How intense does slavery and African American hardships during the 17th and 18th Centuries have to be described for people to grasp the true meaning of making a human into chattel? Slavery has been explained in many ways and underplayed in many textbooks we grew up reading in class, but it is important to understand the all aspects of it and especially distinguish the differences between slavery in urban cities such as New York and Boston rather than rural areas in the South. The readings and the website shows how explicit and how broad the subject can get.
A sense of hope us given of by the website. It briefly explains the struggles African Americans went through as Slaves in New York, and ends most explanations with something along the lines of “the struggle for blacks are intense, but they keep pushing on,” but how exactly are they doing this? In the Evolution of American Urban Society, Howard Chudacoff explains how slaves were different in the cities because they had more privileges than those in the South, mainly because their masters did not rely on them as heavily as they did in the South. He explains that with those privileges “ the close ties between master and slave, and the social life of city streets helped urban slaves to make better lives for them selves.” This is exactly why more restrictions were implemented so power would not be distributed so “carelessly.” He also goes on to mention that as the African American population grew more self-sufficient as far as having their own churches, schools, etc. they were penalized as amore white unskilled labor force took their positions.
Chudacoff in my opinion achieves his goal on making his readers understand New York City Slavery more distinctively, as allowing us to compare the differences between urban and rural areas during that time. I do not think the goal of the web designer was the give us a broad over view on things that we may already know which are pertinent to American History as a whole. Especially marketed towards education the web designer should be more creative and the material should be more in-depth allowing people who see it to separate what they already know from what they are now learning.
This is important because it has to do with abolishing slavery, and is a large art of the way many people live their life today. If slavery wasnt abolished things would be very different.