museum. The repercussions of slavery were far to great to show in an exhibit. Styron expressed, "the unlimited permutations of human emotions and relationships" surrounding slavery, could never be recreated to be in a theme park. Styron expressed through his work the trials and tribulations that his grandmother shared with him about the depths of slavery as a young girl. To Styron the difficult part was not portraying history, but portraying the incomplete road to freedom that a lot