Bound Lives Summary

When one considers historical development from 1607-1865 in what eventually became the United States of America, it is though the unraveling of a detrimental marriage was being enforced with people. In this marriage Great Britain is the groom, The thirteen colonies is the wife, indentured servants is the wife’s child, and Native Americans are the towns peopleeople of African descent are the foster children. The colonial (chiefs) are the marriage counselors. North Atlantic ocean is the land they occupied.

Free Womb Laws and Preservation of Slavery The Colombian and Brazilian Free Womb Laws were two legal initiatives aimed at ending slavery in Latin America. Essentially both laws would free the children of slaves, but not the mother. However, both laws contained provisions that allowed for the preservation of slavery. This paper will argue that free womb laws were manipulated to preserve slavery by comparing and contrasting the two laws.

English slavery in the seventeenth to the eighteen hundreds was widespread and left many after effects upon those who were forced into the triangle trade. Michael Angelo Gomez’s book Exchanging Our Country Marks the Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South takes an interest in the transatlantic slave trade. He examines the diverse beliefs of the wide range of African populations that were brought to the Unites States of America’s south. The merged ethnic identity of the slave culture of the transatlantic slave trade and the changing in political, social structures, and religion created the concept of race and the African American identity.

This novel highlights the fact of the injustices people of color are faced with in everyday life. In the introduction of this book, Michelle Alexander highlights the criminal justice system and how rather than identifying people by their race, people of color are labeled as criminals. I believe the criminal justice system, racial caste, ideology, and global examples of racial caste are all connected to racial inequality. I feel that the race and criminal justice system are connected on the basis that people of color are seen as unequal when compared to Caucasians. In the reading the author provides good examples of how officers are well trained at defending against claims of racial bias in policing.

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.

For several centuries, the United States has faced societal issues in regards to understanding and accepting socio-cultural differences. Therefore, it is essential that people understand these cultural differences in order to eradicate common misconceptions and racial stereotypes. These stereotypes affect social perceptions and have extremely become ingrained in the modern world. To understand the reasons behind the development of misconceptions and racial stereotypes, one must highly understand the history of minority groups. This paper will explore and analyze the historical background, misconceptions, stereotypes, and social injustices of the Latin/Hispanic American culture.

This combination helped to define the chattel slavery in the United States. Despite the cheap labor provided by the African slaves they were still being mistreated. Racial segregation and prejudice existed at the time and Africans were segregated from the rest of the community. They were mistreated and made to do hard labor with little pay or none at all. The slaves began to defy the white’s rules and hard labor (Davidson, 56).

Long had a specific interpretations for the black race in the Caribbean as he said “the same bestial manners, stupidity, and vices, which debase their brethren on the continent, who seem to be distinguished from the rest of mankind.” And although there had not been many sources for historians in that time to interpret anything about Indians, there had been many encounters with black people. This is especially important to know when considering historical narratives about race in colonial and post-colonial Latin America. So again it is important to know that there is already a pre-conceived understanding of the black race before Africans made their way to Latin America as slaves. The black race in Latin America were not the only ones to face the dilemma of bias, as the blending of people from various races such as white, indigenous, or black caused mixed race.

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

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.

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.

In George Reid Andrew’s journal entry entitled “Black Workers in the Export Years: Latin America,” Andrews poses the challenging question, “What were the impacts of the export years on racial dynamics and “racial orders” in Latin America?” Andrew replies with a complex answer: why owning land, racializing labor migrations, and unionizing ethnics groups produced a vast amount of racial conflict and provided space for negotiation in the workforce of multiracial Latin American regions. Andrews starts his claim stating the crucial relevance of owning an efficient amount of land to grow crops during the time period of the late 1800’s in Latin America. Andrews confesses, “Rural workers who hold sufficient amount land to feed themselves and their

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.

This essay, both intentionally and unintentionally gives us a glimpse of contemporary Latin American race relations,

Aquinas recognizes the legitimacy of slavery when there is a common interest between the slave and the master: “It is advantageous for slave and master, fit to be such by nature, that one be the master, and the other the slave. And so there can be friendship between them, since the association of both in what is advantageous for each in the essence of friendship.” As mentioned earlier, the trading of slave from their homeland Africa to the United States was not of the mutual benefit between the slave and the master in the 19th century.