Article ID: CBB203700764

The Penn School’s Educational Curriculum: Its Effects on the St. Helena Songs (2013)

unapi

The Negro spiritual was the central medium by which slaves expressed the suffering of an inhuman existence. Since Reconstruction, the Sea Islands region, comprised of the North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia coastal areas, offered a geographical isolation that fostered songs with a cultural distinctiveness as part of the Gullah tradition. Saint Helena Island, one of the largest of the Sea Islands, provided the earliest written sources of Negro spirituals that were transcribed by white missionaries intrigued by the strange songs emanating from the newly freed slaves. In 1862, two of these missionaries, Laura Towne and Ellen Murray, founded the Penn Normal, Industrial, and Agricultural School, one of the first schools for freed slaves in the South, and for 40 years these committed women endeavored to educate the Negro inhabitants through a Northern curriculum that effectively improved the literacy of students. Yet the school’s cultural bias was equally effective in destroying much of the language and music of its students. Specifically, I will discuss Penn School’s educational and music curricula and the unfortunate linguistic, textual, and melodic losses that resulted from the school’s practices.

...More
Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB203700764/

Similar Citations

Article Dangerfield, David W.; (2015)
Turning the Earth: Free Black Yeomanry in the Antebellum South Carolina Lowcountry (/isis/citation/CBB001422239/)

Article Carmen V. Harris; (2019)
The South Carolina Home in Black and White: Race, Gender, and Power in Home Demonstration Work (/isis/citation/CBB904806755/)

Book Rose, Tricia; (1994)
Black noise: Rap music and black culture in contemporary America (/isis/citation/CBB001181345/)

Book Numbers, Ronald L.; Stenhouse, John; (1999)
Disseminating Darwinism: The Role of Place, Race, Religion, and Gender (/isis/citation/CBB000110621/)

Book Savitt, Todd Lee; (2007)
Race and Medicine in Nineteenth- and Early-Twentieth-Century America (/isis/citation/CBB000772267/)

Article Baker, Robert B.; Washington, Harriet A.; Olakanmi, Ololade; Savitt, Todd L.; Jacobs, Elizabeth A.; Hoover, Eddie; Wynia, Matthew K.; (2009)
Creating a Segregated Medical Profession: African American Physicians and Organized Medicine, 1846--1910 (/isis/citation/CBB001032032/)

Book Oscar de la Torre; (2018)
The People of the River: Nature and Identity in Black Amazonia, 1835–1945 (/isis/citation/CBB716355605/)

Book Wilder, Burt G.; Reid, Richard M.; (2010)
Practicing Medicine in a Black Regiment: The Civil War Diary of Burt G. Wilder, 55th Massachusetts (/isis/citation/CBB001212747/)

Chapter Lewis, Earl; (2000)
Constructing African Americans as Minorities (/isis/citation/CBB000102245/)

Book McBride, David; (2002)
Missions for Science: U. S. Technology and Medicine in America's African World (/isis/citation/CBB000301936/)

Article Rusert, Britt; (2013)
Delany's Comet: Fugitive Science and the Speculative Imaginary of Emancipation (/isis/citation/CBB001201822/)

Book Smith, Kimberly K.; (2007)
African American Environmental Thought: Foundations (/isis/citation/CBB000930104/)

Authors & Contributors
Savitt, Todd Lee
de la Torre, Oscar
Harris, Carmen V.
Rose, Tricia
Dangerfield, David W.
Wynia, Matthew K.
Concepts
African Americans and science
African Americans
Medicine and race
Medicine
Technology and race
Slavery, abolition, and emancipation
Time Periods
19th century
20th century
20th century, early
Places
United States
South Carolina (U.S.)
Africa
Southern states (U.S.)
Amazon River Region (South America)
Tennessee (U.S.)
Comments

Be the first to comment!

{{ comment.created_by.username }} on {{ comment.created_on | date:'medium' }}

Log in or register to comment