Three pages.
dannylovec
museum2page.docxhttps://theautry.org/ https://theautry.org/exhibitions/
For this week's you will have to visit the Gene Autry Museum and then answer the following:
What did you learn from the visit? Be specific and explain.
How does this museum relate to our class? Be specific in your reference.
Required length: 2 pages
Chapter 3: Introduction
Introduction
Historians are interested in slavery, students in racism. Historians want to know how and when slavery originated and developed as an institution protected by law; students want to know why whites and blacks, who have so much in common, still seem to identify themselves as if they were different people with different cultures. This week covers the history and ideas from Chapter 3 in the textbook along with additional materials and perspectives about the slave trade, specifically the concept of "Slave Culture". Slavery is one of the most painful and difficult topics in American history, but you have a chance in this chapter to make the point that institutions usually reflect social demands, and that institutions designed to serve one purpose can be adapted to serve altogether different ends. American slavery clearly began as the profitable solution to an economic problem. By the time slavery was destroyed, it had become the unprofitable solution to a social problem.
Video
Watch this video about Slavery.
Chapter 3: Lecture
The Calculus of Slavery
The question of English racism is being reconsidered by scholars at present, but even if it existed to a significant degree in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it would have worked both for and against the introduction of enslaved Africans into the colonies. If the English hated or feared Africans enough to enslave them, why not keep Africans out of the colonies altogether? Whatever the truth about English racism, it is clear that economics played the crucial role in the introduction of slavery into British North America.
Choices of Labor-Logic of Choice
An English colonist wealthy enough to buy labor had a choice between an English or European indentured servant and an enslaved African. Until around 1700 in British North America, the choice was usually to buy a servant because that purchase made more economic sense. The planter made a series of calculations that you can present to your students in the form of a simple model. The planter weighed four factors: the initial cost of the laborer, the annual cost of maintenance, the annual output per worker and the length of service. If it is explained that servants usually worked for five years, your students will focus on the length of service and give the economic edge to slavery, especially considering that a person enslaved for life could actually bear children, who would be in turn enslaved for life. Pay more attention to the initial cost of a laborer. The British North American colonies were always on the fringe of the Atlantic slave trade. About 90 percent of the ten million people taken from Africa were carried to the sugar plantations in Brazil and the West Indies. The British mainland colonies had to pay a premium to divert slave traders from their preferred routes with the result that an African laborer in the colonial period cost four or five times more than an indentured servant, a price so high that only the largest tobacco and rice growers in North America could afford to buy people directly from Africa.
Conditions of Labor--Economic Cost of Slavery
Through most of the colonial period, the up-front cost was the critical factor in determining whether to buy a servant or a slave. There was relatively little difference in the cost of maintenance. Servants did not live luxuriously, nor could slaves be starved. The productivity of slaves and servants depended less on their status than on the quality of the soil they worked and the amount of equipment they used. When all the calculation was done, the planter wound up weighing the initial cost of the laborer against the expected length of service. A servant worked only five years or so, but these were prime working years. A slave and his or her children would work for life, but some planters doubted that a slave too young or too old was worth having. More importantly, the death rate in the seventeenth-century Chesapeake and in the South Carolina rice fields was so high that neither whites nor blacks could expect to live to a ripe old age. A planter who purchased a servant was taking a chance that he or she would survive for five years. A planter who paid much more for a slave was taking an even greater risk. Until about 1700, the prudent choice was to buy a servant.
If the high death rates of the seventeenth century had continued, North America would have largely escaped the curse of slavery, but times changed. After 1700, British merchants dominated the slave trade and opened a direct trade between Africa and the colonies. At the same time, life expectancy in the Chesapeake improved. The combination of these two factors, plus the desire to profit without regard to morality, fastened slavery upon British North America.
What clearly began as an economic institution soon became a racist social arrangement. (Cotton will also change this arrangement.) Even before the American Revolution, there was a common white belief that blacks were inherently inferior and had to be kept in a subordinate position, whether that was slavery or some other status. By the eve of the Civil War, white southerners truly believed that slavery had ceased to be profitable, but slavery had become for them the only possible social system that would allow whites and blacks to live side by side, and they were willing to fight and die for that system.
The Culture of Slavery
The history of slavery in America is distressing as Celia, a Slave will emphasize. It is extremely complicated. The first thing I want you to work on is not using the term slave, but rather say “people that are enslaved..” How does that change your idea of those in the institution and their relationship to their work and their owners?
Chapter 4: Introduction
Overview
Modern American students usually need help to understand the provincialism of colonial culture. American culture today, especially American popular culture, the one most familiar to you, dominates the world. Pearl Jam is played as ardently in Naples as in Seattle. Michael Jordan is as much an icon in Tokyo as in Chicago. Madonna is as adored in Caracas as she is in Tampa. It is true that most popular culture is created in only a few places, like New York and Los Angeles, but one of the characteristics of modern pop culture is that it happens where it is consumed, not where it is produced. Wherever the television set or shopping mall is, there is the vital center of popular culture.
It was altogether different in eighteenth-century America. Nobody would have understood the concept of popular culture and what we call “folk art” was then considered inferior workmanship. In the eighteenth century, culture was “high” culture: art, architecture, literature, opera, or sacred music. The high culture of the American colonies in that era may be defined as provincial, but that word must be carefully defined. In this chapter we will delve into the developing colonial culture and how it will change over time; from being English to American.
Chapter 4: Lecture
Provincials
Modern American students usually need help to understand the provincialism of colonial culture. American culture today, especially American popular culture, the one most familiar to you, dominates the world. Pearl Jam is played as ardently in Naples as in Seattle. Michael Jordan is as much an icon in Tokyo as in Chicago. Madonna is as adored in Caracas as she is in Tampa. It is true that most popular culture is created in only a few places, like New York and Los Angeles, but one of the characteristics of modern pop culture is that it happens where it is consumed, not where it is produced. Wherever the television set or shopping mall is, there is the vital center of popular culture.
Different meaning of provincials--High vs. Low culture
It was altogether different in eighteenth-century America. Nobody would have understood the concept of popular culture and what we call “folk art” was then considered inferior workmanship. In the eighteenth century, culture was “high” culture: art, architecture, literature, opera, or sacred music. The high culture of the American colonies in that era may be defined as provincial, but that word must be carefully defined. In the narrowest definition, a provincial is simply a person who lives in a province, and a province is just a district governed by a geographically remote capital, but the usual connotation of the word provincial is that of a person unaware of living out of the cultural mainstream and therefore ignorantly proud of the second-rate culture of his or her vicinity. In European literature, the provincial is always smug and boorish. The colonial American could not have been provincial in that sense. There was too much moving around and too many people constantly arriving from foreign places. Americans in the eighteenth century did not value multiculturalism, but they had to adjust to reality. Ben Franklin, for example, normally a reasonable and tolerant man, proposed restrictions on German immigration to Pennsylvania because Germans were not “White.” Nevertheless, Franklin learned to speak German.
There is a less familiar connotation of the word provincial, and it is this one that best describes colonial culture. In this sense, provincials are those so in awe of the culture of the capital that they scorn everything local and slavishly buy or copy whatever is produced in the metropolis.
The feeling of being culturally displaced may have existed at all levels of colonial society. Africans taken by force across the Atlantic dreamed still of the blessed lands in Africa to which they would return in the afterlife. German and Scottish immigrants looked to Heidelberg and Edinburgh for cultural inspiration, not to Boston or Philadelphia. It is, however, among the English-Americans, and especially among the wealthiest, the most prestigious and most articulate, that we can best document the provincialism of colonial America.
National identity- Cultural Dependence
Mrs. Jonathan Edwards, for example, glued black silk patches all over her face before going to church to hear her husband describe with vivid relish the terrors of Hell. She wore face patches because fashionable English women in the mid-eighteenth century wore them. George Washington, before he became a rebel, had his clothes made by a tailor in Old Fish Street in London. The clothes did not fit well, Washington admitted, but they were “genteel” because they were made in England. Every American male with a shilling’s worth of prestige in the eighteenth century wore a wig only because the better sort of Englishmen wore wigs. Every colonial who could hire an architect had a house built in the Georgian style already becoming outmoded in England. When aspiring Americans sought to improve their writing style, they copied the essays of Addison and Steele. When deep-thinking colonials wished to ponder philosophic questions, they began, and usually ended, with John Locke or George Berkeley. When less ponderous but equally earnest Americans wanted to examine moral questions in a dramatic setting, they read novels, most notably Pamela by Samuel Richardson.
Provincial Americans combined their love for everything English with an often-expressed contempt for their own society. Samuel Johnson, who taught at Yale around 1720, remembered that “the condition of learning in Connecticut (as well as everything else) was very low.” Cadwallader Colden, a prominent figure in New York City society, lamented that “few men here have any kind of literature.” John Singleton Copley complained that there was not a single painting in Boston “worthy to be called a picture.” William Byrd II, one of the richest, best-educated of the Virginian planters, sent his daughter to be educated in England because he feared that her character would be corrupted by the savagery of Virginian society. Thomas Jefferson described the state of music in eighteenth-century America as one of “deplorable barbarism.” This contempt for American culture resulted in a brain drain from the colonies. Benjamin West, the best painter born in the colonies before the Revolution, is the prime example, but people like Franklin, Washington and Jonathan Edwards tried, at some time in their lives, to move permanently from America to Great Britain.
American provincialism is long gone. Are impressed by an English university accent? Political independence did not at once result in cultural independence, but new nationhood produced the people like Emerson who nudged Americans into trusting their own modes of thought, their own styles of dress, their own accents and their own artifacts. Today, we Americans, heirs to a successful political and cultural revolution, expect others to imitate us.
