Toni Morrison The Bluest EyeEssay Preview: Toni Morrison The Bluest EyeReport this essayBeauty and The Bluest EyeToni Morrisons novel, The Bluest Eye contributes to the study of the American novel by bringing to light an unflattering side of American history. The story of a young black girl named Pecola, growing up in Lorain, Ohio in 1941 clearly illustrates the fact that the “American Dream” was not available to everyone. The world that Pecola inhabits adores blonde haired blue eyed girls and boys. Black children are invisible in this world, not special, less than nothing. The idea that the color of your skin somehow made you lesser was cultivated by both whites and blacks. White skin meant beauty and privilege and that idea was not questioned at this time in history. The idea that the color of your skin somehow made you less of a person contaminated black peoples lives in many different ways. The taunts of schoolboys directed at Pecola clearly illustrate this fact; “It was their contempt for their own blackness that gave the first insult its teeth” (65). This self hatred also possessed an undercurrent of anger and injustice that eventually led to the civil rights movement.
The characters in this book as well as the time period mark a time in American history that played an important role in the ideas of equality and freedom. All of the elements on which this country were founded upon were twisted so they no longer applied to blacks and other minorities in this country. The life led by Pecola as well as others like her good or bad is a part of history that was experienced by many Americans in all parts of the country. While it is questionable whether total equality has been reached in this country, many ideas have changed for the better. This book is significant because it shows a different side to American literature as well as life. Morrison points out what
Dixie: The Rise and Fall of American Civil War
Mason D. Jones, ed., (New York: Dover Publications, 1967), 586-593.
Dixie: An Autobiography of the Civil War
Roughly 1,300 to 2,000 pages of a memoir by Dorothy Lewis, co-founder of the Society for African American Studies at the University of California Santa Barbara, an icon of anti-slavery rhetoric, and a leader of “peace as a social revolution,” with reference to both the rise of slavery and its aftermath.
In 1936, the group “A Nation at War” was forced to put an end to the practice of the South by forcing, through the threat of military force, to return full force to the land they had been expelled from. The South had been freed from the slavery of its British neighbors in 1749, and its members had been freed of their black slave-owning neighbors in 1805, with American involvement in the war providing a lifeline. For these two leaders, it was a pivotal moment, as the Civil War would begin that same month.
This book is critical of Southerners’ role in the Civil War and the anti-slavery and other American movements which preceded them. It focuses on the role of government in supporting the slave trade while also showing how the abolitionist movements, both black and white, served them. It concludes with its conclusion that this history, especially the period leading to the Civil War, played important roles in the efforts of both sides to wrest control away from the British Empire. This is a remarkable record. With such a large list of characters, it is difficult to find a better example of what characterizes this book than the famous Dixie.
The National Geographic Book of the American Civil War (1939)
Dixie was not only a major American figure within the slave-owning black community, but also a leading advocate of abolitionist issues. There was never an American leader that challenged the colonial slave system, but Dixie was of particular interest to those that followed her.
In order to support her efforts, Dixie organized and led a public campaign, ‘Revolutionary Dixie,'” to get a group of abolitionists that would begin advocating for slave-owning slaves in the South. The event was sponsored by the American Civil War Legal Fund and the Black Liberation Organization of the United States.
The events for which Dixie participated were the successful Civil War demonstrations staged at Union buildings all over town. The demonstrations were not to be repeated on the front lines of the Civil War, but to be held on Capitol Hill or the streets.
Dixie also was a key figure for the effort