Middle Passage

This week, we read the "Middle Passage" by, Robert Hayden in American Literature. In the "Middle Passage", it said that the crew was infected with Ophthalmia, a disease that makes the infected go blind in about tree weeks. Near the end, when all of the crew is either dead or blind, The African slaves, rebel, taking control of the slave ship. After they get control, they kill the rest of the crew except for two and enslave them so that they can go back to Africa. The two say that it was the worst thing ever. My question is, They enslaved more than 3 thousand people on that boat and made them sit crowded under the deck laying in their own feces and dead bodies. How can they say that what they went through, was the worst? Even then, because of the language barrier they were able trick the Africans into the colonies. They did this by going east at day time and west at night time. Is that even possible? wouldn't they just be staying in the same spot? Or were they able to decrease how much they traveled during the day to give them an advantage during the day? The fact that the two captured crewmen thought that they had the worst situation ever bothered me, considering what they did to slaves on the ship. They were much better off than the slaves, taking into account all variables, like: Food, living space, hygiene, and etc. Did they ever realize that right in their line of sight, were people who had it worse than them?

Lowell Mill Liberty?

This week, we read about the Lowell Mill girls for homework. In both of the letters, the girls seemed to have a similar ideal liberty. The right to work and earn money. Even in the short story, a week at the mill, the girls seemed happy to work at the mill even though it would have been hard to work that long with under wage. According to, a week at the mill, most of the girls were from the country, which was the reason why they wanted to work. It said that they wanted to work for more clothes and things of that area. I was wondering, why didn't they work for money instead? wouldn't it be better, so they could help their families more? Another question that I have is, did they get compensation for injuries? Did their families get compensation if they died working at the mill? In any case, were injuries even common while working with the machines? like with hands and fingers in the sewing machines probably. The girls probably went there because they wanted to also break social norms. Like how girls are supposed to not work in that time, at least not that much. My last question is, did they also work on Saturdays, cause it only talked about having Sunday off.
~Keerthana 

Jefferson Readings (Notes on the State of Virginia)

Hi Guys!
So in class, we went over "Notes on The State of Virginia" in which Jefferson writes about his view on slaves. It really surprised me that he would think of executing the experiments that he wrote about. One of them was lighting both an African and a English man on fire. The idea itself seemed horrendous, especially the fact that he wanted to burn them alive and observe it as well. This would have been to see if they would burn differently. Perhaps if he wanted to watch that happen, wouldn't it have been better to watch a cremation of two dead people instead of killing people? That in itself seemed off to me. The words that he used describe slaves insinuated that he thought them sub-human or non-human. Maybe the Deist part of his mind only thought scientifically but, he only spoke about slaves as if they were his personal scientific experiment. He talked about how, when playing music, slaves tended to have a better ear for it. They could play instruments almost perfectly after being taught. Most of the time, according to Jefferson, they would even play better than English people.  Did that mean that he believed that they were intelligent? If so, why did he propose so many horrible experiments to find out if one race was superior to the other? Did it have to do with an inferiority complex rooting from the beginning of slavery and the original Puritan values?
~Keerthana Akella

Hi! first post :)