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Amistad
The story of the Amistad has become part of the less glamorous history in the United States and the wider Western world in terms of the human rights violation that was slavery. The story began in February 1839, when Portuguese slave traders violated all the treaties in existence at the time and abducted Africans from Sierra Leone in order to ship them to Cuba to be sold as slaves. In Cuba, 53 African men and women were sold to Spanish planters. The Cuban schooner Amistad would ship them to a plantation in the Caribbean. However, the simplicity of this plan was ruined by revolting Africans, who seized the ship in on 1 July 1839. The captain and the cook were killed, and the remaining crew members were told to sail to Africa. This plan, however, also did not work, as the U.S. brig Washington seized the Amistad off Long Island, New York. The commander of this ship was Lt. Thomas R. Gedney. The document to be examined here is his libel, a written statement to Judge Andrew T. Judson of the district...
Gedney's aim was to obtain salvage for the ship; therefore, his account of the ship's cargo and its value is very detailed.
Created during August, 1939, when the ship was seized, the libel was written on the Amistad and estimated the value of the ship's cargo at $40,000, while the Africans were valued at $25,000 if they were to be sold as slaves. Maritime law at the time dictated that people who were able to save ships or their cargo from loss could claim compensation in the form of salvage. It is on the strength of this law that Gedney claimed his right to salvage compensation, since it was with great "difficulty and danger" to themselves that he and his crew were able to save the Amistad, its cargo, and its value in human slaves. In other words, they saved the ship from loss to its "rightful" owners. Furthermore, since, according to Gedney, the slaves could speak only…
The lawyers and advocates for the slaves recognize this early in the film, and it is a common theme throughout. This is also tied to the way in which the Amistad case led to the United States' Civil War. All moral objections to slavery aside, there were very real practical (both economic and political) concerns to ending slavery. This case further hurt the slave trade, promising increased economic issues
Amistad and Last of the Mohicans Amistad is a 1997 historical drama directed by Steven Spielberg that focuses on the resolution of the 1839 landmark case in which a group of illegally obtained African slaves mutinied against their "owners" and took command of the ship on which they were travelling. The film centers on the legal battle surrounding the slaves and focuses especially on determining who owns the slaves captured by
contexts within the movie Amistad. It has 2 sources. Despite the fact that the societies that we contemporarily survive and interact within are highly complex and advanced entities, incidences comprised of such social woes as racism and other discrimination continue to come forth to some degree or another. There has, however, been a marginal decline regarding the prevalence of strong, anti-African-American racial discrimination within the U.S. As compared to the
What is the purpose of Foner’s introduction “Rethinking the Underground Railroad”? Brief background on Foner reveals he is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian. The reason for the book is to relay the intense story of fugitive slaves along with the antislavery activists who went against the law to assist in helping the slaves find freedom. The introduction then helps explain this by talking about Frederick Bailey. Frederick Bailey and four of his
Toni Morrison's Beloved This story works to capture the essence of slavery's aftermath for its characters. It tells a truth created in flashback and ghost story. It aims to create mysticism only memory can illustrate. "The novel is meant to give grief a body, to make it palpable" (Gates, 29). The characters are trapped in the present because they are imprisoned by the horrors of slavery. They are literally held hostage
For example, it is very probable that Ferreira Meirelles would have had trouble producing a motion picture on life in the favelas if he did not have access to Lins' manuscript. However, a successful artist needs to gather information from immediate sources in order to be able to efficiently tell a story from his perspective. This is basically what Ferreira Meirelles did at the time when he used Lins'