Solomon Northup achieves something quite profound in this book. The narrative shows how a simple economic institution, backed by law and religion, enforced by those seeking to profit from it, can quickly become rationalized and passed down from generation to generation as a cultural norm.
The institution of slavery is the inhibitor of civilization and modernization in the South. It slows the progress of education, morality, community, social mores, customs, culture, infrastructure, economic advances, wages and labor practices. It however, promotes destitution, waste and abuse.
Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: an American Slave. New York: Penguin Books, 1968. 1. Thesis: Frederick Douglass persuades the reader that the institution of slavery not only robs the slave of all of the fundamental elements
Southern Women and the Revolution – Mary Beth Norton 1. Thesis: The Revolutionary War transformed the social role of women. Depending on which region (North or South) a woman lived in and to which class (rural poor, urban, wealthy white)
American Revolutionaries in the Making: Political Practices in Washington’s Virginia (Charles S. Sydnor, University of North Carolina Press, 1952). 1. Thesis: Despite the somewhat questionable atmosphere of voting and politics, Virginia’s environment fostered and promoted the most qualified persons to
The Only Land They Knew: The Tragic Story of the American Indians in the Old South (J. Leitch Wright, Jr., The Free Press, 1981) – excerpt: The Original Southerners. True knowledge of the intricate workings of the pre-contact southern Indian
Myne Own Ground: Race and Freedom on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, 1640-1676 (T.H. Breen and Stephen Innes, Oxford Press, 1980). Conventional historical analysis of the rise of racism and slavery in the South paints a very broad brush of these as
American Slavery – American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (Edmund S. Morgan, W.W. Norton & Company, 1975). Author and historian Edmund S. Morgan takes a very thorough and chronological approach to the growth of slavery as an institution starting
Today, Americans take so many things for granted. As a nation with a limited attention span and a constant need for instant gratification, we conveniently overlook our own heritage and the difficult work of a few statesmen almost two and a half centuries ago. All of us have handled a ten-dollar bill at one time in our lives, but have we ever stopped to understand the complexities and the vision of the man who appears on that bill? The legacy of Alexander Hamilton lives on in many of our political and economic conventions to this day.
Did the rural, localized Anti-Federalists not see the bigger picture of how the colonies as a whole unit would fit in with the rest of the world? Were Federalists really just in it for their own economic and aristocratic self-interests? It is in this turbulent atmosphere that the true revelations of new Federalist theory emerge.