Word: spotsylvania
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Alex Haley and the TV producers had the Lome Greene character farming cotton in Spotsylvania County, Va.; it should have been tobacco. Harold Cruse, author of The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, observes: "When you see Leslie Uggams and her long polished nails, you just have to laugh." Although Cruse liked Roots, he thought "the ending was contrived, commercialized and romanticized. For one thing, under those conditions, you don't just tie up a plantation owner to a tree and then get into a wagon and casually drive away as if there weren't bloodhounds and night riders...
...rough plank in the ship's airless hold. It was his way of trying to dissolve time and the cultural insulation that can prevent a writer from telling his story. What a story it turns out to be. The 17-year-old Kunta Kinte is sold to a Spotsylvania County, Va., planter for $850 and renamed Toby. But Kunta does not tame easily. Following his fourth escape attempt, half his right foot is cut off by professional slave catchers. He eventually becomes the buggy driver for a physician. In 1789 Kunta marries a slave woman named Bell, who bears...
Foote deals almost too fairly with Grant as well, although the general in chiefs meat-grinder warfare down through the Wilderness and Spotsylvania to Richmond amounted to a kind of condemnation of the man, no matter what his ultimate success. Grant sometimes spent soldiers so profligately that at last even the seemingly limitless manpower of the North seemed about to run out. At Cold Harbor, Lee devised such an intricate system of crossfires for the ill-prepared Grant that as Foote says, "never before, in this or perhaps any other war, had so large a body of troops been exposed...