History According to Alexander

Alexander Grelier 10/29/18 Discussing 12 Years A Slave Film Review by Robbie Collin 12 Years A Slave, review: 'This, at last, really is history written with lightning' Film critic Robbie Collin starts off his review by stating that the general consensus about 12 Years A Slave is that it is the best movie made about American slavery, and he agrees. Although he thinks its the best film made about American slavery, he also doesn't see many contenders to combat the movie. He says that films about American slavery are rare, because of the terrors that really went on. He then goes on to speak on the actor playing Solomon in the film, and says that the part is executed well and gives us a great understanding of the agony Solomon went through. He starts speaking on Solomon's treacherous time at different plantations, describing it as "madness", and rightfully so. He ends by talking about another film about American slavery, Django Unchained, telling us tha...

Alexander Grelier 10/23/18 Slave Narratives              After reading many excerpts of different slave narratives from slaves in Mississippi, I got to have a much better understanding of what slave life in the south was really like. I learned that lots of the time slaves were fed false information by their owners, and were unable to have their own opinion. For example, in one slave narrative I read, the slave wrote about how he heard that Abe Lincoln was attempting to help free slaves, but his owner would say terrible things about the president, giving him a faulty portrayal of what he was really like. It seems that the only way slaves in the 19th century could gain knowledge was through the words and opinions of their masters, leaving them completely oblivious to what was really going on around them. Also, it's easy to tell that these slaves were completely uninformed and blind to the world because of their grammar and word choice. In the exc...

Alexander Grelier 10/18/18 Lincoln Film Review Paraphrase Practice "As Lincoln,  Daniel Day-Lewis  is excellent: he has the president's famous height, and his reedy, hushed manner of speaking. Apparently, Lincoln used to drive his colleagues mad with his odd sense of humour and his long stories, just as we see in the film. We also get a much more rounded picture than usual of Lincoln's wife, Mary Todd. She's notorious for being on the far side of sane – she's reputed to have thrown crockery at Lincoln – and for spending pots of money. Sally Field shows her as a much more complex person, who had suffered real loss in the death of their son Willie." An American history professor on Lincoln: The Guardian My paraphrase of this selected passage: Laura Bennett, a history professor posted on The Guardian, says that the actor Daniel Day-Lewis in the movie "Lincoln" depicts the president very accurately. She says that Day-Lewis possesses man...

Alexander Grelier 10/4/18 Spiritualism and Spiritual Communication in the Reconstruction Era Spiritualism in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans: The Life and Times of Henry Louis Rey After reading a passage from the New Orleans Republican published in 1874, I realized how prevalent the idea of spiritualism and afterlife became in the Reconstruction Era. The interest to communicate with spirits really came to be straight after the Civil War because of the countless deaths and losses of friends and family. The author of the article,"Spiritualism and its Tenets," speaks about the communication with spirits through a medium, what he believes afterlife is like, and the vast differences between the spiritual and "real" world. He explains that using mediums, such as a seance in the picture above, doesn't really allow you to choose who you talk to because of how complex the spiritual world really is in comparison to the real world. I did my own research to find...

Alexander 10/4/18 Newspaper Research Reflection          While looking back at newspapers from Louisiana in 1865-1877, I learned that the use of terms such as "colored" and "negroes" was substantially more prevalent in comparison to modern day. I expected to see these terms in the newspapers, but the shear amount of times these terms were used in one page of a newspaper is absurd. This  newspaper archive  gives specific examples about issues and controversies of the Reconstruction, something that reading a textbook account won't exactly give you. Why did the Reconstruction come to an end in 1877?        The Reconstruction came to an end because of the Compromise of 1877. Promises about maintaining civil and political rights for blacks from Southern Democrats hadn't been kept, and these interferences led to disenfranchisement of black voters all across the south. This compromise took away many rights that recent...