Word: slaving
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Find footnotes.Something about the thesis writer's predicament makes you feel rude if you do not consent to being their slave. "Problem? No problem. Are you kidding?" you say as you rummage through the stacks of Widener for the first time since Reading Period to find the all-important place of publication...
...July 18, 1863, the blacks of the 54th Massachusetts led a virtually suicidal assault upon Fort Wagner, a massive Confederate earthwork guarding the approach to Charleston, S.C., harbor. At a critical moment in Glory's version of the attack, Trip, the runaway slave-soldier played by Denzel Washington, seizes the American flag and runs forward with it to his death. His death says this: "I did not want your white man's flag; earlier I refused the 'honor' of carrying it. But I will do it now, dying with other black men, because, understand me, we are citizens...
...dignity, struggle and pride in accomplishment was replaced in the rhetoric of some black leaders by a toxic seepage of self-pity, of the victim theme. Passivity, grievance and denial became the psychic orthodoxy. The culture of victimization came to replicate in an eerie way the configurations of slave days -- the Government functioning as benevolent slave master, dispenser of all things. Many blacks were trapped in ghettos as surely and hopelessly as slaves on plantations. Perhaps civil rights organizations, designed to battle discrimination and hardening over the years into institutional mind-sets, could not adjust to new realities and needs...
...River (1985). This winsome adaptation of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn celebrated the frontier in music and lyrics by Roger Miller, a wistful lamenter of the lost open road. Designed and staged with shrewd simplicity, it glowed with sentiment: when Huck and the runaway slave Jim got onto the river, they lit cigars -- and ignited a skyful of stars...
...Piano Lesson (1989). An heirloom from a slave ancestor threatens to sunder members of the Charles clan: one wants to keep it as a reminder of suffering, another would sell it to buy the farm where the family were once chattel. Playwright August Wilson was the most important American stage voice to emerge in the '80s, and this piano is the most potent symbol in American drama since Laura Wingfield's glass menagerie...