Connection To Historical Events
The idea behind In the Time of the Butterflies originated in the 1960s when author Julia Alvarez was in the Dominican Republic. The Mirabal sisters had been murdered just three months after their father got involved with the underground against Trujillo.
A motif of the novel is the ruinous effect that dictatorship can have on a nation and its citizens, emotionally and physically. Over his 30-year reign, Trujillo killed 50,000 Haitians and Dominicans. One of the focuses of the novel was his agenda to kill or eliminate blacks who occupy one-third of the Island of Hispanola, or Haiti, while the Dominican Republic, which occupies two-thirds of the area of Hispanola, contains a population of 75% mixed background.
Read more about this topic: In The Time Of The Butterflies
Famous quotes containing the words connection to, connection, historical and/or events:
“One must always maintain one’s connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it. To remain in touch with the past requires a love of memory. To remain in touch with the past requires a constant imaginative effort.”
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“After so many historical illustrations of the evil effects of abandoning the policy of protection for that of a revenue tariff, we are again confronted by the suggestion that the principle of protection shall be eliminated from our tariff legislation. Have we not had enough of such experiments?”
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“The prime lesson the social sciences can learn from the natural sciences is just this: that it is necessary to press on to find the positive conditions under which desired events take place, and that these can be just as scientifically investigated as can instances of negative correlation. This problem is beyond relativity.”
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