History in The United States
In the 1860s, a style similar to the Afro was worn by the Circassian beauties, sometimes known as "Moss-haired girls", a group of women exhibited in sideshow attractions in the United States by P. T. Barnum and others. These women were claimed to be from the Circassian people in the Northern Caucasus region, and were marketed to white audiences captivated by the "exotic East" as pure examples of the Caucasian white race who were kept as sexual slaves in Turkish harems. It has been argued that this portrayal of a white woman as a rescued slave during the American Civil War played on the racial connotations of slavery at the time so that the distinctive hairstyle affiliates the side-show white Circassian with African American identity, and thus:
resonates oddly yet resoundingly with the rest of her identifying significations: her racial purity, her sexual enslavement, her position as colonial subject; her beauty. The Circassian blended elements of white Victorian True Womanhood with traits of the enslaved African American woman in one curiosity.
Read more about this topic: Afro
Famous quotes containing the words united states, history, united and/or states:
“In the United States, though power corrupts, the expectation of power paralyzes.”
—John Kenneth Galbraith (b. 1908)
“The basic idea which runs right through modern history and modern liberalism is that the public has got to be marginalized. The general public are viewed as no more than ignorant and meddlesome outsiders, a bewildered herd.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)
“In no other country in the world is the love of property keener or more alert than in the United States, and nowhere else does the majority display less inclination toward doctrines which in any way threaten the way property is owned.”
—Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859)
“The Constitution of the United States is not a mere lawyers’ document. It is a vehicle of life, and its spirit is always the spirit of the age. Its prescriptions are clear and we know what they are ... but life is always your last and most authoritative critic.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)