5 Interesting Facts About Slavery in the Americas

5 Interesting Facts About Slavery in the Americas Slavery is a topic that never leaves the public consciousness; films, books, art, and theater have all been created about the institution. Yet, many Americans still know far too little about the transatlantic slave trade. They cant say when it began or ended or how many Africans were kidnapped and enslaved against their will. Its difficult to discuss current issues related to slavery, such as reparations, without first understanding how the slave trade left its imprint on Africa, the Americas, and the world. Millions Shipped to the Americas While it’s common knowledge that six million Jews died during the Holocaust, the number of West Africans shipped to the Americas during the transatlantic slave trade from 1525 to 1866 remains a mystery to much of the public. According to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, 12.5 million Africans were loaded up like human cargo and forever separated from their homes and families. Of those Africans, 10.7 million managed to live through the horrific journey known as the Middle Passage. Brazil: Slaverys Epicenter Slave traders shipped Africans all over the Americas, but far more of the enslaved population ended up in South America than any other region. Henry Louis Gates Jr., director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University, ​estimates that a single South American country- Brazil- received 4.86 million, or about half of all slaves who survived the trip to the New World. The United States, on the other hand, received 450,000 Africans. According to a 2016 U.S. Census Bureau report, roughly 45 million blacks live in the United States, and most of them are descendants of the Africans forced into the country during the slave trade. Slavery in the North Initially, slavery wasn’t just practiced in the Southern states of the United States, but in the North as well. Vermont stands out as the first state to abolish slavery, a move it made in 1777 after the U.S. liberated itself from Britain. Twenty-seven years later, all of the Northern states vowed to outlaw slavery, but it continued to be practiced in the North for years. That’s because the Northern states implemented legislation that made slavery’s abolition gradual rather than immediate. PBS points out that Pennsylvania passed its Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery in 1780, but gradual turned out to be an understatement. In 1850, hundreds of Pennsylvania blacks continued to live in bondage. Just more than a decade before the Civil War kicked off in 1861, slavery continued to be practiced in the North. Banning the Slave Trade The U.S. Congress passed a law in 1807 to ban the importation of enslaved Africans, and similar legislation took effect in Great Britain the same year. (The U.S. law went into effect on Jan. 1, 1808.) Given that South Carolina was the only state at this time that hadn’t outlawed the importation of slaves, Congress’ move wasn’t exactly groundbreaking. What’s more, by the time Congress decided to ban the importation of slaves, more than four million enslaved blacks already lived in the United States, according to the book Generations of Captivity: A History of African American Slaves. Since the children of those enslaved people would be born into slavery, and it wasn’t illegal for American slaveholders to trade those individuals domestically, the congressional act did not have a marked impact on slavery in the U.S. Elsewhere, Africans were still being shipped to Latin America and South America as late as the 1860s. Africans in the U.S. Today During the slave trade, about 30,000 enslaved Africans entered the U.S. yearly. Fast forward to 2005, and 50,000 Africans annually were entering the U.S. on their own volition. It marked a historic shift. â€Å"For the first time, more blacks are coming to the United States from Africa than during the slave trade,† The New York Times reported. The Times estimated that more than 600,000 Africans lived in the U.S. in 2005, about 1.7 percent of the African-American population. The actual number of Africans living in the United States might be even higher if the number of undocumented African immigrants was tallied.

Definition and Examples of Syncopy in English

Definition and Examples of Syncopy in English Definition Syncope is a traditional term in linguistics for a contraction within a word through the loss of a vowel sound or letter, as demonstrated, for example, in the casual pronunciation of cam(e)ra, fam(i)ly, fav(o)rite,  mem(o)ry, veg(e)table, and butt(o)ning.Syncope occurs in multisyllabic words:  the dropped vowel (which is unstressed) follows a strongly stressed syllable.The term syncope is sometimes used more broadly to refer to any vowel or consonant  sound thats commonly omitted in the pronunciation of a word. The standard term for this general process is deletion. Syncope is sometimes indicated in writing by an apostrophe. Deleted sounds are said to be syncopated. Adjective: syncopic. See Examples and Observations below. Also see: ApocopeConnected SpeechElisionHaplologyMetaplasmPhonetics and  PhonologyPrinciple of Least EffortProthesis EtymologyFrom the Greek, a cutting off Examples and Observations The term [syncope] is most commonly applied to vowel loss, as in the common British pronunciations of medicine as /medsin/ and of library as /laibri/, but is sometimes extended to consonant loss, as in ever eer and boatswain bosun.(R.L. Trask, A Dictionary of Phonetics and Phonology. Routledge, 1996)Stress ConditionsWhat are the stress conditions on syncope? The vowel that exhibits syncope must be stressless. The vowel can be at the beginning of the word. It can also occur in the middle of a word before a string of one or more stressless syllables. Thus, a word like opera almost always becomes opra, a word like general, genral, a word like chocolate, choclate. In longer words, syncope is possible as well, and more options surface. For example, respiratory can surface as respirtory or respritory.(Michael Hammond, The Phonology of English: A Prosodic Optimality-Theoretic Approach. Oxford University Press, 1999)Syncope as Deletion of Vowels or Consonants- English spelling can be a pai n, but its also a repository of information about the history of pronunciation. Are we being lazy when we say the name of the third day of the working week? Our ancestors might have thought so. Given that it was once Wodens day (named after the Norse god), the d isnt just for decoration, and was pronounced up until relatively recently. Who now says the t in Christmas? It must have been there at one point, as the messiah wasnt actually called Chris. These are examples of syncope.(David Shariatmadari, Eight Pronunciation Errors That Made the English Language What It Is Today. The Guardian [UK], March 11, 2014)- PARLIAMENT is a syncopic word because the I is silent; MAAM is also a syncopic word because the D disappears. The other words of this nature include:ASN: ASSOCIATIONBOSN: BOATSWAINCOS: BECAUSEFOCSLE: FORECASTLESYMBOLOGY: SYMBOLOLOGY The act or process of making such a contraction is known as syncopation.(O. Abootty, The Funny Side of English. Pustak Mahal, 2004)Syncope in PoetrySyncope . . . is what we call either the omission of a consonant (as in neer) or the dropping of an unstressed vowel which is flanked by consonants:Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey(Goldsmith, The Deserted Village)In this line hastening, normally trisyllabic, is reduced by syncope to a disyllable, and the line is thus kept within its decasyllabic confines.Poetic contractions like these are found most often in English verse composed from the Restoration to the end of the 18th century. In the poetry of this period the contractions are often indicated typographically by apostrophes: e.g., hastning.(Paul Fussell, Poetic Meter and Poetic Form, rev. ed. Random House, 1979) Pronunciation: SIN-kuh-pee