African American Colonial Ways of LifeIntroduction:When the settlement of the new world began, a conflict arose between the European, African, and Native American cultures, all of these groups faced hardships. Europeans and African Americans had no survival skills and soon discovered that trading with Indians was their means of survival and profit. For the Native Americans this interaction exposed them to many diseases that the colonists had brought from England, these diseases greatly reduced the Native American population. I will analyze the similarities and differences of the sources when it comes to describing such difficulties faced by the above-mentioned groups of people but also by individuals (women, children, slaves and indentured servants). I will also consider the attitudes that writers display toward early colonial social issues, race, racism, and slavery, focusing on the colonial lifestyles of all settlers. Analysis: For each source to analyze: how, why, and to what effect. From A Captivity Narrative, the author, Mary Rowlandson, details how she experienced the events of 1676. During this time period, King Philip's War was being fought and bands of Indians attacked the frontier settlements at Lancaster, Massachusetts. The author was one of the prisoners, until she was ransomed with money raised by the women of Boston. Early in the narrative, Rowlandson refers to the Indians as “barbarous creatures.” His description of the Indians as savagely cruel is accurate, although we later see that they have stopped being as cruel as at the beginning of the captivity. One of her children suffered alongside her and died in her arms during captivity. I found it strange how... middle of paper... is his place in such society, as he refers to his employer as his "master". Throughout the piece Moraley compares America to Great Britain. Moraley also delves into the comparison and contrast between indentured servitude and slavery. Runaway slave advertisements were a way for masters to try to bring back a runaway slave. From the source, we can deduce that successful escapees were rare, many were soon captured or voluntarily returned to their masters. From some advertisements it is obvious that the slaves were valuable to their owner as one of the rewards was thirty pounds, and earlier in Rowlandson's account she had said that her husband would be willing to pay twenty pounds. Conclusion: Works Cited Shi, David E., and Holly A. Mayer. “Colonial Lifestyles.” In For the Record: A Documentary History of America.. 5th ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2013. 44-81.