Vagrancy

When the word slavery is mentioned one immediately thinks of death, injustice, and inhumanity. One would presume that not much, if anything at all, could be worse than slavery. However, David Oshinsky proved such a thought to be false. Oshinsky’s novel Worse than Slavery depicts events and places, which one might consider being worse than times of slavery. Oshinsky being a professor of history has given insight to the hardships that African-Americans endured after slavery was abolished. He goes…

"Composers must come out into the open; they must fight the battle with other workers" Marc Blitzstein. Blitzstein’s The Cradle will Rock was one of the most powerful pieces of art during the Great Depression ("The Cradle Will Rock", 1). It alone transformed not only Broadway, but also the mentality of the American people during this time of labor, war, and strife. Theatre reached more people during this time than ever before. Under Franklin Delano Roosevelt 's Work Progress Administration 25…

The Civil War was one of the biggest upsets in American history. The Civil War started in 1861 and ended in 1865 with the 13th Amendment which abolished slavery. This war was fought between the Southern and Northern states over four years and is known as the “bloodiest four years in U.S. history” (PBS). The Northern and Southern states were split by the Mason- Dixon line that ran between Maryland and the Pennsylvania territory. White southerners called the Civil War the "war between the…

The Allies established in the city their own police and courts. Except of the Bureau of International Police, which was located on the Golden Horn seafront, each European Power had its own police department (British crocker, French and Italian section) in their zone of control. Americans, having neither a district to control, nor its own army in the city, dispatched their police patrols by evenings to gather from the streets drunken American sailors. Ottoman Police had permanent stations…

Dorothea Puente “I used to be a very good person, at one time”, pleaded Dorothea Puente (New York Times). Dorothea Puente is a known serial killer in California. In 1993, she was convicted of three counts of murder. She was originally accused of nine murders, but the jury did not get to the other six. Her motive was to collect and cash their government checks (The New York Times). Dorothea had an unforgettable childhood; she was put in an orphanage at a young age because her parents had both…

continued to be exploited. African Americans were stuck in a situation that limited them from becoming productive members of society. At this point in time, “every Southern state except Arkansas and Tennessee had passed laws by the end of 1865 outlawing vagrancy” (Douglas A. Blackmon, 17). This meant that is was possible to arrest an African American man for not being under the protection of a white man, despite being a “free person” in the United States. In some states, African Americans…

whites who were afraid that blacks could work the land they owned better than they could and could possibly make more money than them causing them to lose money, because now there was no one to work the land for them. These types of laws included vagrancy laws. These types of laws made it a crime for people to move from place to place without having a visible means to support themselves. So now it was illegal to be jobless or homeless, yet the slaves were free and had nowhere to…

A Victorian criminal had to have grit to not only pull off their crimes, but also deal with the consequences of getting caught. In a time where the police force was only just being created, there were over two hundred crimes punishable by death, and the prison system isolated you from civilization completely, it’s easy to say that living a life of crime was not necessarily thrilling, but a path that could lead directly to the gallows. Crime undeniably shaped the way Victorian culture is viewed…

In the United States, there is in place a system of oppression that every Black citizen must live with every day of their lives. In this system, they are socially characterized as being everything that is wrong with society. In the system, Black people are considered poor, uneducated, and criminal—all things that the American society fights against. Since their importation to the new land, Blacks have been considered to be an inferior race in the country. Over the years, this idea has manifested…

experiences. In order to correctly analyze the impacts, while at the same time drawing parallels to modern day criminalization of Latino youth, reviewing historical fact is very important. Starting off a very early form of criminalization; the Vagrancy Act of 1855, more commonly known…