If this is tough to picture, it might be because in 21st century America we're fortunate to live in a culture where the dividing wall of prejudice has been mostly demolished. Imagine being owned by another person and owning nothing for yourself-not even your name.
What is Chains About and Why Should I Care? By hanging out with Isabel as she mucks her way through this tricky, and often terrifying, terrain, Chains reveals a side of the Revolution that is frequently untold, a more complicated version of this fight than any Fourth of July fireworks display we've ever seen. This is the tale of Isabel, a thirteen-year-old girl who is enslaved by a Loyalist during the war and begins to ask some tough questions about her identity-and the American Revolution-as a result. It also means that this isn't something you hear about very much.Īnd that, dear Shmoopers, is where Chains comes in.
And while there were certainly some people who faced this dilemma head-on, most didn't, which means this is definitely a sticky situation instead of just a shining bright spot in our country's history. If our country's founders owned slaves, does that mean they were talking the talk, but not walking the walk? Pretty much. The early Americans may have been fighting for liberty, but there was one pretty large group left out of their cause: the enslaved people who served their households.īut wait. In her 2008 historical novel, Chains, the first book in her Seeds of America series, Laurie Halse Anderson shows how the idea of freedom was a lot more complicated than we often think. No matter how many times you've heard this story, it's not as simple as it looks. Hold your horses, though, Shmoopers, and kill the inspirational, patriotic victory music just a minute. We know how it all went down-the tea tax protest that literally left the British all wet, the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the war that determined whether the Americans would henceforth be known as heroes or traitors. It's a story handed down over two hundred years of generations, told in books, history classes, movies, and songs: the story of the thirteen British colonies who went rogue and changed the world forever.
0 kommentar(er)
