A Connecticut Yankee in King Author's Court by Mark Twain
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain This is among the most famous of Mark Twain's ahistorical comedies....
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A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain
This is among the most famous of Mark Twain's ahistorical comedies. Its been made into movies, plays , graphic novels, cartoons, ect. However, none of these revisions bear any semblance to the book. One day a Connecticut Yankee manager gets in a fight with one of his workers. He gets punched by his worker and wakes up in Medieval England. On the surface, this book is a critique to the evils of medieval times. However, most of his details are exaggerated or made up. If you look closely, this is Mark Twain's equivalent to uncle Tom's Cabin.
By now, Mark Twain was familiar with the book. Like any Northerner, Mark Twain hated the guts of the Southerner. The Southerners are not show in a positive light in any of his books. As for this satire, the main theme is the abolition of slavery. Around the middle of the book, the Yankee and the King dress up as commoners. They got bored of court life and they did not have any knights nearby. A slaver group passed by and enslaved them. Since they could not prove their ranks they were screwed.
It seems that it was a common practice in the South that any black man was considered a slave. If he did not have any papers on him, they where captured and sold as slaved. Kinda like what's happening now to the Latinos in the South. It was a pretty common practice. This book also shows skepticism about the abolitionist success in the South. Though the blacks had recently become freed, they still considered the white southerners their masters. It is hard to take the slavery from the slaves. If you think about it, it was not until the 1960s that the blacks threw Jim Crow out the window. In any case, Mark Twain's deep satire of the south deserves 5 star rating.
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