Question

How do the historical details in this passage support the authors' claim?

The text includes parts of primary-source interviews with enslaved people to illustrate the difficulty of life on a sugar plantation in Louisiana.
The text includes a secondary source to explain why the enslaved people on sugar plantations worked seven days each week.
The text includes primary-source quotations to show that religious beliefs eased the lives of enslaved people on sugar plantations.
The text uses secondary sources to describe working conditions in the sugar fields on the plantations across the American South.

Answer 1

The first two details support the authors’ claim most directly; the last two do not.

- Primary-source interviews with enslaved people (detail 1) bolster the claim because firsthand testimony supplies concrete, eyewitness evidence of harsh daily conditions.
- A secondary source explaining why enslaved people worked seven days a week (detail 2) supports the claim by giving structural/contextual reasons for the extreme labor demands.

- Primary-source quotations about religion easing life (detail 3) do not support the claim that life was hard; they complicate it by showing coping strategies rather than documenting the severity of conditions.
- Using secondary sources about plantations “across the American South” (detail 4) is weaker support for a claim focused on Louisiana sugar plantations: it may overgeneralize regional conditions and so does not directly prove the specific hardships on Louisiana sugar estates.