...support themselves. According to “Slaves to Democracy, “ Often the only thing they had available to use was their own bodies, so if they were unable to pay, they were force to become slaves.” One can conclude that this is how the slaves family was being paid. The intistution of slavery allowed democracy to flourish. Athenian democracy required that citizens give up a numerous amount of their time . For example , “ Decisions concerning important and domestic matters were ultimately...
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...Indentured Laborers Indentured laborers were young people who after abolishment of the slave trade and passage into the New World, offered to work for an employer for a certain number of years. This led to the indentured servitude labor system which was widely spread in the 18th century in the British colonies in North America and elsewhere. The system was used particularly as a way for the poor freed in the British and German states to get passage to the American colonies. These young people would work for a fixed number of years then be free to work freely. The employers would buy the indentured from the sea captain who brought the people over. This was done due to the labor demand that existed in the plantations and other work areas especially after the abolishment of slave trade and slavery. Note: after the abolishment of slave trade and slavery, the slaves held is captive for labor were freed. However, this did not mean the plantains and did not need labor. Some of the indentured laborers worked as farmers, as helpers for farm wives, as apprenticed craftsmen, and as miners among a variety of other professions. Both sides, the employer and the indentured laborer, were required to meet their terms which were legally enforced by local American courts. In case of any runaways, those laborers were sought and brought back to their employers to continue as their contract required. In the 17th and 18th century, about half of the white immigrants to the American colonies were...
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...Naomi Chebii American Culture and Film 2nd Essay: 12 Years a Slave 28-09-2015 Ref: Analysis on 12 Years a Slave The film 12 Years a Slave tells the horrific true story of a free black man Solomon Northup, who was dragged, kidnapped and sold into slavery in 1850s America to suffer years of abuse in the Pre-Civil War South. From start to finish, basic facts about the time, the places, the people, and the practices of the day are incorporated, sometimes in excessive detail, into Northup’s story. He speaks with authority on all subjects of his enslavement, naming names and pointing out landmarks along the way. In doing so, he dares skeptics to refute his story, knowing that public record and common knowledge would defend it. The son of an emancipated slave, Northup was born free. He lived, worked, and married in New York, where his family resided. He was a multifaceted laborer and also an accomplished violin player. In 1841, aged 33, he was tricked into leaving his family behind his wife, and two young daughters, by two white con men, who offered him a job as a fiddler in a travelling circus. So he travelled with them to Washington, D.C., where they dragged him and sold him to a slave trader called Burch. Despite having papers showing he was a free man, Solomon was whipped and beaten and subjected into a brutal torture by his new owner. 12 Years a Slave serves as a timeless indictment of the practice of human slavery. As we saw from the film how Northup’s detailing the abuses...
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...and Cash Flow Analysis for Jaeden Industries Strayer University From all of the information I have read about industrial growth after the civil war, it had major ups and downs in American life. The United States experienced industrialization when machines replaced hand labor that was the main means of manufacturing. This change increased production of precious steel and iron. The road to have machines replace humans was not easy for all big business, African Americans, Immigrants and Farm Labor. The issue of war need not remain excluded, but can be forename significantly a role to our country’s trade and industry standing during that time, particularly when iron and steel was flourishing. The development of various raw material deposits, like coal, iron and oil that made massive contributions to the United States that transformed our economy and the beginning of shaping America. www.myrevolutionwar.com The United States became more industrialized and less agricultural. Iron was significant because it was essential in the making of weapons and tools, such as railroads and the rifles used during and after the Civil War”. http://voices.yahoo.com/industrialization-after-civil-war-modernizing-2582796.html. One important fact after the Civil War was the railroad and railroad expansion. The railroads played an astonishing part in industrialization, rebuilding efforts, and coast-to-coast financial growth. The jobs were low paid and abundant, but freed slaves would have a...
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...12 Years a Slave is a period drama/historical drama filled with complex characters, each with their own motivations and notions of morality. Although just about every major character is portrayed in a manner ripe for analysis three characters stand out in particular; Solomon Northrup, William Ford and Samuel Bass. The narrator, Solomon Northrup shall be the first character examined in this paper. The son of a freed slave, Northrup lived as a free man with his wife and two children in the North until 1841 when he was offered a job as a musician in Washington, D.C., once there he was tricked by his white companions who drugged him and sold him into slavery. Over the course of the next twelve years Solomon was subjected to unimaginable cruelty and stripped of not only his name but his very humanity. Solomon valued his freedom greatly, more than any...
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...Critical Analysis of Westward Expansion “Go west, young man”. It was the phrase of the 19th Century advocating for Manifest Destiny. Manifest Destiny was the idea that settlers were destined to expand to the west. “Americans not only considered Westward expansion a desirable objective but an endowment from God through which they could take their democratic republicanism across North America (Dobson, 2013). There were many factors that urged westward expansion, but the most common reasons for settlers were for the social environment, the natural environment, and the economic opportunities. The social environment of the west included the idea of freedom and the idea of Native American interaction. The natural environment was thriving in the west as gold and other precious minerals were discovered throughout westward expansion. The economic opportunities in the west were almost endless. As settlers took adapted Manifest Destiny, opportunist and businessmen took it towards their advantage...
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...nation. In fact, many were built on the back of slave labor, whether the slaves were indigenous peoples or imported bodies. While many nations have undertaken measures to overcome racial disparity, others have encouraged racial democracy. Brazil, a modern and industrialized nation, suffers from racial discrimination based on their position in the world economy and built on the ideology of the past. History Brazil’s history is rife with racism and slavery, dating back to its discovery by Pedro Alveres Cabral in 1500. Brazil was originally settled with the intention of harvesting Brazilwood. However, over time the profits from that were supplanted by sugar, which soon became the major export (Phillips 117). Over a short period of time, Brazil became the leading producer of sugar in the Atlantic world. The production of all these exports meant cheap labor was needed. During this time, the Portuguese were sending between 4,000 and 5,000 slaves per year to Brazil from Angola and West Africa; by the 18th century, one million slaves had been imported (117). The continually shifting landscape meant that Brazil’s exports continued to shift. By the time the 19th century came around, Brazil’s major export was coffee as sugar production had shifted to the Caribbean Islands. The continued influx of European slaves and citizens resulted in an uneven population. European labor was generally more skilled and slowly began to overtake slave labor. Around this same time, the abolition...
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... He argues that because, “race relations have changed so much in recent years...the life chances of individual blacks have more to do with their economic class position than their daytoday encounters with whites.” He believes that through programs like affirmative action, black people have been freed from constructs of race and now face discrimination based solely on class.In his delineation of race relations, Wilson states that different systems of production have imposed constraints on the way racial groups interact. So thus, when examining a production system and its lasting impacts, we must begin with its lifeblood, labor. According to Wilson, in a nonmanufacturing, or “plantation economy”, the labor market is controlled by a small aristocracy. In the South, this aristocracy controlled all social and political power. Whites who did not own slaves did not yield much influence. The primary goal of the aristocracy was to maintain a cheap labor supply, and as life expectancy increased, slave labor proved to be the best investment. This was in part beneficial to the poor white man because he did not have to compete with black men for employment. Once slaves acquired more freedom, and eventual emancipation, tension surfaced along racial lines. This tension only escalated as farming and lowerskilled occupations became mechanized, thus leading blacks to migrate to cities and then to the North. In an attempt to secure their dominance, poor...
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...of Black Americans. They have their own unique history that differs from people of different skin colors who moved to the North American continent. Black Americans were originally from Africa and brought to the North American continent as slaves. The most prominent distinctive factor is their dark skin color. In 2015 the black population in America was 46.3 million people, which is about 14.4 percent of the U.S. population. As stated earlier, they originated from Africa and were transported to North America as slaves. They were freed from that lifestyle with the help of the emancipation proclamation that was made in 1862. Since they were separate for a long time, they developed their own cultural traditions,...
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... History books mainly reflect the involvement of men. The abolitionists (Clarkson and Wilberforce), the Slave traders (Canot) and the enslaved (Equaino). In portrayal of enslaved people, men appear more frequently. In the movie Amistad it is told from the point of view of Cinque; in the TV series Roots it follows Kunta Kinte. This male dominated history fails to acknowledge, belittles and devalues the role of women at all levels of slavery. What about the female slave traders, slave owners, enslaved females, female rebels and abolitionists? Are they really invisible? Verene Shepherd, in Women in Caribbean History states that up until the 1970s Caribbean books neglected women because early historians looked at colonisation, government, religion, trade and war fare, activities men were more involved in. Also some historians felt that women’s issues did not merit inclusion and where women could have been included, such as slave uprisings, their contributions were ignored. Shepherd believes changes occurred with the influence of women’s groups who tried to correct the gender neutral or male biased history. There was also a shift into social history, looking at the non elite and into topics such as family life. Books started to look at women’s social and political activities. Unfortunately there was a lack of first hand accounts from the period of the transatlantic slave trade – accounts written by men at the time either ignored women or perpetuated the myth of female inferiority...
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...classic that is part of the curriculum in high schools throughout the United States. Huck Finn, as one should easily guess, is the protagonist of the entire book. Huck faces many challenges throughout, from his faked death to get away from a lonely life and abusive father, to his internal struggle of turning Jim in. And because of its historical accuracy and moral actuality, it should be a continued required reading in high school curriculums. The setting of Huck Finn is before the Civil war, roughly 1835-1845, when slavery was still legal in the recently independent United States. Any slave not freed by his owner was hunted down and white domination was frequently practiced and seen. When Huck faked his death towards the beginning, was also when Jim, the Widow’s slave, fled. Whites and...
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...Chapter 1 Summary The narrator speaks of his grandparents, freed slaves who, after the Civil War, believed that they were separate but equal—that they had achieved equality with whites despite segregation. The narrator’s grandfather lived a meek and quiet life after being freed. On his deathbed, however, he spoke bitterly to the narrator’s father, comparing the lives of black Americans to warfare and noting that he himself felt like a traitor. He counseled the narrator’s father to undermine the whites with “yeses” and “grins” and advised his family to “agree ’em to death and destruction.” Now the narrator too lives meekly; he too receives praise from the white members of his town. His grandfather’s words haunt him, for the old man deemed such meekness to be treachery. The narrator recalls delivering the class speech at his high school graduation. The speech urges humility and submission as key to the advancement of black Americans. It proves such a success that the town arranges to have him deliver it at a gathering of the community’s leading white citizens. The narrator arrives and receives instructions to take part in the “battle royal” that figures as part of the evening’s entertainment. The narrator and some of his classmates (who are black) don boxing gloves and enter the ring. A naked, blonde, white woman with an American flag painted on her stomach parades about; some of the white men demand that the black boys look at her and others threaten them if they don’t...
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...bring the real and the fraudulent Wilks brothers to a tavern for examination. The frauds draw suspicion when they fail to produce the $6,000 from the Wilks inheritance. A lawyer friend of the deceased then asks the duke, the dauphin, and the real Harvey to sign a piece of paper. When the lawyer compares the writing samples to letters he has from the real Harvey, the frauds are exposed. The dauphin, however, refuses to give up and claims that the duke is playing a joke on everyone by disguising his handwriting. Because the real William serves as scribe for the real Harvey and cannot write due to his broken arm, the crowd cannot prove that the real Wilkses are indeed who they say they are. To put an end to the situation, the real Harvey declares he knows of a tattoo on his brother’s chest, asking the undertaker who dressed the body to back him up. But after the dauphin and Harvey each offer a different version of the tattoo’s appearance, the undertaker surprises everyone by telling the crowd he saw no tattoo. The mob cries out for the blood of all four men, but the lawyer instead sends them out to exhume the body and check for the tattoo themselves. The mob carries the four Wilks claimants and Huck with them. The mob is in an uproar when the $6,000 in gold is discovered in the coffin. In the excitement, Huck escapes. Passing the Wilks house, he notices a light in the upstairs window and thinks of Mary Jane. Huck steals a canoe and makes his way to the raft, and he and Jim shove...
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...The speaker of this poem is a small boy who was sold into the chimney-sweeping business when his mother died. He recounts the story of a fellow chimney sweeper, Tom Dacre, who cried when his hair was shaved to prevent vermin and soot from infesting it. The speaker comforts Tom, who falls asleep and has a dream or vision of several chimney sweepers all locked in black coffins. An angel arrives with a special key that opens the locks on the coffins and sets the children free. The newly freed children run through a green field and wash themselves in a river, coming out clean and white in the bright sun. The angel tells Tom that if he is a good boy, he will have this paradise for his own. When Tom awakens, he and the speaker gather their tools and head out to work, somewhat comforted that their lives will one day improve. Analysis “The Chimney Sweeper” comprises six quatrains, each following the AABB rhyme scheme, with two rhyming couplets per quatrain. The first stanza introduces the speaker, a young boy who has been forced by circumstances into the hazardous occupation of chimney sweeper. The second stanza introduces Tom Dacre, a fellow chimney sweep who acts as a foil to the speaker. Tom is upset about his lot in life, so the speaker comforts him until he falls asleep. The next three stanzas recount Tom Dacre's somewhat apocalyptic dream of the chimney sweepers’ “heaven.” However, the final stanza finds Tom waking up the following morning, with him and the speaker still trapped...
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...A multitude of people of this century have their own definitions of an unsung hero. The true definition is one whose heroic actions, qualities, or achievements live on with acute, significant recognition. Susan B. Anthony is appropriate example of an unsung hero. Anthony was born on February 15, 1820, and died on March 13, 1906. She was the second out of seven children. Anthony was raised in a quaker household that promoted women's rights.Lastly she devoted her life to the rights of others. One can argue that Susan B. Anthony is a hero because she is determined, courageous, and altruistic due to her life experiences. Susan’s selflessness helped to further solidify activism in Slave/Women’s rights. From an early age, she was raised to respect...
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