Sojourner Truth

Introduction.

When we want to write an essay, the hardest thing to do is always to find a good beginning – the one which is going to catch the attention of the reader. It is quite the same when we decide to write a thesis for our master, except that the first step that is to say choosing the subject is I think the most difficult thing I had to do. Choosing between British civilization and American civilization was not at first a very easy task but my choice around September became clear enough and I plunged into the American one. But why did I choose American civilization? Since the first year at university, I have been fond of American civilization and if I hesitated it was because I was going to spend my first year of my master in England. So, at first – before summer – I decided to begin some research on a contemporary subject in British history – it was about the place of religion in public schools. But there was nothing to do I was not motivated by the subject and each time I read the brochure to choose the different classes we had to take for the year 2008-2009, I always found myself more attracted by the subjects which were going to be studied in American civilization. So, I changed and began to look for a subject that I could be interested in in American civilization. After several researches on the web, I found a website which was about the black women who had been very active in the 19th century. I read several extracts of different biographies such as the one of Harriet Tubman or Frances Harper but I chose to study the biography of Sojourner Truth who was said to be an abolitionist and a feminist. What made me choose her instead of another was because her biography appeared to be more complex than the other ones. Indeed, she had been a feminist and an abolitionist at the same time, but she did not spend her whole life defending women’s and slaves’ rights. She had a life before that – she had been a slave woman and religion had always played a very... [continues]

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