Documetation Problem In History

2 Pages 452 Words

Documentation of any event (no matter how significant) is a very difficult task. It is human nature to have some bias and objectivity when looking at any situation. In order to accurately document an event we must be able to control these feelings. This, in my opinion, is an impossible task. No matter how hard we try, I do believe some objectivity will sneak through into our documentations. In the case of slavery in the United States in the time period before the Civil War I believe this problem was magnified by the very nature of the event being documented. This paper will focus on why I believe the documentation of slavery in the U.S. is very skewed.

Slavery has existed since the beginning of time. It is common practice to use all means possible to keep slaves from joining together and revolting. One method used is denial of education. In the case of the African slaves brought to America these people were very uneducated. The majority could not read nor write. American slave masters used this to their advantage. Even after many generations of slaves had passed slave masters still were able to keep the vast majority of them illiterate by denying them any education at all. What this created was a very one-sided account of the happenings of that period of time.

When we read history, especially the early history of slavery in the United States, what we are mainly getting are accounts based on slave owners’ and educated white men’s’ documentation of the events. There is very little input by the slaves themselves. This inherently causes these pieces of history to be skewed towards the white man’s view. As we go along the timeline there eventually are more and more educated slaves and white men; who tell the stories of the slaves as had been told to them by the slave. However, we still cannot get rid of the fact that the majority of the information had to come from the white men of the time.

Besides this example, there are ...