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The Post-Civil War Era

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American actor and playwright, Ayad Akhtar reflected, “I see the American experience as being defined by the immigrant paradigm of rupture and renewal: rupture with the old world, the old ways, and renewal of the self in a bright but difficult New World.” While Akhtar was reflecting on the current society in America, the experience in the Post-Civil War era was similar in it’s ability to fight the old and make room for the new. To give a connotative definition, the American Experience was the act of fighting and using every opportunity for oneself to survive in a competitive and ever changing market of social, political, and artistic construct. Many artists, authors and other creators influenced this definition with their work by their portrayal …show more content…

What became the idea of success has since evolved as the ideals of the society and the people shifted. The Post-Civil war era was an exceptional time for defining what truly was the experience of America. Part of this era was also referred to as Reconstruction, a time of social, economic, and political change within the country as a result of the nation’s unpreparedness for the newly freed black population. The freed slaves helped politically define the American experience by the way that they fought for their freedom and worked rigorously to find success in a country that was still plagued with prejudice and racial injustice. It wasn’t only African Americans who struggled to find a place in America, but women too. The late 1800's was a time where women and women's organizations were fighting for social, economical, and political equality. Socially, women heavily impacted the way people portrayed the everyday life of people living in America. They actively sought to be seen as hardworking individuals and not just the assets of their male counterparts. In a way as well, women socially defined the American experience as working to success in a society that was working against them. While the country fights within itself both socially and politically, a major focus within the artistic area of this time period was the image of humans surviving in nature. One of …show more content…

During Reconstruction, the point of it was to integrate former slaves into normal societal life. Unfortunately, because many African Americans were never fully compensated for slavery, much of the black population lived in rural poverty in the South and faced discrimination from Black codes and labor contracts (Recchiuti). Like explained before, this struggle within the black community shaped the American experience. What Homer did was capture the daily lives of Post-Civil war African Americans in order to convey how they successfully survived in a place that formerly segregated itself from the union to keep them as slaves. In his watercolours, The Conch Divers (1885) and The Water Fan (1898-99), Winslow understood the importance of using every aspect to emanate the political hardships that the black community still faced. His portrayal of black workers on a ship in The Conch Divers shows how they were still treated like slaves in the way that they all lack shirts and what clothing they had is torn, the work that they are doing is painstaking, and no doubt that Homer had in mind the very minimal compensation the workers were receiving when he used such pale colours to depict the scene. Here Winslow Homer is showing the working struggle of an African American and how they are still surviving with what little they were given. This

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