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America’s Culture Of Narcissism – Return Of Kings

Although the jazz era ended almost a century ago, this time influenced by Louis Armstrong was a huge cultural shift that still remains in our society in which African-Americans are a vast part of our music industry amongst pop, rap, reggae, and more.

Discovery, Exploration, Colonies, & Revolution

From a literary standpoint, the autobiographical narratives of former slaves comprise one of the most extensive and influential traditions in African American literature and culture. Until the Depression era slave narratives outnumbered novels written by African Americans. Some of the classic texts of American literature, including the two most influential nineteenth-century American novels, Harriet Beecher Stowe's (1852) and 's (1884), and such prize-winning contemporary novels as William Styron's (1967), and Toni Morrison's (1987), bear the direct influence of the slave narrative. Some of the most important revisionist scholarship in the historical study of American slavery in the last forty years has marshaled the slave narratives as key testimony. Slave narratives and their fictional descendants have played a major role in national debates about slavery, freedom, and American identity that have challenged the conscience and the historical consciousness of the United States ever since its founding.

TIMELINES & MAPS / PRIMARY DOCUMENTS DISCOVERY & …

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, slave narratives were an important means of opening a dialogue between blacks and whites about slavery and freedom. The most influential slave narratives of the antebellum era were designed to enlighten white readers about both the realities of slavery as an institution and the humanity of black people as individuals deserving of full human rights. Although often dismissed as mere antislavery propaganda, the widespread consumption of slave narratives in the nineteenth-century U.S. and Great Britain and their continuing prominence in literature and historical curricula in American universities today testify to the power of these texts, then and now, to provoke reflection and debate among their readers, particularly on questions of race, social justice, and the meaning of freedom.

Slave labor required for farming and tobacco ..

Following Columbus' lead were countless conquistadors, mostly explorers who initiated other forms of cultural contact between the Spanish and the people of America and Africa in their quest for adventure and riches. In 1519, Hernán Cortés brought Spanish forces beyond the Caribbean into present-day Mexico. Eventually, he took over the Mexican capital Tenochtitlán in 1521 and launched a "scorched earth" policy. Cortés lived for a time with a multi-lingual native woman, a "gift" of a Mayan chief upon his arrival in the Yucatan. Their son was the "first "-a person of mixed race-in the hemisphere. This precedent of "race-mixing" characterized Spain as a more integrative society than that which would form further north in the English colonies. Later, when disease undermined its ability to use the local population as a labor force, Spain imported African slaves into the Caribbean. Africans often accompanied the Spanish conquistadors as guides and interpreters. They too mingled with the Spanish and native populations to create new racial categories distinctive to the Atlantic World.

How the Transatlantic Slave Trade has influenced …

Close to two million slaves were brought to the American South from Africa and the West Indies during the centuries of the Atlantic slave trade. Approximately 20% of the population of the American South over the years has been African American, and as late as 1900, 9 out of every 10 African Americans lived in the South. The large number of black people maintained as a labor force in the post-slavery South were not permitted to threaten the region's character as a white man's country, however. The region's ruling class dedicated itself to the overriding principle of white supremacy, and white racism became the driving force of southern race relations. The culture of racism sanctioned and supported the whole range of discrimination that has characterized white supremacy in its successive stages. During and after the slavery era, the culture of white racism sanctioned not only official systems of discrimination but a complex code of speech, behavior, and social practices designed to make white supremacy seem not only legitimate but natural and inevitable.

How the Transatlantic Slave Trade ..

The African societies (like those of the American Indians and the Europeans) were highly dependent on the environmental conditions and varied widely across the continent. Africa very much resembled America in its diversity of cultures across deserts, grasslands, and forests, its established networks of trade, and resource competition. The early use of iron implements raised productivity and subsequently increased the continent's population, which reached about 50 million by the fifteenth century. Much of that population was organized politically under large empires, like the Kingdom of Ghana. Ghana achieved architectural and artistic wealth principally through important trading contacts with the Middle and Far East. Other kingdoms also developed skilled craftsmanship, codes of law, and trading networks. Alongside these trade relationships, Muslim influences, which had spread throughout Africa since the eleventh century, also shaped African community life. African societies differed most markedly from those in Europe in terms of familial organization (matrilineal rather than patrilineal). For example, property rights and inheritance descended through the mother.