ON THE SLAVS and ITALIANS and JEWS IN THE 1870'S : THE HISTORY OF WHITE PEOPLE

pages 234-235 Nell Irvin Painter Author

..." Economic hard times further aggravated labor tensions. In the 1870's Slavic and Italian coal miners in Western Pennsylvania suffered abuse, ostracism, cheating, incarceration, and attack. The U.S. Army massacred Lakota (Sioux) at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in 1890, as lynching that scourge of black Americans, took the lives of eleven Italians in New Orleans in 1891. Elsewhere labor conflict brought out company private militia (such as the Pinkertons) and state and national guards to course striking workers, as in the Homestead, Pennsylvania, steelworks in 1892...

A notable instance of anti-Semitism occurred in 1877 when a Saratoga Aperings hotel refused to admit the New York financier Joseph Seligman, whose bank had helped fiance the Union during the Civil War. Organized outbreaks of anti Jewish violence occurred for the first time during the Depression of the 1890's.  In Lousiana and Mississippi night riders attacked Jewish families and businesses. Personal abuse like stone throwing, hitherto occasional, became common throughout the North. When their employer hired fourteen Russian Jews, five hundred New Jersey workers rioted for three days in 1891, forcing Jewish workers and residents to flee..."

*****
Commentary from ANCESTRY WORSHIP GENEALOGY

I you're writing an authentic family history, it's important to relay the memories of relatives and their experiences with ethnic and religious prejudices. Placing the story in history can help the reader's modern perspective.  If there are various stories that do not agree, it is good to publish them all, crediting the story teller and their relationship to the story. 

THE HISTORY OF WHITE PEOPLE by NELL IRVIN PAINTER : BOOK EXCERPT

Page 263  ON SERVANTS (NOT SLAVES) WHO HAD TO PAY OFF THEIR SERVITUDE.

"It was true that if they survived the transatlantic voyage, sale, resale, and many years of servitude, freed people and their descendants tended to remain poor. But survivors occasionally rose into the ranks of the landowning. Of the 5,000 indentured servants transported to Virgina between 1670 and 1680, 241 managed to acquire their own land."

HOMELESS CHILDREN SHIPPED TO THE NEW WORLD : EXCERPT FROM THE HISTORY OF WHITE PEOPLE : ARE THERE DUTY BOYS OR WOMEN FROM BRIDAL BOATS IN YOUR FAMILY TREE?

pages 4  from the book "THE HISTORY OF WHITE PEOPLE" by Nell Irvin Painter

... "In 1618 the City of London and the Virginia Company forged an agreement to transport vagrant children. London would pay five pounds per head to the company for shipment on the Duty, hense the children's sobriquet "Duty Boys." Supposedly bound for apprenticeship, these homeless children - a quarter of them girls - were then sold into field labor for twenty pounds of tobacco each.

A first shipment of 100 homeless children landed in Virginia around Easter in 1619, some four months before the arrival of "20 and odd Negros." ...

The Virginia Company, ever entrepreneurial, also transported poor women on "bridal boasts," selling them in Virginia and Maryland for 120 pounds of tobacco. At this point in the seventeenth century, Britons, male and female, outnumbered Africans in American tobacco fields; even by the middle of the century, when Virginians population of settlers numbered about 11,000 only 300 were African.

Any of them - African, British, Scottish, or Irish - were lucky to outlive their terms of service." ...

THE HISTORY OF WHITE PEOPLE by NELL IRVIN PAINTER : BOOK REVIEW by ANCESTRY WORSHIP GENEALOGY

I've been reading NELL IRVIN PAINTER's book "The History of White People" which is Copyright 2010 and published by W.W. Norton and Company. I'll be sprinking this blog with excerpts from that book here and there.

This is the story of European slavery ("Whites enslaving Whites"), class in Europe and America, which included indentured servants and slaves, and the notions of who was more worthy.

There was a progression of early theorists who decided that being low class had everything to do with intelligence and character as genetic; the "imbeciles" and "morons" and "the unfit" were the target of sterilization for the good of society. ( I note: This is the danger of genealogy motivated by snobbery!)

Painter does an excellent job of reporting the notions of race or ethnicity as individuals are considered to be of more or less worthy because of these notions. Racism was inherent in the descriptions of Europeans as "Nordic" or "Alpine" or "Mediterranean" as determined by physical features rather than country of origin.

This book may remind you of your own bad experiences or what your ancestors experienced because of their origins.

Perhaps they were considered of subnormal intelligence and not up to decent jobs because they were Italian or Slovak?

Are you yourself still experiencing intolerance and prejudice based, not on your character or deeds, but because of your ethnicity?