The Civil War took place from 1861-1865 and it was fought between the Union and the Southern Confederate States. The Confederate Army fought for their right to own slaves while the Union fought to abolish all slavery. In the book Confederate Reckoning by Stephanie McCurry, she explains things that take place during the war but are not apart of the battle. McCurry thoroughly explains African slaves and white women during the civil war and their political state of mind and political consequences of their actions and behavior. The Confederate government had to deal with both slaves and white women because of their own choice to fight against the Union in the Civil War.…
James Gregory’s, American Exodus, is a book that focuses on Dust Bowl migration to California, and their economic and social struggles in California. The book first starts off setting up the historical context of the Dust Bowl and the migrants with statistics, maps, pictures, and migrant backgrounds in the introduction. The overall book reads like a history textbook on the Dust Bowl, which is divided into two parts instead of narrative based on one family like The Grapes of Wrath. The first part of the book is organized chronologically, focusing on the resettlement of the Dust Bowlers, and the second part is done thematically and focuses on Okie culture. Gregory’s approach successfully showed the clash of cultures and social struggles the migrants faced in California accurately without having to caricaturize the migrants.…
Imagine enjoying the comforts of one's home; simply dining with the family protected by any and every outside discomfort. Then imagine deciding to leave this behind in efforts to defend a nation that great patriotic feelings have been developed towards.. Author and professor, James M. McCaffrey, wrote the well researched book Army of Manifest Destiny: The American Soldier in the Mexican War, 1846–1848 to portray the war in the “viewpoint of the common soldiers’ experience” (xii). Most authors simply write regarding where the battles took place and who was in charge. McCaffrey, however, zooms in to what actually went on as having a life of a soldier.…
In Nathaniel Philbrick’s narrative Mayflower, he tells the story of the struggle and hardships of a group of people who cross the ocean to find personal and religious freedom in a new land. These people are the Pilgrims, but they are much different from the stereotypical pilgrims that we think of today. Philbrick tells the story of the Pilgrims struggle to survive in their first few months, their first meetings with and the rise and eventual fall of the alliance between the Native Americans and the Pilgrims. I found the book to be very interesting when I read it, and though it was boring or slow at times, it provided a great deal of intriguing information that I never knew before about the story of the Pilgrims and their long, treacherous…
After reading Drew Faust’s book James Henry Hammond and the Old South, I agree that is a far more than suitable text upon which to end the semester. It is does indeed, bring together all of the themes and ideas we have discussed so far in this class. James Henry Hammond lived an interesting lifestyle and it was one that could have only occurred in the Old South. By examining the writings and of both Anthony S. Parent and Joshua D. Rothman respectively, it becomes clear to see how Hammond developed the personality and characteristics that he did. Parent lays out how the society that Hammond grew up in came to be, then describes how the class structure and elitist system became the way of life in the South and some of the problems that came with…
At the tender age of seven years, Charles W. Chesnutt’s milieu was a tumultuous and political battlefield. The Emancipation Proclamation and 13th Amendments had both just been sanctioned, changing his and his family’s foreseeable future. Establishing his roots during this period of racial revolution with his fluid identity can easily be what influenced him to write a commentary on “racial passing,” such as The House Behind the Cedars. Racial passing, as defined by Randall Kennedy, an Ohio State Law journalist, is “a deception that enables a person to adopt certain roles or identities from which he would be barred by prevailing social standards in the absence of his misleading conduct.” Like his main characters Rena and John, Chesnutt grew up in an environment where he could pass as either black or white.…
Incidents In The Life Of a Slave Girl This book was written by Harriet Jacobs as in autobiography of her life. She takes an audience roll in the book and names the main character Linda Brent. Harriet writes it this way so that if someone were to read it they won’t know it is her. The book was written before the civil war and since she was a slave, she was often fearful for her life. When reading this book there were several things that stood out as to why Harriet Jacobs wrote this book.…
Robert Reiner’s “Ghosts of Mississippi” tells the story of how a white prosecutor named Bobby DeLaughter reopens the case in of Medgar Evers’ assassination in 1989 and eventually won a conviction against Byron De LaBeckwith, who had spent many years boasting about the assassination and not being convicted of the crime. The movie was released on December 20, 1996 and was later recognized by the Academy of Motion Picture Art and Science in one category and an Oscar nominee for makeup. Actors such ad Alec Baldwin, James Woods, Whoopi Goldberg, Virginia Madsen, and Susanna Thompson starred in the movie. Darrell and James Van Evers, two of Medgar Evers’ children, acted in their actual roles in the movie. The family was very involved in the filming…
The Slave Ship: A Human History written by Marcus Rediker is a painful eye-opening novel, embodying the many truths at a life at sea. This testament to a time when Anglo-American slave ships subjected countless numbers to the hatred and terror of the world, aims to eloquently prevail the provocative stories behind it. Rediker recreates this world by using personal accounts and seafaring records to reproduce the feelings and emotions that challenged life and death along this rigorous journey. After the 1700’s in a world progressively dominated by Britain, slave ships transported millions of people from African coastlines to the New World.…
Anthony Osorio 51 History Period 4 William Grimes Everyone wants freedom, but what lengths are you willing to go to obtain it? Yes, slavery helped the economy, but separating people by race is immoral, and no person knows this better than William Grimes, writer of the first slave narrative Life of William Grimes, Runaway Slave.…
The Foxman is an interesting book written by Gary Paulsen. Paulson wrote The Foxman in 1997. Gary Paulsen is an American writer of young-adult literature. He has written over 200 hundred books and more than 200 magazine articles, short stories, and several plays. In one of his many books, The Foxman, Paulson writes about a boy who has to be seperated from his original family, and is taken to his family members who own a farm, in the woods of Minnesota.…
George C. Wolfe’s, The Colored Museum, uses the play dynamic in order to create, celebrate, and critique the African American past and future. The African American legacy is carefully dissected in an almost carefree attitude about the impacts it had on the people. The Colored Museum explores the ideas of African American. George C. Wolfe uses clever wit to say the unthinkable about a serious topic, which leaves the audience in an uncomfortable ruin. The audience is left to navigate though each Act with an apprehensive attitude about what.t it might hold.…
We are all acclimated with the biblical story of Babylon. In antediluvian times, this once great city, the imperial capital of the Babylonian imperium, declined under the weight of its own decadence and corruption, becoming an epic symbol of the promises and perils of puissance, materialism, and cruelty. Centuries later, historian Robert O. Self has recapitulated this proverbial plight in his pathbreaking study of postwar Oakland, California. Though the two cities are disunited by great time and space, the metaphor, borrowed from some of his subjects, proves apt. For as Self shows in this affluent and detailed work, the story of postwar Oakland is withal a turbulent tale, one that exposes the extents and limits of affluence and avarice, prejudice…
Analysis of the Short Story “Gryphon” by Charles Baxter In the short story, “Gryphon”, the author, Charles Baxter, writes a story about a fourth-grader named Tommy who gets a strange substitute teacher, Miss Ferenczi, who tells “substitute facts” in order to expand students’ minds and make them wonder more (Baxter 253). The setting of the story is mainly in Tommy’s fourth-grade classroom at Garfield-Murray School in Five Oaks, “a rural community” in Michigan (Baxter 251). It takes place from October to December during the late 1900’s (presumably early 1980’s). Due to Miss Ferenczi’s strange persona, the main character Tommy, Carol Peterson, Wayne Razmer, Carl Whiteside, and many other classmates are taught in an unconventional form, which gives…
In his well-known article “Fiction and Non-fiction”, Kendall Walton introduces his theory of fiction as a game of make believe, in which representational art can be presumed as props that impose specific imaginings. Furthermore, Walton’s 1978 paper “Fearing Fictionally” addresses the paradox of fiction i.e. how can we be moved by things that do not exist in the case of fiction? The following paper will critically assess how Walton’s position in ‘Fearing Fictionally’ is related to his argument in ‘Fiction and Non Fiction’. In fiction and non-fiction, Walton’s fundamental notion is that of the term ‘representation’, which he often uses interchangeably with ‘fiction’.…