Antebellum Slavery

     During  the later part of the eighteenth century, slavery seemed to be on the decline. The American and French Revolutions gave many slaves an opportunity to escape servitude and become free. Also, revolutionary ideas spread throughout the Caribbean, Spanish America and the United states, convincing many slave owners to let their slaves go. However, during the early nineteenth century, slavery underwent a huge boom in the southern part of the United States and Spanish territories in the New world. The reason for this boom was mostly due to Eli Whitney's latest invention, the Cotton Gin. The Cotton Gin vastly sped up the cotton cleaning process allowing for garments to be made faster. To keep up with the demand of cotton, many more slaves were imported to the United States. To put it in perspective, in 1790, the entire South produced about 1.5 million pounds of cotton and in 1860 the South produced nearly 2.3 billion pounds of cotton. By 1860, slavery had become firmly entrenched in the South due to the increased cotton demand.
 
     By basing slavery on race, the race which is forced into slavery loses all their dignity because they are considered inferior to the race which put them there. For example, prince Abdul Rahman was considered royalty in his community in Africa until he was taken into slavery in Missouri where he was nothing more than slave. Also, His owner cut off his long  hair which was a strong symbol of pride and importance in his culture. Rahman had his dignity stripped away by being put into slavery. This system of race based slavery ignores intelligence thoughts and morality and just categorizes people based on skin color. This shows how flawed and fundamentally wrong slavery is.

   

Fear of women

     In class, we have been learning about reforms in the 1800's in America. Most recently we learned about the Women's Reform. Our essential questions were:  How did mid ­19th century American society react to women's demands for equality? Does 21st century society still react differently to men and women? To answer these questions we read a couple of different articles and even watched a modern day commercial. Another thing we did was look at this picture to determine if it was an accurate representation of a women's life during the 1800's.
     The first article we read and took notes on was called the Intimately Oppressed by Howard Zinn. With this article we picked out passages and asked questions about them so that our fellow classmates could answer them and further our understanding of the reform. Next, we read The Rights of Women: Laws and Practices which talked about the social restrictions placed on women during the 1800's. Then, we compared those restrictions to the resolutions proposed in the Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions, a document drawn up by the Seneca Falls convention that detailed the rights that women wanted to have and pointed out how they have been oppressed. Using all this information, we answered the first essential question. Society reacted to women's demands for equality by both accepting it and denying it, some men were afraid that by letting women have rights society would collapse and other people wanted women's rights because they knew it would be beneficial to everyone. To help answer the second essential question, we watched a Filipino Pantene add showing how society views women based on their jobs or actions. The answer we came up with was that people do view women differently but a lot less so than in the 1800's and they are not as public about it. Overall, the women's Reform was very effective in giving women more rights and allowing them to play a bigger part in society.