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To Kill A Mockingbird Influences

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Historical Influences in To Kill a Mockingbird

The Great Depression was a “time of devastation and uncertainty”, also it was a time “bread lines and debt” in the American history (McCabe 12). After the stock market crashed in 1929 there was a height during the time that “ the unemployment rate had reached nearly 25 percent” (McCabe 12). In To kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee had many historical influences several from real life events. Harper Lee drew her influences from Jim Crow laws, mob mentality, and Scottsboro trials.
The first influence on Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird is the Jim Crow laws. The Jim Crow laws are a racial caste system. Jim Crow are a bunch of harsh against Blacks laws (Pilgrim). The Whites did these actions because they disliked any benefit made Blacks including economic and political (Pilgrim). If the Blacks are to disobey then the punishments could be a lynching (Pilgrim). The Jim Crow laws are seen in To Kill a Mockingbird. One of the laws that you could see was “ Never assert or even intimate that …show more content…
Mob mentality is a behavior in which people in a large group think like one (Smith). For example Molly Edmonds says, when in a large group it just takes one person to rile it up into a mob. During the mob people lose their individuality and feel invisible, therefore they think they are not responsible (Edmonds). Mob mentality is detected in To Kill a Mockingbird. A behavior of mob mentality is that it only takes one person to change the thinking of the group. In the book there is the scene in which Scout is taking to Mr. Cunningham and make him realizes what they are doing. After that the tone of the group depletes and every follows Mr. Cunningham home. So as soon as someone can whip up a mob it can be changed by anyone including little girls (Lee 206). Mob mentality has affected the book To Kill a Mockingbird, and so has the racism that is seen in the Scottsboro

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