Slavery Gave Me Nothing to Lose

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Unit 8
Slavery Gave Me Nothing to Lose
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Stage 1 Warming-up Activities
Stage 2 Reading-Centred Activities
Stage 3 After-Reading Activities
Stage 4 Listening-and-Speaking Practice
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Warming-up Activities

• Group work
• Questions for thought and discussion
• Background information
• Enriching your vocabulary
• Comparing the following words

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Group work

• Go over the preview, the pre-reading questions
  and the title of the text before listening to the
  summary of the story and anticipate what we are
  going to read.

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Questions for thought and discussion

• Listen to a short passage carefully and then
  answer the following questions .

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Background information

• Eatonville It is a small community of great
  significance to African-American history and
  culture. Located just north of Orlando, Florida
  between Winter Park and Maitland, it is
  historically recognized as the first incorporated
  African-American municipality in the United
  States and one of the oldest surviving African
  communities in the U.S. Following the Civil War,
  free Africans settling in the area worked
  primarily as farm hands clearing land or helping
  in the construction of nearby Maitland, a white
  township.

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• Eatonville is culturally important for its
  renowned native daughter, Zora Neale Hurston
  (c.f. Note 3 below), author, anthropologist and
  folklorist. Her words captured forever the
  culture of the community and painted an image of
  an environment typical of the rural Southern
  working-class African-American. Each January,
  Eatonville plays host to the Zora Neale Hurston
  Festival of the Arts and Humanities. In addition
  to Zora Neale Hurston, other notable residents of
  Eatonville include Hall of Fame football player,
  Deacon Jones and Dr. Benjamin Perry, president of
  Florida AM University.

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• Orlando It is the fifth-ranking U.S. destination
  of overseas travelers after San Francisco,
  Miami, Los Angeles and New York City and it
  claims the second highest number of hotel rooms
  in the U.S., lagging just behind Las Vegas in the
  bedroom stakes. The city has also established
  itself as part of Florida's high-tech corridor,
  boasting not only the space technology industries
  focused on the Florida Space Coast, but a healthy
  dose of bits and bytes makers as well.

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• There wasn't much to Orlando until Walt Disney
  started buying up property at the city's
  southwestern edge in the 1960s and the property
  he bought became Disney World in 1971. Since
  then, waterslides, roller coasters, fairy tale
  palaces and costumed characters have made Disney
  World one of the world's most visited tourist
  attractions.

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• Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) American writer,
  folklorist and anthropologist. Born in
  Eatonville, Florida, Hurston was educated at
  Howard University, at Barnard College, and at
  Columbia University, where she studied under
  German-American anthropologist Franz Boas.
  Eatonville was the first incorporated all-black
  town in the United States, and Hurston returned
  there after college for anthropological field
  study that influenced her later output in fiction
  as well as in folklore. Hurston also collected
  folklore in Jamaica, Haiti, Bermuda, and
  Honduras.

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• Mules and Men (1935), one of her best-known
  folklore collections, was based on her field
  research in the American South. Tell My Horse
  (1938) described folk customs in Haiti and
  Jamaica. As a fiction writer, Hurston is noted
  for her metaphorical language, her story-telling
  abilities, and her interest in and celebration of
  Southern black culture in the United States. Some
  of her earliest work was published in the small
  magazine Fire!!, which Hurston, along with
  notable writers such as Langston Hughes and
  Wallace Thurman, produced in 1926.

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• Her best-known novel is Their Eyes Were Watching
  God, in which she tracked a Southern black
  woman's search, over 25 years and 3 marriages,
  for her true identity and a community in which
  she can develop that identity. Hurston's prolific
  literary output also includes such novels as
  Jonah's Gourd Vine and Seraph on the Suwanee,
  short stories, plays, journal articles, and an
  autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road. Hurston's
  work was not political, but her characters' use
  of dialect, her manner of portraying black
  culture, and her conservatism created controversy
  within the black community.

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• Throughout her career she addressed issues of
  race and gender, often relating them to the
  search for freedom. In her later years Hurston
  experienced health problems, and she died
  impoverished and unrecognized by the literary
  community. Her writings, however, were
  rediscovered in the 1970s by a new generation of
  black writers, notably Alice Walker, and many of
  Hurston's works were republished. In 1995 a
  two-volume set of her writings, some previously
  unpublished, was released.

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• Jacksonville It is 134 miles northeast of
  Orlando, Florida. Once infamous for its smelly
  paper mills, it is now one of the South's
  insurance and banking capitals. Although
  Jacksonville claims to be the capital of
  Florida's historic First Coast, the city dates
  its beginnings from an early-1800s settlement
  named Cowford, because cattle crossed the St.
  Johns River here. Cowford changed its name to
  Jacksonville in 1822 to honor General Andrew
  Jackson, the provisional governor who forced
  Spain to cede Florida to the United States 2
  years earlier.

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• the Civil War The American Civil War was the
  only war fought on American soil by Americans. 3
  million fought and 600,000 died. It was fought in
  the United States of America between the northern
  states, popularly referred to as the Union, and
  the seceding southern states (in the U.S., The
  South), calling themselves the Confederate States
  of America or the Confederacy between 1861 and
  1865. There is considerable debate about causes
  that may have motivated the states to war, such
  as state's rights with respect to the federal
  government, taxation, and imbalance of trade.

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• But there is no question that the salient issue
  in the minds of the public and popular press of
  the time, and the histories written since, was
  the issue of slavery. Slavery had been abolished
  in most northern states, but was legal and
  important to the economy of the Confederacy,
  which depended on cheap agricultural labor. The
  Union was led by President Abraham Lincoln and
  the Confederacy by President Jefferson Davis.
  Significant Southern military leaders included
  Robert E. Lee, Thomas Stonewall Jackson, James
  Longstreet, and P.G.T. Beauregard. Northern
  leaders included Ulysses Grant, William Tecumseh
  Sherman, and George Meade.

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• It started with Lincoln's victory in the
  presidential election of 1860, which made South
  Carolina's secession from the Union a foregone
  conclusion. The state had long been waiting for
  an event that would unite the South against the
  antislavery forces. Once the election returns
  were certain, a special South Carolina convention
  declared that the Union now subsisting between
  South Carolina and other states under the name of
  the United States of America' is hereby
  dissolved. By February 1, 1861, six more
  Southern states had seceded. On February 7, the
  seven states adopted a provisional constitution
  for the Confederate States of America. The
  remaining southern states as yet remained in the
  Union. 

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• Less than a month later, on March 4, 1861,
  Abraham Lincoln was sworn in as president of the
  United States. In his inaugural address, he
  refused to recognize the secession, considering
  it legally void. His speech closed with a plea
  for restoration of the bonds of union. But the
  South turned deaf ears, and on April 12, guns
  opened fire on the federal troops stationed at
  Fort Sumter in the Charleston, South Carolina
  harbor. The war ended in 1865 with the surrender
  of Confederate forces.

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• General Lee surrendered his Army of Northern
  Virginia on 9 April 1865 at Appomattox Court
  house. The Civil War ended with the emancipation
  of all slaves held in the Confederate States.
  Slaves were not freed in the remaining states
  until the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to
  the Constitution by 3/4 of the states, which did
  not occur until December of 1865, 8 months after
  the end of the war. A great deal of ill will
  among the Southern survivors resulted from the
  total warfare practiced during the war by the
  Union armies and the reconstruction program
  forced on the former Confederacy by the Union
  victors.

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Enriching your vocabulary

• Read the sentences carefully and guess the
  meaning of the italicized term in each sentence
  according to the context and your own
  experiences.

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• She propped herself against the cold, damp wall
  with the baby in one hand and a bottle of gin in
  the other.
• He lay, propped up by pillows, his face pale and
  eyes dull.
• The organization had continually opposed any
  change and had had little understanding of the
  industrialization process up to that time.

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• My study is the perfect place for an author,
  especially if he doesnt object to being
  occasionally peered at through the windows by
  curious visitors.
• These points have been mentioned in passing in
  the previous class, but they are summarized here
  for the sake of convenience and for added
  emphasis.

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• Yesterdays meeting resumed talks broken off 8
  years ago this event has been taken as a new
  start in the relationship between the two
  countries.
• Your behavior is extremely important in that it
  conveys your attitude much more effectively and
  directly than the words you use.

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• But talent can be developed and trained and
  provide a sound basis for you to give of the best
  inside you.
• Even when other people around us do things we
  disapprove of, we dont have to laugh at them.
• Although they belonged to different generations,
  they shared many thoughts in common.

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• This time he could afford to make no mistake his
  teacher was there at his elbow, watching every
  move.
• It is the community who should, in the main,
  determine whether police are to be involved in
  resolving community conflicts.

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• Doubtlessly he paid a price for that too, but if
  he had not felt that misery he could never have
  created the works he did.
• Retirement allowed him the time to enjoy music,
  often in company with his children and
  grandchildren.
• As soon as he's more or less mastered something,
  he's bored with it.

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Homework

• Learn the new words and expressions of the text
  by heart.
• Go over the text and try to get the main idea of
  the text.
• Analyze the structure of the text.

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Reading-Centred Activities

• 1. Global Reading Task
• Reading Skills
• Text structure analysis
• 2. Detailed Reading Task
• Language points
• Simulated writing
• Summary of the text

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After-Reading Activities

• Vocabulary Exercises
• Translating and Writing

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Listening and speaking activities

• Talking about the topic or retelling the text
• Listening and speaking practice in XP center