American History Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 250 words

American History - Research Paper Example Clayton Holbert’s mother and grandmother were freed in this way but later captured by â€Å"what they called ‘nigger traders’† and sold them back into slavery (p. 287). The Holbert family experienced the end of slavery like so many others: they were free, but had no way to earn a living, no place to go, and no education. The Holberts stayed on with their former master and eventually bought a small farm nearby (pp. 288-289). The concept of freedom for these families only meant that they were no longer owned by someone; they continued to live their lives in familiar places doing what they had always done. Looking back on their slavery experiences, both Holmes and Holbert remember their former lives with some nostalgia. Clayton Holbert comments, â€Å"People were more friendly than they are now. They have almost lost respect for each other† (p. 286). Joseph Holmes comments, â€Å"in dose days white folks wuz white folks an black folks wuz black folks† (p. 7). Admittedly, both of them were children at the end of the Civil War, and both had lived a vast majority of their years as free men. The difficulties and hard living which happened to them and their families after the war affected how they felt about slavery, and when white people and black people mixed together freely the black people were exposed to many more hateful whites than when they were segregated. Reading these interviews gives us an interesting perspective on what freed slaves felt and thought, both about their freedom and about their lives afterward. Everybody remembers their lives through the filters of time. These two men did not remember being mistreated by their masters, and so they have few bad memories of their former lives. For them the transition from slavery to freedom made little difference in how they eventually led their

Book review of The Holocaust in History by Michael R Marrus Essay

Book review of The Holocaust in History by Michael R Marrus - Essay Example The Holocaust in History is a book that affiliates to a broad historical perspective, which deserves a good and exhaustive reading by the students of history, if not by the lay people. Its goes without saying that Marrus did resort to an exhaustive research and documentation, to come out with this immaculately contrived introduction as to how the historians tend to write about the Holocaust. The approach of Marrus tends to emphatically highlight the need for demystifying the Holocaust, so that it may be studied as an event in the contemporary Western history. Hence in this book, Marrus has systematically summarized the available authoritative historical writings pertaining to the salient aspects of the Holocaust that are, the pivotal position and scope of anti-Semitism in Nazism, the role played by the Jewish resistance, Jewish leadership and bystanders, and collaborators. To put it simply, The Holocaust in History has less to do with the history of the Holocaust and is more about th e historiography of the Holocaust. In The Holocaust in History Marrus does delve on the centrality of anti-Semitism to Nazism, but not in a very polarized perspective as preferred by many other historians. In the preface to this well written book, Marrus classifies the literature pertaining to Holocaust in two categories, one comprising of works drafted â€Å"as witness, or in commemoration, or as a sombre warning to future generations†; and the other that were meant to be â€Å"the modes of discourse, the scholarly techniques, and the kind of analysis used for all other historical issues.† Marrus’ work, The Holocaust in History primarily focuses on the second type of literature. In this book, Marrus primarily seems to be engrossed in the task of analyzing what the other historians have so far researched and written about the facts pertaining to the Holocaust, to dig out and analyze the details of what actually happened and how it happened, and to delve on the s alient causes behind the Holocaust. Though it may certainly surprise the contemporary students and teachers of history, yet, it is a fact that significant parts of the literature that Marrus relied on while writing The Holocaust in History, ascribes to 60s or later times. This is so because Marrus believes that in the aftermath of the Holocaust, either there was a scant interest in the Holocaust, or much historical writing, scholarship and documentation about Holocaust was â€Å"ghettoized† and not balanced. It was only in the early 60s or later that the Holocaust as a topic of historical interest experienced a turning point. According to Marrus, the Holocaust claimed the lives of six million Jews, yet to limit the scope and magnitude of Holocaust to the Jewish sufferers would be an immense historical travesty (p.8). To arrive at a total and realistic relevance of the Holocaust, the historians also need to take into account the six million non-Jewish sufferers who also had to bear with the tyranny and consequences of the Holocaust (Marrus p.9). The Holocaust also claimed the lives of millions of Gypsies, Russian POWs, Spanish Republicans, Poles, Czechs, French and homosexuals (Fischel p.38). Though, it is different that the Eastern victims of the Holocaust received a different treatment as compared to the victims from the Western Europe, both from the historians and the Western political leadership. While unravelling