Time and distance overcome

Time and Distance Overcome

The text "Time and Distance Overcome" deals with race struggle in the southern United States, in the early nineteen century. Eula Biss starts the text with telling the story of the phone's origin and development and deployment of the telephone network. The racial struggle was a subject that preoccupied many people, especially in the southern states there was cruel scenarios that you cannot even imagine in today's America.

In the first part of the text, it is especially telephone poles that are focused on. It focuses on the development and the growing number of poles and the connections it creates. At the beginning referring Eula Biss there is great skepticism about Graham Bell's new invention, and that it is impossible to make connections so that everyone can get in touch with each other.
Eula Biss describes that after you could have demonstrated the capabilities of the phone, it was an invention that primarily approached to the rich, because it was a “Boston banker”, which had installed a private line between his work and his home.
With new things and phenomena that creates always new problems. The U.S. population will also be unhappy with the new poles put up everywhere. Although the public authorities, in the form of judges, gives people the argument that they are within their rights to cut down the new poles and gives prohibition to companies to put more up.
The issue of telephone poles, justifying Elua Biss with: “The War on Telephone Poles was fueled, in part, by terribly American concern for private property and a reluctance to surrender it to a shared utility. And then there was a fierce sense of aesthetics, an obsession with purity, a dislike for the way the poles and wires marred a landscape that those other new inventions, skyscrapers and barbed wire, were just beginning to complicate. And the perhaps there was also a fear that distance, as it had always been known and measured, was collapsing”
So it is the change that part of the population finds problematic, but equally that there must physically be at a telephone pole in front of your soil.
In the second part of the text, it is again the telephone poles that are in focus. Now it's just in a different way - they are the center of the events relating to the killing of black people. It is as Eula Biss also writes, not the telephone poles that are to blame for their attention. That's what they are used for, and this is where she describes them as being terrible because they are being used as tools that help to kill the blacks. She also describes how it has become normal to see black because you can now buy postcards with a negro on fire who have lost large parts of his legs while he was hanging from a telephone pole. However, it will be withdrawn because the postmaster finds it "unmailable".
“The lynching’s happened everywhere, all over the United States. From shortly before the invention of the telephone to long after the first trans-Atlantic call. More in the South, and more in rural areas. In the cities and In the North there were race riots.
These race riots forcing about 500 out of their homes, and during the events related to a negro in a pile, but fall down, and this is where a newspaper writes: "Negros are lying in the gutters every few feet in some places"
This quote describes what race riots pose and how the condition is in some places in America.

The text can be divided into two main parts. The first describes how the development of the telephone network in America and the problems that came with the new network. The second describes how race struggle in America have occurred, especially in order to tell what methods were used to kill the blacks.
The first part starts by talking about the beginning of the telephone network development - would it even be possible? The second starts telling us where there have been committed murders.
The text is divided so that you first read about the telephone network and its evolution, and then move quick access system on to the race riots. This may be because it is easier to navigate in the text, but also because the telephone pole is of great importance in the second part, though not definite about it.
Throughout the text uses Eula Biss many quotes: from newspapers (New York Times), from Mark Twain, Rutherford B. Hayes, Herbert Casson, from WEB Du Bois, Claude McKay, and even quotes Graham Bell himself has written. It shows that she has investigated and found material to substantiate her own words on both the telephone network and the "race riots".
Eula Biss maintains this essay would tell about the history of the United States, both technologically, but also how human nature has been and what it has got people to do to each other.
The text as Eula Biss has written an essay. The sender is Eula Biss herself. The essay is written for those who would like to have another story about the struggle against blacks, and see where you put it up against / with the development of the telephone network. She makes telephone pole to a symbol. A symbol associated with the killing of the black, but also a symbol of the development of society where it is easier to communicate.
If you look at the text itself, so that there are two things that arouse my attention. The first is the use of quotes from various sources. This makes the text seem more reliable, but it also becomes more personalized, because it sets specific human face on the stories. The other thing is especially in the second part of the text. Here she uses anaphors when she use the word "in" several times at the beginning of the sentences, after which comes a story about, that in a city there has been committed crimes against a black man.
When she uses anaphora, it is to corroborate her story that there was indeed a heads against blacks in the U.S. back then.
If we look at what the effect is that she actually describes two histories, it is that she makes the telephone pole into a symbol for the killing of the black, and therefore causing people a connecting between the two things.

I think that the division of the text into two parts, making it very different over other texts, without compromising the text. However, one must be careful that you do not stop reading halfway because you do not think it makes sense with the topic you were expecting to read about.
The message of the essay may also be some hard to see because it is not directly such as "stop killing black people." You must enter and read between the lines and find the message in this essay.