ENGL 102
apostrophes
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ENGL 102 apostrophes |
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Apostrophes There are numerous apostrophe errors in this paper. They may be missing apostrophes or apostrophes where they don’t belong. Fix the errors by adding or deleting apostrophes. I grew up near a town in southeast Texas that was known as the regional headquarters for the KKK—Ku Klux Klan. The KKK generally hated anyone who was different. Although they are most famous for harassing black people, they also hated Jews and Catholic’s, and Im sure there are some other groups they didnt like as well. I was always terrified to go through that town—Vidor, Texas—even though I was the right color (white) and the right religion (Protestant). What they did to frighten and hurt those different from themselves’ was wrong then and is still wrong and sometimes still happening today. They did things like burn down peoples barns and houses, throw bricks inside windows, burn crosses out on the front lawns, lynch young black men, beat up people, and generally terrorize them. Nothing excuses them for what they do, but it helps us to understand why they do what they do if we review some of the history of the South. East Texas is so close to Louisiana geographically and politically that that part of the state is more like the South, while other parts of Texas are quite different. At the end of the Civil War, the Souths economy was devastated. Much of it’s agricultural land and homes had been burned by Sherman (he burned entire cities). So many of the young men had been killed or crippled by the war. A society made up more of women than men was left to try and rebuild an agrarian society with no money and no labor (the large plantations relied on slave labor, remember). Worse still, Lincolns assassination left men in charge of Reconstruction who were less interested in “union” than in vengeance. Northerners came in and bought plantations for ten cents on a dollar because the now poor whites couldnt pay taxes. It was hard enough to grow food enough for ones family, much less to grow enough to sell. A crop like cotton, which was the Souths biggest money maker, is very labor intensive. Men and women worked in the fields for long, exhausting hours picking cotton until their hands bled from the sharp cotton bolls. Blacks were promised forty acres and a mule to set them up as farmers, reparation from the days of slavery. Certainly they deserved that or more, but the whites looking on saw their own land sold on the auction block to Northerners while blacks were getting land. The white’s felt disenfranchised and powerless. They couldnt really fight the Northerners now in charge, so they put on sheets and rode out on horses and terrorized the blacks in the dark. Its a childish way to practice power. Even today, poor whites, often called “poor white trash” where Im from, hate just about anyone who is more successful than they are. They use the history of the South, the devastated economy, the stealing of land by rich Northerners to excuse their lack of success over a hundred years later. In stories handed down every generation, the children have been told that its the government and the blacks and Jews (who they think control banks) that keep them from making it in this world. |
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