slavery
gregladen | July 5, 2015As part of the current discussion of the use of the Concrete Flag to express one's Free Asshatitute, in particular in relation to a volunteer firefighter who stuck one of the flags on the fire truck turing the Independence Day Parade in a small community in Outstate Minnesota, I saw someone state that there were more slaves in the North than in the South.
Specifically, the individual, commenting on a the flag story on a local news site, said:
Now, this particular joker was trying to say that there were lots of white people who "may as well have been slaves" in the North, or words to that…
aardvarchaeology | June 10, 2013British Archaeology #131 (July/August) has a feature by Pippa Bradley that caught my interest. It's about a Wessex Archaeology dig in 2004-05 at Cliffs End farm in Thanet, a piece of north-east Kent that was an island up until the 16th century when silting finished connecting it to mainland England. What we're dealing with here is ritual murder, some pretty strange disposal of the dead and ancient Scandinavian migrants.
Use of the site begins in earnest with six ring-ditch barrows during the Early Bronze Age (2200-1500 cal BC). These were poorly preserved and yielded few interesting finds.…
gregladen | April 6, 2013Why was the Civil War fought?
This is "Confederate Heritage and History Month" so it is a good time to talk about the Civil War. The Civil War was fought over slavery. I don't have anything else to say about that right now, but my friend John McKay has written a lengthy blog post explaining this. Have a look: It's Treason Appreciation Month
gregladen | January 25, 2011And yes, Michele...
the Civil War was indeed fought to end slavery.
Your average teabagger probably thinks that the American Civil War was not fought to end slavery. I'm guessing that they subscribe to one of those revisionist versions of American History in which the Civil War was about something else and slavery had nothing to do with it. That idea always perplexed me until now. Now, because of comments made by Michele Bachmann last week I understand that they don't link the Civil War to slavery because they think that the institution of slavery was ended by the Founding Fathers.
Lat…
grrlscientist | June 16, 2010tags: Black Market Soccer, sports, soccer, futbol, World Cup Soccer, human trafficking, slavery, documentary, investigative reporting, television, streaming video
Sadly, slavery is not dead after all. This video shows a scene from the documentary "Soccer's Lost Boys." In this video, correspondent Mariana van Zeller goes undercover to explore the last, desperate hope of young West African players living illegally in Paris: a pick-up game with sketchy middle-men who try to sell the players to outside agents.
The reason that FIFA, the governing body of the sport, has decided to hold the World…
grrlscientist | April 6, 2010tags: How to Combat Modern Slavery, philosophy, morality, ethics, behavior, poverty, culture, slavery, human rights, human values, Kevin Bales, TEDTalks, streaming video
In this moving yet pragmatic talk, Kevin Bales explains the business of modern slavery, a multibillion-dollar economy that underpins some of the worst industries on earth. He shares stats and personal stories from his on-the-ground research -- and names the price of freeing every slave on earth right now.
Kevin Bales is the co-founder of Free the Slaves, whose mission is to end all forms of human slavery within the next 25…
thusspakezuska | February 23, 2010How did you celebrate George Washington's birthday this year? You didn't do anything? Well, it's not too late. Pour yourself a nice hot cup of coffee or tea, and sit down to read a pair of fascinating articles published this past Sunday and Monday in the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Hercules: Master of cuisine, slave of Washington
A birthday shock from Washington's chef
If you don't already know - and why would you, this stuff isn't in our history books - Hercules was a great chef, and one of nine slaves Washington kept at the first White House in Philadelphia. The history of slavery in the…
grrlscientist | February 5, 2010tags: A Brief History of the United States of America, humor, funny,comedy, African-Americans, Black Americans, guns, KKK, Ku Klux Klan, NRA, National Rifle Association, racism, streaming video
This video explains the intimate relationship between guns, freedom and racism. Yes, I know there are exceptions to this guns-freedom-racism link, but I grew up among morons like this, and I couldn't escape from their festering hatred fast enough.
terrasig | March 28, 2009
Dr John Hope Franklin was a 1935 A.B. graduate of Fisk University in Nashville, TN, then earned his M.A. (1936) and Ph.D. (1939) from Harvard University. [For reference, W.E.B. DuBois also graduated from Fisk (1888) and was the first Black to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard (1895).] Franklin's doctoral dissertation, The Free Negro in North Carolina, 1790-1860, planted the seed for his classic 1947 work, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans (subtitle later changed to "A History of African-Americans"). This book, now in its eighth edition, was written originally during his four-…