African American West Myths

According to Ellen Carol DuBois in "American History thru Women's Eyes", life for women varied in late 1800s, because they were so diverse and they faced different challenges such as discrimination based on ethnicity, economic challenges, and also poverty. A woman's life experience also varied based on the reasoning why the family or the woman chose to move to the west. Life as a native woman, as a woman settling "family west" and a woman settling "wild west" differed. DuBois referenced these two types of processes in which western land was to be consolidated as a part of the American nation. The "wild west" and the "family west" (DuBois, page 346).

In Chapter 1 and 2 of “Creating Black Americans,” author Nell Irvin Painter addresses an imperative issue in which African history and the lives of Africans are often dismissed (2) and continue to be perceived in a negative light (1). This book gives the author the chance to revive the history of Africa, being this a sacred place to provide readers with a “history of their own.” (Painter 4) The issue that Africans were depicted in a negative light impacted various artworks and educational settings in the 19th and early 20th century. For instance, in educational settings, many students were exposed to the Eurocentric Western learning which its depiction of Africa were not only biased, but racist as well.

The Western United States was founded upon several layers of political, economic, and social causes that started the Western movement. The passages from John Barr’s book Peace Came in the Form of a Women which looks at the west before large amounts of Europeans arrived and how the large Native American population organized themselves focusing in on the Caddo people. While William Hyde’s’ book Empires, Nations, and Families: A New History of the North American West 1800-1860 as it depicts the European look and motives for the westward movement. According to Barr and Hyde’s the west before the westward expansion tended to owned and operated by the large Spanish population in Mexico and the enormous cities of the Native Americans that made up the land.

Blues could not exist if the African captives had not become American slaves. Without African slaves from West Africa, there would be no blues music. The immediate predecessors of blues were the Afro-American/American Negro work songs, which had their musical origins in West Africa. It is impossible to say how old the blues are but it is certainly no older than the presence of Negros in the United States. The African slaves brought their music with them to the New World.

People were drawn to the West because it was scene as the last resort to make a living when all else failed in the East. Communication with friends and family who had moved west led these pioneers to believe the journey would be easy and the reward for getting west would be best. And the greatly available land was the strongest pulling factor to people interested in adventuring west. Migration was a personal choice that depended on several key factors, “Age of the head of household; economic status; personal attitudes; and projected costs and benefits of the resettlement.” Most historians agree that the majority of the people who migrated west were middle class and mostly immigrants to the US.

The Westerns were born out of a violent part of the American history. The Southwest of America was invaded by white settlers, and the lands that belonged to the Indians were forcefully taken away from them. The U.S. cavalry was used to snatch those lands. Thus, the American Civil War opened the Southwest to the white settlers. The conflict of the Southwest became the most common theme of the Western genre of literature and movies.

Native Americans flourished in North America, but over time white settlers came and started invading their territory. Native Americans were constantly being thrown and pushed off their land. Sorrowfully this continued as the Americans looked for new opportunities and land in the West. When the whites came to the west, it changed the Native American’s lives forever. The Native Americans had to adapt to the whites, which was difficult for them.

hat is the nature and causes of the issue? Media misrepresentation of African Americans as an industry issue has been a major concern in our American culture; and is also a component of media bias in the United States. Unfortunately, the media representation of minorities has not always been in a positive light. Instead there has been publicized, controversial and misconstrued images of who African Americans truly are. Since the mass media is an important source of information about African Americans and their image, it influences the public perception and reinforce opinions about African Americans.

Exam Paper 1 In what ways did the American West of the late nineteenth century represent a contrast to the East? In what ways did the two regions resemble each other?

During the “Gilded Age” period of American history, development of the Trans-Mississippi west was crucial to fulfilling the American dream of manifest destiny and creating an identity which was distinctly American. Since the west is often associated with rugged pioneers and frontiersmen, there is an overarching idea of hardy American individualism. However, although these settlers were brave and helped to make America into what it is today, they heavily relied on federal support. It would not have been possible for white Americans to settle the Trans-Mississippi west without the US government removing Native Americans from their lands and placing them on reservations, offering land grants and incentives for people to move out west, and the

This essay is about O Pioneers by Willa Cather. This book is based on life in the west, Nebraska specifically. The Bergson family comes to the west for better but they cannot find it. Their first years were very hard and became even worse when the soul provider John Bergson dies.

While reading the book, Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma, I learned a great deal about early Indian life, in a way I had not before. Of course, in grade school you learn about “Pocahontas” but not in the way Camilla Townsend describes her. I started this book not really knowing what to expect besides to learn more than I had previously known. I know recently a lot about history has come up for discussion in ways it has never before. Native Americans and Africa Americans have been a topic of discussion for the past few years, shedding light on their history.

The white settlers that went west were from different European Nations. There were also Indians still living in different regions of the West. In California there were Mexican immigrants, Chinese, and African-Americans. All the different cultures, the landscape, and the vast size of the west made it a diverse region. Once again, the U.S. Government went about populating the western frontier by taking land from

A view of Americans as a special, exceptional people because Americans had progressively taken over the West and conquered primitive societies was firmly established in the minds of Americans by frontier myth. One of problems is that the frontier myth is a story, and “all stories are partial; that is, in creating narrative coherence, they leave things out, and emphasize other things”. They are not necessarily false, but neither are they history. As the society evolved, the concept of the frontier is consequently redefined as a space of social and cultural interaction and replaced by the terms “contact zone” by Mary Louise Pratt in her 1992 book Imperial Eyes. Contact zones are “social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other.”

People of all ages enjoy good storytellers and good narratives, especially those whose cultures are rooted in oral traditions. African Americans have their art forms deeply embedded in orality as well as literary (Banks-Wallace, 2002). However, few studies have focused on the narratives of African American adults beyond the historical and literary perspectives of oration. There remains a lack of information informing speech-language pathologists, researchers, and other professionals on the discursive nature of narration or the cognitive-linguistic influences undergirding African American narrative production.