US History Assignment: What you learned ch3&4 Write a minimum 12 sentences on something that was new for you in this week's content, making certain to use your own words. You will be able to write it directly on this page. You will not be able to move onto the next module until you have completed this. Also, please write your name after your contribution. Chapter 3: Introduction Introduction Historians are interested in slavery, students in racism. Historians want to know how and when slavery originated and developed as an institution protected by law; students want to know why whites and blacks, who have so much in common, still seem to identify themselves as if they were different people with different cultures. This week covers the history and ideas from Chapter 3 in the textbook along with additional materials and perspectives about the slave trade, specifically the concept of "Slave Culture". Slavery is one of the most painful and difficult topics in American history, but you have a chance in this chapter to make the point that institutions usually reflect social demands, and that institutions designed to serve one purpose can be adapted to serve altogether different ends. American slavery clearly began as the profitable solution to an economic problem. By the time slavery was destroyed, it had become the unprofitable solution to a social problem. Video Watch this video about Slavery. Atlantic Slave Trade Chapter 3: Lecture The Calculus of Slavery The question of English racism is being reconsidered by scholars at present, but even if it existed to a significant degree in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it would have worked both for and against the introduction of enslaved Africans into the colonies. If the English hated or feared Africans enough to enslave them, why not keep Africans out of the colonies altogether? Whatever the truth about English racism, it is clear that economics played the crucial role in the introduction of slavery into British North America. Choices of Labor-Logic of Choice An English colonist wealthy enough to buy labor had a choice between an English or European indentured servant and an enslaved African. Until around 1700 in British North America, the choice was usually to buy a servant because that purchase made more economic sense. The planter made a series of calculations that you can present to your students in the form of a simple model. The planter weighed four factors: the initial cost of the laborer, the annual cost of maintenance, the annual output per worker and the length of service. If it is explained that servants usually worked for five years, your students will focus on the length of service and give the economic edge to slavery, especially considering that a person enslaved for life could actually bear children, who would be in turn enslaved for life. Pay more attention to the initial cost of a laborer. The British North American colonies were always on the fringe of the Atlan ...

1. US History
Assignment: What you learned ch3&4
Write a minimum 12 sentences on something that was new for
you in this week's content, making certain to use your own
words. You will be able to write it directly on this page. You
will not be able to move onto the next module until you have
completed this. Also, please write your name after your
contribution.
Chapter 3: Introduction
Introduction
Historians are interested in slavery, students in racism.
Historians want to know how and when slavery originated and
developed as an institution protected by law; students want to
know why whites and blacks, who have so much in common,
still seem to identify themselves as if they were different people
with different cultures. This week covers the history and ideas
from Chapter 3 in the textbook along with additional materials
and perspectives about the slave trade, specifically the concept
of "Slave Culture". Slavery is one of the most painful and
difficult topics in American history, but you have a chance in
this chapter to make the point that institutions usually reflect
social demands, and that institutions designed to serve one
purpose can be adapted to serve altogether different ends.
American slavery clearly began as the profitable solution to an
economic problem. By the time slavery was destroyed, it had
become the unprofitable solution to a social problem.
Video
Watch this video about Slavery.
Atlantic Slave Trade

2. Chapter 3: Lecture
The Calculus of Slavery
The question of English racism is being reconsidered by
scholars at present, but even if it existed to a significant
degree in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it would have
worked both for and against the introduction of enslaved
Africans into the colonies. If the English hated or feared
Africans enough to enslave them, why not keep Africans out of
the colonies altogether? Whatever the truth about English
racism, it is clear that economics played the crucial role in the
introduction of slavery into British North America.
Choices of Labor-Logic of Choice
An English colonist wealthy enough to buy labor had a choice
between an English or European indentured servant and an
enslaved African. Until around 1700 in British North America,
the choice was usually to buy a servant because that purchase
made more economic sense. The planter made a series of
calculations that you can present to your students in the form of
a simple model. The planter weighed four factors: the initial
cost of the laborer, the annual cost of maintenance, the annual
output per worker and the length of service. If it is explained
that servants usually worked for five years, your students will
focus on the length of service and give the economic edge to
slavery, especially considering that a person enslaved for life
could actually bear children, who would be in turn enslaved for
life. Pay more attention to the initial cost of a laborer. The
British North American colonies were always on the fringe of
the Atlantic slave trade. About 90 percent of the ten million
people taken from Africa were carried to the sugar plantations
in Brazil and the West Indies. The British mainland colonies
had to pay a premium to divert slave traders from their
preferred routes with the result that an African laborer in the
colonial period cost four or five times more than an indentured
servant, a price so high that only the largest tobacco and rice

3. growers in North America could afford to buy people directly
from Africa.
Conditions of Labor--Economic Cost of Slavery
Through most of the colonial period, the up-front cost was the
critical factor in determining whether to buy a servant or a
slave. There was relatively little difference in the cost of
maintenance. Servants did not live luxuriously, nor could
slaves be starved. The productivity of slaves and servants
depended less on their status than on the quality of the soil they
worked and the amount of equipment they used. When all the
calculation was done, the planter wound up weighing the initial
cost of the laborer against the expected length of service. A
servant worked only five years or so, but these were prime
working years. A slave and his or her children would work for
life, but some planters doubted that a slave too young or too old
was worth having. More importantly, the death rate in the
seventeenth-century Chesapeake and in the South Carolina rice
fields was so high that neither whites nor blacks could expect to
live to a ripe old age. A planter who purchased a servant was
taking a chance that he or she would survive for five years. A
planter who paid much more for a slave was taking an even
greater risk. Until about 1700, the prudent choice was to buy a
servant.
If the high death rates of the seventeenth century had continued,
North America would have largely escaped the curse of slavery,
but times changed. After 1700, British merchants dominated
the slave trade and opened a direct trade between Africa and the
colonies. At the same time, life expectancy in the Chesapeake
improved. The combination of these two factors, plus the desire
to profit without regard to morality, fastened slavery upon
British North America.
What clearly began as an economic institution soon became a
racist social arrangement. (Cotton will also change this
arrangement.) Even before the American Revolution, there was
a common white belief that blacks were inherently inferior and
had to be kept in a subordinate position, whether that was

4. slavery or some other status. By the eve of the Civil War, white
southerners truly believed that slavery had ceased to be
profitable, but slavery had become for them the only possible
social system that would allow whites and blacks to live side by
side, and they were willing to fight and die for that system.
Slavery US History
The Culture of Slavery
The history of slavery in America is distressing as Celia, a
Slave will emphasize. It is extremely complicated. The first
thing I want you to work on is not using the term slave, but
rather say “people that are enslaved..” How does that change
your idea of those in the institution and their relationship to
their work and their owners?
Chapter 4: Introduction
Overview
Modern American students usually need help to understand the
provincialism of colonial culture. American culture today,
especially American popular culture, the one most familiar to
you, dominates the world. Pearl Jam is played as ardently in
Naples as in Seattle. Michael Jordan is as much an icon in
Tokyo as in Chicago. Madonna is as adored in Caracas as she is
in Tampa. It is true that most popular culture is created in only
a few places, like New York and Los Angeles, but one of the
characteristics of modern pop culture is that it happens where it
is consumed, not where it is produced. Wherever the television
set or shopping mall is, there is the vital center of popular
culture.
It was altogether different in eighteenth-century America.
Nobody would have understood the concept of popular culture
and what we call “folk art” was then considered inferior
workmanship. In the eighteenth century, culture was “high”
culture: art, architecture, literature, opera, or sacred music. The

5. high culture of the American colonies in that era may be defined
as provincial, but that word must be carefully defined. In this
chapter we will delve into the developing colonial culture and
how it will change over time; from being English to American.
Chapter 4: Lecture
Provincials
Modern American students usually need help to understand the
provincialism of colonial culture. American culture today,
especially American popular culture, the one most familiar to
you, dominates the world. Pearl Jam is played as ardently in
Naples as in Seattle. Michael Jordan is as much an icon in
Tokyo as in Chicago. Madonna is as adored in Caracas as she is
in Tampa. It is true that most popular culture is created in only
a few places, like New York and Los Angeles, but one of the
characteristics of modern pop culture is that it happens where it
is consumed, not where it is produced. Wherever the television
set or shopping mall is, there is the vital center of popular
culture.
Different meaning of provincials--High vs. Low culture
It was altogether different in eighteenth-century America.
Nobody would have understood the concept of popular culture
and what we call “folk art” was then considered inferior
workmanship. In the eighteenth century, culture was “high”
culture: art, architecture, literature, opera, or sacred music. The
high culture of the American colonies in that era may be defined
as provincial, but that word must be carefully defined. In the
narrowest definition, a provincial is simply a person who lives
in a province, and a province is just a district governed by a
geographically remote capital, but the usual connotation of the
word provincial is that of a person unaware of living out of the
cultural mainstream and therefore ignorantly proud of the
second-rate culture of his or her vicinity. In European literature,
the provincial is always smug and boorish. The colonial
American could not have been provincial in that sense. There
was too much moving around and too many people constantly

6. arriving from foreign places. Americans in the eighteenth
century did not value multiculturalism, but they had to adjust to
reality. Ben Franklin, for example, normally a reasonable and
tolerant man, proposed restrictions on German immigration to
Pennsylvania because Germans were not “White.”
Nevertheless, Franklin learned to speak German.
There is a less familiar connotation of the word provincial, and
it is this one that best describes colonial culture. In this sense,
provincials are those so in awe of the culture of the capital that
they scorn everything local and slavishly buy or copy whatever
is produced in the metropolis.
The feeling of being culturally displaced may have existed at all
levels of colonial society. Africans taken by force across the
Atlantic dreamed still of the blessed lands in Africa to which
they would return in the afterlife. German and Scottish
immigrants looked to Heidelberg and Edinburgh for cultural
inspiration, not to Boston or Philadelphia. It is, however,
among the English-Americans, and especially among the
wealthiest, the most prestigious and most articulate, that we can
best document the provincialism of colonial America.
National identity- Cultural Dependence
Mrs. Jonathan Edwards, for example, glued black silk patches
all over her face before going to church to hear her husband
describe with vivid relish the terrors of Hell. She wore face
patches because fashionable English women in the mid-
eighteenth century wore them. George Washington, before he
became a rebel, had his clothes made by a tailor in Old Fish
Street in London. The clothes did not fit well, Washington
admitted, but they were “genteel” because they were made in
England. Every American male with a shilling’s worth of
prestige in the eighteenth century wore a wig only because the
better sort of Englishmen wore wigs. Every colonial who could
hire an architect had a house built in the Georgian style already
becoming outmoded in England. When aspiring Americans
sought to improve their writing style, they copied the essays of
Addison and Steele. When deep-thinking colonials wished to

7. ponder philosophic questions, they began, and usually ended,
with John Locke or George Berkeley. When less ponderous but
equally earnest Americans wanted to examine moral questions
in a dramatic setting, they read novels, most notably Pamela by
Samuel Richardson.
Provincial Americans combined their love for everything
English with an often-expressed contempt for their own society.
Samuel Johnson, who taught at Yale around 1720, remembered
that “the condition of learning in Connecticut (as well as
everything else) was very low.” Cadwallader Colden, a
prominent figure in New York City society, lamented that “few
men here have any kind of literature.” John Singleton Copley
complained that there was not a single painting in Boston
“worthy to be called a picture.” William Byrd II, one of the
richest, best-educated of the Virginian planters, sent his
daughter to be educated in England because he feared that her
character would be corrupted by the savagery of Virginian
society. Thomas Jefferson described the state of music in
eighteenth-century America as one of “deplorable barbarism.”
This contempt for American culture resulted in a brain drain
from the colonies. Benjamin West, the best painter born in the
colonies before the Revolution, is the prime example, but
people like Franklin, Washington and Jonathan Edwards tried,
at some time in their lives, to move permanently from America
to Great Britain.
American provincialism is long gone. Are impressed by an
English university accent? Political independence did not at
once result in cultural independence, but new nationhood
produced the people like Emerson who nudged Americans into
trusting their own modes of thought, their own styles of dress,
their own accents and their own artifacts. Today, we Americans,
heirs to a successful political and Cultural Revolution, expect
others to imitate us.

8. https://theautry.org/ https://theautry.org/exhibitions/
For this week's you will have to visit the Gene Autry Museum
and then answer the following:
What did you learn from the visit? Be specific and explain.
How does this museum relate to our class? Be specific in your
reference.
Required length: 2 pages
Chapter 3: Introduction
Introduction
Historians are interested in slavery, students in racism.
Historians want to know how and when slavery originated and
developed as an institution protected by law; students want to
know why whites and blacks, who have so much in common,
still seem to identify themselves as if they were different people
with different cultures. This week covers the history and ideas
from Chapter 3 in the textbook along with additional materials
and perspectives about the slave trade, specifically the concept
of "Slave Culture". Slavery is one of the most painful and
difficult topics in American history, but you have a chance in
this chapter to make the point that institutions usually reflect
social demands, and that institutions designed to serve one
purpose can be adapted to serve altogether different ends.
American slavery clearly began as the profitable solution to an
economic problem. By the time slavery was destroyed, it had
become the unprofitable solution to a social problem.
Video
Watch this video about Slavery.
Atlantic Slave Trade
Chapter 3: Lecture

9. The Calculus of Slavery
The question of English racism is being reconsidered by
scholars at present, but even if it existed to a significant
degree in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it would have
worked both for and against the introduction of enslaved
Africans into the colonies. If the English hated or feared
Africans enough to enslave them, why not keep Africans out of
the colonies altogether? Whatever the truth about English
racism, it is clear that economics played the crucial role in the
introduction of slavery into British North America.
Choices of Labor-Logic of Choice
An English colonist wealthy enough to buy labor had a choice
between an English or European indentured servant and an
enslaved African. Until around 1700 in British North America,
the choice was usually to buy a servant because that purchase
made more economic sense. The planter made a series of
calculations that you can present to your students in the form of
a simple model. The planter weighed four factors: the initial
cost of the laborer, the annual cost of maintenance, the annual
output per worker and the length of service. If it is explained
that servants usually worked for five years, your students will
focus on the length of service and give the economic edge to
slavery, especially considering that a person enslaved for life
could actually bear children, who would be in turn enslaved for
life. Pay more attention to the initial cost of a laborer. The
British North American colonies were always on the fringe of
the Atlantic slave trade. About 90 percent of the ten million
people taken from Africa were carried to the sugar plantations
in Brazil and the West Indies. The British mainland colonies
had to pay a premium to divert slave traders from their
preferred routes with the result that an African laborer in the
colonial period cost four or five times more than an indentured
servant, a price so high that only the largest tobacco and rice
growers in North America could afford to buy people directly
from Africa.
Conditions of Labor--Economic Cost of Slavery

10. Through most of the colonial period, the up-front cost was the
critical factor in determining whether to buy a servant or a
slave. There was relatively little difference in the cost of
maintenance. Servants did not live luxuriously, nor could
slaves be starved. The productivity of slaves and servants
depended less on their status than on the quality of the soil they
worked and the amount of equipment they used. When all the
calculation was done, the planter wound up weighing the initial
cost of the laborer against the expected length of service. A
servant worked only five years or so, but these were prime
working years. A slave and his or her children would work for
life, but some planters doubted that a slave too young or too old
was worth having. More importantly, the death rate in the
seventeenth-century Chesapeake and in the South Carolina rice
fields was so high that neither whites nor blacks could expect to
live to a ripe old age. A planter who purchased a servant was
taking a chance that he or she would survive for five years. A
planter who paid much more for a slave was taking an even
greater risk. Until about 1700, the prudent choice was to buy a
servant.
If the high death rates of the seventeenth century had continued,
North America would have largely escaped the curse of slavery,
but times changed. After 1700, British merchants dominated
the slave trade and opened a direct trade between Africa and the
colonies. At the same time, life expectancy in the Chesapeake
improved. The combination of these two factors, plus the desire
to profit without regard to morality, fastened slavery upon
British North America.
What clearly began as an economic institution soon became a
racist social arrangement. (Cotton will also change this
arrangement.) Even before the American Revolution, there was
a common white belief that blacks were inherently inferior and
had to be kept in a subordinate position, whether that was
slavery or some other status. By the eve of the Civil War, white
southerners truly believed that slavery had ceased to be
profitable, but slavery had become for them the only possible

11. social system that would allow whites and blacks to live side by
side, and they were willing to fight and die for that system.
Slavery US History
The Culture of Slavery
The history of slavery in America is distressing as Celia, a
Slave will emphasize. It is extremely complicated. The first
thing I want you to work on is not using the term slave, but
rather say “people that are enslaved..” How does that change
your idea of those in the institution and their relationship to
their work and their owners?
Chapter 4: Introduction
Overview
Modern American students usually need help to understand the
provincialism of colonial culture. American culture today,
especially American popular culture, the one most familiar to
you, dominates the world. Pearl Jam is played as ardently in
Naples as in Seattle. Michael Jordan is as much an icon in
Tokyo as in Chicago. Madonna is as adored in Caracas as she is
in Tampa. It is true that most popular culture is created in only
a few places, like New York and Los Angeles, but one of the
characteristics of modern pop culture is that it happens where it
is consumed, not where it is produced. Wherever the television
set or shopping mall is, there is the vital center of popular
culture.
It was altogether different in eighteenth-century America.
Nobody would have understood the concept of popular culture
and what we call “folk art” was then considered inferior
workmanship. In the eighteenth century, culture was “high”
culture: art, architecture, literature, opera, or sacred music. The
high culture of the American colonies in that era may be defined
as provincial, but that word must be carefully defined. In this
chapter we will delve into the developing colonial culture and

12. how it will change over time; from being English to American.
Chapter 4: Lecture
Provincials
Modern American students usually need help to understand the
provincialism of colonial culture. American culture today,
especially American popular culture, the one most familiar to
you, dominates the world. Pearl Jam is played as ardently in
Naples as in Seattle. Michael Jordan is as much an icon in
Tokyo as in Chicago. Madonna is as adored in Caracas as she is
in Tampa. It is true that most popular culture is created in only
a few places, like New York and Los Angeles, but one of the
characteristics of modern pop culture is that it happens where it
is consumed, not where it is produced. Wherever the television
set or shopping mall is, there is the vital center of popular
culture.
Different meaning of provincials--High vs. Low culture
It was altogether different in eighteenth-century America.
Nobody would have understood the concept of popular culture
and what we call “folk art” was then considered inferior
workmanship. In the eighteenth century, culture was “high”
culture: art, architecture, literature, opera, or sacred music. The
high culture of the American colonies in that era may be defined
as provincial, but that word must be carefully defined. In the
narrowest definition, a provincial is simply a person who lives
in a province, and a province is just a district governed by a
geographically remote capital, but the usual connotation of the
word provincial is that of a person unaware of living out of the
cultural mainstream and therefore ignorantly proud of the
second-rate culture of his or her vicinity. In European literature,
the provincial is always smug and boorish. The colonial
American could not have been provincial in that sense. There
was too much moving around and too many people constantly
arriving from foreign places. Americans in the eighteenth
century did not value multiculturalism, but they had to adjust to
reality. Ben Franklin, for example, normally a reasonable and

13. tolerant man, proposed restrictions on German immigration to
Pennsylvania because Germans were not “White.”
Nevertheless, Franklin learned to speak German.
There is a less familiar connotation of the word provincial, and
it is this one that best describes colonial culture. In this sense,
provincials are those so in awe of the culture of the capital that
they scorn everything local and slavishly buy or copy whatever
is produced in the metropolis.
The feeling of being culturally displaced may have existed at all
levels of colonial society. Africans taken by force across the
Atlantic dreamed still of the blessed lands in Africa to which
they would return in the afterlife. German and Scottish
immigrants looked to Heidelberg and Edinburgh for cultural
inspiration, not to Boston or Philadelphia. It is, however,
among the English-Americans, and especially among the
wealthiest, the most prestigious and most articulate, that we can
best document the provincialism of colonial America.
National identity- Cultural Dependence
Mrs. Jonathan Edwards, for example, glued black silk patches
all over her face before going to church to hear her husband
describe with vivid relish the terrors of Hell. She wore face
patches because fashionable English women in the mid-
eighteenth century wore them. George Washington, before he
became a rebel, had his clothes made by a tailor in Old Fish
Street in London. The clothes did not fit well, Washington
admitted, but they were “genteel” because they were made in
England. Every American male with a shilling’s worth of
prestige in the eighteenth century wore a wig only because the
better sort of Englishmen wore wigs. Every colonial who could
hire an architect had a house built in the Georgian style already
becoming outmoded in England. When aspiring Americans
sought to improve their writing style, they copied the essays of
Addison and Steele. When deep-thinking colonials wished to
ponder philosophic questions, they began, and usually ended,
with John Locke or George Berkeley. When less ponderous but
equally earnest Americans wanted to examine moral questions

14. in a dramatic setting, they read novels, most notably Pamela by
Samuel Richardson.
Provincial Americans combined their love for everything
English with an often-expressed contempt for their own society.
Samuel Johnson, who taught at Yale around 1720, remembered
that “the condition of learning in Connecticut (as well as
everything else) was very low.” Cadwallader Colden, a
prominent figure in New York City society, lamented that “few
men here have any kind of literature.” John Singleton Copley
complained that there was not a single painting in Boston
“worthy to be called a picture.” William Byrd II, one of the
richest, best-educated of the Virginian planters, sent his
daughter to be educated in England because he feared that her
character would be corrupted by the savagery of Virginian
society. Thomas Jefferson described the state of music in
eighteenth-century America as one of “deplorable barbarism.”
This contempt for American culture resulted in a brain drain
from the colonies. Benjamin West, the best painter born in the
colonies before the Revolution, is the prime example, but
people like Franklin, Washington and Jonathan Edwards tried,
at some time in their lives, to move permanently from America
to Great Britain.
American provincialism is long gone. Are impressed by an
English university accent? Political independence did not at
once result in cultural independence, but new nationhood
produced the people like Emerson who nudged Americans into
trusting their own modes of thought, their own styles of dress,
their own accents and their own artifacts. Today, we Americans,
heirs to a successful political and cultural revolution, expect
others to imitate us.