Racial and Ethnic "Jokes"
Prudence included in her scrapbook a number of "jokes" that mine humor from stereotypes about African Americans and Irish immigrants. In these clippings Irish people are usually identified as such and the jokes, predictably, are about drunkenness. African Americans, on the other hand, are sometimes identified explicitly by race, but in other cases the reader is expected to infer the character's race from dialect clues or from names like "Moses" or "Plato." These stories rely for their "humor" on stereotypes about African Americans' supposed gullibility or dishonesty.
According to Michael Hill's history of the Person Place, Prudence's father Thomas A. Person owned 28 slaves in 1864; while many of these enslaved persons left Louisburg after emancipation, a few stayed with the family as paid servants. Considering her family's participation in the institution of slavery, it is notable that Prudence's scrapbook contains no articles or commentaries about the effects of emancipation, the freedmen's movement, or the lives of African Americans after the Civil War.
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