Several Essays

1. By this statement the authors are simply stating that while slaves were made "freedmen" by Lincoln's efforts and by the victory of the North over the South, in everyday reality they were hardly on anything resembling an equal social, political, legal or economic footing with whites. Whites still occupied the top rail and blacks---freed or not---still occupied the bottom rail.

Histories of the era, say the authors, are inaccurate in part because the blacks studied in those histories were part of the "higher social classes" (172). Therefore, in general, the misimpression is given through these histories that freed slaves were far more liberated and far more able to take socioeconomic advantage of that liberation than in fact most of them actually were.

History is written by those with power, and according to the biases---conscious and unconscious---of those with that power. In this case, whites wrote the history of the freedmen, and it was flattering to those whites to believe that their efforts to free the slaves had paid off. The more socioeconomically empowered freedmen, therefore, were sought out by white historians as the primary sources of the experience of ex-slaves. This fact gives most histories of the era a more positive portrait of the conditions of freedmen's lives than actually existed. For most slaves recently freed, liberation did not mean that those freedmen suddenly moved from the bottom rail of society to anywhere near the top rail. The latter was stil

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United States prejudiced against these two men because of their politics and their ethnicity? The evidence as presented by the authors seems to clearly suggest such prejudice. The fact that the judge who oversaw the case was clearly prejudiced as well, which affected not only the trial but the appeals which followed. Again, this calls into question the nature of political and social discourse in the country dating back to the founding of the nation. Many of the individuals who founded the country were indeed political radicals--revolutionaries, in fact. However, studying the Sacco and Vanzetti case, it is clear that the judicial system of the era did not reflect any openness to such radical views on the part of the two defendants. 4. The authors' analysis of the "great man" theory of history does not settle the issue, but it makes clear that in the case of Huey Long the theory certainly in part holds true. Long is clearly an "event-making" individual who "not only leads people as the 'fork in the road,' he also helps create that fork" (301-302). The "great man" theory holds that such a man is able to overcome social and political resistance to his views as he imposes his views on society, as Long certainly did. At the same ti

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