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The Slave Community
The Slave Community
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The Slave Community
John W. Blassingame, the author of the book The Slave Community: The Plantation Life in the Antebellum South, tries to put across the point that the Slave Community had attacked the idea of Stanley Elkin. Elkin was of the idea that Southern slavery had gotten so severe to the point of destroying slave culture that existed before. In essence, southern slavery had interfered with slave culture and the only ones that had remained were child-like slaves that doted and depended on their masters a lot. Blassingame’s idea was that the slave community did not agree with Stanley Elkin’s notion of southern slavery.
John W. Blassingame’s book The Slave Community: The Plantation Life in the Antebellum South assesses how black people become enslaved in pre-civil war. Blassingame examines the slave family and the black culture at the time. He delves into courtship practices, sexual attitudes, childbearing, wedding ceremonies, language, family roles, and discipline. The story in the Slave Community is told from the perspective of an enslaved individual.
The book contradicts the interpretations of the historians that suggested that African-American slaves were submissive and docile sambos that liked to benefit from paternalistic relationships they shared with their masters on the southern plantations. Blassingame uses psychology to assess the narrative of the fugitive slaves that had been published in the 19th century. The author comes to the conclusion that an independent culture had developed among the slaves and that the slaves exhibited numerous personality types. Blassingame asserts that through concentrating on enslaver, historians gave a distorted view of plantation life which stripped slaves of distinctive and meaningful culture, religion, or manhood.
The plantation represented a battlefield where slaves came to fight for their psychological and physical survival. Blassingame’s book brings a new perspective to the institution; a perspective of the slaves themselves. Blassingame challenges the timeworn stereotype of the slave being a docile and passive creature that lack purpose, drive, and responsibility. Blassingame traces the emergence of slave personality traits and analyzes resistance patterns in the slave community. Additionally, Blassingame concludes by proving that slaves had a rich family and cultural life, which they deliberately kept hidden from their white masters. Unlike other books that address slavery from the outside, The Slave Community delves into the inside of slave quarters and attempts to capture the religion, music, family life, and folklore of slaves.
Blassingame bases his argument on various sources, including the memoirs of formerly enslaved people that he uses to examine how black people were enslaved, their deep ties with African heritage, and the process of acculturation in the south. Blassingame shows the way slaves controlled some aspects of their life while wearing a mask of submissiveness which was the harsh reality of life in the plantations. Furthermore, Blassingame draws upon sociological and psychological insights to interpret the relationships between masters and slaves. The author incorporates a traveler’s impression and a planter’s viewpoint to bring a dimensional portrait of plantation life, which effectively separates mythology from historical reality.
Without a doubt, John Blassingame, the author of the book titled The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South, is successful in attaining its objective of showcasing the culture of the slaves that were not known to masters. In the book, Blassingame explores a period of twenty years when the population of people in New Orleans more than doubled. Essentially, Blassingame was successful in showing that historians did not fully exploit the experiences of American slaves. Blassingame asserted that historians gave a distorted view of plantation life by concentrating more on the save owner.
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The size of the government to a very large extent depended upon two important macro and micro economic concepts
Introduction:
The size of the government to a very large extent depended upon two important macro and micro economic concepts. Large governments should impact the social sectors vey definitely and large governments have an increased role to play by bringing in policies and reforms directly for the people without any intermediaries. The size of the government is also decided upon by the deadweight burden that is caused by private sector funds transfer and the resultant effect of this of increased burdens on tax payers .This seems to be too technical a definition of how large governments should be but the fact remains that if governments have to really play the role of a welfare state and make inclusive reforms for people they have to be large so that every sector of the economy including the very important social sectors can be clearly attended to .
Size of the government:
A large government has with it many advantages and with many issues too. The first and the foremost is should governments be big and if so who will be paying for such big governments. Hence the bigger the government the higher is the taxes that people will have to pay to support government spending. Over the years government threshold spending has been increasing at an alarming rate justifying the fact that government is growing in size, which is evident from the figure below
The articles of confederation assumed that the division of power between the state and the centre was to purport better concepts of the union of states. Though initially the size of the union government or the federal government as it was called was aimed to be small to effectively mediate of state polices, the ineffective functioning of state governments led to the federal government increasing in size and with it the spending of the federal government also increased with more subjects being bought under the federal perspective. The challenges that arose from a massively growing federal government had to be supported by the states and the citizens. It was left to populist votes and the congress to assume proprietary concerns over the size of the government.
The powers that are shared between the state and the centre is also a very decisive factor in judging the size of government. Where the powers are shared equally and many subjects are brought under state purview, the federal government has only few areas of jurisdiction. This will enable the federal government to remain small and work effectively in those areas over which it has its subjective and objective review. But with growing powers being given to the federal government more and more subject shave been taken up by federal government to supervise, oversee and have review. As many departments have to be necessarily stipulated as being subject to federal jurisdiction, the size of the government has to increase. A good check and balance system can work only if there is a government which is big enough to handle the various departments through its tripod machinery. Though the onus of upkeep of the large government ultimately falls on the tax payers and private sector, it cannot be denied that larger the government, greater the beauracracy and higher the standards of performance.
Conclusion:
It is populist opinion that smaller governments can work on shoe string budgets and bring great relief to tax payers but large governments intervene in making the government machinery transparent and policies and reforms towards betterment of society and citizens.
References:
Feldstein, Martin.“Tax Avoidance and the Deadweight Loss of the Income Tax.” NBER Working Paper No. 5055. Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1995b
James Robison and Jay Richards, INDIVISIBLE: Restoring Faith, Family and Freedom before It’s Too Late, February 20, 2012
Micheletti, M. (2000), End of Big Government: Is It Happening in the Nordic Countries?. Governance, 13: 265–278. doi: 10.1111/0952-1895.00134
Patrick Garry (June 14, 2011). “The meaning of big government”. Renew America. Retrieved 26 April 2012. Peter Lindhert (2004). “Does Big Government Hurt Economic Growth”. St. Johns University. Retrieved 26 April 2012.http://blogs.hbr.org/fox/2013/01/how-big-should-government-be.htmlhttp://history.state.gov/milestones/1776-1783/Articles