Bound Lives Summary

Since African slaves were not accepted as human by mainsteam society, their descendents are affected by the same social dilemma, forcing those in Latin America to remain below Europeans and even indigenious

Under the power and jurisdiction of their masters, slaves lost their humanity and became extensions of their masters (Rauch, Sherman, & Hagel). Consequently, slaves wished to escape their cycle of subordination as presented in many non-fictional slave texts, such as in Mariano Pereira’s interview after slavery or in the Ilheus, Bahia slave treaty in 1789 (Krueger). Given that the slave could not challenge the institution with enough power to eliminate it, slaves must have sought other means to oppose the institution and gain some autonomy. Hence, primary sources become excellent texts to extract and define the form of resistances slaves utilized to oppose their masters. In Plautus’s play, Pseudolus, and Machado de Assis’s short story, The Cane, slaves used the manipulation of language, the master’s power in persuasion, and the reliance on others to wager on gaining autonomy.

Barker, Joseph. Interesting Memoirs and Documents relating to American Slavery. London: Chapman, Brother, 1846. Reprinted from a copy in the Negro Collection of the Fisk University Library. Mnemosyne Publishing, Inc., Miami:

At times the assertions in Jennifer L. Morgan’s Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery can seem unexpectedly straightforward, for example when she merely states that, “African women were there” (197). At other points, the connections she proposes between race, gender, the body, colonialism, and ideology are almost overwhelmingly entangled and complex. But it is perhaps this mix of the explicit and the theoretical that make the book such an insightful and transformative work in the field of early Atlantic history. For while her topic is focused, the depth of her questioning, the scope of her research, and the attention she pays to the theoretical framework within that topic are profound. Morgan’s overall goal for the book

Two things that were extremely important to the basic societal functions of colonial American society were women and the church. Much different from today’s world, woman’s main purpose in this society was to give birth to children and provide dowries to their husbands at marriage. The church was obviously there to provide a moral compass and rule to the people of this age. How do women and the church relate however? The relationship between these figures however is important to understanding how colonial Latin America worked especially when we discuss marriage and social standing.

Jean Stuntz adds to the growing literature of southern women in colonial American by examining the lives of Hispanic women in Texas in her article, “Spanish Law and Texas Women in Colonial Texas: 1719-1821.” Stuntz relied on sources such as government documents, archival materials such as disputes, testimony, wills, pleadings, land deeds, and legal records to demonstrate that under colonial laws, Spanish women had rights unlike in other places, the laws were designed to exclude women of color, regardless of their status. In colonial Texas, Hispanic women, including poor women, had rights. Working within the law, they were able to file suits. When filing suits, a woman’s marital status was not mentioned, it was not important according to Stuntz.

By using this reference, it illustrated the severity of the alienation of blacks in the Southern United States. In 1619, a Dutch ship “introduced the first captured Africans to America, planting the seeds of a slavery system that evolved into a nightmare of abuse and cruelty that would ultimately divide the nation”. The Africans were not treated humanely, but were treated as workers with no rights. Originally, they were to work for poor white families for seven years and receive land and freedom in return. As the colonies prospered, the colonists did not want to give up their workers and in 1641, slavery was legalized.

Ira Berlin’s Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America is a history of African-American slavery in mainland North America during the first two centuries of European and African settlement.” (1) The first slaves arrived in the New World in 1619 and over the next two hundred years the Atlantic developed from a society with slaves to a slave society. In Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America, Berlin argues that both slavery and its culture evolved over time and place to fit the needs of the surroundings.

The theme of slavery still, to this day, remains and the world doesn’t need to remain shy on this brutal topic. Gaspar, David Barry, and Darlene Clark Hine. Black Women and Slavery in the Americas: More Than Chattel. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996. Print.

Within all major societies of the world exists a power struggle between the majority and the minority, the disenfranchised and the coddled. But no power struggle has achieved the same notoriety as the black slave’s plight in the Western world. From England to the West Indies and the Americas, black slaves suffered insurmountable trauma and subjugation. One of these slaves, Olaudah Equiano, recounts his experiences, both triumphant and pitiful, within the Americas and England to affect change in his audience and in the world. In his The Life of Olaudah Equiano, he utilizes specific rhetorical strategies to affect this change and to accomplish his goal.

Slavery in Africa and in Latin America was distinct, despite being connected through the Atlantic slave trade. While traditional African slavery was practiced largely by communities to help produce food or for prestige, slave labor in Latin America was practiced on a much larger scale, for it was central to the colonies’

In Antebellum America, the United States’ Southern slave-based

Can you imagine being ripped from your family, without warning? The act of slavery brought about abundant despair, great heartache, and death for millions across the United States. Perhaps that is an inconceivable idea for most; however, that very uncertainty is what slaves

Slavery, a substitution of indentured services on the Southern ranches has been existing as ahead of schedule as the seventeenth century of the provinces. Indeed, even after the Revolutionary War, it has dependably been the most sizzling subject to discuss among the areas of the United States. In spite of the way that this business of human subjugation stayed quite well everywhere until the mid nineteenth century, continuous resistance to bondage had been dependably been expanding the country over. Among the various basic strengths and particular occasions that added to this developing resistance were the social conflict with the abhorrent framework, and the political components which additionally had impacts among the general population in

The author, Douglas R. Egerton, has his M.A. and Ph.D. from Georgetown University. His grandparents were slaveholders and believed that slaves were property. He became interested in race relations because of grandparents and the television series “Roots”. He specifically concentrates on race relations in the American South. He is now a history professor at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, New York.