In fact, the American Revolution may have served to assert the natural rights of some people, but those people were limited to a class of white males.
It is important to keep in mind that one of the ideological underpinnings of the Revolution was a challenge to imperialist ideals, and race-based oppression and slavery had long been major parts of the imperial system. Despite that, it is unfair to characterize Britain as pro-slavery, as the British began to embrace abolitionist sentiments prior to the Revolution. In fact, British Imperialists struggled with the concept of slavery, because of the fact that denying the right to own slaves was viewed as economic oppression by many white colonists, because, without slavery, the cash crops that made colonies profitable were difficult, if not impossible, to harvest (Brown, 1999). They began by attempting to limit the import of slaves into the colonies, something that they seemed to suggest was a strike against British Imperialism. This could have had a negative financial impact on some of the colonists. This dichotomy highlights the difficulty of reconciling competing versions of freedom. There was the question of literal freedom, which slavery undoubtedly compromised, but there was also the question of social and economic freedom. For many white colonists, economic oppression was the most significant way that Britain impaired their freedom.
In fact, one of the inherent difficulties with the idea of the American Revolution and the role of slavery in the Revolution has to do with a basic assumption underlying traditional discourse about the Revolution. It has been taken as axiomatic that men will resort to violent conflict in order to ensure their personal liberty and freedom (Appleby, 1976). Therefore, one must question why the slaves did not do so. Did this underlying knowledge that consistent denial of access to liberty will promote violence in men help contribute to the increasingly barbaric conditions of slavery in the American south? This certainly seems to be a plausible lesson learned from the Revolutionary War, though Nash does not spend a substantial period of time investigating antebellum slaveholding conditions and their relationship to Revolutionary attitudes about liberty and freedom to enable the reader to draw a conclusion about his opinion.
While Nash focuses explicitly on slavery and race relations, it is important to understand that blacks were not the only racial minority to be treated with apparent unfairness during the Revolutionary period. Black slaves were not the only ones to suffer from this apparent hypocrisy; for example, during the 1770s, Puritan captivity narratives regained popularity, highlighting the apparent savagery of Native Americans,...
Nash's work may have contributed to the wider reading our modern texts include, rather than the revisionist version which paraphrases down to 'the North had to accept slavery against its will because the South would have balked from the new republic.' Our selection of texts, particularly the primary material, consider this dynamic with more balance than in the century and a half prior to Nash, if his historiography is true.
This happened because blacks had learnt that they no longer had to obey the people that illegitimately enslaved them. Slaves had been determined to fight for their freedom through any means possible, and, they took advantage of any opportunity that they had to become free. According to Nash, tens of thousands of slaves have left the American continent as the British forces advanced inland. Apparently, a great number of black
We would not accept such an assertion about any other historical notion. Who would say that the revolution was inevitable, without the fight of the patriots and the leadership of the Founding Fathers? Yes, the question of slavery was a contentious issue -- but it was just as contentious a hundred years later, a hundred more years of bondage for blacks, and a hundred more years of making the
Race and Revolution An iconoclastic figure in the study of American History, Gary Nash, who is Director of the National Center for History in the Schools at UCLA, writes from a position of authority as he questions the history that many of us were taught during our primary and secondary educations. In Race and Revolution, Nash turns his keen vision toward the matter of slavery at the time our country was
Gary Powers Spy Plane Issue The Cold War has been called the twentieth century's 'longest-running international morality play.' It was a play that lasted decades and produced thousands of players, both major and small, as well as two critical scenes set in Cuba and Berlin. The full weight of the drama settled on one person, an American pilot named Francis Gary Powers. When Powers 'fell from the sky' outside the Soviet
He adds a complete set of notes and references used at the end of each chapter in addition to the nineteen complete documents he includes at the end of the book. He completed exhaustive research, so his ideas are not simply based on speculation; they are well thought out and thoroughly investigated. He uses a combination of books, articles, letters, memoirs, and other written documents to ensure he has
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