Essays on Banneker

After a read of Belinda Sutton’s 1783 Petition and the 1791 letter dubbed To Thomas Jefferson from Benjamin Banneker, it is impossible to overlook the authors’ shared perception of men and women of color deserving more than what the Caucasians gave them at the time. Sutton believed that after her years of captivity as the human chattel of one Isaac Royall, she should have a “morsel of [the] immense wealth” her servitude under bondage had given the master (1783, par.5). Similarly, in a wider perspective of the racist ideologies that fueled the slavery system, Banneker insisted that his ...

Described as a man of the first many in terms of his inventions and accomplishments, Benjamin Banneker was the first self-educated African-American born in 1731 in an enslaved family. Both of Benjamin Banneker parents were free people considering that his mother was a daughter of an English woman named Mary, who got married to a slave Bannka after she had freed him. Therefore, Benjamin was able to elude the cruelty that many African-Americans went through as slaves and even had the privilege of attending a Quaker school while staying with his maternal grandmother. In that, he began his education ...

Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence with of aim of establishing the revolution that the colonists were planning and enforcing on America. A famous line from the declaration reads, “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” With this line, Jefferson meant that all men are equal and they deserved equality in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (Amitarge 145). This line is not an absolute. This is because in our society, there is evidence that some people have more rights than others while other people are oppressed. There are many forms of oppressions that prove this statement ...

Even if a young person looks at his or her own personal family history and genealogy, he or she will find that the lives of their ancestors and their own personal lives are entwined in the history, black history, of America. African American history is rich and expansive. The American black has contributory history, history in plight as well as in triumph and success. There is more to be discovered in the annals of black history than one could fit into eight pages. Thus, this paper will highlight short bursts of contribution, plight and triumph in each era important to ...

ABSTRACT

Stanley Elkins proposed a groundbreaking theory about the effect of oppression and totalitarianism on subject races, one that drew from multiple academic disciplines. James McPherson’s interpretation is more fact-based and less theoretical, drawing from anecdotal archival sources to develop an environment-centric picture of slavery in the Antebellum and Civil War periods. Ultimately, the success of African-Americans in all walks of life have tended to show that, as abolitionists argued, servility was a temporary product of the powerlessness of their situation in the plantation South.

Debating America’s Legacy of Slavery

James McPherson and Stanley Elkins represent two different approaches to the discipline of historical study and ...