Major Works Data Sheet In this column, choose five quotations from the text, one focusing on each of the following literary elements: In this column, analyze the significance of your quotations. Allow the following questions to guide your responses: Why is this important? What does this reveal? Why does the author say it this way?
Toni Morrison theorized that “With typically eighteenth-century reticence [Olaudah Equiano] records his singular and representative life for one purpose; to change things,” (512). He wanted to challenge the way people viewed slavery. History explains the gruesome and disturbing past that the African slaves experienced in terms of being owned, abused, and controlled under barbaric behaviors of white men. Due to the devastating and unthinkable actions committed to the African slaves, they were unable to share their mistreatment with the world and their voice was forced to stay silent. In literary works, people are able to become a voice throughout history, and because African slaves were kept quiet, they did not get the change to share with the
By analyzing John White 's watercolor replicas of engravings by Theodore De Bry we can tell how John White 's journey to establish a colony in Raleigh 's charter territory, Virginia, in 1587 affected his few of the Native Americans. Even though this journey ended in bad blood between the two very different people, a look into their life gave John White greater respect for their passion for family, friends, and religion. We see this in the way John White 's images gave us more of a warm view of their family, housing, and religious practices rather than focusing on them being blood thirsty killers preparing for war. With outrageous rumors of the possibility of Native men pillaging the newly made villages and raping their delicate women,
In Equiano's personal slave narrative, "The Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African", Equiano flips the idea that the African people are backwards and barbaric, thus ripe for slavery, by demonstrating his personal exceptionalism through his literacy to show that it is truly the white people who are backwards and barbaric through their own hypocrisy. This reversal that Equiano demonstrates in his slave narrative shows that the savagery of African people exists as a misconception and makes the reader fully grasp the need to abolish slavery and any inequality present. On page seventy-eight, Equiano uses first person pronouns like 'I', 'my', and 'me' to separate himself from the other African people and whites around him. This separation that Equiano creates demonstrates his exceptionalism as an African slave.
In his letter he described his life as an indentured servant as one where he has nothing to comfort him but sickness and death. The life that he was living in colonial Virginia was one where you couldn’t escape or else you will be captured. Attempting it could of cause him to die, therefore he hoped his parents brought his escape but with his parents being poor there was no way of escaping the life of an indentured servant. Having no escape as an indentured servant, he wrote to his parents a letter asking that his parents bought out the indenture. In his letter, he wrote that he was trapped in a place filled of diseases that can make any body weak and leave you with lack of comfort and rattled with guilt.
Douglass encountered multiple harsh realities of being enslaved. For example, the ex-slave was practically starved to death by his masters on multiple occasions. In fact, “[He was] allowed less than a half of a bushel of corn-meal per week, and very little else... It was not enough for [him] to subsist upon... A great many times [he had] been nearly perishing with hunger” (pg 31).
A group of settlers from England moved to Roanoke Island which is located in the Atlantic Ocean in sixteenth century. Moreover, there were so many people that landed on the island included 117 men, women and children from England. However, after all of them lived in the island for one month, they found that they lacked of food. Then, as the leader of the colony, Governor John White that known as White felt that he need to act so he went to England again in order to get more food because all of them need more suppliers of food. Somehow, he found so many mysterious things happened.
He writes that “all of them were powerfully, adamantly, dangerously afraid (pg 18)” including himself. Their fear lied in the way that they dressed so differently than those who considered themselves “white.” It was in their loud music, and harsh language. It was in the violence on the streets and in the way a mother would wail on her child. All of this grew due to fear for their own bodies.
Slaves were treated with the lowest of respect, and had no form of justice or rights. The slave system during the time that Frederic Douglass was a slave was corrupted, and he made that very clear within his narrative. In Douglass’ narrative we are shown how little rights the slaves
In Frederick Douglass’s book, he writes accounts of his time in slavery and beyond. Throughout the book, Douglass writes about not only the physical hardships slaves endured, but the mental and emotional hardships as well. In Chapter X, Douglass describes a battle he had with a temporary slave owner named Mr. Covey. After the fight concludes, Douglass writes, “This battle with Mr. Covey was the turning point in my career as a slave. It rekindled the few expiring embers of freedom, and revived within me a sense of my own manhood.
“I think slavery is the next thing to hell. If a person would send another into bondage, he would, it appears to me, be bad enough to send him into hell if he could”(Tubman). Being born into slavery affected young Frederick Douglass negatively. He experienced the cruel world of abuse and suffering of slavery. In the book, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass, he uses imagery and metaphors to explain the agony slaves went through so that white slaveholders understand that abusing their slaves is not right.
1.Before reading this speech, I never thought of the fact that blacks felt like “outcasts” during the 4th of July. 2.Douglass really made it a point that “the fourth of July is yours, not mine” (1). He is speaking about only whites celebrated Independence while blacks still do not have independence. 3.In this speech, Douglass mocked the United States for being a “hypocrite” when it came to independence in terms of America’s religious beliefs at the time.
his plantation, the amount of violence Northup details becomes more frequent, and he describes the fear that all slaves faced at the beginning of the new work day “Then the fears and labours of another day begin; and until its close there is no such thing as rest. He fears he will be caught lagging through the day; he fears to approach the gin house with his basket-load of cotton at night; he fears, when he lies down, that he will oversleep himself in the morning. (Northup, pg.171). Solomon Northup captures the relentless emotional and physical toll that slaves faced every day at the hands of their masters and the hired help.
Being enslaved was not an easy job for African Americans. African Americans survived slavery through their connection with their culture. They then went on to contribute to the economic and social development of the South and America. African Americans survived the institution of slavery and Africanized the American South. They helped free themselves by sticking together as a family, resisting, as well as wanting slavery to change.
Frederick was a man of many things. African-American social reformer, abolitionist, writer, orator, and a former slave. But what made him become this great man. The fact that he was a former slave allowed him to understand firsthand the terrors of slavery. He could read and write, which was instrumental in his life.
