Read the passage from Sugar Changed the World.In the 1930s, reporters spread out across the American South to capture the voices of history. Some African Americans who had been born as slaves were still alive, and could describe how they had lived sixty years earlier. Through their words we can finally begin to hear about sugar slavery from those who lived it.Ellen Betts, who grew up as a slave on a sugar plantation in Louisiana, recalled that they worked "hour in, hour out, the sugar cane fields sure stretch from one end of the earth to the other." Ceceil George remembered that she "come up in hard times—slavery times." "Every body worked, young, an ole’, if yo’ could carry two or three sugar cane yo’ worked. Sunday, Monday, it all de same . . . it like a heathen part o’ de country." She meant that in other states slaves got Sunday off to worship God. Not in Louisiana: There, sugar was god, and work was the only religion.
Which details do the authors include to support the claim in this passage? Select two options.
Read the passage from Sugar Changed the World.Since sugar had to pass through many hands before it reached the fairs, it was expensive and hard to get. King Henry III of England, for example, liked sugar. Yet there was little he could do to satisfy his craving. He wrote to one official in 1226 asking if he could possibly obtain three pounds of the precious substance—at a cost of about 450 modern dollars. He later appealed to a mayor, hoping he might be able to get four more pounds of the rare grains. And finally, by 1243, he managed to buy three hundred pounds.The fairs lasted until the 1300s, when Venice came to dominate European trade with the Muslim world. The Venetians greatly expanded the sugar trade, so much so that a hundred years after Henry III's reign, the English were able to buy thousands of pounds of the sweet stuff each year.
Read the passage from Sugar Changed the World.Slave labor was valuable because it produced cheap sugar that everyone wanted to buy. But if people stopped buying that sugar, the whole slave system would collapse. In the years leading up to the American Revolution, the women of New England refused to buy English products and English tea. The loss of income made London rescind some of the taxes it had imposed on America. Now this same tactic—boycotting—was used to fight slavery. Some 400,000 English people stopped buying the sugar that slaves grew and harvested. Instead, they bought loaves of sugar that carried a label that said, "Produced by the labor of FREEMEN"—the sugar came from India.When the English looked at the sugar they used every day, Clarkson and the other abolitionists made them see the blood of the slaves who had created it. The very fact that slave-made sugar was so popular made it harder for the English to ignore the reality of slavery. Sugar was a bridge—like the sneakers and T-shirts and rugs that, today, we know are made by sweatshop labor. If you wanted the product, abolitionists forced you to think about how it was made. Slavery—a practice as ancient as human civilization—was becoming unacceptable, a form of inhumanity people could no longer tolerate.
Read the passage from Sugar Changed the World.The fairs were very well organized. They featured covered galleries so that merchants could buy and sell even if rain came drumming down; cellars were so large, they resembled underground cities. At the fairs, merchants could trust the weights and measures, and a strict order prevailed for how things were to be sold. For the first twelve days one could sell only woven cloth—which is what the traders from northern Europe brought. Then the "sergeants" of the fair would walk through the streets crying, "Pack up, pack up" and all the cloth must be put away. Now the leather traders, who came from as far as Spain, and the fur merchants, whose goods might come from Russia, filled the tables with piles of hides and pelts.
Read the passage from Sugar Changed the World.In the 1400s, Spain and Portugal were competing to explore down the coast of Africa and find a sea route to Asia. That way, they could have the prized Asian spices they wanted without having to pay high prices to Venetian and Muslim middlemen. Spanish and Portuguese sailors searching for that sea route conquered the Canary Islands and the Azores. Soon they began building Muslim-style sugar plantations on the islands, some of them staffed by slaves purchased from nearby Africa. One sailor came to know these islands particularly well because he traded in "white gold"—sugar. And then, as he set off on his second voyage across the sea to what he thought was Asia, he carried sugar cane plants from Gomera, one of the Canary Islands, with him on his ship.His name was Christopher Columbus.
What evidence from the passage best supports the inference that making sugar was difficult? Select two options.
Read the two passages from Sugar Changed the World.Knowing that their slaves were likely to die by the time they reached their thirties, Louisiana sugar planters were extremely selective—they bought only healthy-looking young men in their late teens. On average, the men purchased in Louisiana were an inch taller than the people bought in the other slave states. Those teenagers made up seven to eight out of every ten slaves brought to America's sugar Hell. The others were younger teenage girls, around fifteen to sixteen years old. Their job, for the rest of their short lives, was to have children. Elizabeth Ross Hite knew that, for sure, "all de master wanted was fo' dem wimmen to hav children." Enslaved children would be put to work or sold. The overseer S.B. Raby explained, "Rachel had a 'fine boy' last Sunday. Our crop of negroes will I think make up any deficiencies there may be in the cane crop." That is, a master could sell any slaves who managed to live, if he needed more money than he could make from sugar.Jazz was born in Louisiana. Could it be that a population of teenagers, almost all of them male, were inspired to develop their own music as a way to speak, to compete, to announce who they were to the world? Bomba in Puerto Rico, Maculelê in Brazil, jazz in Louisiana—all gave people a chance to be alive, to be human, to have ideas, and dreams, and passions when their owners claimed they were just cogs in machinery built to produce sugar.The sugar workers in Hawaii were not enslaved—they chose to come. But they still lived hard lives:Hawai'i, Hawai'iI came seeing the dreamBut my tears now flowIn the canefieldsWhen the Africans were brought to work in sugar, they had to form new families, learn new languages—they had to find ways to blend their new lives with what they recalled from their homelands. The holehole bushi hint at one way sugar workers have always found strength and comfort:My husband cuts the caneI carry the stalks from the fieldTogether, the two of usWe get by
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