American and Slavery- Week 3

     During the past week in American Studies, we studied slavery more in depth than we did in the previous week, and we studied the effects slavery had on America as a whole, for example, the Civil War. We watched a documentary about slaves, and freed slaves in the Northern states. The documentary talked about David Walker an African born free. He was an active abolitionist who owned a printing press, helping spread ideas about abolishing slavery. But doing that he had made some enemies and was assassinated. The second person they focused on was Maria Stewart, an African woman who was greatly influenced by the ideas of David Walker. Also in American Studies, we studied the map of the United States, and how it grew over the years due to many different events, leading up to the Civil War. What we studied in American Literature somewhat tied into what we were studying in Studies. We analyzed President Lincoln's second inaugural speech and found relations to some portions of the Bible. We uncovered how he really felt about slavery, and that gave us another perspective to use when talking about opinions on slavery.

Women's Rights - Week 2

           In this past week of American Studies, we learned quite a bit of history on John Adams and his viewpoint on the creation of the Declaration. We viewed a documentary that was quite informative and had lots of details regarding the Declaration and what happened inside of Congress. Another big topic we talked about in class was women's rights. We read a letter that Abigail Adams had sent to her husband, John Adams. In the letter she asked basic questions such as how is the war doing, is everything OK, and things of that fashion. But she also had a few suggestions of her own for the Declaration. She suggested to include women's rights as it was extremely important to society. She believed that without women, that men would go somewhat out of control, and all men could become tyrants if they didn't have a proper women to guide them. This ideal is somewhat similar to the Puritan ideal of man being evil, but also differs in the fact that Puritans did not give women rights at all. Near the end of the week. we read a court case involving a dispute over land and ownership of the land. In class, we got in a discussion about the Americans and how they had to send the Natives out of their home territory and into reservations, and the argument that had popped up was that, was it progress from actually killing all them. I believed it wasn't since the Americans were forced to do it, and if they did kill most of them, there would be a war at hand. And on top of that, 1/3 of the Native population died while traveling to the reservation.

Jefferson and slavery-Week 1

            In American Studies, we read over "Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia", and the text surprised me. After the Declaration of Independence was written is 1776, the Congress had agreed that all men were created equal and all slaves should be emancipated. But Thomas Jefferson's thoughts disagreed with that popular opinion. He believed that blacks should be deported back to Africa after their slave term was over. Jefferson believed that when slaves turned 45 they should be colonized back in Africa. Thomas also supported the notion of slaves being black since they have body characteristics that helped them with the heat and extreme workload. This surprised me because Jefferson had agreed with and written the Declaration of Independence. This led me to believe that maybe some other congressmen also had differing thoughts and just agreed with the popular vote of emancipating slaves. In American Literature class, we also read the text of Equiano, a slave who traveled to Europe and eventually became a European. The text gave us an insight of what slaves went through and gave a standard to compare to when talking about Jefferson. That is one of the many interesting and surprising things we discussed in the American Studies class and I hope to learn and talk about even more interesting texts and ideas