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Ship Clotilda Sparknotes

Decent Essays

Often times, the way that people interpret historical events is affected by many things including the person that is doing so and whether they are biased/unbiased to the situation. Other affects include lack of good memory, exaggeration, and/or lack of good research which can result in a twisted story. A majority of writers on the topic of slavery had it all wrong, according to many researchers and analysts. Sylviane Diouf, however, did much research and found the facts and truth for her book. She used a plentiful amount of resources such as government documents, newspaper prints, oral histories, missionary accounts, ship documents, and linguistic data to put her themes across; therefore, she had plenty of knowledge on the topic before writing, …show more content…

This ship, that was built by a famous ship carpenter named William Foster, was the last documented ship to import African slaves to the United States. The “social life” of the ship Clotilda began in 1855 in Mobile, a southern city described by the author as the “slave-trading emporium of Alabama”, where her rigging was announced by a local newspaper. Dreams of Africa in Alabama is an analysis of the slave ship as a community and society bound by water with an emphasis on the lives of the slaves, and it also studies the Clotilda as a cultural commodity. She did not only consider the story of the ship, but also the lives of the slaves during and after the ship made it to America. This book uses documents and photographs from the ship and the people aboard it that have never been published before in order to recreate the lives of the slaves. Diouf gathered the personal and detailed testimonies of the slavers, and those of the deported Africans to provide hard proof for her story. She writes and teaches about the Middle Passage and reality of life in the southern United States as a slave through the period of the Civil War and emancipation. Diouf not only shows how the African captives survived slavery, the civil war, and reconstruction in Alabama, but also how they fought to preserve African

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