Preview

Frederick Douglass Paper

Powerful Essays
Open Document
Open Document
965 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Frederick Douglass Paper
Process Paper

For this year’s I.P., I picked Frederick Douglass to be my topic. The reason I picked him was because he was a great man and a well known abolitionist figure. He dedicated his life to opposing slavery. I have always admired Douglass since my first grade teacher told my class about him. Once I researched a little about him, mainly the time period of his life, I realized he was a perfect choice for my I.P. topic. He interested me and I could easily get plenty of information on him. I knew that all the information I needed was out there, I just needed to go out and find it. I went to my local library and checked out books on my topic. Remember, it’s about quality, not quantity, and that’s not an excuse for underachieving. I checked out three or four really effective books, a few that could be categorized as multigenre themselves. They contained both primary and secondary documents. Secondly, I researched him on the internet; and I don’t mean googling “Frederick Douglass.” I searched specific things like “Frederick Douglass as a slave” and “Frederick Douglass’ escape.” This allowed me to narrow the “millions” of results one always gets when using Google. I received plenty of good websites that I could use that summarized his whole life. I picked multigenre as my presentation category and its obvious why. Frederick Douglass’ life was a multigenre in a sense. He wrote letters and poems and narratives all about his life and slavery. He personified slavery and did all he could to abolish it. A multigenre would best represent Douglass and his life. In order to make my multigenre effective in “moving” the reader, I had to look at one of the examples Mrs. Jackson provided me with. Using that as a template, I wrote poems and short stories appropriate to the time period that related to the idea of the wrongness of slavery and Douglass. I found pictures that illustrated Douglass’ ideas, as well as drew a few of my own. I tried to picture myself as a



Bibliography: Turley, David. Slavery. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers, 2000. Print. [This book gets into great detail of the what a slave would experience and what a slave owner would experience which really helped me with my multigenre] Douglass, Frederick Vernellia, Randall. "No Struggle No Progress." autoredirect to main site. N.p., n.d. Web. 25 Oct. 2012. <http://academic.udayton.edu/vernelliarandall/poetry/> [This website had a poem that I used in my multigenre. It was a primary source]

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    Have you ever done something big or important? If so, there’s a good chance you met challenges along the way, and maybe even inspired others to do big things like that too. Frederick Douglass did an important thing. He contributed to the abolitionist movement in the United States, and similarly, faced many challenges along the way and even inspired others to join the movement. But how did he contribute?…

    • 416 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    Slavery, the dark beast that consumes, devours, and pillages the souls of those who are forced to within its bounds and those who think they are the powerful controllers of this filth they call business. This act is the pinnacle of human ignorance, they use it as the building blocks for their “trade,” and treat these people no more than replaceable property that can be bought, sold, and beaten on a whim. The narrative of Frederick Douglass is a tale about a boy who is coming of age in a world that does not accept him for who he is and it is also told as a horror that depicts what we can only imagine as the tragedies placed on these people in these institutions of slavery. It is understood as a chronicle of his life telling us his story from childhood to manhood and all that is in between, whilst all this is going on he vividly mixes pathological appeals to make us feel for him and all his brethren that share his burden. His narrative is a map from slavery to freedom where he, in the beginning, was a slave of both body and mind. But as the story progresses we see his transformation to becoming a free man both of the law and of the mind. He focuses on emotion and the building up of his character to show us what he over time has become. This primarily serves to make the reader want to follow his cause all the more because of his elegant and intelligent style of mixing appeals. Through his effective use of anecdotes and vivid imagery he shows us his different epiphanies over time, and creates appeals to his character by showing us how he as a person has matured, and his reader’s emotion giving us the ability to feel for his situation in a more real sense. This helps argue that the institution of slavery is a parasitic bug that infects the slave holder with a false sense of power and weakens the slave in both body and spirit.…

    • 1321 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    The best way to give someone the idea of an institution’s terrible enormity, is to give them depictions of people who have suffered under it. This is the principle idea of the slave narrative, where former slaves tell their experiences in slavery and how they escaped. As most were written when slavery was still legal, the true purpose of these published accounts is addressed in a myriad of different ways throughout, but sums up to this - to convince the reader, through depictions of abuse and dehumanization, that slavery should not be condoned, for the perpetual abuse and misery the slave must endure is not worth the product. Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs are two examples of slave narrative authors who utilize this emotional appeal…

    • 2006 Words
    • 9 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Frederick Douglass was a significant figure because once he was free from slavery, he became an anti-slavery lecturer, an outspoken supporter of women’s rights, and in 1863 he talked to President Lincoln about the treatment of black soldiers. He also became President of the Freedman’s Savings Bank and as a Chargé d'Affaires for the Dominican Republic. Frederick showed that no matter what happened, people should fight for what’s right.…

    • 645 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Frederick Douglass themes was Historical because when he was twenty years old he succeeded the escape by being a sailor and sailing off to a different…

    • 258 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    -Frederick Douglass was an African-American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer, and statesman. After escaping from slavery in Maryland, he became a national leader of the abolitionist movement from Massachusetts and New York, gaining note for his dazzling oratory and incisive antislavery writings. In his time he was described by abolitionists as a living counter-example to slaveholders' arguments that slaves lacked the intellectual capacity to function as independent American citizens. Even many Northerners at the time found it hard to believe that such a great orator had once been a slave.…

    • 526 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Frederick Douglass was an African-American slave that defied the odds by doing something that none of his own kind could do. This inspirational man learned how to read and write all while working as a slave and trying to overcome the challenges of his lifestyle.…

    • 519 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    To quote the famous Frederick Douglass, “if there is no struggle, there is no progress…” and I assure you, there was struggle that resulted in not only progress for him, but for the nation as a whole. Frederick Douglass did many things that were deemed as impossible during his time period under the circumstances which the nation was under. To tell you more about this man I will be giving you a brief introduction into his personal life and into his remarkable achievements as a world renowned American abolitionist, author, and orator. Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey was born in February of 1818, although no one knows the exact date, was born on the eastern shore of Maryland to a slave woman.…

    • 799 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    A reverent abolitionist, social reformer, Frederick Douglass pursues his dream with all sorts of obstacles and disadvantages. He, on the contrary, made huge social reform and nominated for vice president. It is hard to believe he has once been a slave. Working for a plantation…

    • 559 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Douglass appeals to ethos through personification to convince readers that slavery was far more painful than anyone could ever imagine, encouraging…

    • 788 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    Slavery has always been a difficult topic to discuss from the point of view of a slave, due to the lack of information directly from slaves. Thankfully, a now well-known abolitionist and former slave, Frederick Douglass wrote a narrative of his entire life in slavery, as far back as he could remember. He let the world know the ugly truth of what life was like for an America slave, and what trauma slaves endured all around him. Douglass let’s people explore his innermost thoughts and only hides details when discussing his escape, as to not prevent other slaves from escaping through the Underground Railroad, as he did. His book, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, finally humanizes slaves.…

    • 1073 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    Emotional aspects will pull in historians, as well as students who desire as much knowledge of Douglass’ life as possible. The book was engaging in the sense that it took the reader into the actual life and times of Frederick Douglass, and gave the reader an accurate description of all that happened during his life at the time. He was not only an intelligent man, but was well cultured and adamant in his belief system. He gets down to every detail in daring fashion, and entices the reader with his stories of resilience and aptitude in the abolitionist movement. Douglass fulfilled his objectives by writing this book as a way to further popularize himself during his time with the movement.…

    • 738 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Frederick was one of the many that helped abolish slavery. “ Douglass’s reputation as a fighter gives him a leadership role in his local slave community. He uses this quality to teach other slaves to read and write and the engineer a run away plot.” During his time…

    • 920 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    African American Beliefs

    • 970 Words
    • 4 Pages

    The realist depiction in art of contemporary life drawed attention to everyday conditions. Frederick Douglass’s autobiography played a big part of exposing the truth behind one of America’s darkest times and how it impacted millions of people (narrative). This movement opened the eyes of millions of people didn’t understand how it felt to be broken mind, body and spirit. But African Americans didn’t have to be a slave to understand the impact of something as little as someone’s skin color. De Bois never experienced how life was like as a slave but he lived through the time that followed a time period that affected his race greatly (narrative). This helped shape the American Dream by exposing that not everything is as it seems and that freedom of the body is just as important as freedom of the mind. I was very interested in reading about Douglass’s journey from slavery to a “free man” and the truth about how bad slavery really was in America. I believe that this was the most impactful movements out of all the ones we…

    • 970 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    Dehumanizing Slaves

    • 1999 Words
    • 8 Pages

    The Dehumanization of the Enslave: Frederick Douglass The Narrative of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself…

    • 1999 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Better Essays