Hanging indents on Google Docs

A question came up about using Google Docs to properly format a bibliography, and in particular, how to set up hanging indents. After a bit of scouring, I found the following tutorial video that I hope proves helpful.

Google Docs Hanging Indent from Steve Weller on Vimeo.

An alternative approach is to create the document in Word and them import it into Google Docs with "Conversion On." This method will turn the .doc file into a Google Document and preserve the formatting.

Sample Structure for Final Project Posts

As all of you work on researching and then putting together your primary source analyses for the final project, I wanted to make a sample post to give you a sense of how to set up these final blog posts by including an embedded video file and a Chicago Style Bibliography.

So, to be super-meta about it, I've made this video to walk you through putting up this post. Check it out here:


After you embed your video, you'll need to embed your Chicago Style Bibliography. I encourage you to make your Bibliography in Google Docs, which will easily allow you to then embed the code in a post. As indicated in the video, you'll go to the HTML tab in the composition field and then paste the "embed code" that Google Docs generates once you choose to "publish to the web" in a document. Here's what the will then look like:

Please let me know if you have any questions and I'll look forward to listening to and learning from your analyses. Remember, this final post is DUE by Tuesday, Nov. 26 at 3:00 pm MDT.

Self-Reflection and Course Feedback

In class today (Nov. 19) we'l spend the last part of class reflecting on the course and offering some constructive feedback in terms of class structure, assignments, etc. Please write a comment that addresses the following two questions: 1. What have you learned from this class? What have been your areas of greatest challenge and intellectual growth during this trimester? 2. What constructive feedback/suggestions do you have for the class?

In this week’s reading, the final chapters of Davis’ text offer insights into the American Civil War and Slave Emancipation.  Davis highlights some of the pivotal moments in the Civil War and the impact African Americans made to the success of the Union; in addition, Davis includes a number of quotes from Abraham Lincoln, who became known as “the liberator,” to further the dichotic mindsets between the North and the South.  Davis interestingly points out Lincoln thought slavery to be a “great moral and political evil” even though he accepted the “Fugitive Slave Law and promised that he would not interfere with slavery in the fifteen existing states where it was still legal” (308).  Lincoln held true to this promise while he was running for President because he knew the importance that the border-states would have in the outcome of an impending war, a topic that Davis stresses.  Davis also includes the many steps and laws Lincoln took to gradually persuade border-states and later congress to end the institution of slavery.  Lincoln was not a devoutly religious man, but he remarks that if slavery was to be overturned, it would be at God’s will (316).  As we have seen before many people used religion to justify their actions, was Lincoln doing the same? In contrast, many whites held the fear of freeing blacks into a white society while recognizing slavery as a curse, but it is interesting to see that even Unionist whites saw having “free negroes” as an even greater curse. (310).  How could one aid the Union’s efforts in a war of segregation while maintaining this mindset? 

The Epilogue connects the emancipation of American Slavery to other slave institutions around the world.  Davis notes the “global pattern of inevitable ‘historical progress’” (324-325) that started in Europe.  How could an anti-slavery sentiment spread in such a large proportion?

Later, Davis writes of the progress made towards racially equality, but doesn’t include much information to the extent of racial segregation that African Americans faced after manumission; however he does remark that “we have a wealth of evidence to show that humans are no less eager than in the past to dominate, degrade, humiliate, and control – often in order to confirm their own sense of pride and superiority”(329).  With that said, many slave owners truly believed that it was “easier” for slaves while in serfdom, to some extent, couldn’t this be true?

Slavery in the Nineteenth Century South

        This week's reading highlighted the personal and economic relationship slaveowners had with their slaves in the nineteenth century antebellum South. Our first reading dealt with the hardship many slaves were exposed to in regards to epilepsy. Boster discusses the story of a fifteen-year-old slave girl who is tried for arson, who also is found out to have epilepsy. Epilepsy in the nineteenth century was thought to be some sort of possession, hysteria, or psychopathy and was therefore impossible to treat as a legitimate illness by the doctors of the time. In the 1800s, however, it was seen as a serious medical issue. Epilepsy through history, as Boster points out, is most commonly attributed to slaves in multiple cultures and time periods. We now know this anomaly is a result of the disease's association with physical trauma and onslaughts of these seizures can be provoked by physical and emotional stress. Boster shows us that epilepsy was considered to be so serious it was placed higher than ulcers and asthma in many cases. She also says epilepsy was used as an umbrella term for "unsoundness."
        Additionally, because epilepsy was so common within slave populations, the disease subsequently lowered the value of the slave in the eyes of the slaveholder. Both Boster and Davis point out that this behavior on the part of the slaveholder/buyer was essential to understanding the underlying nature of slavery in the nineteenth century antebellum South.
       The ownership of a quality body was very important to the slave-buying class. Because buying another human was so expensive (especially if you planned to own more than a dozen) slaveowners used great care when buying slaves. As Davis points out they wanted to "promote good health and the natural increase in the size of slave families." Oddly enough, he also points out that slaveholders wanted to provide a high standard of living for their investments. From a modern perspective this strikes us as completely counter-intuitive because of the conditions we know slaves endured. This brings me to my first question: Davis says that the slaveowners were convinced that their best interest and their slave's best interest were identical, and an ideal living quality was essential to a wealthy planation. All it would take is one look at slave quarters and know that a "high standard of living" was not available for most slaves. So why were slaveowners convinced of this? Did they think they were fulfilling their "best interest" even though many of their slaves were ill and living in poor shelter?
        My second question returns to epilepsy: Why was epilepsy (and all the things it meant during the 1800s) so important to slave owners/ buyers? Why was there such a fixation surrounding a disease that was fairly common for slaves (ie more so than constantly debilitating diseases/disorders like asthma and arthritis)?

Primary Source selection for final project

Sorry about the belated post, but better late than never, right?

Just to jog your memory, here's the description of the assignment that appears on the syllabus:

Thematic Primary Source Analysis Presentation – Drawing on their chosen subtopic, students will select one primary source document and put together a 5-7 minute presentation that interprets its significance in light of their theme and the document’s importance to the wider history of Atlantic slavery. Students will use a digital presentation tool (e.g. Prezi, iMovie, Educreations, VoiceThread, Keynote, and the like) of their choice to design, record, and share their presentations on the class blog. Along with each presentation, students will also need to submit a Chicago Style bibliography that cites the sources they used in their research.

So, as promised in class on Tuesday, I put up this post so that each of you could reply in the comments writing what primary source will be the focus of your final project and including a hyperlink to that source.

Remember, that the primary sources need to relate to your chosen theme for the course. If you're having some difficulty, please email me ASAP so we can talk about what you might be interested in and then work to hunt something down that you'll find interesting.

Finally, also remember that this primary source analysis is one that you're putting together in a multimedia format that can be uploaded and shared via this blog. YouTube is lousy with tutorials about how to record presentations in the various programs and websites that I've listed above. Check those our for some guidance on how to put those together.

Here's one example related to Keynote:

Slave Resistance and Revolt

In the Davis reading for this week, the primary focus was on the topic of slave revolts, specifically those of Nat Turner of Virginia, Denmark Vesey of South Carolina, and John Smith of Barbados. One of the first issues that Davis deals with is how the historical representation of these revolts has changed through time, our modern interpretation not being arrived at until the 1960s. How would differing interpretations of such a controversial subject help shape political and social discourse about slavery both before and after abolition?

One interesting fact that I noticed in the Davis reading was his highlighting of the major discrepancies between the number of whites killed by revolting slaves and the number of slaves, both belligerent and not, during and after the revolt. In each slave revolt that Davis studies, the number of slaves killed vastly outnumbered the number of whites killed. Indeed, Davis emphasizes the self-discipline required for the slaves to not succumb to anger and kill those who had so brutally oppressed them and their kind. After this, Davis mentions the fact that there were really no successful slave revolts in the period between 1831 and John Brown's raid around the time of the Civil War, which raises the question did the slave-owning elite's massive and brutal responses help subdue the slaves with threat of brutal violence, or were there some other forces at work in determining whether slaves revolted or not?

Blassingame, in his review of Roll, Jordan, Roll introduces Genovese's concept of reciprocity, which basically states that slaves and masters were mutually dependent on each other in the slave owning society. Genovese posits that while slaves provided the masters with social status and self-esteem, the masters provided the slaves with a station in life and "prevented their own dehumanization" (403). On one side, this theory provides slaves with some semblance of power, albeit small, in having influence over their masters. One the other hand, it seems to stray dangerously close to affirming the notion that the paternalistic behaviors of the masters were actually beneficial to the slaves. Taking this into account, I have two questions. First, do you think the theory of reciprocity is valid? Second, how do you think Genovese's claims related, if at all, to the ideas of slave revolts discussed in the Davis chapter?

In the second packet, Rereadings: Roll, Jordan, Roll, Walter Johnson primarily talks about the power structures of slavery that Genovese discusses in his book. One of the main distinctions made is the one between "individual and collective acts of resistance" (1), a concept that I believe relates back to the Davis chapter on slave revolts. Davis points out that most slave revolts other than the Haitian Revolution were localized affairs, and despite their including up to hundreds of slaves, were not truly collective acts of resistance. To be collective, all slaves of a given group or country would have to unite to throw off the yoke of their oppressors, like what was done in Haiti. Why the slaves in North America were unable to do this remains up for debate. It could be attributed to their lack of knowledge of the immensity of the slave system due to the oppression of the plantation system. Or, as Davis points out, it could be due to their lack of awareness of the temporal situation that they were in, i.e. how they saw the history of slavery that they were living in. To what do you attribute the absence of slave revolts from 1831 to 1859?