Slavery

1. Slavery • By the end of Huck Finn, Huck sees Jim as a human being: a whole person, not a piece of property. • This is monumental due to the culture in which Huck grew up. • Let’s return to the Declaration of Independence: • “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” • Yet, the Constitutional Convention contradicted that premise.

2. Slavery • In Artiicle 1, Section 2, paragraph 3, the “three-fifths compromise” between Southern and Northern states dictated that only three-fifths of the slave population was counted for taxation purposes and representation in Congress. • Counting slaves as part of the population rather than as property would give the Southern states more political clout.

3. Slavery • This doesn’t necessarily mean that a slave was only seen as three-fifths of a person. • But it surely turns the ideal that “all men are created equal” into a gray area at best. • The three-fifths compromise was rendered moot by the 14th Amendment, Section 2, adopted July 9, 1868. • This was three years after the end of the bloodiest war in American history.

4. “Why We’re Still Fighting the Civil War”: By David Von Drehle • Myths • States’ rights were the motivating force for the war, not slavery. • Only the South profited from slavery. • “Lost Cause”: the Antebellum South was one of noble cavaliers, brilliant generals, and happy slaves, all faithful to a glorious lost cause. • The goal for millions of Union soldiers was to free the slaves.

5. “Why We’re Still Fighting the Civil War” • Truths • “It was slavery that had broken one nation in two and fated its people to fight over whether it could be put back together again.” • Founding Fathers saw the whole thing coming.

6. “Why We’re Still Fighting the Civil War” • Realities • War still being waged in some ways. • Confederate History Month proclamation in Virginia did not even mention slavery. • Frequent fights to get Confederate flags removed from Southern state capitols. • “The Civil War gave us, to an unmatched degree, the nation we became.”

7. “Why We’re Still Fighting the Civil War” • Quick review • Allusion: a brief reference to a person, event, place, or phrase outside of a story that the writer assumes the reader will recognize. • An allusive reference can be real or fictional. • A literary allusion refers to another written work, art piece, book, etc.

8. “Why We’re Still Fighting the Civil War” • Allusions • John Brown • Jefferson Davis • Ulysses S. Grant • Ku Klux Klan • “A boy from Mississippi goes to California to make a movie called “Blue Hawaii”

10. Gone With The Wind: An Epic Novel • Margaret Mitchell wrote the book in a one-room apartment on Peachtree Street in Atlanta; now houses the Margaret Mitchell House and Museum. • Published in June, 1936; awarded Pulitzer Prize in 1937. • Best-selling novel in history. • From writer Pat Conroy: • “Margaret Mitchell was a partisan of the first rank, and there has never been a defense of the plantation South so implacable in its cold righteousness or its resolute belief that the wrong side had surrendered at Appomattox Courthouse.” • Mitchell writes of the Confederacy “as Paradise, as the ruined garden looked back upon by a stricken and exiled Eve, disconsolate with loss.”

11. Gone With The Wind: A War Novel • From Conroy: “It is the South as an occupied nation that forms the heart of this not impartial novel. • It is the song of the fallen, sung in lower key by the women who had to pick up the pieces of a fractured society when their sons and husbands returned with their causes in their throats, when the final battle cry was sounded. • To Southerners, ‘Gone With The Wind’ was not just a book; it was an answer, a clenched fist raised to the North, an anthem of defiance.”

12. Gone With The Wind: A Woman’s Tale • Mitchell leaves the battlefields of Gettysburg and Vicksburg, Bull Run and Antietam, to the others, and places the Civil War in the middle of Scarlett O’Hara’s living room. • It is Scarlett O’Hara herself who represents the unimaginable changes that war has wrought on all Southerners. • “Gone With The Wind” tells the whole story of a lost society through the eyes of a single woman, and that woman proves match enough for a world at war, an army of occupation, and every man who enters those sugared realms of her attraction.

13. Gone With The Wind: Fast Film Facts Date of release • Dec. 15, 1939 Producer • David O. Selznick Director • Victor Fleming Setting: • (Time)  The Civil War and first part of the Reconstruction Era • (Place) Atlanta, Georgia and the surrounding countryside; one scene in New Orleans and one in London. Protagonist: • Southern belle Scarlett O’Hara  Major conflict: • Scarlett struggles to survive and prosper during the Civil War and Reconstruction Era.

14. Gone With The Wind • From this viewing, you will be expected to: • Identify the main characters; their traits, actions, importance to the story. • How are they related to each other? • What is their family situation? • What are their professions? • How do they influence the behavior of others?

15. Gone With The Wind • Track how the characters change: Are they static or dynamic? • Demonstrate the importance of key scenes and their importance in the plot. • Understand context of the story and its modern relevance. • Know basics of debate surrounding the Civil War, then and now. • Understand the film’s place in history

16. Gone With The Wind • Identify key concepts in the supplemental readings. • Fill out viewing guides during the viewing and be prepared to discuss them. • View the film through different lenses, including racial and feminist.