What are the potential biases in each one and the problems such biases would pose for a historian who wanted to use them to write about slavery in the American South before 1860?
a. A speech made to an abolitionist society by a slave who escaped to the North in 1854.
b. A book written by an English aristocrat's wife about her travels throughout the south during 1848.
c. Oral interviews recorded in the 1930's with black people who had been slaves.
d. The diary of a plantation owner's wife, written in the years 1824-1855, her husband owned the largest plantation in Louisiana.
e. The ledger book for a county in South Carolina, kept for tax purposes, that recorded all sales and purchases of slaves and the value of each slave, covering the years 1830-1860.
Thanks in advance :DA question for all you History nerds about slavery?
Most sources are biased;historians need to identify these biases and distill what accuracy and truth there is from them.
a: The speech is likely to have been written by someone else,probably an abolitionist with no first hand experience as either a slave owner or slave.Parts of it may therefore be exaggerated or even wholly falsified for effect,Further,neither a slave nor an abolitionist is going to have anything good to say about slavery.The speech will concentrate wholly on the bad parts.
b: She's likely to have stayed and socialized only with rich families.She would probably not have seen the reality of slavery up close.Her views could be influenced by the attitudes of these families,and what they had to say about slavery.
c: As people get older,sometimes it becomes harder to remember things with 100% accuracy.An ex slave interviewed in the 1930s would be very old,probably only a child during slavery.They might therefore misremember things or,being at child at the time,not fully understand the significance of everything they experienced as a slave.
d: She's unlikely to criticize the system that's made her and her family obscenely rich.She's far more likely to justify slavery as beneficial to the enslaved.
e: This would be a good source - it's just a financial and economic record,and therefore has no axes to grind or points to make.The factual accuracy of the material will therefore be very high.However,as it's only for South Carolina 1830-1860 its figures can't be projected onto other states or into other years.
Always a good idea to insult those you want help from.
Makes them go out of their way for you.
Look it up yourself. I'm too nerdy.A question for all you History nerds about slavery?
Hi this has to be a wake up call to a lot of americans when they start spouting about civil rights if they are white. yes slavery happened and yes britain was as guilty as any about this trade. they did the capturing and transporting of slaves to the new world.
so it was a very shameful part of western history something we should be ashamed of.
most of the european countries where also involved france, Germany and italy we all had a hand in it.
so are you proud of what you did i don't think so in fact our fore fathers or should i say the middle classes at the time where the real culprits in all this misery.
Thank you - I am a history nerd, and proud of it!
B - An aristocrat's wife would feel at home with the plantation owners, although they would not be as grand as many in England. But slavery had been outlawed in Britain by 1772, and that was followed by outlawing the slave trade in 1807, and then a Empire wide (with some exceptions) ban in 1833. The woman would have to be older than 61 to have had any contact with someone who was a slave in Britain. She would have been raised in a culture that did not accept slavery, and was strongly abolitionist. BUT, some aristocrats would have owned slaves in other parts of the Empire that were not freed until 1833, and they were paid for this "loss".
The bias would be from a person who may have experienced all her life that slavery was wrong and was abolished, and might be more harsh in her condemnation of Americans, from a superior point of view, as well as a citizen of Britain - at the time, the most successful and wealthy Empire in the world.
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