Short Essay #1

            That attitudes and images of Europeans towards the African ebbed and flowed throughout the years as different viewpoints were socially addressed. 

Early European views of Africans were without the taint of the racism that developed in later centuries. Wealth, the appearance of nobility, and good manners appeared to be the main criteria in determining social ranking of these African visitors, along with religion. Hostility was aimed toward not the color of their skin but the God they prayed to – Muslims were still not welcome in Europe, no matter how many years separated from the Crusades.

At this starting point of 1400, Africans were not unknown to Europeans. Prior to this time period, neither continent was wholly isolated from the other. The Crusades aside, the relatively close proximity of southern Europe and North Africa meant that throughout the Middle Ages a small number of Africans made the journey to Europe. Most of southern Europe, including the Italian city states, in particular, had contact with the Middle East and North Africa. The presence of Africans in Europe actually dates back to the era of Rome, wherein the relationship between Europe and African truly began. It was this Mediterranean sphere that would have a larger number of African inhabitants due to its proximity to Northern Africa.

The life of the African slave was also different in the two areas. Mediterranean slaves were seen as beasts of burden – they worked the fields and performed all manners of manual labor under the watchful eye of their master. The life of an African ‘slave’ in Atlantic Europe was a bit more civil. They were domestic servants to the wealthy, playthings for the rich, and generally treated much better. In the end though, they were unpaid labor and therefore slaves.

England was very critical of slavery (i) but at the same time found themselves deeply entrenched in the slave trade. Spain on the other hand simply bought and sold Africans with little or no empathy for the ones they were buying and selling. Africans were considered property or mechandise with no

The Story of Me

Hey. My name is Frederick Miller and I live in Peoria, Arizona; it’s a suburb of Phoenix. I’ve lived in the Phoenix valley for almost 20 years. I grew up in a small Illinois town called Clinton and wound up here in Arizona after a six year stint in the U.S. Marine Corps. While in the Corps, I was stationed in Twentynine Palms, California and served in Desert Shield/Desert Storm back in the early 90’s when we stopped Saddam Hussein from overtaking the small oil nation of Kuwait. I moved here at the end of my enlistment with my first wife, telling her I’d give it a year and if I didn’t like it, we were moving to the Midwest. Well, I liked it here and we stayed although we divorced in ’97.  I am currently married (for the 2^nd and last time) to a San Diego girl and we have six children between us (a his, hers, and ours kinda thing).

The Marines taught me to do financials and I worked as a bookkeeper, project accountant, and finally Senior Accountant through the years. I got totally sick of numbers and had a mid-life crisis and decided to go to school. I started at Glendale Community College in 2007 and worked my way to Arizona State University West where I am attending the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College in order to become a Secondary history teacher (7^th through 12^th).

Through my life, I’ve been avid scholar of history. I’ve studied all types of history but I can honestly say the subject of “Africans in Europe” has not been one of them. I am an American Civil War fanatic and I’ve read and studied all matters of the Slave Trade, but since that is not the topic of this class I’ve got a lot to learn. I enjoy American History and hope to teach it in high school – my main eras being the Civil War and Vietnam. World History is enjoyable as well – I tend to read and study the Crusades era as well as ancient Greece and Rome.

This should be an interesting class and I hope to be able to take something away from it that I can utilize in the classroom when I get there. I look forward to these next few weeks and getting to know those that I can.

Frederick