Hi everyone! I'm going to be adding to this post over the next few days, but just wanted to give you a sense of how to begin your analysis of your chosen newspaper ad from Last Seen: Finding Family After Slavery.
I chose this ad, published in 1897 in the Richmond Planet by a woman named Annie Sloan Powers. I think I read through about five or six ads before I settled on this one. I wanted to find one from my home state of Connecticut, so I searched by location.
I started with the initial questions: what do you notice? What do you wonder?
A note on these questions:
I'll be honest with you--when I first encountered these kinds of open ended questions as student, I found them kind of annoying! But, now I find them so useful. The open nature of these questions allows us to pull out specific pieces from the source that stand out to us. We might all have different things we notice and different things we have questions about in this ad. In the video below, you can hear my initial observations and questions, and where I'm thinking of adding context in my post.
Another quick note:
I'm planning on composing a more formal "example" of a primary source analysis post, but also wanted to give you a window into my process as I go along. I hope this is useful for you as you select your own ad from the database and begin your own analysis!
Update, September 20th:
Below, you can find the draft of my responses to the second and third questions I'm asking you to consider in your Primary Source Analysis Posts:
Primary Source Analysis Post #1: Annie Sloan Powers
Note: In this draft, I've linked to the secondary sources consulted for the post (my Module 2 blog post and the reference readings from The American Yawp.)
The end and immediate aftermath of the Civil War revealed the ingenuity and resilience of formerly enslaved people. Trying to make sense of their new place in a society and culture that had been built upon their exploited labor forced many families and individuals to make difficult decisions to safeguard themselves from racist retaliation and violence. The Sloan family had been disconnected from each other in 1865 North Carolina. It wasn’t until 1868 that North Carolina was readmitted into the Union after ratifying the Fourteenth Amendment. The Sloan family must have experienced significant upheaval and turmoil in that three year period, where even as the war had ended and slavery had been abolished, Black Americans were subject to violence and intimidation, as well as legislation that “reestablished antebellum power relationships.”
According to the American Yawp, conservative politicians recaptured North Carolina’s state legislature by 1870. That meant that the political gains that Black men had made as voters and elected representatives were stymied just five years after the Civil War had ended.
Annie Sloan Powers’ ad reveals one of a lasting effect of the turmoil wreaked by white supremacist backlash to the Confederacy’s loss of the Civil War: the separation of family members. However, it also reveals another important legacy: the way that Black families worked to define what freedom meant after slavery. Stitching together families who had been disconnected as result of the war was one way formerly enslaved people worked to assert their autonomy and show that they too deserved a place in the United States polity and society. The fact that Powers published this ad in 1897, thirty years after she had last seen her family, demonstrates “the enduring pursuit of family reunification.”
Additionally, Powers’ “enduring pursuit” of reconnection with her family is even more significant if we take into account the rise in lynching and institutionalization of segregation that occurred in the 1880s and 1890s in the South. Perhaps Powers had read about the death of a Black man or woman in the South and it had inspired her to connect with long-lost relatives to make sure they were safe.