America a History of us

[nadinbrzezinski]

I find it amazing... first episode... and no mention of the indentured servants...

Of course we have the Slaves... but the other slaves are hidden from view.

THis is one of the reasons we are where we are as a country by the way.

[WCGreen]

1. I watched about ten minutes and realized this was right of center

ideology masquerading as history...

[bushisanidiot]

2. I've been watching all morning.

the first episode mentioned african slaves and free africans fighting along side the colonists against the indians and again against the british. that was the only mention i saw of slavery.

i'm now watching the third or fourth episode and they are focusing on slavery now. talking about the invention of the cotton gin and how slavery was actually decreasing in the south until it was invented. then there was a boon in the cotton industry.

i also noticed the disgusting commercials for the bank of america. they tried to make the commercials look like they are a history channel story. bah!

anyway, i wish i knew my history better because i wonder how much of this series is right wing spin.

[nadinbrzezinski]

3. Quite a bit of it

and never do they mention INDENTURED servants, which was a form of white slavery, which came to the new world before black slavery did. In fact, black slavery took the form of indentured servitude for the first fifty years or so. Slaves, African Slaves, did not become life time property for a while and many of the early black slaves had black slaves of their own (which might be disconcerting to us, but slavery was also common in East Africa)

[JustAnotherGen]

7. By the early 18th century

Slavery had become 'racialized'. I'm watching this and while I appreciate the 'struggles' that poor whites went through to come to America? Compared to the legalized rape, kidnapping of children, horrific beatings, toes cut off for running away (my great great great grandfather Ragland was a victim of this - but he still got away the fourth time down into Mexico) . . . the short history of indentured servitude by blacks and whites (where one DELIBERATELY entered into the contract) has had a less significant impact on the psyche of white folks than it has on black folks.


Why can't slavery just stand on its own? By 1960 a descendent of a white indentured servant from Europe had entitlements and priviledges that a black descendent of slaves did not. As a matter of fact, not just in the South but in the majority of America they LORDED it over the black folks in our country.


This lead to the 'Great Migration'. My dad married to my mother (a white woman) was the tail end of that in the 1970s - but his oldest sibling participate in the early 40's, and the others in the 50's. There's a great book I finished about a month ago called The Warmth of Other Suns that speaks about the 6 Million Black (yep I'm going to say it) that immigrated from the South to other parts of America seeking a better life and opportunity. They CHOSE this, sometimes working at crappy jobs in places like Detroit, NYC, Boston, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, etc. etc. not knowing what awaited them after their long journer.

Now since we don't EVER get to speak about the immigration of black people in this country to OTHER parts of this country as a 'panoramic epic story' in the way we do the folks that came through Ellis Island (I descend from one of those too - From France in early 1921) - then we can't always speak of Europeans indentured servitude in the same vein as blacks sold by other blacks to whites for slavery in America.

[bushisanidiot]

10. +1

well said!

[nadinbrzezinski]

12. Because human trafficking is human trafficking and I am also well aware

of why it became racialized.

But we need to deal with the whole of it.

This country was not, contrary to national myth, built as a beacon of freedom and liberty...

That is the lesson of this.

Oh and here is more, since we have refused to deal with this crap... we have SLAVERY going on right now. No, not legal... but in form... we STILL have human trafficking too. And you know what? With the same results in fact in the economic system.

oh and here is what you are not aware off, running from your master as a WHITE Slave would earn you beatings. would earn you extension of your term, or death.

[JustAnotherGen]

25. Really

You don't think I was aware of that? Really -you don't think a descendent of SLAVES is WELL AWARE of the punishment they received? Oh you missed that part where my great great grandfather was missing toes from his many run aways.

Rolling eyes and being a good negro listening to what I'm supposed to know and not know.

[WhaTHellsgoingonhere]

4. Middle class college educated students are the new....

...wave of indentured servants, beholden to banks, and under extreme pressure to pursue careers in better paying fields than education, academics, and physical or social sciences because they leave school swimming in debt. It's so much worse, here, than in England. However, I'm sure the Conservatives there are looking at our system with envy.

[nadinbrzezinski]

6. One reason we have seen this increased production of well

propaganda... is that the center will not hold. We have reached that point where people are starting to connect dots.

The more I think about it, things like this series are an effort to counter Zinn and the New History.

[Goldstein1984]

5. Indentured servants can be indentured in different ways

Maybe the establishment producers of the program or their sponsors were concerned about how many viewers would learn about indentured servants and realize that they have a lot in common with them.

How many Americans are indentured to Bank of America?

[nadinbrzezinski]

8. There is that

but it is not just that program. The more research I do into the aspect the more the new history seems to be going to the way side.

[Poboy]

9. I watched the first 4 episodes and gave up. Total propaganda piece.

Feel good flag waving for the masses.

[rurallib]

11. Turned it on and saw Newt Gingerich and turned it off

wasn't much question what was going on there.

[jwirr]

13. My hobby is genealogy and one of my most interesting finds was

papers of indenture of our ancestor by his brother. I am assuming that in this case it was a way of getting the rest of the family over here. I do not know anything bad about this particular case.

[nadinbrzezinski]

14. What was the year? They did change in nature over the 350

years that they lasted. Hell, the LDS ran some all the way to the 1870s to get converts across.

[jwirr]

17. Around 1790s.

[nadinbrzezinski]

18. Ah after the US became the US

this is when indetures became industrial contracts, I am almost willing to bet that your long distant relative had slills, probably in the textile trades. This helped one person, and once they earned their freedom, they could bring others over.

By the 1790s the practice was mostly on the way out also because Europeans were able to afford the ticket. and salaries in the new world, once you became free, were anywhere from twice to three times higher than Europe, in general of course. Why the mythology that the country was laid with gold started to rise.

The salaries were still higher since labor needs were acute, not as bad as they were in the 1600... but still acute. Oh and of course there was a frontier to serve as a safety valve too.

[jwirr]

20. I know that the owner of the indenture was a southern farmer. This same

family moved out of the south to avoid the slavery issue. Some of them later fought in the civil war for the union. They were also Quakers.

[nadinbrzezinski]

21. Ah as quakers that makes all the sense in the world

Quakers fought slavery before it was cool.

I am sure you are fascinated by it. I got a few PDFs on the nature of it from places like the American Historical Review, and I highly recommend this book

http://www.amazon.com/White-Cargo-Forgotten-History-Britains/dp/0814742963/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1292119500&sr=1-2

[jwirr]

24. Thank you.

[lunatica]

15. Many of the first settlers where indentured servants

And there were many black people who also came over as indentured servants and paid for their eventual freedom. You would never learn this in a regular American History course in College which I hated. I learned much more when I took Women's History instead. It turned out to be one of my favorite classes.

Who new there were women in this country? And who knew that many of the Western States gave women the vote long before 1920 just to get them to move there? Not to many.

[nadinbrzezinski]

16. Yep and all that is brushed over

by the way even less covered these days... LABOR.

[Synicus Maximus]

19. It is mostly propaganda and should be covered adequately but

what about the slaves of today? According to Anti-Slavery International, the world's oldest human rights organization, there are currently over 20 million people in bondage. UNICEF estimates that 200,000 children from West and Central Africa are sold into slavery each year.

Read more: Slavery in the Modern World — Infoplease.com http://www.infoplease.com/spot/slavery1.html#ixzz17rBuuUDO

[nadinbrzezinski]

22. Here my answer to a fellow DU'er

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=9753086&mesg_id=9753604

And for the record not just in the third world either.

I got to see some of it first hand as a humanitarian worker

[JVS]

23. It's a real facile and celebrity BS kind of series.