Word: historians
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...dramatization that set off this vast craving for the book and that reached so deeply into Americans' minds. Part of its success may have come from the use of familiar techniques of TV melodrama?with a twist: the heroes and heroines were black. Said black Historian Benjamin Quarles of Morgan State College in Maryland: "There was the threat of violence, the appeal of sex, all building up to a wonderful climax?all the things that make for good television...
There are more substantive complaints. Historian James Brewer Stewart says, "The master/slave relationship was ridden with ambiguity. Plantation overseers and owners were not all-powerful. They were tied by a system of reciprocal rights and obligations." Roots often has a flattened, cartoon quality: the whites nearly all villainous, the blacks uniformly heroic. Africa is romanticized to the point that it seems a combination of 3rd century Athens and Club Méditerranée, with peripatetic philosophers afoot and Claude Lévi-Strauss expected for dinner...
...Magnolias-and-Banjos School. This interpretation, promoted in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, was elaborated by the Southern historian Ulrich B. Phillips. The premise, which influenced historians well into this century, had it that blacks were innately lazy and incompetent, capable of working only under compulsion. In this view, blacks were childlike innocents, perhaps biologically inferior; slavery, whatever its excesses, was a generally benign means of giving the colored people civilized ways. Gone With the Wind carried that general message...
...Blacks as Devastated Victims. This view predominated from the late '40s through the Kennedy Administration. Historian Stanley Elkins, building on black Sociologist E. Franklin Frazier's work in the 1930s, detailed in Slavery (1959) a view that whites had done to blacks what the Nazis did to the Jews. Blacks were-and are-acted upon; they do not themselves act, because their culture was broken by slavery and its racist aftermath. The view awakened liberal guilt and paralleled the rise of the white civil rights movement. The Moynihan report described the devastation of black family life and asked...
...machine pose issues still further from technological solution--the moral choice of how long to support a patient on the edge of death. The scarcity of many sophisticated medical services relative to the demand, Reiser writes, raises also the moral dilemma of how to distribute those services. With an historian's pleasure, Reiser points out that to use these latest scientific advances man must look to ethics, one of the oldest disciplines. Medicine the science has in many areas reached a limit which it can pass only as medicine...