ipl-logo

Examples Of Personifying America By Mary Ann Shadd Cary

788 Words4 Pages

An African American writer, lawyer, and abolitionist, Mary Ann Shadd Cary published a newspaper called Provincial Freeman, after escaping to a fugitive slave community in Canada. Recently, the United States had passed the Fugitive Slave Act and was on the brink of the Civil War, with the treatment of African Americans growing ever worse. Unfortunately, Cary found many people who opposed the establishment of an African American newspaper and many of her own countrymen who seemed impassive to their struggle. In an effort to show the necessity of having a newspaper written by African Americans, one which showed the abolitionists’ perspective in the turbulent times, Cary wrote an editorial, in an urgent tone, utilizing personification and rhetorical …show more content…

Much of targeted audience hailed from the United States, and seemed content with simply fleeing from the chaos, placing the thoughts of their homeland into a dark corner of their mind. However, Cary brings back their repressed patriotic feelings, placing the United States as a center of one of her arguments. Personifying America, Cary states that “as the great country grows, we grow with it; as it improves and progresses, we are carried forward on the bosom of its onward tide”. Commonly, Americans refer to the United States as a mother, and one of the most comforting places of a mother will always be the warmth and protectiveness of her bosom. Here, Cary refers to the United States as a mother, mentioning one of the most warm and protective places on her: the bosom. By bring the United States to life and comparing her to a mother, Cary awakens some deep part of her American audience that desired to stay with and protect their homeland from the plague that is slavery. Once the previously apathetic African Americans reawaken to the abolitionist cause, Cary will be able to gather additional support for her dream of an African American newspaper. Since these abolitionists reside in Canada, they cannot directly fight to free America. Instead, they must accomplish what they can through words, and the strongest and easiest course to accomplish this goal would be through the retention and expansion of the …show more content…

Questioning their reasoning, Cary asks her opposition, “Is not that plain?” at the conclusion of one of her arguments based around the fact that African Americans need an outlet for their own voices, because without one, they would be at “at the mercy of the demagogue” in America. By asking such a question after a stream of persuasive rhetoric, Cary, who seems almost impatient, tries to reiterate her basic argument in the simplest way possible, so her entire audience can easily comprehend her thesis. Clearly, she believes in the evident necessity of her newspaper, and desires for her audience to understand and sympathize with her beliefs. As the final line of her piece, Cary asks “Do you agree with us?”. By utilizing personal diction in this question, she directly asks each person reading her editorial this inquiry, allowing them to be increasingly swayed by her words, since humans normally feel more attached to an idea if they themselves seem to be an important part of it. Additionally, by compiling all her supporters into an inclusive “us”, Cary creates a sense of unity within the African Americans, the abolitionists, and their supporters, a feeling many human beings desire to understand. When she forms this inclusive diction into a question, Cary seems to be asking - at the most basic level - whether or not her audience agrees with

Show More
Related
585 Words | 3 Pages

Stephanie McCurry, in her revolutionary book Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South, claims that her book is about “politics and the power in the Civil War South, about the bloody trial of the Confederacy’s national vision, and about the significance of the disfranchised in it.” Choosing to examine both yeoman/poor white women and enslaved African Americans in the Confederacy, McCurry’s book distances itself from the historiography focused on answering the question of “why the Confederacy lost the Civil War.” Instead, McCurry focuses more exclusively on the effects of the Civil War and how war changed both the United States and the world, most notably in Cuba and Brazil. Conjecturing as her primary thesis, McCurry argues that “the power that counts in politics, is often exercised brutally, and almost always wins, but that once in a long while – as in the Civil War South – history opens up, resistance prevails, and the usually powerless manage against all imaginable odds to change the

Read More
565 Words | 3 Pages

Mary Ann Shadd Cary was an African American writer, newspaper publisher, educator, lawyer, and abolitionist. In 1851 she traveled from the United States to Canada to work with the fugitive community. She uses strong rhetorical strategies in her editorial that she published in the newspaper Provincial Freeman to link the fugitives and to promote antislavery. Cary begins her editorial by stating “we need an organ, too, for making our voice heard at home.” She uses an analogy, referring to the fugitives who need a functioning body like a newspaper to make their voice heard.

Read More
1510 Words | 7 Pages

(Grimke, 191) Three words, shouted over the din outside, are an especially effective way to turn listeners’ heads because they focus on a group most previous speakers - at that convention and in the entire abolitionist movement - had left behind. Grimke’s demand for action did not simply include women but was exclusively addressed to them, which was an unexpected and somewhat shocking choice to an audience who expected male-oriented speeches. This gains the interest of various distracted listeners through shock factor and engages women specifically through the promise of advice for fighting slavery

Read More
467 Words | 2 Pages

She ends the first paragraph with “Is not that plain?” after she explains that the community of fugitive slaves who don’t have a voice needs her newspaper to express themselves. Shadd Cary also ends her last paragraph “Do you agree with us?” The simple and yet straightforward rhetorical questions establish a tone of authority. Shadd Cary’s audience is the community of fugitive slaves most of whom are not educated, so her tone is somewhat forceful in order to convince them to agree with her, leaving them with no little option.

Read More
1327 Words | 6 Pages

The major role played by African American women in the reconstruction era is revised and illustrated in Tera W. Hunter’s To Joy my Freedom and Elsa Barkley Brown’s article Negotiating and Transforming the Public Sphere: African American Political Life in the Transition from Slavery to Freedom. Both documents analyze the participation and involvement of black women in social and political activities inside of their communities. To Joy my freedom, written by Tera W. Hunter provides an inner look into the lives and strives of African American women – mainly working class – living in Atlanta between the eighteenth and nineteenth century, in the middle of one of the most belligerent environments created in the era of Reconstruction.

Read More
1026 Words | 5 Pages

Project Report: Oral History and the History of the Civil Rights Movement - Kim Lacy Rogers, The Journal of American History, Vol. 75, No. 2 (1988), pp. 567-576 The civil rights movement of the early 1960s was one of the most significant events in the modern history of the United States, one that has elicited much examination and research by historians. An era that saw the power and influence of the movement play an integral role in the eradication of legalised segregation and the disenfranchisement of African Americans. Given the historic importance of the civil rights movement, this paper aims to examine Dr Kim Lacy Rogers ‘Oral History and the History of the Civil Rights Movement’, published in the Journal of American History in 1988.

Read More
849 Words | 4 Pages

David Brooks, writer of “One Nation Slightly Divisible,” tries to control the audience’s minds by using “we” in his article. Similarly, Jonathan Rauch, writer of “In Defense of Prejudice: Why Incendiary Speech Must Be Protected” argues in a biased point of view exceptionally to attract the audience to believe his personal view towards prejudice. Even though both Brooks and Rauch share the same bias perspective, Brooks reveals a more pervasive biased opinion compared to Rauch. David Brooks stands out with a positive effect of bias to convince the readers and help unfold his viewpoint to grasp the audience's attention. Rauch also uses bias to convince the reader but was not as effective as Brooks' tactics to convey his objective through diction,

Read More
559 Words | 3 Pages

By having a published p[aper emitting through-out New York, African Americans’ in many states began to realize that doing anything would make a difference in the Revolution. This newspaper was one of the fundamental blocks building up to the Appeal written by David Walker in 1829. However, due to these efforts in creating a revolt, whites within America began to throw violent efforts in an attempt to stop the end of slavery. In 1829, white mobs lead an attack on African American homes’ and businesses’ in Cincinnati, Ohio. This event relates to this document because it outlines the fear that white supremacists held for the end of the enslavement and discrimination of blacks.

Read More
1255 Words | 6 Pages

“A woman and a movement: Ida B. Wells and the Anti- Lynching Movement” Cultural constructs that are detrimental to the unity and fairness of all are historically marked by social-political movements that cause an upheaval of old systems. During these tense and often conflictual movements, there are certain voices that stand out among the throng of dramatic and biased opinions. During the anti-lynching movement, Ida B. Wells was one of those voices. She utilized her journalistic capacity and position as author to spread her message of dissention against lynching and the unfair prosecution and deaths of African Americans. Her openly uncensored publications, ’Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in all its phases, and ‘The Red

Read More
1219 Words | 5 Pages

The Power Behind “Just Walk on By” In Brent Staples article “Just Walk on By”, Staples shares his thoughts on the way marginalized groups interact. He uses his own experiences as a young African American man to shed light on how people can have implied biases that affect the way they treat other people. Staples does this to demonstrate how society develops preconceived notions in the minds of individuals about marginalized groups, primarily African American men, which are often a flawed representation of the people within these groups. The rhetoric he uses is key to developing an understanding persona and an emotional appeal that exposes the implied biases of people without alienating or offending the audience, to whom-- among others-- he attributes these biases.

Read More
591 Words | 3 Pages

Within the borders of the United States’ limited, yet expansive history, there have been many cases of social injustice on a number of occasions. The relocation and encampment of Native Americans and the oppressions of the early movements for women’s suffrage are two of many occurrences. Around the middle of the 20th century, a movement for equality and civil liberties for African Americans was kindled from the embers of it predecessors. James Baldwin, a black man living in this time, recalls experiences from within the heart of said movement in this essauy, Notes of a Native son. Baldwin conveys a sense of immediacy throughout his passage by making his writing approachable and estimating an enormous amount of ethos.

Read More
724 Words | 3 Pages

The story takes place at the height of the Civil Rights Movement in America, when desegregation is finally achieved. Flannery O’Connor’s use of setting augments the mood and deepens the context of the story. However, O’Connor’s method is subtle, often relying on connotation and implication to drive her point across. The story achieves its depressing mood mostly through the use of light and darkness in the setting.

Read More
738 Words | 3 Pages

Question # 6 The Abolitionist Movement In the 1800’s the abolitionist movement was put in place by political oppositions to achieve immediate emancipation of all African American slaves in the ending of racial segregation and discrimination. The Abolitionist movement in the United States of America from the 1830s until 1870 was an effort to end slavery in a nation that valued personal freedom of slaves and believed all men are created equal. There were limitations of the early abolitionist movement in noting that certain political oppositions and white abolitionists did not think that African Americans or people of color should have equal rights because of their ethnic backgrounds, gender and knowledge.

Read More
1133 Words | 5 Pages

Sources Analysis Freedom During the Reconstruction era, the idea of freedom could have many different meanings. Everyday factors that we don't often think about today such as the color of our skin, where we were born, and whether or not we own land determined what limitations were placed on the ability to live our life to the fullest. To dig deeper into what freedom meant for different individuals during this time period, I analyzed three primary sources written by those who experienced this first hand. These included “Excerpts from The Black Codes of Mississippi” (1865), “Jourdan Anderson to his old master” (1865), and “Testimony on the Ku Klux Klan in Congressional Hearing” (1872).

Read More
921 Words | 4 Pages

The quintessential image of the American dream is that of a house with a white picket fence and Mama thinks the house she buys in Clybourne Park will allow the Younger family fulfill that dream. It’s a symbol for belonging in America; it can also represent an acceptance of American cultural values, such as capitalism. In addition, it’s an emphasis on the Youngers’ value on family and the home because the Youngers rely on each other during hard times, and they are not afraid of what may happen in the new neighborhood they know they are not welcomed in because they know they have each other. Moreover, Lindner and the other residents of Clybourne Park who offer to buy the house the Youngers bought represent the discrimination against African Americans at this time, and possibly a reason black Americans, like the Younger family, need to fight for a sense of belonging. “And we have decided to move into our house because my father- my father- earned it for us brick by brick” (Hansberry 148).

Read More

More about Examples Of Personifying America By Mary Ann Shadd Cary

Related Topics

Open Document