Robert And Bessie Brown : Civic Minded Residents Of Bradley, South Dakota Essay

Alice Malsenior Walker, an African American born into poverty, came into this world on February 9, 1944 in Eatonon, Georgia. She was the youngest child of eight children born to Willie Lee and Minnie Tallulah Walkers. Both of her parents were sharecroppers as well as expert story tellers. Things were not easy for the Walkers and Alice often witnessed her mother’s frustration of having the burden to take care of eight children with little means. Even though children of share croppers were usually made to work the fields, Alice’s mother made sure that her kids received an education. Alice was brilliant at writing poetry.

“He was a quiet , soft-spoken man who wore old-timey clothes, fedoras, button-down wool coats, suspenders, and dressed neatly at all times, regardless of how dirty his work made him” (Mcbride 6).“His father was a black man, a railroad brakeman, and his mother a Native American, so he had a lot of indian in his face: brown skin, slanted brown eyes, high cheekbones and a weather-beaten outdoor look about him..” (Mcbride 120).The writing is figurative by the use of similes and metaphors. “In running from her past, Mommy has created her own nation, a rainbow coalition that descends on her house every Christmas and Thanksgiving.” (277)“Her grits tasted like sand and butter, with big lumps inside that caught in your teeth and suck in your gums.”(McBride 67) . “Ma cried, and she wailed and wailed, the sound of her cries circling the house like a spirit and settling on all the corridors and beds where we ay, weeping in silence.”(McBride 128) Allusions are used to give a timeframe of the time period by talking about issues.“She actually liked Malcolm X. She put in nearly the same category as her civil rights heroes, Paul Robeson, Jackie Robinson, Eleanor

Ida B. Wells, an African-American woman, and feminist, shaped the image of empowerment and citizenship during post-reconstruction times. The essays, books, and newspaper articles she wrote, instigated the dialogue of race struggles between whites and blacks, while her personal narratives, including two diaries, a travel journal, and an autobiography, recorded the personal struggle of a woman to define womanhood during post-emancipation America. The novel, _THEY SAY: IDA B. WELLS AND THE RECONSTRUCTION OF RACE_ , provides an insight into how Ida B. Wells's life paralleled that of

Abraham Lincoln is best known for his great speeches and his role in the civil war, but what most people do not know is how he and his wife met and what effect her family had on his presidency. In Stephen Berry’s book House of Abraham: Lincoln and the Todds, a Family Divided By War, Berry tells about the life of Abraham and his wife Mary Todd. In this book, he includes the influence that the Todd family had played on his personal life as well as his presidency. This book begins with Mary Todd’s grandfather and eventually he ends with Lincoln’s assassination. The main focus of the author is to give the reader a better understanding of the Todd clan, and also to understand what it was like to be apart of the family. The content of the book allows for people to go into the mind of the Todd family. After reading this book, it is easy to see why Abraham had such a difficult time with the Civil War not just because he was president, but also because his wife’s family was split by it.

Debra Marquart, in The Horizontal World, takes the reader through her life in North Dakota, travelling all the way back to between the years of 1885 and 1911 when her immigrant, Russian grandparents, first arrived in America. Marquart, from a more modern point of view, feels like her grandparents were deceived by a facade that enveloped the Midwest- claiming that the area is not as exciting as the media made it out to be. She uses intense diction to condemn the state, proves the deceitful tendencies of the North Dakota through juxtaposition, and manipulates the pathos of the reader by triggering sympathy for the incoming settlers.

“The Lost Children of Wilder” is a book about how the foster care system failed to give children of color the facilities that would help them lead a somewhat normal and protected life. The story of Shirley Wilder is a sad one once you find out what kind of life she had to live when she was a young girl. Having no mother and rejected by her father she has become a troubled girl.

Lillian was a laundress and his father was a coachman and a caretaker. As a child William

In the 1940’s and the 1950’s, America was going through a world war and several difficulties that included problems in civil and woman rights on the home-front. In two different nonfiction memoirs by female authors, we see different yet similarities in the novels. Nisei Daughter by Monica Sone is a memoir by a Japanese-American woman, in which she describes her childhood, adolescence, and young womanhood while growing up in a Japanese immigrant family in Seattle, Washington in the 1930 's. In the second narrative, Coming of Age in Mississippi by Anne Moody is a memoir by an African-American woman whom writes about her childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood life and growing up in her home state during the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950’s. Moody and Sone had childhoods that lacked positive influences in certain areas and tell their stories to help others in understanding the issues that surrounded them as being minority women in a society that don’t accept them.

Her poem, A Bronzeville Mother Loiters In Mississippi. Meanwhile, A Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon, is what I chose to focus on in my paper. Brooks’s poem is all about Carolyn Bryant and how she might have felt about the murder of Till. She presents Carolyn as almost sympathetic, oppressed housewife whose refuses to accept her role and her husband role in the injustice murder of Till. Instead, she rationalizes it by comparing the murder to a fairy tale. She makes herself the princess, her husband the prince, and Till the dark villain.

Agee and Evans set out to publish an article in Fortune Magazine, but when they brought back their work to the editors, they were rebuked. The “article” was over 400 pages of controversial writing and even various book editors refused to publish it as a novel. Finally in 1941 it was published by Mifflin in Massachusetts after the author was forced to take out a few outlawed words in the state. They failed in their original mission to produce an “article,” but undoubtedly presented a “photographic and verbal record” of the average white southern tenant farmer families. By living with three different families for four weeks, Evans depicted their innermost sorrows through his photographs, and Agee portrayed and emboldened their spirit by his written words. The novel itself was an experiment in form, with Evans’ photos all placed in the front without captions, rather than dispersed throughout the novel. Even in the text, Agee continually stops himself mid-description and enters into a stream-of-consciousness describing the difficulties of articulating accurately the tenant families true expressions. For these reasons, it was considered a failure when it was published, but also for the same reasons it was considered an amazing success twenty years later in the 1960s.

Clara Brown was the woman behind a quotidian name, yet, to my recent knowledge, a not so quotidian life. By the mere viewing of her gravesite, I was singularly drawn to choose this particular individual despite my imagination’s inability to brushstroke a hazy portrait of her. My initial interest in Clara Brown, I know, derived from the solemn two sets of four digits centered at the top of her headstone; 1859 and 1885. They were bold and attention-grabbing, like a title to the piece of literature that was Clara Brown’s life.

She thrived in an industry which was predominantly male-operated, challenging the limits of what a women could pursue. With her knowledge of the family business, Frances was considered “as good a judge of credits as any banker in the country.” (74) Frances Harling proved herself to be just as capable as any male banker, much admired for her capabilities by both old and new generations of the time. Among the women of Black Hawk, Mrs. Gardener also challenges gender norms by running a business. She runs a hotel, with primarily male visitors, with the help of her husband. Although it was common at this time for men to be in charge of their family’s business, Mrs. Gardener took this position in her family’s dynamic. It was in fact “Mrs. Gardener who ran the business and looked after everything. [...] [Her husband] was a popular fellow, but no manager.” (89) Although men were usually the breadwinners of their families during this time period, Mrs. Gardener showed that women could be breadwinners as well. Her skills and ambition provided her with a successful business opportunity that she took pride in. Additionally, her husband appeared grateful for her skills as Mr. Gardener realized “that without [Mrs. Gardener] he would hardly be more than a clerk in some other man’s hotel.” (93) Mrs.

The author uses conflicts she experienced trying to achieve her own American Dream, to show the strife the Younger family had

The author of the book won many awards. He won the John Newbery Award, Anne V. Zarrow Award for Young Readers' Literature, and the Golden Kite Award for Fiction. He wrote other books like The Secret School, Crispin: The Cross of Lead, and The Fighting Ground. This book took place in a time where people would have to work long hours and don’t make enough money to support yourself or your family because they are poor. Being a woman in the 1800’s you wouldn’t be able to go to school.

Early in their lives, two young sisters, Ruth and Lucille, experience loss and abandonment from the men in the family. Their grandfather had died in a train derailment into Lake Fingerbone before they were born, and their father leaves them while they are very young. Then their mother commits suicide, but not before dropping the girls off on their grandmother’s porch. Moreover, then, “she sailed in Bernice’s Ford from the top of a cliff named Whiskey Rock into the blackest depth of the lake (23), again into Lake Fingerbone. After only a few months their grandmother dies leaving the girls to the remainder of the family, a collection of eccentric females. The girls deal with all of this by relying on each other. Soon, their great Aunt’s,