racism

White Privilege and Literature in Gale Literature Criticism

| By Rebecca Parks | One of my favorite pastimes is walking in a pretty neighborhood with my 73-year-old mother. We share a mutual love of domestic architecture and landscaping that borders on obsession. When we see a flower bed that wows us or a roofline that thrills, we’ll rather unabashedly stare from the sidewalk, … Read more

19th Century Nitty-Gritty: Out of Savagery into Civilization

By Melissa Rayner

Native American rights have been in the news quite a bit lately, especially as they relate to the Redskins controversy. That got me thinking:  How were things back in our favorite century?

And what I found broke my heart, much in the same way reading The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison breaks my heart every single time (yes, normally, these blog posts are kind of hilarious, and I promise to return to hilarity next week).

My search turned up an autobiography by Joseph K. Griffis (formerly Tahan), Out of Savagery into Civilization, in which he recounts–and even dumbs down–his many adventures as a wild man of the plains and how he eventually found his place among learned, civilized society. Here, the introduction lays out his many experiences:

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