3. What is the relevant context(s) that can help us, as scholars, to interpret the meaning of this image/object?
Conceptual: What concepts or themes—including concepts we have learned about in class and/or those you have researched on your own—can help you interpret the image/object and why it matters?
Race segregation/Exclusion: Restricting people to certain actions, groups, and activities based on how they are seen as a person.
"I say, there is room enough for all of us to be free, and it not only does not wrong the white man that the negro should be free, but it positively wrongs the mass of white men that the negro should be enslaved; that the mass of white men are really injured by the effects of slave labor in the vicinity of the fields of their own labor"(Williams, 5)
Industrial work: Consequences based on how people's bodies are
"The ethno-religious composition of those profiting form the slave trade was not limited to Jews and Muslims"(Kolodziejcyk, 156)
"There are rules about when they can hunt, what they can huntm and how they may hunt it"(Thomas, 563)
Material Culture Study: Why slavery was made and how it was developed
"But what, I wonder now as I wondered all those years ago, is the point of hunting?"(Thomas, 561)
"He believes that he is in a different world when he is in the woods"(Thomas, 561)
Theoretical:What theories—including theories we have learned about in class and/or those you have researched on your own—can help you interpret the image/object and why it matters?
Equality: Providing the same opportunities towards every ethnicity within society in order to create an equal space.
"But despite whatever reverence the men (and particularly Ike) may feel towards Sam, he is not treated as an equal, even in the woods where he is undisputedly wiser than any other man"(Thomas, 567)
"Certainly the negro is not our equal in color -- perhaps not in many other respects; still, in the right to put into his mouth the brea that his own hands have earned, he is the equal of every other man, white or black"(Williams, 3-4)
Inclusion: The idea of including every ethnicity in each situation in order to create freedom for everyone.
"Human beings, specifically those skilled enough to be called hunters, are nobles in the sporting worldview, just as human beings specifically those fortunate enough to be born into the planter class, are nobles in the Southern ruling class worldview"(Thomas, 569)
"The American people look upon slavery as a vast moral evil; they can prove it such by the writings of those who gave us the blessings of liberty which we enjoy; and that they so looked upon it, and not as an evil merely confining itself to the States where it is situated"(Williams, 3)
Footnotes: Kolodizjczyk, "Slave Hunting and Slave Redemption as a Business Enterprise: The Northern Black Sea Region in the Sixteenth to Seventeenth Centuries" Thomas, "Hunting Stories & Stories Told about Hunting: What Isaac McCaslin Thinks He Learns in The Big Woods" Williams, " Slavery" and "Reconstruction of the Union"