Oct 01, · Good "Attention Getters" Are Vital for Essays. An "attention getter," also known as an "attention grabber," "hook," or "hook sentence," refers to the first sentences of an essay and is always found in the introductory paragraph. It consists of an intriguing opening that is designed to grab your reader's attention Essays on American environmental history. Nature Transformed is an interactive curriculum enrichment service for teachers, offering them practical help in planning courses and presenting rigorous subject matter to students. Nature Transformed explores the relationship between the ways men and women have thought about their surroundings and the ways they have acted toward them “The Central European Network for Sonic Ecologies (CENSE) is an informal network of individual voices coming from various backgrounds. We propose this emerging network to fill the need of fostering more perceptive and conscious thinking and solutions, addressing developments in the social and cultural fields of Central Europe (and beyond) related not only to sound art, ecomusicology, and
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CONTACT US SITE GUIDE SEARCH. Heather Andrea Williams University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill National Humanities Humanities essays Fellow ©National Humanities Center. In some ways enslaved African American families very much resembled other families who lived in other times and places and under vastly different circumstances. Some husbands and wives loved each other; some did not get along. Most parents loved their children and wanted to protect them.
In some critical ways, though, the slavery that marked everything about their lives made these families very different. Belonging to another human being brought unique constrictions, disruptions, frustrations, and pain. Slavery not only inhibited family formation but made stable, secure family life difficult if not impossible. Enslaved people could not legally marry in any American colony or state. Colonial and state laws considered them property and commodities, not legal persons who could enter into contracts, and marriage was, and is, very much a legal contract, humanities essays.
This means that until when slavery ended in this country, the vast majority of African Americans could not legally marry. In northern states such humanities essays New York, Pennsylvania, or Massachusetts, where slavery had ended byfree African Americans could marry, but in the slave states of the South, many enslaved people entered into relationships that they treated like marriage; they considered themselves husbands and wives even though they knew that their unions were not protected by state laws.
A father might have one owner, his "wife" and children another. Some enslaved people lived in nuclear families with a mother, father, and children. In these cases each family humanities essays belonged to the same owner. Others lived in near-nuclear families in which the father had a different owner than the mother and children.
This use of humanities essays labor to produce wealth lay at the heart of slavery in America. Enslaved people usually worked from early in the humanities essays until late at night. Women often returned to work shortly after giving birth, sometimes running from the fields during the day to feed their infants.
On large plantations or farms, it was common for children humanities essays come under the care of one enslaved woman who was designated to feed and watch over them during the day while their parents worked, humanities essays. Slave quarters. Mulberry Plantation, South Carolina, humanities essays. On large plantations, slave cabins and the yards of the slave quarters served as the center of interactions among enslaved family members.
Here were spaces primarily occupied by African Americans, somewhat removed from the labor of slavery or the scrutiny of owners, overseers, and patrollers. Many former slaves described their mothers cooking meals in the fireplace and sewing or quilting late into the night.
Fathers fished and hunted, sometimes with their sons, to provide food to supplement the rations handed out by owners. Enslaved people held parties and prayer meetings humanities essays these cabins or far out in the woods humanities essays the hearing of whites.
In the space of the slave quarters, humanities essays, parents passed on lessons of loyalty; humanities essays about how to treat people; and humanities essays of family genealogy. Humanities essays was in the quarters that children watched humanities essays create potions for healing, or select plants to produce dye for clothing.
It was here too, humanities essays, that adults whispered and cried about their impending sale by owners. Family separation through sale was a constant threat.
Enslaved people lived with the perpetual possibility of separation through the sale of one or more family members, humanities essays. A multitude of scenarios brought about sale. An enslaved person could be sold as part of an estate when his owner died, or because the owner needed to liquidate assets to pay off debts, or because the owner thought the enslaved person was a troublemaker.
A father might be sold away by his owner while the mother and children remained behind, humanities essays, or the mother and humanities essays might be sold. These decisions were, of course, beyond the control of the people whose lives they affected most.
Sometimes an enslaved man or woman pleaded with an owner to purchase his or her spouse to avoid separation. The intervention was not always successful. Historian Michael Tadman has estimated that approximately one third of enslaved children in the upper South states of Maryland and Virginia experienced family separation in one of three possible scenarios: sale away from parents; sale with mother away from father; or sale of mother or father away from child.
The fear of separation haunted adults who knew how likely it was to happen. Young children, innocently unaware of the possibilities, learned quickly of the pain that such separations could cost. Many owners encouraged marriage to protect their investment in their slaves. Paradoxically, despite the likelihood of breaking up families, family formation actually helped owners to keep slavery humanities essays place, humanities essays.
Owners debated among themselves the benefits of enslaved people forming families. Many of them reasoned that having families made it much less likely that a man or woman would run away, thus depriving the owner of valuable property.
Some owners honored the choices enslaved people made about whom their partners would be; other owners assigned partners, forcing people into relationships they would not have chosen for themselves, humanities essays.
Abolitionists attacked slavery by pointing to the harm it inflicted upon families. Just as owners used the formation of family ties to their own advantage, humanities essays, abolitionists used the specter of separation to argue against the institution of slavery. Frederick Douglass, who was enslaved in Maryland before he escaped to Massachusetts and became an abolitionist stridently working to end slavery, began the narrative of his life by humanities essays "Eliza comes to tell Uncle Tom that he is sold and that she is running away to save her baby.
the effect of slavery on his own family. Further, humanities essays, he lived with his grandmother, while his mother lived and worked miles away, walking to see him late at night. In his narrative, aimed at an abolitionist audience, Douglass suggested that slaveowners purposefully separated children from their parents in order to blunt the development of affection between them. Abolitionists such as Douglass and Stowe argued that slavery was immoral on many grounds, humanities essays, and the destruction of families was one of them.
Following the Civil War, when slavery finally ended in America after nearly two hundred and fifty years, humanities essays, former slaves took measures to formalize their family relationsto find family members, humanities essays, and to put their families back together. During slavery, many people formed new families after separation, but many of them also held on to memories humanities essays the loved ones they had lost through sale.
Starting inhundreds of people placed advertisements in newspapers searching for family members. Parents returned to the places from which they had been sold to take their children from former owners who wanted to hold on to them to put them to work.
And, thousands of African American men and women formalized marriages now that it was possible to do so. Some married the person with whom they had lived during slavery, humanities essays, while others legalized new relationships, humanities essays. Humanities essays find that the most exhilarating and meaningful discussions occur when students have an opportunity to engage with primary sources.
Working with documents helps students to develop analytical and investigative skills and can give them a sense of how historians come to their understandings of the past. Interacting directly with documents can also help students to retain information and ideas. I offer a few primary sources here that should stimulate discussion and help students to imagine what life may have been like in the past. As English colonists began the process of putting slavery into place, they paid careful attention to family arrangements among enslaved people.
Legislators in Virginia and Massachusetts passed laws in the s making clear that the rules would be different for slaves and that family would not offer protection from slavery. Whereas some doubts have arisen whether children got by any Englishman upon a negro woman should be slave or free, Be it therefore enacted and declared by this present grand assembly, that all children borne in this country shall be held bond or free only according to the condition of the mother, and that if any Christian shall commit fornication with a negro man or woman, he or she so offending shall pay double the fines imposed by the former act.
Students will likely find humanities essays language of this statute humanities essays bit confusing, but will also enjoy deciphering it. Depending on the age and humanities essays of your students and the strictures of your school district, you may want to cut the last section regarding fornication. You can have an interesting discussion here about the role of the state or colony in this case in determining who would be a slave and who would be free.
Ask students why they think slaveowners, many of whom were represented in colonial legislatures, would have wanted this provision. How did it help them? What concerns were they attempting to satisfy here? What would be the status of a child born to an enslaved mother and white, slaveowning father?
What impact might this have had on black men who were being denied the right to determine the status of their children even though they lived in a patriarchal society in which men were generally dominant? Note for students that because whites were not enslaved in America, the children of a white mother and enslaved father was automatically humanities essays, but in some colonies and later states, legislation humanities essays white women and their mixed-race children by apprenticing the children until adulthood and extending the period of service for the white woman if she was an indentured servant.
What were the implications of such punishment? What message did legislatures send about the ideal racial makeup of families? The following paragraph is from Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girlwritten by Humanities essays Jacobs, a former slave, in My father, by his nature, as well as by the habit of transacting business as a skilful mechanic, had more of the feelings of a freeman than is common among slaves. My brother was a humanities essays boy; and being brought up under such influences, he early detested the name of master and mistress, humanities essays.
One day, when his father and his mistress had happened to call him at the same time, he hesitated between the two; being perplexed to know which had the strongest claim upon his obedience.
He finally concluded to go to his mistress, humanities essays. Poor Willie! He was now to learn his first lesson of humanities essays to a master.
In this brief passage, Jacobs takes us into the world of one enslaved family. You might begin the discussion by encouraging students to describe the scene in their own words, humanities essays. This exercise will require them humanities essays focus closely on the details of the episode. As a child Jacobs lived in Edenton, North Carolina, in the eastern, highly humanities essays part of the state. Ask students to think about what the setting might have been.
Why did he have to think about it? What lessons had he already learned about power as it related to him, an enslaved child? Why did he make decision that he ultimately did? This incident illuminates tensions in the roles that enslaved people had to play in their lives. He appealed to his son to recognize that their humanities essays made the father as important, and possibly as powerful, as their owner, humanities essays.
Ask student to explore these tensions. What do his words tell us about his feelings? What claims was he making despite his status as a slave. Did he put his son at risk by demanding obedience? Note for the students that although many enslaved children grew up apart from their fathers, some had fathers in their homes.
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In the humanities or the arts (and sometimes in math and science), you might be asked to write an informal essay, one more exploratory and reflective, developing not 'top down,' by supporting a thesis with reasons and examples, but rather 'bottom up,' by starting with experiences and finding some storyline or trail of explanation “The Central European Network for Sonic Ecologies (CENSE) is an informal network of individual voices coming from various backgrounds. We propose this emerging network to fill the need of fostering more perceptive and conscious thinking and solutions, addressing developments in the social and cultural fields of Central Europe (and beyond) related not only to sound art, ecomusicology, and The Mellon International Dissertation Research Fellowship (IDRF) offers six to twelve months of support to graduate students in the humanities and humanistic social sciences who are enrolled in PhD programs in the United States and conducting dissertation
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