This “wiki” forum week is very similar to the one you completed the week of 1/30, where you posted a link and description to some content about race and or citizenship as broad terms.
Your assignment this time is to find a source related to the social and historical context for The Underground Railroad. You will share that information with us using the forum.
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Assignment description:
“Although slavery is now one of the most intensively-studied aspects in United States history,” writes the Digital History collective at University of Houston, “there was a long period during which it was largely ignored.”
As the discipline of American History developed, studies of slavery were quite limited. Focus was on law, governmental policy and political debates – and not onthe lives and experiences of slaves. A well-known historian from the late 19th C named Ulrich Phillips was one of the few to write about slavery, but did so by focusing on the slaveholders’ points of view. The result, write contemporary historians Oliver & Louise Horton, “[portrayed] blacks as passive, inferior people, whose African origins made them uncivilized, [and] seemed to provide historical evidence for the theories of racial inferiority that supported [ongoing] segregation”.
More modern studies of US history & slavery have attempted to amend this problem in their discipline – but how successful have they been?
For this exercise, we will create a list of sources that provide information about the history of slavery. What are “slave narratives”, and what have historians written about them? What was the WPA slave narrative collection? What do academics and cultural critics have to say about why there been so many contemporary works of historical fiction about slavery & the era of slavery in the last few years? (see: 12 Years a Slave ; Hamilton ; Birth of a Nation; The Underground Railroad – all produced between 2014-2016).
As with the previous assignment, a wide variety of sources are acceptable. You may find scholarly discussions/articles more relevant to this exercise, but feel free to post content from well-known and accredited newspapers, popular magazines, or even specialized websites dealing with race, history, or social justice.
Also as with the previous assignment, you must provide a 2-3 sentence summary of the source. Be clear in that explanation about the relationship between your choice and our coursework.
