Wait a second!
More handpicked essays just for you.
More handpicked essays just for you.
Example of bias in history
Historical bias
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
After the track meet, I was treated to a meal at Hackett Hot Wings in Joplin, Missouri. Sporting newtworks on flat screens lined the walls. As I set there waiting on my food, silence engulfed the roof around me. As flashes of baseball, football, and basketball ran across the screen, I noticed all the black excellence. I recalled my brief lesson about slavery in middle school. I set my attention to this lesson more than any other. This lesson was about my family, my friends, and me. Older now, I realize I am not happy with the textbooks. Somehow, they fit my history into two chapters. In the two chapters, it spoke of slavery and Jim Crow. I don’t remember them recalling the rapes, whippings, hanging, malnutrition. Hell, I remember we were banned
History is taught and perceived in different ways throughout the country, however historians and teachers play a major role in how history is understood. My history teacher made me understand that the African-American slaves suffered adversity in different manners but never explained how their efforts led to a revolution in America. This gap has been filled by David Roediger in his book Seizing freedom where he reminds us of what we have missed in our prominent and scholarly accounts of emancipation and what we might gain by revisiting an era when “profound and unimaginable changes exploded” across the country(p.9). In reference to WEB Du Bois analysis of Civil war as workers strike, David Roediger accounts for the upsurge and
As a child in elementary and high school, I was taught that President Abraham Lincoln was the reason that African slaves were freed from slavery. My teachers did not provide much more information than that. For an African American student, I should have received further historical information than that about my ancestors. Unfortunately, I did not have the opportunity or desire to research slavery on my own until college. And with my eagerness and thirst for more answers concerning my African American history, I set out to console my spirit, knowledge, and self-awareness of my ancestors’ history. I received the answers that my brain, mind, and soul need. Although Abraham Lincoln signed the 13th Amendment of the United States Constitution, courageous African American slaves were the real heroes and motivation of the movement.
When reading about the institution of slavery in the United States, it is easy to focus on life for the slaves on the plantations—the places where the millions of people purchased to serve as slaves in the United States lived, made families, and eventually died. Most of the information we seek is about what daily life was like for these people, and what went “wrong” in our country’s collective psyche that allowed us to normalize the practice of keeping human beings as property, no more or less valuable than the machines in the factories which bolstered industrialized economies at the time. Many of us want to find information that assuages our own personal feelings of discomfort or even guilt over the practice which kept Southern life moving
In this story it clearly shows us what the courts really mean by freedom, equality, liberty, property and equal protection of the laws. The story traces the legal challenges that affected African Americans freedom. To justify slavery as the “the way things were” still begs to define what lied beneath slave owner’s abilities to look past the wounded eyes and beating hearts of the African Americans that were so brutally possessed.
Dorsey, A. (2007). Black History Is American History: Teaching African American History in the Twenty-first Century. Journal of American History, 93(4): 1171-1177
During the nineteen sixties, African Americans experienced an immense amount of changes such as the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Civil Rights Act of 1968. Prior to these changes, African Americans faced racial segregation. Segregation was prevalent in housing, transportation, education, medical care and even in the United States Armed Forces. In the poem, History Lesson, the speaker recalls a memory on a beach in Mississippi regarding segregation with her grandmother in the 1930’s. A comparison of the speaker and her grandmother shows both the belief in segregation in the 1930’s compared to the desegregation in the 1970’s. By utilizing historical criticism, History Lesson by Natasha Trethewey can be analyzed from a historical point of view.
Slavery was an intrinsic part of North American history from the founding of the Jamestown colony in 1607 to the legal abolition of servitude in 1865. But our nation continues to grapple with the economic, political, social, and cultural impact of that peculiar institution to this day. Over seventy years after the end of the Civil War, the WPA Federal Writer’s Project sought to understand the impact which slavery had on the lives of African Americans who once lived under its yoke. In 1936-38, the Writer’s Project sent out-of-work writers to seventeen states to record the personal narratives of former slaves; the result was an outpouring of nearly 3,000 stories from men and women who were born into bondage and released into uncertain freedom early in their lives. The relatively small collection of 26 narratives gathered in Mississippi in these years reveals the complexities of African American life before and after emancipation. While this sample should not be read as indicative of the memory and experience of former slaves at large, it does raise important questions about the meaning of freedom, the failures of Reconstruction, and the perceived quality of life for blacks during and after slavery. A careful reading of the Mississippi narratives reveals nostalgia for the security and stability of slavery and an overwhelming dissatisfaction with the failed promises of freedom: “turned … loose, … lak a passel o’ cattle,” former slaves struggled to realize the concrete benefits of an abstract freedom and longed for better days;[1] This weary nostalgia must be recognized not as a rejection of freedom, but as a denunciation of the powers, which declared them fr...
Lisa Simon outlines her three main goals of this article as: 1. To demonstrate the importance of constantly questioning what has been left out of historical texts used in classrooms, 2. To inspire educators to critique class texts and incorporate marginalized perspectives into their teaching, and 3. Offer specific steps for educators and students to follow to find these marginalized perspectives. In this article, Simon explores the limitations of using Karen Hesse’s free verse novel Out of the Dust to portray the Oklahoma Dustbowl experience. She argues that like many classroom texts and textbooks this novel is told only from the white perspective, marginalizing the experiences of Oklahomans of color during that time period as well
American History is a topic taught in very small detail during all levels of education. From elementary school to college, educators educated students with the facts and theories regarding the transformation of this country from the 1600s to today. While there are many events and time periods in this nation’s history that have shaped its culture and society, one of the most thoroughly studied eras in American History is that of slavery in the antebellum south. Every student in school has taken at least one class in which the teacher shows facts and figures about the horrors of slavery, or shows pictures of the squalor of slave quarters with the intention of shocking and upsetting the inhabitants of the classroom. Most students, however, are never taught the “whole story”. They never learn about the lives behind the numbers or the events behind the pictures. The realness was cover up by white supremacy. The book, “Kindred” show some struggles blacks had to face in the early days.
Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell About Life in the Segregated South. New York: New Press, 2001. Print.
One of the widely recognized controversies in American history is the 1930s, which housed the Great Depression and the post-civil war, the ruling of Plessy versus Ferguson and the Jim Crow Laws, and segregation. While textbooks detail the factual aspect of the time there is only one other literature that can exhibit the emotion experienced in the era. To Kill a Mockingbird is the acclaimed novel that displays the experiences of the South, through inequality and segregation, social class differences and the right to fairness. The novel’s experiences are narrated through a grown Scout, who appears as a little girl in the novel, offering her innocent views on the happenings in Maycomb County. The most observed aspect of the novel is race and racism; with Tom Robinson’s trial being the prime focus of the novel, the issue of race is bound to be discussed throughout the novel is race, racism and segregation; with Tom Robinson’s trial being the focus of the novel, the issue of race is heavily represented throughout the novel. With Mockingbird being a common book among English Language Arts and Literatures classrooms, the topic of race is bound to surface amid a young, twenty-first century group of student of students with the inevitability of this discussion, the question remains on how to approach the conversation as an educator. As an educator, one should seek to establish the context of the times, prepare the students for the conversation and examine the other characters and situations similarly to race. Educators must also be introspective before examining their students’ feelings, so that they are not surprised by their emotions and can also express their feelings to their students. The discussion should target a goal, one of examin...
Fourteen thousand. That is the estimated number of Sudanese men, women and children that have been abducted and forced into slavery between 1986 and 2002. (Agnes Scott College, http://prww.agnesscott.edu/alumnae/p_maineventsarticle.asp?id=260) Mende Nazer is one of those 14,000. The thing that sets her apart is that she escaped and had the courage to tell her story to the world. Slave: My True Story, the Memoir of Mende Nazer, depicts how courage and the will to live can triumph over oppression and enslavement by showing the world that slavery did not end in 1865, but is still a worldwide problem.
Northup, Solomon, Sue L. Eakin, and Joseph Logsdon. Twelve years a slave. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1968. Print.
394). Once we recognize that something bad as occurred and who is responsible, then the next step is to take action such as an apology. In 1995, a church apologized to African Americans for overlooking and prolonging individual and systematic racism in this lifetime (Pg. 394). In educational systems, we must give an apology to the children and parents who have been victims of the segregation within the schools system. Before 1954, children who were not white were prevented from attending white schools under a policy called “separate but equal” (Pg. 208). During slavery, many African Americans were forbidden to read and write by laws and the slaves who were considered free were not allowed to enroll in public schools (Pg. 208). In this case, the children would get an apology from the United States for not allowing them to read and write and for not allowing the free slaves to have access to an education. This apology leads us to Eric’s next step where we actually make something happen in fixing the
[1] In the movie Sankofa, Haile Gerima does not hesitate to show the audience the horrors of slavery. Not only does he show the brutal and humiliating practices used by slaveholders to subjugate slaves but he also shows how slaveholders used Christianity to control and manipulate slaves. He demonstrates the huge impact of slavery on today’s society and the importance of looking back to slavery to understand the present. Traditionally, history textbooks have hesitated to talk about any of these aspects of slavery. Present history books have begun to describe the brutalities of slavery but still refuse to explain slavery’s impact or to mention Christianity’s role in slavery. There are three main reasons for this hesitance to be truthful about all aspects of slavery when writing history textbooks. These are patriotism for the United States, cultural bias towards the white race, and a bias towards Christianity.