Blood On The Forge Analysis

John. W. Blessingame, The Slave Community: The Plantation Life in The Antebellum South (Oxford University Press, Inc: 1972, 1979).

Exploring Chapter 1, allowed me to view the way different cultures took advantage of not only African Americans, but Native Americans as well. Native Americans were invaded by Spanish settlers, taken into slavery and forced to live with harsh living conditions. Settlers exposed them to a vast number of diseases, and tricked other Native Americans into agreements, in which they were starved, made to live in the cold, and which ultimately led to the death of many of them. Native Americans were resistant to being

How can you start from the bottom and rise to the top, but still not be on top? The strength of African Americans over the years is outstanding, but I will it ever be good enough. From discrimination, starvation, Jim Crow, the lack of the right to vote, and job deprivation, came The Great Migration. The Great Migration is one of the most historical periods in America. People, mainly African Americans, departed the southern region of the United States, to relocate in the Northern region of the United States for various reasons. To name a few, discrimination, racism, but mainly for employment. However, was relocating worth it? Was it really a difference ? We will find out. In Blood on the Forge,the author, William Attaway, introduces reader to three men, the Moss brothers. Attaway, emotionally connects with his characters, taking readers on a crusade through one of the most historical periods in United States history, The Great Migration. This journey sets off in the deep roots of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in the early 1900 's. Tag along as we venture through the emotion and hardships of the Moss brothers story.

2. The promise of the New South originally, the town’s people, workers, labors and families, instinctively thought the promise of wealth, jobs, and economic growth would encompass their lives by moving to the mining and mill villages. Their views engulfed hope in the economical shifting agricultural social order to encircle the state of the art industrial New South civilization. labor reformers, thought they were doing the best for labors, by recruiting them to move to camps and move for jobs to better their way of less, unfortunately to come to the demise of being taken advantage of.

Have you ever wondered what a blacksmith and munitions maker at a Sugar Plantation in the 1800s was like? At the Levi Jordan Plantation, an excavation revealed a cabin that indicates a resident that worked lead, manufactured lead shot, and possibly other metals. This cabin is now called the “Smith’s Cabin”. At the Plantation, western artifacts used in African cultural context have been found during the excavation. Indications from these artifacts show that although these African and African Americans were no longer in their original cultural context, they still maintained some of their African cultural beliefs. The excavation of the Munition Makers’ cabin revealed information about the Munitions Maker, the purpose of the cabin, and showed findings of animal remains.

In the memoir of abolitionist Olaudah Equiano, he describes the “enormous cruelties” committed by white slave traders on captured Africans during the eighteenth century transatlantic slave trade, which still flourished as he penned his 1784 narrative (Equiano, 5). While Equiano seeks to characterize the innocence and humanity of his African brethren and therefore justify the unethical nature of their

“The Slave Crucibles” and “A Federal Assault” provide different perspectives on the experiences of slaves. “The Slave Crucibles” contributes personal insight into the different aspects of the lives of slaves while “A Federal Assault” exhibits a generalized viewpoint on the effects of laws such as the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 on the majority of the slave population. Both pieces of literature demonstrate the injustices and demeaning treatment towards African Americans during the 19th century.

Have you ever wondered what a blacksmith and munitions maker at a Sugar Plantation in the 1800s was like? At the Levi Jordan Plantation, an excavation revealed a cabin that indicates a resident that worked lead, manufactured lead shot, and possibly other metals. This cabin is now called the “Smith’s Cabin”. At the Plantation, western artifacts used in African cultural context have been found during an excavation. Indications from these artifacts show that although these African and African Americans were no longer in their original cultural context, they still maintained some of their African cultural beliefs. At the Munition Makers’ cabin, the

Passed down from generation to generation, oral tradition predominates as one of the most significant sources in discovering the history of the African diaspora. Plagued by illiteracy, the tangible text of the past remain useless for both the freed man and slave, this heightens the use of spoken word to elicit the events of themselves and their ancestors. Through the American Folklore Center, the stories that George Johnson convey, take form. Interviewed in 1940, George Johnson, a former slave from Brierfield, Virginia, recalls the tales of his own enslavement as well as the stories he passed down from his father and grandfather. However, his strictly progressive rendition of his place in North American slavery not only question the accuracy

The novel represents a fiction story of a young lady living in a slave community and illustrates her struggles for escaping her miseries. The timeframe depicted in this novel is where the slave exchange, and the working of the American economy on that exchange, was near its pinnacle. It is additionally the period when divisions between the Northern states (in which servitude

To begin, Cash’s elite Southern white man is distantly related to everyone in a thirty mile radius (pg. 26). This situational-connectedness allowed the elite man to socially preside over the poor white man. With Southern romanticism, Cash asserts that the elite white man would tend to and care for the poor white man in times of extreme need. Planting advice was given as needed to the poor man, resources were shared; a weird paternalism existed. Cash also touches on the inevitable haughtiness that would come from the elite whites.

The central role of black religion and culture in the lives of slaves was another important part of our discussion. Gomez had already demonstrated that the acculturation of slaves in the United States was a slow and far from linear process. Well into the 1830s African influences dominated over those the white slave holding society sought to impose on Africans and the children. Challenging the notion of African naiveté and backwardness, Gomez, Stuckey, Blassingame and Levine illustrate that slaves appropriated white culture, taking in only what they felt necessary and valuable. Often, the appropriation was stimulated by cultural overlaps, as Africans related whites’ instructions (often my means of coercion)

Slavery and Circuses: The Development of Race and American Slavery as a Result of Fabricated Class Divisions Imposed by the Jamestown Elite

In the novel’s opening section, Attaway emphasizes the pastoral rhythm of southern life, which later provides a striking contrast to the strident industrial swiftness of northern life. Unlike the later parts of the novel, the opening section follows a dream-like flashback structure. As in a pastoral form the narrative portrays the natural cycles of the Moss brothers’ environment: harvest time, the changing seasons, weather cycles, and birth-death for humans and nature. This pastoral setting is Kentucky as the Moss family struggles to survive as sharecroppers. Hence the novel marks a clear deviation for the uncomplicated/simple life of the pastoral tradition. Racial and economic oppression in the South follows a conventional, though horrendous,

Attaway moved from the segregated state of Mississippi to the industrialized city of Chicago, Illinois. The novelist became part of the Great Migration, just as the Moss brothers became part of it when they escaped Kentucky to work on the steel mills of Pennsylvania. It is apparent that Blood on the Forge has a distinct connection to Attaway’s life.