The Great Magnet And English Transatlantic Migration Essay

The progression of people into and within the United States has had an essential impact on the nation, both intentionally and unintentionally. Progressions such as The Great Migration and the Second Great Migration are examples of movements that impacted the United States greatly. During these movements, African Americans migrated to flee racism and prejudice in the South, as well as to inquire jobs in industrial cities. They were unable to escape racism, but they were able to infuse their culture into American society. During the twentieth century, economic and political problems led to movements such as The Great Migration and The Second Great Migration which impacted the United States significantly.

Everything discussed in Chapter 3: Forging Tighter Bonds and the Crash Course video “The Quakers, the Dutch, and the Ladies” occurred between 1640 and 1700. Barbados gained a lot of attention from the amount of wealth they were making from growing sugar. Soon the Barbados slave code helped perpetuate slavery by allowing slave master to do as they please. With the rebellion of the indentured servants the colonies would have to find a new work force following Barbados’s successful methods. (Chapter 3)

With economic conditions in England worsening, European immigrants travelled to the New World in pursuit of a better life. From 1607 to 1700, over half a million Europeans emigrated to the New World. Some set their sights on the West Indies, looking to build their fortune on sugar cane once they acquired land. The vast majority of settlers came as indentured servants, packed like cattle on ships to the Americas. Indentured servants were similar to slaves, they could be bought and sold, whipped, and subject to punishment from their masters. However, indentured servants earn their freedom after serving several years. On the contrary, some settlers were able to pay their way into the New World; although the process to the Americas was difficult

European nations came to the Americas to boost their wealth and expand their influence over world affairs. The first enduring British colony was established in Jamestown in the Chesapeake Bay region by the Virginia Company. To honor the memory of Elizabeth I, the never married “Virgin Queen” the company’s directors named the region Virginia. (pg.41) The Jamestown colonist had a tough time of it. They were so occupied looking for gold and other exportable assets that they could barely feed themselves. It wasn’t until 1616, that Virginia settlers learned how to farm tobacco. It became Virginia’s main source of revenue and helped the colony survive. The first African slaves appeared in Virginia in 1619.

“It was otherwise in the Chesapeake, the colonies of Virginia and Maryland. There, the legal institution of slavery grew out of economic opportunism and evolving social custom.” However, racism was involved as well in these areas. The British North Americans again resorted to the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, bringing in the labourers necessary to grow their crops; no matter how inhumane. “Economic need drove the tobacco planters to import large numbers of enslaved Africans in the late seventeenth century.” Working on these plantations was not an easy life, and the travelling conditions that these people went through were

Each colony in the Americas had its fair share of difficulties within their economy. What the colonists chose to rely on as a source of revenue was of utmost importance in creating a stable economy, whether it was the production of sugar, tobacco, cotton, or possibly even the trade of fish or fur. Through the discussion of climate and location, it becomes clear all colonies could not effectively produce or trade the same goods. For instance, the Carolinians were at first dependent upon the trade of deerskins and the use of Indian slaves in their economy. Alan Taylor points out that both deerskins and Indian slaves were “diminishing commodities” that were beginning to lay a “flimsy economic foundation for their new colony” (236). The Carolinians, according to Taylor, recognized that they needed to “develop a valuable agricultural staple for export” in order to create a stable economy (236). They were then able to cultivate and specialize in rice, becoming the “English Empire’s great rice colony just as the Chesapeake specialized in tobacco and the West Indies in sugar” (237). New England’s economy on the other hand had a prosperous start, “primarily from the regular infusion of newcomers,” who “consumed the crops made by the first-comers” (174). However, after the conclusion of the Great Migration in 1640, New England began to

In addition to “soul food” many other historical events are discussed in this movie. The Great Migration, according to Black Past, “…was the mass movement of about five million southern blacks to the north and west between 1915 and 1960…to major northern cities such as Chicago, Illinois, Detroit, Michigan, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and New York, New York.” (Christensen). One large reason for the mass migration was the to escape the southern states’ poor economy in the south. After the end of slavery, the southern economy suffered drastically because slave plantations were the South’s main source of income. During this time period, Black people were sucked into the capitalistic cycle of sharecropping, tenant farming and/ or labor, farming, while barely making enough money to provide for his/her families.

The Europe of the 17th and 18th centuries craved the sugar from the West Indies more and more as time went on. To keep up with these demands of the sugar economy sugar planters would bring seemingly endless supplies of enslaved Africans from across the Atlantic. With an increasingly high income it didn't matter that others were suffering under an oppressive system, or did it? In this paper I will prove that slavery grew increasingly race based from the 1660’s onward, slave laws were created and practiced more commonly, and standards for sexual race based relations had changed more dramatically. All of these things lead to the oppression of black slaves and lead to the establishment of a soley race based slavery system.

In 1843, farmers from Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee and Ohio, who were not satisfied by the future their homes could offer them, decided to leave on a 2000-mile journey to Oregon in hope of finding better lives . In 1845, a few years after "The Great Migration of 1843", fur trapper and guide Stephen Meek, mislead a group of emigrants following the Oregon trail from Missouri to the Willamette Valley, to a shortcut that put many of their lives at stake. Based on this true story, Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff (2010) uses its mise-en-scène, cinematography and other formal properties to generate meaning about themes represented in this event such as trust, survival, and women’s role in a patriarchal society. The demonstration of this type of society is shown in the film by the use of the women’s point of view, which will be analysed using a simple chosen excerpt. In the selected scene, the women’s muteness and passiveness can be clearly identified by multiple elements of formal features such as the point of view shot and edit of sound.

One major cause of western migration in the nineteenth century was the California Gold Rush. Many poorer families decided to move their entire family by carriage to California in order to make a better living. Families fought through many hardships to achieve this dream, however, as family members died from illnesses such as Camp Fever. While most families looked at the beneficial opportunities of acquiring this gold, many families walked away from this endeavor penniless.

“The transatlantic slave trade concerns history of three continents over four centuries and it has served as a crucial element of New World protohistory since the slave trade soared in the eighteenth century in response to the increasing demand for unfree labor in both the Caribbean and the

The Ottoman Empires blockage of the once popular trade route to the east, led to the exploration of the America’s. In the late 15th century, with the European’s goal to find a new trading route, the Portuguese, with their strong maritime power, were the first to venture out. Not only was the establishment of a new trade route crucial, but so was the discovery of resources to exploit for European gain. Land empires formed, bringing about the enslavement of native populations, and control of production and labor. No more was this evident than in the Caribbean Islands. Small but crucial assets to Europe, why did the Caribbean islands have such a big impact on the slave trade? Many European countries had colonized several regions in North and South America, yet there was something about the Caribbean’s that made them indispensable to their respective economies. The politics in Europe, the Caribbean’s fertile soil, and its demographics were key factors in the Caribbean’s importance. All three factors were essential in the Caribbean becoming a staple in the slave trade.

A black women by the name of Isabel Wilkerson, once stated some very influential words of wisdom to express her feelings toward the Great Migration. She stated,

“Expansion of sugar plantations in Spanish and Portuguese America, and the eager demand in Europe for American silver and gold, increased the need for slave labour (World History for Us All).” The number of African slaves across the Americas between the 16th to the

Several slaves preferred to jump from the boats and die in deep sea than being brought to countries like America and being traded like animals by slave owners. Approximately 12 million slaves were transported to the Americas between the 17th and 19th century in the so called “Trans-Atlantic slave trade”. Portugal was one of the first countries to transport Africans to America to work as slaves in sugar plantations in Cape Verde. This essay will focus on the processes that originated the Atlantic slave trades, how slavery emerged in the United states, and in the post-slavery life of African Americans.