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Analysis Of The Book ' The Slave Community '

Good Essays
Darien Wellman
Age of Jackson to 1900
Dr. Gershenhorn
September 1, 2015
Blassingame, John W. The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1972. In the book titled The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South, author John Blassingame’s theme, focused on the history of African slave experience throughout the American South. After much research, the author said in the preface that most historians focused more on the planter instead of the slave. He also pointed out that most of the research on slaves by previous historians was based on stereotypes, and do not tell the real history of slave life and a slave’s inner self. Most of these historians, who focused on antebellum southern history, left out the African-American slave experience on purpose. Through much gathering of research, Blassingame hoped to correct this injustice to the history of African-American slaves, and show how slavery affected slaves, but also American life, culture, and thought. In the first half of the book, Blassingame did a fantastic job of explaining the conditions of African slaves coming to the American south, and being exposed to Western culture for the first time. The exposure to Western culture by Africans was something that was not focused on as much by other historians. One crucial example the author used was that of one African slave known as Olaudah Equiano, who was sent to a plantation in Virginia. Based on his own accounts,
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