Brianna's US History Blog

In many cases, movies do tend to misrepresent real historical facts and conditions but movies also provide a different perspective on history. It is very much possible to learn about history from watching a movie. With a movie, new opinions can be formed that may not have been found by reading a book. Movies allow for viewers to form new and different opinions by accurately representing important historical facts but by also forming a different kind of emotional connection that a book otherwise could not. In the movie, 12 Years a Slave directed by Steve McQueen, Solomon Northrup's slave narrative is brought to life. In a movie review, "The Blood and Tears, Not the Magnolias," by The New York Times, movie critic Manohla Dargis explains that Mr. McQueen is found putting the already fabricated ideas of American history used in films into perspective through his insightful tactics which draws on the allurement of films. Although 12 Years a Slave is an adaption of Solomon...

I read Harriet Ann Jacob's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl . I read several different parts of her story that I thought were interesting. First I read about her childhood in Chapter I. Harriet begins by talking about how she was born a slave but her parents neglected to tell her until she was six years old. She mentions how her grandmother, a free black woman, was kidnapped during the Revolutionary War and sold as a slave. Harriet talks very highly of her grandmother and of her experiences and how she was born as a slave. The next chapter I read was Chapter V "Trials of Girlhood." Harriet talks of her experience as a female slave. Here, like in the first chapter, Harriet talks highly of her grandmother and how she wished she could share what was happening to her with someone else who would understand. She struggles with the idea of how her master treated her once she started to become an "adult," " both pride and fear kept me silent.”(47). The last c...