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January 13 - February 8, 2020
Sad
The Taino were removed from the face of the earth, though recent research hints that their DNA may survive, invisibly, in Dominicans who have African or European features, genetic strands from different continents entangled, coded legacies of the Columbian Exchange.
Read an article about this in National Geographic
American trees are helping to bring the rains.
Worth noting, especially were droughts are a problem.
Data are sketchy and incomplete, but according to the Brandeis University historian David Hackett Fischer about 60 percent of the first wave of English emigrants came from nine eastern and southeastern counties—the nation’s Plasmodium belt.
These emigrants brought malaria and other maladies to North America. And today, their descendants judge immigrants as dangerous!!!
But in many respects the nation’s turn to bondage is baffling—the institution has so many inherent problems that economists have often puzzled over why it exists. More baffling still is the form that bondage took in the Americas: chattel slavery, a regime much harsher than anything seen before in Europe or Africa.
A huge stain, still not widely acknowledged.
Slavery, in his view, was largely the irrational product of humankind’s “love to domineer.”
Logical
A particular worry was education; echoing many in British Guiana, Booker president Josiah Booker denounced the notion of teaching his company’s employees to read because it would encourage them to aspire “far above their station in life.” Wrong ideas in the wrong people’s hands could put the elites’ political power at risk.
This mentality still exist today. Education for all would push powerful elites out of their comfort zone.
extractive states.
Immoral
one highlighted in economics textbooks, where private markets allow both sides to gain economically, and one that rarely appears in those textbooks, in which trade is a tool of statecraft, the goal is political power, and both sides usually do not win.
Why a trade war is more about pleasing base than actual benefits for the countries involved.
practice, the picture is complicated by business’s attempts to manipulate government for their own ends, often to the detriment of state policies, and by groups within the state that use power for private gain.
Still common enough today.
MALTHUSIAN INTERLUDE
Slogans, ever present in Maoist China, explained how to do it: Move Hills, Fill Gullies and Create Plains! Destroy Forests, Open Wastelands!
A nightmare caused by ignorance.
The cause of the flooding—deforestation in the Loess Plateau—was well understood.
Why we need to keep trees.
Which made it all the more incredible when Mao Zedong ordered more land clearing in the Loess Plateau.
His lack of knowledge caused a devastating famine.
“Tens of millions of people being forced to work night and day, most of it on projects that a child could have seen were a terrible stupidity. Cutting down trees and planting grain on steep slopes—how could that be a good idea?”
I agree.
batata, the Taino name for sweet potato (and the source of its scientific name, Ipomoea batatas).
Been reading about the Taino people recently. They could haveeducated the explorers how to adapt to the land instead of destroying it.
To manage water and control erosion, Andean peoples built more than a million acres of agricultural terraces. Carved like stairsteps into the hills, the Spanish voyager Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa marveled in 1572, were “terraces of 200 paces more or less, and 20 to 30 wide, faced with masonry, and filled with earth, much of it brought from a distance. We call them andenes” (platforms)—a term that may have given its name to the Andes. (Fifteenth-century Indians used more appropriate methods than those ordered by Mao in the twentieth century, and had much better results.)
They deserved admiration for finding creative ways to adapt to their environment
In many places raised fields were not possible and so Indians constructed smaller wacho or wachu (ridges), parallel crests of turned-up earth perhaps two feet wide, separated by shallow furrows of equal size.
Looked this up for a visual. Impressive.
When one field was done, villagers moved to the next, until everyone’s fields were ready—a tradition of collective work that is a hallmark of Andean societies.
Ingenious people.
In England, farmers denounced S. tuberosum as an advance scout for hated Roman Catholicism. “No Potatoes, No Popery!” was an election slogan in 1765.
Say what!!!!!
THE GUANO AGE
Bone dealers supplied the factories from increasingly untoward sources, including the recent battlefields of Waterloo and Austerlitz. “It is now ascertained beyond a doubt, by actual experiment upon an extensive scale, that a dead soldier is a most valuable article of commerce,”
Oh my!
They were apoplectic as Peru’s guano barons sauntered around Lima in the latest Parisian fashions, bejeweled trollops on their arms.
Mind blowing.
THOROUGHLY MODERN FAMINE
(It is worth noting that the Andes did not have such widespread potato epidemics.)
Proves that change is not always an improvement.
“Secondary pests,” insects that previously were controlled by some of the species killed off by insecticides, also profit. Here, too, industry has a solution: more pesticides.
Similar to the drug industry.
The crash was inevitable.
peach palm
Because caucheiros killed
Julio César Arana.
Well deserve end of life.
Arana’s empire disintegrated. He died penniless in 1952.*
Karma
More
For Ford, the next
As the surviving attackers
BAD BEGINNINGS
NEW WORLD BORN
Under the law, Indian Christians were entitled after baptism to be treated exactly like Spanish Christians, who could not be enslaved. But colonists argued the contrary; Indians were, in effect, less human than Europeans, and thus could be forced to work even after they converted.
These people were mentally challenged.
It marked the arrival of the Atlantic slave trade.
A shameful part of history.
FAMILY VALUES
Indo-European women were not allowed to wear Indian clothes. Afro-European women were not allowed to wear Spanish-style gold jewelry or the elegant embroidered cloaks called mantas. And so on—scores of petty regulations, issued in uncoordinated bouts of malice and anxiety, a quibbling, bureaucratic assault by Spain against its unruly offspring.
So, they did not like the results of their tyranny.
SHOOK-UP CITY
Everything changed when Mirra was seven. Portuguese pirates seized a
Known collectively as chinos, Asian migrants spread slowly along the silver highway from Acapulco to Mexico City, Puebla, and Veracruz. Indeed, the road was patrolled by them—Japanese samurai perhaps in particular.
In Acapulco?
talavera ware,
Chinese imitation of a Chinese-made Mexican imitation of a Chinese original.
Karma
About two hundred chino barbers set up shop in the Plaza Mayor, treating maladies with a combination of Eastern and Western techniques: cauterization and acupuncture, bloodletting and Chinese herbal medicine. Wealthy women flocked to their kiosks.
Makes Mexico’s history all the more interesting.
Forest of Fugitives
American history is often described in terms of Europeans entering a nearly empty wilderness. For centuries, though, most of the newcomers were African and the land was not empty, but filled with millions of indigenous people. Much of the great encounter between the two separate halves of the world thus was less a meeting of Europe and America than a meeting of Africans and Indians—a relationship forged both in the cage of slavery and in the uprisings against it. Largely conducted out of sight of Europeans, the complex interplay between red and black is a hidden history that researchers are
...more
This will rewrite most history books.
Kings and emperors who wanted to enrich themselves thus didn’t think in terms of occupying land but of controlling people. Napoleon sent his army to seize Egypt. An African Napoleon would have sent his army to seize Egyptians.
That’s disturbing.
In their hunger for labor, European
