Answer to Question #230731 in History for Noodles

Question

1. Describe the distinctions between “top rail” and “bottom rail” bias in history, and the difficulty  

of compiling “bottom rail” history.

Answer 1

Bottom Rail History: History told from the base up according to the point of view of minimized individuals 

- Sambo look: The slaves set up a front that they were cheerful in light of the fact that they would not like to be rebuffed by their proprietors, so the proprietors regularly imagined that they were glad since they didn't have the foggiest idea about any better. 

- Northern fighters were frequently similarly as bigoted as the Southerners, so they would regularly give the Sambo form of the story. Prejudice would likewise be energized in the North by the dread that liberated slaves would move toward the North and contend with them for occupations. 

- The Abolitionists needed to interface with the slaves and help them, yet they actually weren't ready to totally isolate themselves from their white culture. 

- We don't have a lot of history from the Bottom Rail in light of the fact that there were laws against slaves figuring out how to peruse and compose and they did not have the method for instruction just as the prosperity to spread their story. In case they were talked with, they regularly said what the questioners needed to hear. History is told by the victors, so we frequently don't have documentation of the persecuted. The well off top rail class have more sources since they had the assets to get it going. 

- To recreate the tales of the base rail, the creators recounted stories according to the point of view of the slaves through the oral customs of their families. During the 1930s, interviews were directed through the Federal Writers' Program, so the writers utilized those. 

- Challenges in attempting to recount the narratives of previous slaves: Discerning the top rail inclination that we may subliminally have or that the records have, keeping the text in its social and social setting and not misconstruing it, slaves might have changed subtleties in interviews, the questioners might be one-sided