September 4, 2019

So as I was writing this blog, school was cancelled for tomorrow!  Everything on our calendar the next few days will just shift one day.  Some essays may stay on Fridays, so I will make all of those calendar shifts later tonight.  

Today our conversations centered around the role of unfree labor systems in the English Colonies in America.  We began the day with a debrief discussion over the podcast you listened to last night on Maroon communities in the Great Dismal Swamp.  Next we completed our first HAPP of a secondary source, a selection on the Middle Passage by historians Mannix and Cowley.  We spent the rest of class using a heuristic chart to guide our analysis of a set of advertisements for runaway slaves published in Colonial newspapers in the 1700's.  

Your task tonight is to use the information from those documents to write a one or two paragraph response to the prompt below.  Please take the feedback I gave at the end of class into consideration as you craft your responses:  

• Be more formal in your writing style
• Avoid the use of direct quotations
• Make clear assertions
• Cite, explain, and link supporting evidence from the documents.

Don't forget, Chapter 4 is now due Monday!

-H

Prompt:
Using what you have learned from these advertisements, compare the institutions of servitude and slavery in colonial America.  In what ways were these worlds similar? What were the most significant differences?

Sample use of evidence based on last night's prompt:

Among the significant reasons for the low life expectancy in the Jamestown Colony’s early years was starvation.  Writing in 1617, Governor Samuel Argall commented on the significantly poor conditions of his colony.  Argall noted that public buildings had been left to crumble and planting of food crops was abandoned in favor of planting as much tobacco for profit as possible, even in the public square and roadways.  This indicates that the colonists were active participants in their own starvation by refusing to grow food crops, thus making starvation a major contributing factor to the low life expectancy in the colony. 

Red: assertion
Blue: Introduction of evidence
Green: Explanation of evidence
Purple: Link between evidence and assertion