Such reasoning failed to notice that Englishmen, in the early seventeenth century, used the work servant when they meant slave in our sense, and, indeed, white Southerners invariably used servant until 1865 and beyond. ... During the seventeenth century, the slaves had had very few and slim opportunities to establish stable family relationships. ... By the early nineteenth century, slaveholders increasingly adopted an ideal that Christianity would make the slaves more submissive, orderly, conscientious so in turn the plantation owners encouraged missionary activities among slaves. ... Even ...

• Word Count: 1042
• Approx Pages: 4
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

Some of the first settlers in seventeenth century America were British revolutionaries escaping religious prejudices back home. ... During the first half of the 19th century, the country migrated west. ... America in the eighteenth and nineteenth century was so dynamic and corrupt that money replaced everything and people thrived on its economic vitality. ...

• Word Count: 1128
• Approx Pages: 5
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

Dryden and Davenant's changes to Shakespeare's original continued to influence the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century critics. Eighteenth-century commentaries on Caliban still treated him as a monster, but they focused on new issues. ... From the late eighteenth century commentators began to associate The Tempest's plot, language and characters with Europe's exploration and colonization of America. ... "Colonial metaphors" was a trend contemporaneous to the American school and flourished in the twentieth century outside the English-speaking nations. ... The view prevalent ...

• Word Count: 2369
• Approx Pages: 9
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

Systems of kinship varied in West Africa in the different regions but "it was commonly accepted that kinship was "the principal way of ordering relations between individuals (Walvin 2001;p 174)" By the mid eighteenth century within the Chesapeake region and despite the mammoth difficulties slaves had to endure, family systems developed and became the cornerstone of slave life. ... Like their slave counterparts in America slaves in Barbados by the end of the eighteenth century lived in an immediately recognizable nuclear family. ... This was also the situation a century later when missiona...

• Word Count: 2095
• Approx Pages: 8
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

The trans-Atlantic slave trade was the largest long-distance coerced movement of people in history and, prior to the mid-nineteenth century, formed the major demographic well-spring for the re-peopling of the Americas following the collapse of the Amerindian population. ... From the late fifteenth century, the Atlantic Ocean, once a formidable barrier that prevented regular interaction between those peoples inhabiting the four continents it touched, became a commercial highway that integrated the histories of Africa, Europe, and the Americas for the first time. ... For several cent...

• Word Count: 4994
• Approx Pages: 20
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

Aphra Behn is a complicated figure within English theatrical history. As the first woman in England to classify herself as a professional writer and playwright, she wrote to support herself and to prove a point during a time when women were deemed subordinate to men. She was a commoner among royals, revolting against the societal norms of her time with her vulgar, yet ingeniously crafty works. Behn's influence extends far beyond being just a writer of her time period; rather, she left a mark as a pillar of English literature. She was an adventurist, an abolitionist, feminist, and civil r...

• Word Count: 2238
• Approx Pages: 9
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: Undergraduate