The analysis of Woodward in THE STRANGE CAREER OF JIM CROW 1955 essays

The analysis of Woodward in THE STRANGE CAREER OF JIM CROW 1955 essays The paper will analyze C. Vann Woodward's "The Strange Career of Jim Crow" (1955). "Woodward begin his series of lectures by nothing that, although an early form of Jim Crow-type legislation could be found in the cities of the antebellum North ("One of the strangest things about the career of Jim Crow was that the system was born in the North and reached an advanced age before moving South in force"), race relations in the nineteenth-century South were more often than not characterized by intermingling and close contact. (17) "In most aspects of slavery as practiced in the antebellum south," he notes, "segregation would have been an inconvenience and an obstruction to the functioning of the system. The very nature of the institution made separation of the races for the most part impracticable." (12) Similarly, while some elements of Jim Crow showed up during Reconstruction (such as the separation of churches and segregation of public schools), "race relations during Reconstruction could not be said to have crystallized or stabilized nor to have become what they later became. There were too many cross currents and contradictions, revolutionary innovations and violent reactions...for a time old and new rubbed shoulders and so did black and white in a manner that differed significantly from Jim Crow of the future or slavery of the past." (25, 26) In fact, Woodward, argues, even Redemption didn't herald the onset of Jim Crow. While "it would certainly be preposterous to leave the impression that any evidence I have submitted indicates a golden age of race relations in the period between Redemption and complete segregation," Woodward argues, "the era of stiff conformity and fanatical rigidity that was to come had not yet closed in and shut off all contact between the races, driven the Negro...

A Profile in Composition

A Profile in Composition A profile is a  biographical essay, usually developed through a combination of anecdote, interview, incident, and description. James McGuinness, a staff member at  The New Yorker  magazine in the 1920s, suggested the term profile (from the Latin, to draw a line) to the magazines editor, Harold Ross. By the time the magazine got around to copyrighting the term, says David Remnick, it had entered the language of American journalism (Life Stories, 2000). Observations on Profiles A Profile is a short exercise in biographya tight form in which interview, anecdote, observation, description, and analysis are brought to bear on the public and private self. The literary pedigree of the profile can be traced from Plutarch to Dr. Johnson to Strachey; its popular modern reinvention is owed to The New Yorker, which set up shop in 1925 and which encouraged its reporters to get beyond ballyhoo to something more probing and ironic. Since then, with the wacky proliferation of media, the genre has been debased; even the word itself has been hijacked for all kinds of shallow and intrusive journalistic endeavors.(John Lahr, Show and Tell: New Yorker Profiles. University of California Press, 2002)In 1925, when [Harold] Ross launched the magazine he liked to call his comic weekly [The New Yorker], he wanted something differentsomething sidelong and ironical, a form that prized intimacy and wit over biographical completeness or, God forbid, unabashed hero worship.  Ross told his writers and editors that, above all, he wanted to get away from what he was reading in other magazinesall the Horatio Alger stuff. . . .The New Yorker Profile has expanded in many ways since Rosss time. What had been conceived of as a form to describe Manhattan personalities now travels widely in the world and all along the emotional and occupational registers. . . . One quality that runs through nearly all the best Profiles . . . is a sense of obsession. So many of these pieces are about people who reveal an obsession with one corner of human experience or another.  Richard Prestons Chudnovsky brothers  are obsessed with the number pi and finding the pattern in randomness; Calvin Trillins Edna Buchanan is an obsessive crime reporter in Miami who visits the scenes of disaster four, five times a day; . . . Mark Singers Ricky Jay is obsessed with magic and the history of magic. In every great Profile, too, the writer is equally obsessed. Its often the case that a writer will t ake months, even years, to get to know a subject and bring him or her to life in prose.(David Remnick, Life Stories: Profiles From The New Yorker. Random House, 2000) The Parts of a Profile One major reason writers create profiles is to let others know more about the people who are important to them or who shape the world in which we live. . . . [T]he introduction  to a profile needs to show readers that the subject is someone they need to know more aboutright now. . . . Writers also use the introduction of a profile to highlight some key feature of the subjects personality, character, or values . . ..The body of a profile . . . includes descriptive details that help readers visualize the subjects actions and hear the subjects words. . . .Writers also use the body of a profile to provide logical appeals in the form of numerous examples that show that the subject is indeed making a difference in the community. . . .Finally, the conclusion of a profile often contains one final quote or anecdote that nicely captures the essence of the individual.(Cheryl Glenn,  The Harbrace Guide to Writing, concise 2nd ed. Wadsworth, Cengage, 201) Expanding the Metaphor In the classic Profile under [St. Clair] McKelway, the edges were smoothed out, and all effectsthe comic, the startling, the interesting, and occasionally, the poignantwere achieved by the choreography, in characteristically longer and longer (but never rambling) paragraphs filled with declarative sentences, of the extraordinary number of facts the writer had collected. The Profile metaphor, with its implicit acknowledgment of limited perspective, was no longer appropriate. Instead, it was as if the writer were continually circling around the subject, taking snapshots all the way, until finally emerging with a three-dimensional hologram.(Ben Yagoda, The New Yorker and the World It Made. Scribner, 2000)