...Phillis Wheatley: The Life of a Mastermind The African American intellectual prodigy, Phillis Wheatley once stood on the slave block awaiting sale. In 1761 at the age of seven or eight, Phillis was purchased by a Boston merchant, Mr. John Wheatley, for his wife. Mrs. Wheatley chose Phillis, young as she was, because of her" humble and modest demeanor” (Odell 9). Mrs. Wheatley initially hopes to train Phillis to replace the aging house slaves and to be her companion, since Mrs. Wheatley's daughter, Mary, would soon be old enough to leave home (Richmond 15). The turning point for Phillis Wheatley was that she was fortunate enough to be educated. This was an amazing blessing to her because it was uncommon for free women in this...
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...Phillis Wheatley is now viewed as a renowned and world-famous poet- but she didn’t start out that way. As a young girl, she was brought as as slave to the New World on a slave trade ship that was returning from Senegal, Sierra Leone and the Isles de Los, near the coast of Guinea. She was purchased by Susanna and John Wheatley who named her after the ship she was brought on- the Phillis. Although she did not yet speak English, they noticed her aptitude for learning and taught her to read and write. Phillis published her first poem at the age of thirteen and continued to rise to success and fame after that. Her ability to wrap religious sentiments in short and well constructed couplets caught the attention of people everywhere, from America to England and Europe. Unfortunately, with the appreciation and recognition came insistent incredulity that an African woman could write so well. Henry Louis Gates Jr., a twentieth century professor who specializes in analyzing...
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...RESEARCH PAPER Phillis Wheatley's work presents an excellent example of the triumph of optimism over experience. Who is Phillis Wheatley? That is what I asked myself upon learning of a reading assignment. We were assigned to read Phillis Wheatley’s poem “On being brought from Africa to America”. Prior to reading the poem I decided to research the life of Phillis Wheatley. I did this so that I could have a better understanding of what I was about to read. This is why I imagine one of her poems was chosen for reading in our Stories of Immigration course. In the next few sentences I will share with you some of Wheatley’s experience in America. You will discover some of the hardships Wheatley faced. I ask that as you read and think of the experiences that are being described, place yourself in Wheatley’s shoes. What would you do? How would you feel? Would you choose to live a life of optimism or pessimism? Phillis Wheatley was kidnapped at a young age; stripped from the arms of her mother, taken away from the only land that she knew. We all have heard of the dreadful voyage from the west coast of Africa to the eastern American coastlines. Upon landing, Phillis took an immensely negative experience and was able to find something good out of the ordeal. I am not so sure that I would have been able to do or see the sun shine through the rain as Phillis was able to. I am close to my parents and Lord knows how much I love and need my mom. Imagine the thought of no longer...
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...African American Women Under Slavery This paper discusses the experiences of African American Women under slavery during the Slave Trade, their exploitation, the secrecy, the variety of tasks and positions of slave women, slave and ex-slave narratives, and significant contributions to history. Also, this paper presents the hardships African American women faced and the challenges they overcame to become equal with men in today’s society. Slavery was a destructive experience for African Americans especially women. Black women suffered doubly during the slave era. Slave Trade For most women who endured it, the experience of the Slave Trade was one of being outnumbered by men. Roughly one African woman was carried across the Atlantic for every two men. The captains of slave ships were usually instructed to buy as high a proportion of men as they could, because men could be sold for more in the Americas. Women thus arrived in the American colonies as a minority. For some reason, women did not stay a minority. Slave records found that most plantations, even during the period of the slave trade, there were relatively equal numbers of men and women. Slaveholders showed little interest in women as mothers. Their willingness to pay more for men than women, despite the fact than children born to enslaved women would also be the slaveowners’ property and would thus increase their wealth. Women who did have children, therefore, always struggled with the impossible conflict...
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...University of North Carolina at Pembroke English and Theatre DEPARTMENT COURSE: ENG 2100: African American Literature Fall 2014 INSTRUCTOR: Dr. Charles Tita OFFICE: West Building, Office of Distance Education OFFICE HOURS: Monday 4-6 and Tuesday/Thursday 10:30-12 OFFICE PHONE: 521 6352 FAX: 910 521 6762 EMAIL ADDRESS: charles.tita@uncp.edu LECTURE TIME: Tuesday/Thursday 2-3:15pm LOCATION: DIAL 147 REQUIRED TEXT Gates Jr., Henry Louis, and Nellie Y. McKay, eds. The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2004. OPTIONAL REFERENCES Locke, Alain, ed. The New Negro. New York: Atheneum, 1968. hooks, bell. Teaching to Trangress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge, 1994. Harrold, Stanley. American Abolitionists. New York: Pearson Education, 2001. Youngs, J. William T. American Realities: Historical Episodes-From First Settlements to the Civil War. New York: Longman, 2000. Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press, 1963. COURSE DESCRIPTION: A survey of African American literature, introducing students to genres, trends, and major periods of African American literature, ranging from the 17th-, 18th- and 19th- century autobiographies and narratives to 20tth –century works. Authors include: Jupiter Hammon, Briton Hammon, Sojourner Truth, Nat Turner, Claude McKay, Zora Neale Hurston, Sterling Brown, Richard Wright, Lorraine Hansberry, Amiri Baraka, Toni Morrison...
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...English 311.01 (13471): The History of African-American Writing Fall 2015 Tuesday, Thursday 11:00-12:15 JR 244 Professor Nate Millsnathaniel.mills@csun.eduOffice hours: Tuesdays 1:00-3:30 and by appointmentSierra Tower 718 | Course Description / Objectives Through a historical survey of the work of major African-American writers from slavery to the present, this course will examine the defining features of African-American expression. The course is organized around a foundational question: what makes African-American literature African-American? Is it just a set of texts that happen to have been written by authors who identified as black in their respective historical moments? Are there distinct formal and thematic paradigms that unify these texts into a coherent literary tradition? What relation do black texts bear to other black texts, as well as to the Western canon? Are African-American texts necessarily “political,” by definition protesting the social and political marginalization of black people in America? Do African-American texts represent the particular experiences of African Americans, or do they (also?) address universal problems and experiences? The cultural, literary-formal, and political distinctiveness of African-American writing will thus be the guiding theme of this course’s rigorous, fast-moving survey. Additionally, students in 311 will acquire knowledge of the following: * The ways African-American...
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...Chap1 Comparing Apples and Oranges The concept of “apples and oranges” relates to the consistency of anything that is compared with something else. Whenever you make a comparison in sentence, you have to make sure the things you compare are , in fact, comparable. Than ①主语比较 1. Because the Earth’s crust is more solid there and thus better able to transmit shock waves, an earthquake in the eastern United States will typically devastate an area 100 times greater than will a quake of comparable magnitude occurring in the West.(D-P35-9) 2.Local residents claim that San Antonio, Texas, has more good Mexican American restaurants than does any other city in the United States. (D-p78-14) 3.The guiding principles of the tax plan released by the Treasury Department could have even greater significance for the economy than do the particulars of the plan. (C-p8-6) 4. Because natural gas is composed mostly of methane, a simple hydrocarbon, vehicles powered by natural gas emit less of certain pollutants than those burning gasoline or diesel fuel. (C-p8-16) 5. The United States government employs a much larger proportion of women in trade negotiations than does any other government. (C-p22-8) 6. The pay of senior executives increased in 1990 by a larger percentage than did the wages of other salaried workers. (C-p67-5) 7. A newly developed jumbo rocket, which is expected to carry the United States into its next phase of space exploration, will be able to deliver a heavier load...
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...North American Indians and their development of advanced full-year calendars based (E) that the North American Indians developed advanced full-year calendars based 2. A 1972 agreement between Canada and the United States reduced the amount of phosphates that municipalities had been allowed to dump into the Great Lakes. (A) reduced the amount of phosphates that municipalities had been allowed to dump (B) reduced the phosphate amount that municipalities had been dumping (C) reduces the phosphate amount municipalities have been allowed to dump (D) reduced the amount of phosphates that municipalities are allowed to dump (E) reduces the amount of phosphates allowed for dumping by municipalities 3. A collection of 38 poems by Phillis Wheatley, a slave, was published in the 1770’s, the first book by a Black woman and it was only the second published by an American woman. (A) it was only the second published by an American woman (B) it was only the second that an American woman published (C) the second one only published by an American woman (D) the second one only that an American woman published (E) only the second published by an American woman 4. A common disability in test pilots is hearing impairment, a consequence of sitting too close to large jet engines for long periods of time. (A) a...
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...COURSE STUDENT GUIDE TO CULTURAL AWARENESS INDEX LESSON TITLE PAGE 1 Philosophical Aspects of Culture SG- 3 C1 Native American Experience SG- 4 C2 White American Experience SG- 23 C3 Arab American Experience SG- 43 C4 Hispanic American Experience SG- 53 C5 Black American Experience SG- 76 C6 Asian American Experience SG-109 C7 Jewish American Experience SG-126 C8 Women in the Military SG-150 C9 Extremist Organizations/Gangs SG-167 STUDENTS ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR BEING FAMILIARIZED WITH ALL CLASS MATERIAL PRIOR TO CLASS. INFORMATION PAPER ON THE PHILOSOPHICAL ASPECTS OF CULTURAL DIFFERENCE Developed by Edwin J. Nichols, Ph.D. |Ethnic Groups/ |Axiology |Epistemology |Logic |Process | |World Views | | | | | |European |Member-Object |Cognitive |Dichotomous |Technology | |Euro-American |The highest value lies in the object |One knows through counting |Either/Or |All sets are repeatable and| | ...
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