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Midwife's TALE Chapter Summary

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A MIDWIFE’S TALE, A HISTORY OF JONATHAN ALDER, and VOICES FROM SLAVERY all give insight into the past. Specifically the past of different groups of people, these include, Native Americans, African Americans, women, rich, middle class, and working white men. While they all give insight into the past of these groups they all have their similarities and differences, strengths and weaknesses. After analyzing what each book says about these groups the conclusion of which book is most trustworthy will be made.
The first book is A MIDWIFE’S TALE written by: Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. This book gives insight into Martha Ballard’s life as a midwife through her many diary entries, in doing so it gives lots of information on women and white men specifically …show more content…

Yetman gives a great amount of information on African Americans and a little on whites specifically rich and middle class though the information given on them is told through slave’s stories so it is more so indirect insight. That being said the information presented on African Americans includes how they were viewed, treated, and what they believed. So how were they viewed? Well obviously as property less than human and so on, however there were slave owners that view them almost like family an example is “Marster and Missus…looked up all the Negros they heard of whoever belonged to them…when Marster and Missus found any of theirs they would say ‘well, come on back home.’... Some were so glad to get back…” (Yetman 32). This shows how some slaves were viewed as family because after being freed their former owners came looking for them telling them to come back home and live with them and some were very happy to go back. This also gives insight on how whites treated their slaves and how African Americans viewed their owners. Though this shows a more or less “bright” outcome there are many dark outcomes as to be expected from slavery. Overall VOICES FROM SLAVERY shows how not all African Americans hated slavery but they greatly depended on the owner. While showing that is also shows how not all owners were terrible. This book not only gives information about white men slave owners it also gives information on women. The information given on women suggest that women were allowed to own slaves and discipline them and that they could be just as nice or as cruel as men “owned by an old maid named Miss Kitty Digs” (Yetman 38). This shows how women were able to own slaves. This book does not seem to give much insight on Native Americans or social levels of whites as it showed well off whites could be nice or horrible to slaves as the same for average or less than well off whites it just depended on the person. Overall it gives a

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