Directions: Complete the reading listed below. Then type out your answers to the questions. You should submit your answers to Canvass and be prepared to discuss your answers to these questions in class on the day they are due.

Readings:
1) Greenberg, “Introduction,” The Confessions of Nat Turner (pp. 1-31)
2) Grey/Turner, The Confessions of Nat Turner (pp. 38-58)

• Where does the text, “The Confessions of Nat Turner,” come from? What are the sources strengths and weaknesses? How must the historian approach this source and what use of it can she/he make?
• What are the various ways to connect Turner’s slave revolt to the history of slave resistance within and without North America?
• How did the white community respond to Turner’s revolt in both the short and long term?
• What kind of person is Nat Turner? Describe him. What did he want? How do you understand what his larger project was?
• At the time and over the years, how have different people understood both Nat Turner the man and the revolt he led? What is the legacy of Nat Turner’s revolt?

Answer preview

Question 1

The text “The confession of Nat Turner “comes from an interview to Turner by Thomas Ruffin Gray in jail cell two months after the revolt. Gray attempts to demonstrate Turner’s confession over the rebellion movement and killings that left fifty whites dead in Virginia and Southampton. The interview has the strength of using the first person to show Turner’s voice eliminating the fear of variations in the confession. Among the weakness the sources has is that Gray had overall control of the material; thus, not all information is trustworthy since there is the room for omissions. Historians…

 

(600 words)