Contributions of Steamboats to slavery (Essay Sample)

Instructions:

How steamboats helped spread slavery in southern united states. You can choose the option with one song The Lost world ANALYSIS ESSAY (Essay #3) NITTY GRITTY: Length: 1500 to 1750 words (don’t go over 1750 words; you are doing a different assignment than your peers if you do) Rubric Reflection/Author’s Note: Complete the questions following your grading conference Choosing a character or scene from the book The Lost World, choose one of the following prompts: Create a playlist of 5-7 songs that describe a character in depth. Your playlist should include a discussion of how the songs fit that character. Create a playlist of 5-7 songs that will serve as a playlist for the highlights of the book. Your playlist should include a discussion of how the songs are an apt soundtrack for the book. Choose one song or music video to analyze explaining how it serves to characterize one of the characters in the book. OPTIONAL: Instead of turning in an essay, turn in a scriipt for a podcast. Turn in your podcast for a final grade in addition to the scriipt. Both elements must be included in your submission. The scriipt is VITAL to this prompt. Regardless of the prompt you are choosing, this essay will require you to analyze the song and its relationship to what you have chosen to write about. Why is the song appropriate? What makes the song "speak" to the character or make it speak for a section of the book? Why did you choose the song(s) for this character or this particular moment in the story? Choose a perspective on the character that demonstrates growth (or stagnation) and identify scenes in the novel that reflect the character’s view through specific lyrics (or tone) of a song. Select songs appropriate for the character, and provide a rationale for each song chosen, including supporting evidence from the text. These songs should provide an understanding or glimpse into an aspect of the character or the novel that may not be readily noticeable except through analysis. For example, you don’t want “Brown-Eyed Girl” to describe a character because that is rather obvious when the author states, "The character had brown eyes." Instead, aim for an aspect of the character or the story that you make connections to that may not seem obvious on the surface. Think: Why is this important information to have? In your paper, you will need to: thoughtfully examine the song(s) and the character or book as a piece of writing/literature and analyze how the song(s) demonstrate(s) the ability to present a theme that connects to the chosen character to his/her readers or defines a specific scene in the novel itself that may not be obvious on first glance. Creating an argument or persuasive element for this type of paper is difficult because the argument does not seem obvious. However, if you think about how the playlist contributes to the development of the character or represents a scene in the story, you can bring your character and the story to life. In other words, use the lyrics and tone of the songs to make the argument that the character is or is not believable or why specific songs would be the best venue to enhance the understanding of the story or the character and his/her actions. Details The introductory paragraph of your paper should include information to help the audience understand what this essay is about: the author’s name, the title of the story, a few sentences of background information on the characters or sequence of the novel, and a thesis statement that presents an arguable point. In the final paragraph, you should bring the essay to a logical conclusion by making a statement about the significance of your discussion. Why does this matter? Who should care about this? You can choose to examine one or more rhetorical strategies: deliberate style or structure appeals to emotion/logic/credibility repetition use of images or audio (if you are using a music video to analyze) pacing of song(s) Your Audience Assume that your audience has read the story, but not necessarily heard or be familiar with the songs. (Many people do not have eclectic taste in music—they like what they like.) You will want to pull specific lines from specific songs to demonstrate the interconnectedness or the connection, so ensure that you are using the correct APA formatting for lyrics of songs and include both the book and the lyrics on your Reference page. Look in your textbook in the APA section to gain enlightenment or make an appointment with the MCS specifically to go over your citations and references. Remember that you will need to know APA formatting for many of your classes here at CHS, so it's a good idea to get familiar with it now. Tone The language and stylistic choices should be appropriate for your audience. This isn't about a "right" or "wrong" playlist. If you see a connection, then the song is "right." However, you can't just say, "this is right." You have to explain in non-belittling (pejorative) terms why this is "right." Aim to show through example how your claims are “right.” Minimum Requirements Your playlist should be 5-7 songs long (unless you are choosing the prompt with only one song to analyze or the podcast prompt). Include a thesis statement that presents your topic and an arguable point about the connection between the character and your playlist or song. Yes, this includes the podcast. Include analysis. You are not writing a summary of the story or the song or the character or the book.(This is where most students fall short.) Consider the overview of the story and songs to be brief, and assume that your reader has read The Lost World. You should include contextual information, if necessary, but otherwise, the bulk of your essay should concentrate on analysis and connection. Essentially, you are presenting an argument about how and why the songs you have chosen portray a certain theme or symbol about the character or memorialize a specific moment in the book. Your essay must show evidence of clear interpretation and insightful analysis. The same holds true for the podcast. Introduce and elaborate upon quotations (including song lyrics!); do not just “drop” them into your writing. The explanation of what you see in the quotation and what you think others should see IS the analysis. Organize your paper logically with clear topic sentences and transitions to move the reader along and show relationships between ideas within your paper. Use third person point of view and present tense. Pay careful attention to grammar, usage, and mechanics. Include a Reference page in APA format that includes the names of the songs and the story and any secondary sources that have been used. Be certain that you have included in-text citations throughout your essay whenever you have quoted, summarized, referenced, or paraphrased information. You will be writing more about the technique the author uses than the topic of the piece. You may discover, however, that to judge its effectiveness fully, you need to think about how the text contributes to a debate or asks/answers an important question. source..

Content:

THE CONTRIBUTION OF STEAMBOATS TO SLAVERY Name Course Date The 18th century came to a close, and the 19th century began. With it, a new chapter began in America. Traffic along the Mississippi river started to pick up thanks to the steamboat and the transport time of goods, which usually took days, just took a few hours. Goods were getting to their destinations in record time as had never been seen before, and the economy was booming. This was development, wasn't it? America was moving in the right direction. Its transportation system was becoming efficient. And everyone should have been happy. However, that was not the case. As the steamboats became the popular mode of transportation, they fueled a kind of trade that had been going on in the Western world and America for centuries. And if one dared to look close enough at the cargo of one or two steamboats, one could not miss catching a glimpse of a human-like figure bound in shackles and lumped up together with the cargo on decks of those very same steamboats. Their destination was the sugar and cotton plantations. This sight was the same one that brown had seen many times as he worked on the steamboats. He might have been angry or sad or even resigned and thought of it as the way things were. History, it seems, had only brought bitterness to his kind. Nevertheless, for him, things were slightly better. As he worked on the boats, he had some moments to himself that allowed him to scan his surroundings. And as he later remarked, the work on the steamboats was much different from the ones in the plantations (Buchanan, 2007, p.5). It is no secret that the steamboats rekindled with such vigor the slave trade, nor is it a secret that those same steamboats provided much respite and even freedom for numerous enslaved people. Therefore, to what extent did the steamboats contribute to slavery, and to what extent did they do the reverse? This paper explores these possibilities and aims to establish steamboats' role in the slave trade. As recorded, in history books, in the year 1860, some 1 915852 bales of cotton made their way from Mississippi to the textile mills in New York and Liverpool. It is no secret that these products resulted from slave labor (Buchanan, 2007, p. 6). Its transportation, too, from the plantations to the very steamboats that had delivered them to the docks at New Orleans, was facilitated by slave labor. From the plantations to the steamboats, it had all been the sweat of African Americans. The steamboat industry rejuvenated an old and terrible aspect of human history. As the century snaked through time and nearly half of it was gone, records indicate that the number of enslaved people was so great that they were a sizable chunk of the American urban labor force by then. In Louisville, for instance, 5442 enslaved people were toiling away to support the steamboat industry, whereas, in other parts of the south, such as New Orleans, there were more than 17,000 enslaved people (Buchanan, 2007, p.12). The phrase "sold down the river" was common during that time. As discussed by Edward Ball (2015), many enslaved people were separated from their families and taken down to New Orleans, where they were sold to work in sugar and cotton plantations down in the south. Many enslavers jumped on this new wave to get extra money and sold or leased some of their enslaved people to the steamboat owners and merchants (Coles, n.d). While in these boats, the enslaved people were to perform numerous terrible tasks such as chambermaids doing laundry, cleaning the boats fueling the boat engine, loading and unloading cargo onto the boats, and even measuring the river's depth (Coles, n.d). Undoubtedly, enslavers extensively exploited these individuals thanks to the steamboats. To replace these enslaved people who worked on the steamboats, other new enslaved people had to come in to take their places on the plantations and numerous other positions. This time was a bleak time for African Americans. During this time, states such as Missouri, Kentucky, and Tennessee sold numerous enslaved people to the southern states, where demand grew thanks partly to the booming business that the steamboats had created (Buchanan, 2007, p.83). The most wanted enslaved people during this period were young adults deemed very suitable for the complex menial jobs in the various plantations in the south. To confirm just how the steamboat economy had revived slavery, records show that numerous enslavers made their way down to the south to sell their enslaved people with the hope of making some good money. For instance, numerous enslavers, such as C.M. Rutherford, documented that the prices of enslaved people at the time he had gotten to Natchez, where he had intended to sell his enslaved people, had considerably come down due to a saturation of the market with enslaved people. In his records, he mentioned that the enslaved people were coming so fast southwards that they were ruining his chances of fetching what he termed a reasonable price for his enslaved people. The steamboats facilitated all these (Buchanan, 2007, p.84). And as the steamboat economy continued to grow, so did the slave trade. Rutherford was desperate to make some money out of this growing venture. So he had at a time sent one of his slave agents to Louisville to get the best-enslaved people for his slave yard in New Orleans, where he wanted to sell them and make a profit just like other enslavers such as Lewis Robards in Kentucky. In Missouri, the slave trade occurred right before the courthouse. Some firms had developed and were dealing mainly in the slave trade, such as the Blakey and McAfee firms, whose operations were so large that they “…rivaled the city’s most prosperous mercantile establishments…” (Buchanan, 2007, p. 85). The treatment of these enslaved people on the steamboats was so horrible, and as recalled by William Brown, one lady drowned herself just because she had been from her husband and child. Furthermore, the treatment they underwent during the transportation on the steamboats was terrible, and records indicate they were treated like livestock and kept standing in their waste. Nevertheless, one might argue that the steamboats were not all bad and did not contribute to slavery but did the opposite. This view may be because the steamboats provided a way for enslaved people to contribute significantly to their families and communities financially. As the wages offered for the boat hands were way better than the ones that any other enslaved people received. Furthermore, the steamboats were a way that numerous enslaved people used to esc...

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Contributions of Steamboats to slavery (Essay Sample)

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