If you buy this wonderful book your life will improve immeasurably. This is not a money back guarantee.
It has photographs in it that I took. Seems like lots of fun to me. Doesn’t it seem like fun?
Why not buy it?
For yourself
Or a friend.
You should definitely buy it.
If you buy this wonderful book your life will improve immeasurably. This is not a money back guarantee.
It has photographs in it that I took. Seems like lots of fun to me. Doesn’t it seem like fun?
Why not buy it?
For yourself
Or a friend.
You should definitely buy it.
It has photographs in it that I took. Seems like lots of fun to me. Doesn’t it seem like fun?
Why not buy it?
For yourself
Or a friend.
You should definitely buy it.
But if you cannot bear to part with money then please enjoy this freed pdf version.
CLICK ON THIS LINK TO GET IT: black/white
I went for a walk and I took these pictures on my walk.
Click the flag.
I went to the Pentagon last night and this is what I saw.
What if The Matrix, and other classic Hollywood movies had been made in Africa? This is what they’d look like.
Hmmm. Thoughts. Having thoughts.
What if The Matrix, and other classic Hollywood movies had been made in Africa? This is what they’d look like.
Hmmm. Thoughts. Having thoughts.
Out and About (2013)
Out and About (2013)
So it would apppear that I’ve done quite a lot of these.
Here they all are together.
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So it would apppear that I’ve done quite a lot of these.
Here they all are together.
This slideshow requires JavaScript.
So it would appear that I’ve done quite a lot of these.
Here they all are together.
At the end of the 18th century, slavery in the United States was a declining institution. Tobacco planters in Virginia and Maryland had exhausted their soil and were switching to wheat. Wage labor was increasingly replacing slave labor in both the urban and the rural areas of the upper South.
And then came cotton.
The first part of the story is well known: the invention of the cotton gin in the 1790s and the concomitant rise of industrial capacity in Britain and the urban North made possible the profitable cultivation of cotton in a vast region of the lower South (Native land), one that stretched from South Carolina to Louisiana, which came to be called the “Cotton Kingdom.”
Between 1803 and 1838, the United States, most famously personified by Andrew Jackson, fought a multifront war in the Deep South. In those years, the United States suppressed slave revolts and pacified whites still loyal to the European powers that had once controlled the region. These wars culminated in the ethnic cleansing of the Deep South. By the end of the 1830s, the Seminole, the Creek, the Chickasaw, the Choctaw and the Cherokee had all been “removed” to lands west of the Mississippi. Their expropriated land provided the foundation of the leading sector of the global economy in the first half of the 19th century.
In the 1830s, hundreds of millions of acres of conquered land were surveyed and put up for sale by the United States. This vast privatization of the public domain touched off one of the greatest economic booms in the history of the world up to that time. Investment capital from Britain, the Continent and the Northern states poured into the land market. “Under this stimulating process, prices rose like smoke,” the journalist Joseph Baldwin wrote in his memoir, “The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi.”
Without slavery, however, the survey maps of the General Land Office would have remained a sort of science-fiction plan for a society that could never happen. Between 1820 and 1860 more than a million enslaved people were transported from the upper to the lower South, the vast majority by the venture-capitalist slave traders the slaves called “soul drivers.” The first wave cleared the region for cultivation. “Forests were literally dragged out by the roots,” the former slave John Parker remembered in “His Promised Land.” Those who followed planted the fields in cotton, which they then protected, picked, packed and shipped — from “sunup to sundown” every day for the rest of their lives.
Eighty-five percent of the cotton Southern slaves picked was shipped to Britain. The mills that have come to symbolize the Industrial Revolution and the slave-tilled fields of the South were mutually dependent. Every year, British merchant banks advanced millions of pounds to American planters in anticipation of the sale of the cotton crop. Planters then traded credit in pounds for the goods they needed to get through the year, many of them produced in the North. “From the rattle with which the nurse tickles the ear of the child born in the South, to the shroud that covers the cold form of the dead, everything comes to us from the North,” said one Southerner.
As slaveholders supplied themselves (and, much more meanly, their slaves) with Northern goods, the credit originally advanced against cotton made its way north, into the hands of New York and New England merchants who used it to purchase British goods. Thus were Indian land, African-American labor, Atlantic finance and British industry synthesized into racial domination, profit and economic development on a national and a global scale.When the cotton crop came in short and sales failed to meet advanced payments, planters found themselves indebted to merchants and bankers. Slaves were sold to make up the difference. The mobility and salability of slaves meant they functioned as the primary form of collateral in the credit-and-cotton economy of the 19th century.
It is not simply that the labor of enslaved people underwrote 19th-century capitalism. Enslaved people were the capital: four million people worth at least $3 billion in 1860, which was more than all the capital invested in railroads and factories in the United States combined. Seen in this light, the conventional distinction between slavery and capitalism fades into meaninglessness.
We are accustomed to reckoning the legacy of slavery in the United States in terms of black disadvantage. The centrality of slavery to the nation’s economic development, however, suggests that any calculation of the nation’s unpaid debt for slavery must include a measure of the wealth it produced, of advantage as well as disadvantage. The United States, as W. E. B. Du Bois wrote, was “built upon a groan.” (via New York Times)
Capitalism as Slavery. Slavery as Capitalism.
At the end of the 18th century, slavery in the United States was a declining institution. Tobacco planters in Virginia and Maryland had exhausted their soil and were switching to wheat. Wage labor was increasingly replacing slave labor in both the urban and the rural areas of the upper South.
And then came cotton.
The first part of the story is well known: the invention of the cotton gin in the 1790s and the concomitant rise of industrial capacity in Britain and the urban North made possible the profitable cultivation of cotton in a vast region of the lower South (Native land), one that stretched from South Carolina to Louisiana, which came to be called the “Cotton Kingdom.”
Between 1803 and 1838, the United States, most famously personified by Andrew Jackson, fought a multifront war in the Deep South. In those years, the United States suppressed slave revolts and pacified whites still loyal to the European powers that had once controlled the region. These wars culminated in the ethnic cleansing of the Deep South. By the end of the 1830s, the Seminole, the Creek, the Chickasaw, the Choctaw and the Cherokee had all been “removed” to lands west of the Mississippi. Their expropriated land provided the foundation of the leading sector of the global economy in the first half of the 19th century.
In the 1830s, hundreds of millions of acres of conquered land were surveyed and put up for sale by the United States. This vast privatization of the public domain touched off one of the greatest economic booms in the history of the world up to that time. Investment capital from Britain, the Continent and the Northern states poured into the land market. “Under this stimulating process, prices rose like smoke,” the journalist Joseph Baldwin wrote in his memoir, “The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi.”
Without slavery, however, the survey maps of the General Land Office would have remained a sort of science-fiction plan for a society that could never happen. Between 1820 and 1860 more than a million enslaved people were transported from the upper to the lower South, the vast majority by the venture-capitalist slave traders the slaves called “soul drivers.” The first wave cleared the region for cultivation. “Forests were literally dragged out by the roots,” the former slave John Parker remembered in “His Promised Land.” Those who followed planted the fields in cotton, which they then protected, picked, packed and shipped — from “sunup to sundown” every day for the rest of their lives.
Eighty-five percent of the cotton Southern slaves picked was shipped to Britain. The mills that have come to symbolize the Industrial Revolution and the slave-tilled fields of the South were mutually dependent. Every year, British merchant banks advanced millions of pounds to American planters in anticipation of the sale of the cotton crop. Planters then traded credit in pounds for the goods they needed to get through the year, many of them produced in the North. “From the rattle with which the nurse tickles the ear of the child born in the South, to the shroud that covers the cold form of the dead, everything comes to us from the North,” said one Southerner.
As slaveholders supplied themselves (and, much more meanly, their slaves) with Northern goods, the credit originally advanced against cotton made its way north, into the hands of New York and New England merchants who used it to purchase British goods. Thus were Indian land, African-American labor, Atlantic finance and British industry synthesized into racial domination, profit and economic development on a national and a global scale.When the cotton crop came in short and sales failed to meet advanced payments, planters found themselves indebted to merchants and bankers. Slaves were sold to make up the difference. The mobility and salability of slaves meant they functioned as the primary form of collateral in the credit-and-cotton economy of the 19th century.
It is not simply that the labor of enslaved people underwrote 19th-century capitalism. Enslaved people were the capital: four million people worth at least $3 billion in 1860, which was more than all the capital invested in railroads and factories in the United States combined. Seen in this light, the conventional distinction between slavery and capitalism fades into meaninglessness.
We are accustomed to reckoning the legacy of slavery in the United States in terms of black disadvantage. The centrality of slavery to the nation’s economic development, however, suggests that any calculation of the nation’s unpaid debt for slavery must include a measure of the wealth it produced, of advantage as well as disadvantage. The United States, as W. E. B. Du Bois wrote, was “built upon a groan.” (via New York Times)
Capitalism as Slavery. Slavery as Capitalism.
Once again proving that weekend tent forts and the accidental misspellings of children are the best things in the world.
A Memory of Happier Times Part III
This lovely set of photographs is confused somewhat only by the salacious and entirely unrepresentative name of the person who posted it. I will not ruin the surprise by telling you the name here. Click on the link and enjoy for yourself.
This is what I experienced on my journey into Washington DC on the day of The Inauguration of President Barack Obama.
In the great moments of history there is always a place where nothing much is happening.
Washington Today.
Washington Today.
10 Pictures a day: VII
10 Pictures a day: VII
10 Pictures a Day: V
10 Pictures a Day: V
10 Pictures a Day: IV
10 Pictures a Day: IV
10 Pictures a Day: I
10 Pictures a Day: I
Happy Birthday from your Stalker.
I know it’s your birthday today
But I know you don’t want me to call
So I took your last text message you sent me
And changed the meaning so all
The lines are opposite:
Thank you for your gift
It was very thoughtful.
It all turned out just as you hoped
I want us to be together forever
It was the perfect gift at the perfect time
I’m so alone without you
Please keep sending me love letters.
Happy Birthday
I didn’t mean to turn love into
Stalking.
Happy Birthday from your Stalker.
I know it’s your birthday today
But I know you don’t want me to call
So I took your last text message you sent me
And changed the meaning so all
The lines are opposite:
Thank you for your gift
It was very thoughtful.
It all turned out just as you hoped
I want us to be together forever
It was the perfect gift at the perfect time
I’m so alone without you
Please keep sending me love letters.
Happy Birthday
I didn’t mean to turn love into
Stalking.
DOOR TO ANOTHER DEMENTION.
Once again proving that weekend tent forts and the accidental misspellings of children are the best things in the world.
DOOR TO ANOTHER DEMENTION.
Once again proving that weekend tent forts and the accidental misspellings of children are the best things in the world.
The SleepCoat League Presents: 