Carney And Rosomoff 's The Shadow Of Slavery

Harris, Leslie M. In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626-1863.

The foods that were brought back to the Old World such as, potatoes and corn proved a vital and necessary resource to the Europeans. Another short-term effect of the Columbian exchange was the migration of African slaves to the Americas. The majority of the Africans that were enslaved were caught in village raids or were war captives. They were caught by other Africans and sold to the European slave traders for money and other prized possessions. For slaves, the voyage known as the Middle Passage was a terrifying and perilous journey, with a death rate potentially as high as 50%.

Gomez examines both the African communities from which these people came and the specific places in North America to which they were taken. The ethnicity of Africans brought to Virginia, to South Carolina, or to Louisiana shaped the African American communities on those areas much more than did the nature of their work or other factors. The Bambara and Malinke people from the Senegambia region who were transported to colonial South Carolina and French Louisiana brought with them their technological skill in growing rice. The first slave ships to reach Louisiana, in 1719, brought both African slaves and African rice seeds. By the end of the century, however a greater proportion of African brought to Louisiana were Yoruba, Fon, or Ewe. These people Gomez argues, synthesized the complex Yoruba region into "hoodoo," which Gomez neither romanticizes nor belittles.

“The Slave Ship: A Human History” written by Marcus Rediker describes the horrifying experiences of Africans, and captains, and ship crewmen on their journey through the Middle Passage, the water way in the Atlantic Ocean between Africa and the Americas. The use of slaves to cultivate crops in the Caribbean and America offered a great economy for the European countries by providing “free” labor and provided immense wealth for the Europeans. Rediker describes the slave migration by saying, “There exists no account of the mechanism for history’s greatest forced migration, which was in many ways the key to an entire phase of globalization” (10). African enslavement to the Americas is the most prominent reason for a complete shift in the

In his book, The Ruling Race, James Oakes describes the lives slaveholders in the South. Oakes begins by arguing that most historians study the perspectives of slaves or the slaveholders who had many slaves. He then states that a vast majority of slaveholders in the South had just a few slaves. Oakes stresses that these large slaveowners did not provide an accurate representation of the slave owning South, and that this group was much more diverse than most historians acknowledge. Oakes focuses on the lives, religions, and ideologies of the slaveholding South. In particular, Oakes focuses on the paternalism and the liberalism of southerners. Oakes claims that paternalism slowly faded and gave way to liberalism and commercialism in the South.

Being forced into an alien society is one of the most obvious comparisons evident in the Rowlandson and Equiano slave narratives. In the slave narrative written by Rowlandson, she is abducted from her home along with several of her friends and family members. Once she is captured, she is brutally forced to reside with the same Indians she witnessed scalp and slaughter her loved ones. After having spent several days with these Indians, Rowlandson decides in order to survive, she will try to acquire their ways of livelihood. Rowlandson attempts to consume the food that the Indians provide for her, but she soon discovers that the taste of the rancid food is more revolting than she can tolerate, but she continues trying to fit in, in her mind it is the only way she can possibly escape from the Indians alive. Coincidentally, Equiano also has to endure very similar perils. In the introduction to Equiano’s slave narrative, we acquire that he is being forced into slavery by his own people, in order to be sold to the white slave owners in America. For Equiano being forced into slavery was a very horrendous experience. America for Equiano is a very alienated society, and it is unlike any place he has ever seen before. Once in America, Equiano along with other slaves that have also been apprehended are forced to line up in a gated area, which is much like a supermarket for slaves, or a place where the slave owners are able to select and purchase the slaves they desires. While

“The African slave trade,” writes Gary B. Nash “is one of the most important phenomena in the history of the modern world.” The slave trade started in the late fifteenth century and prolonged for the next 400 years. Over those 400 years, approximately ten million Africans sailed across the Atlantic to America against their will. Shown in Red, White, and Black; The Peoples of Early North America, psychological, geographical and political factors affected the lives of slaves in early America; the masters subjugated the slaves through those means. In other parts of the Americas, as well as in the colonies, the slaves’ living conditions differed.

For centuries Europeans and African rulers conducted the worlds largest forced migration of people across the globe, transporting millions of Africans against their will in order to provide a large and cheap labor force to work plantations in the New World. In return for the capture and trafficking of slaves, African rulers received European manufactured arms, textiles, metal goods, as well as produce from across the Atlantic such as tobacco, cane sugar, and alcohol. As a result of the rapidly expanding capitalism and industry in Europe it wasn’t until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that the flow of slave labor into to the Americas increased dramatically, the majority of which went to labor on plantations in the West Indies and Brazil.

Twelve Years a Slave tells the first-person account of Solomon Northup, a black man born free in New York, who is kidnapped and sold into slavery in 1841 Washington D.C., prior to the Civil War. Mintus Northup, Solomon’s father, was emancipated upon the death of his owner, and continued as a free man to work in agriculture, for both members of the family that gave him his namesake, as well as other private farmers in New York state. Solomon was born in 1808, and grew up a child that was taught the value of work and effort, often helping his father with farm work. In his spare time, he studied and learned how to play the violin- a skill that would come to benefit him throughout his life, in addition to the enjoyment it gave him to play.

During the first week of class, four readings were assigned. One of the readings, “Food and Eating: Some Persisting Questions,” by Sidney Mintz, discusses the paradoxes of food. Although food seems like a straightforward concept, it is actually extremely complicated. According to Mintz, there are five paradoxes, including: the importance of food to one’s survival, yet we take it for granted, how people stick to their foodways, but are willing to change, whether the government should allow people to freely choose food or if they should protect the people through regulations, the difference in food meanings according to gender, and the morality of eating certain foods. All of these paradoxes give people questions to think about, making this an extremely philosophical look at food studies. It also mentions that food must be viewed through the cultural context that it is in, which became important in “The Old and New World Exchange”, by Mintz, and “Maize as a Culinary Mystery”, by Stanley Brandes. These discuss the diffusion of foods after 1492 in different ways. The Mintz reading gives an overview of all of the foods spread from the Americas to the Old World, and vice-a-versa, but does not go terribly in depth on the social changes and effects of specific foods. Brandes focuses on the cultural impact of specifically maize on the European diet, noticing that most Western Europeans shunned it. He studies the cultural implications of this, concluding that maize was not accepted

Within each region it was also common to see different variations of the plant depending on how well it was cultivated in each area. It would be the expansion of Islam that would help with the “rediscovering” of the banana in Asia and once again in Europe. By the outbreak and presence of the Islamic culture Muslim merchants carried bananas amongst their goods in their trade routes to and from various regions such as South Asia, Middle East, North Africa, and West Africa`. Arabian conquerors and Islamic dispersion helped bring the banana plant to the west which would lead to the carriage and eventual movement to the New World by explorers traveling to the Caribbean for missionary purposes. The Japanese found other uses for the banana by using its fibers to be utilized for textile purposes and making other fabrics. In Europe however, the presence of the banana was most likely introduced to the Europeans by Moorish invasion in the 16th century. The Portuguese were establishing the cash crop in Brazil which also could be another source of how the crop spread to the New World and sugar plantations in the Caribbean. This area of the Caribbean extended out to Central and South America is where we now familiarize ourselves with the cultivation of the

The Atlantic slave exchange, which endured from the late sixteenth to mid nineteenth hundreds included European nations, for example, Britain, Spain and France which all had colonies in the Americas and Africa. Europeans had the control and power during this time of the trade. The boats were carrying produced product, slaves, and trims between Caribbean, West Africa, and American colonies. Be that as it may, in the eighteenth, century, the Caribbean remained the business center of the British Empire and the significant maker of income for the crown. In any case, slave-developed items from the territory possessed a bigger and bigger piece of Atlantic trade. The utilization of African slaves was imperative to developing. The usage of African

The trade along the African coast made a three drastic change in economic purposes. It effected trading in mining, goods, slaves and development of remoted areas that are populated. Mining was a great investment of transporting goods that would spread throughout the Mediterranean Sea, Red Sea and Indian Ocean. The African trade mining linked the whole world to want the minerals from Africa. Slaves were one of the most important aspects of trade because they were considered to be the second behind minerals to be valuable. There were high demands for slaves because the elites needed them for the use of military and household services. The third important effect of trade was that it promoted the growth of towns and agriculture. Muslims would

Slavery is defined as the owning of someone who is your legal property and therefore, must obey you. Slavery had such a profound impact on the history of the United States, but how did it affect the slaves themselves? In 12 Years A Slave, director Steve McQueen tells the story of a man named Solomon Northup, who is mentally and physically scarred for life after being captured and sold as a slave for twelve years, before his eventual escape. In Octavia E. Butler's book, Kindred, the reader follows the life of 26-year-old Dana who is transported into the eighteen hundreds when her descendant, Rufus, is in a life-threatening situation. She struggles to get through the Antebellum South; her experience of slavery also scars her for life and changes who she is as a person. Through the use of slaves as objects or animals and the forcing of them to do regrettable actions, Butler and McQueen argue that the institution of slavery corrupts slaves by degrading their humanity and integrity, lowering their perception of themselves to a subhuman level.

The Natchez District where a tribe of Indians were housed as slaves was the first Mississippi region where plantations were established. There African slaves were introduced into the Natchez plantation system in the early 1700s by the French colonists where the first major profitable crop that thrived from African slave labor in Natchez was tobacco products. The slaves shipped here came with a militant spirit after being harbored amongst the torturous vessels. Their aggression, at first took the form of resistance on slave ships as many deckhands and captive slaves experienced the unforgiving waters, this is again explained in the novel Saltwater Slavery written by Smallwood. One of the earliest recorded incidents of a slave resistance was the Natchez Indian Revolt of 1729 against the French colonists. The African arrival in Natchez did not quell this militancy. Instead it caused the Natchez to increase their aggression. However, the French quickly recognized the preceding contact and interaction between the slaves and the Natchez Indians and as a counter they, (the French) eventually extended their cruelty to the Indians. The Natchez Indians became aware that the French began to whip young Indian boys just as they did their African slaves, along with the French commander at Fort Rosalie taking the Natchez land, encouraged the Natchez nobles to act in retaliation. To reflect the cruelty of the French, Natchez Indians recruited several slaves, promising them freedom, and in