Pinboard (jerryking)
https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/public/
recent bookmarks from jerrykingHow George Brown helped create Canada in spite of himself - The Globe and Mail2024-01-08T05:01:16+00:00
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-a-nations-paper-george-brown-confederation/
jerrykingabolitionists ahead_of_the_curve Confederation forethought forward_looking futurists George_Brown George-Étienne_Cartier Globe_&_Mail history John_Ibbitson journalists money-making nation_builders newspapers politicians prison_reform Sir_John_A._MacDonald technology reconciliation rivalrieshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:ae3914007788/Never Missed An Opportunity To Miss An Opportunity2023-10-16T04:51:28+00:00
http://alonben-meir.com/writing/never-missed-an-opportunity-to-miss-an-opportunity/
jerryking>Abba Eban,, once remarked that the Palestinians "never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity" to >>seize on historic opportunities<< for ending their conflict with Israel. In 1947 they rejected, with the support of the Arab States, the United Nations' Partition plan that would have established a Palestinian state. Subsequently, up till 1967, the Palestinians categorically rejected every Israeli peace offer. Following the Six Day War of 1967, >>Golda Meir<<, then Israel's Prime Minister, offered to return virtually all the territories Israel had just captured in exchange for peace. The Palestinians and Arab States answered with the famous three no's–no recognition, no negotiation, and no peace. In 1979, the Palestinians declined a joint Egyptian and Israeli invitation to join the peace negotiations at >>Camp David<<, which if they accepted, could have led to >>self-rule<< and then to an independent state. In the Summer of 2000, the PA turned down the historic offer by former Prime Minster >>Barak<< and President Clinton at Camp David. If >>Mr. Arafat<< had accepted, we would have seen the beginnings of a thriving Palestinian state spanning all of Gaza and 97% of the West Bank. Not only did the PA turn down the offer, it unleashed the second Intifadah that has left the infrastructure and cities of the Palestinians in ruin.
This overarching pattern of rejecting off-hand any offer that could lead to a permanent peace confirms the belief of many Israelis that the Palestinian leadership has never accepted the principle of two states living side-by-side. The vehemence of the rejection of Sharon's plan and the rationale behind it speak volumes about the PA's real intentions, especially in regards to its demand of the "right of return."
]]>history Israel Mideast_peace missed_opportunities Palestinians Palestinian_Authority Ariel_Sharon Arab-Muslim_world seizing_opportunities Six-Day_War Abba_Eban Camp_David_accords Ehud_Barak Golda_Meir self-rule Yasser_Arafat two-statehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:564fc65daaf0/OLD TORONTO2023-08-28T15:01:31+00:00
https://www.oldtorontoseries.com/?fbclid=IwAR2HjfJw4jje0GKYgOe0tIDsSwVyhQugtyIaG6n_gIb8_6TpVSHRsCffQoo
jerrykingFacebook history nostalgia Torontohttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:67341316fe15/Opinion | Using Frederick Douglass to Rationalize Slavery? In Florida, Yes!2023-08-17T16:07:23+00:00
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/16/opinion/florida-prager-slavery-frederick-douglass.html?action=click&module=Well&pgtype=Homepage§ion=Opinion%20Columnists
jerrykingCharles_Blow education Florida Frederick_Douglass indoctrination public_education public_schools rationalizations slavery history propaganda Ron_DeSantishttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:11534aaafd62/Opinion | Ron DeSantis and the State Where History Goes to Die - The New York Times2023-07-31T00:47:52+00:00
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/28/opinion/desantis-slavery-florida-curriculum-history.html
jerrykingeducation politics racism Florida history Ron_DeSantishttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:7ff1bd8fc550/Industrial Revolution iron method ‘was taken from Jamaica by Briton’ | Science | The Guardian2023-07-24T17:44:12+00:00
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/jul/05/industrial-revolution-iron-method-taken-from-jamaica-briton
jerrykingeconomic_history England history history_of_technology industrialists industrial_espionage Industrial_Revolution inflection_points intellectual_property Jamaica jump-start know-how manufacturers metallurgy narratives predatory_practices private_records slave_holders slavery tacit_knowledge United_Kingdom colonialism innovationhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:82ff11d4ccee/Opinion | The History Behind Debates Around Affirmative Action2023-06-07T19:28:59+00:00
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/07/opinion/resistance-black-advancement-affirmative-action.html
jerrykingaffirmative_action African-Americans history Randall_Kennedyhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:692792923766/Opinion | There Is a Reason Ron DeSantis Wants History Told a Certain Way - The New York Times2023-05-21T22:30:03+00:00
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/20/opinion/desantis-history-education.html?action=click&module=Well&pgtype=Homepage§ion=Opinion%20Columnists
jerrykinghistory Lost_Cause Ron_DeSantishttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:f5dd8f3880c0/Opinion | Tucker Carlson, ‘White Men’ and the Lynch Mob Mentality2023-05-04T13:33:50+00:00
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/03/opinion/tucker-carlson-mob-mentality.html
jerrykingCharles_Blow Fox lynchings power_relations Tucker_Carlson white_men white_supremacy extrajudicial_killings history herd_behaviour mob_justicehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:5b016b604be2/‘Spying on the Reich’ Review: Reading Hitler’s Mind - WSJ Part II2023-04-22T20:43:03+00:00
https://notes.pinboard.in/u:jerryking/215c6ae63501616b6578
jerryking>codebreakers<< at >>Bletchley Park<< asserted that recovering th...]]>'30s Bletchley_Park books book_review codebreaking Czechoslovakia economic_data France Germany history intelligence-gathering intelligence_analysts intelligence_failures interwar_years national_interests Nazis open_source Poland political_manipulation prewar security_&_intelligence sigint United_Kingdom Weimar_Republic WWIIhttps://notes.pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:305284092f13/‘Spying on the Reich’ Review: Reading Hitler’s Mind - WSJ2023-04-22T09:02:56+00:00
https://www.wsj.com/articles/spying-on-the-reich-book-review-reading-hitlers-mind-6445464b?mod=hp_user_preferences_pos2#cxrecs_s
jerryking>For intelligence agencies in Britain and other European countries, uncovering Nazi plans meant penetrating one man’s intentions.<<
Review of "Spying on the Reich: The Cold War Against Hitler" by R.T. Howard.
Struggling to divine Germany’s intentions in the midst of the Sudeten crisis in 1938, the British ambassador in Berlin, Nevile Henderson, put his finger on the fundamental point that had flummoxed conventional >>intelligence-gathering<< efforts against the >>Nazi government<<. “It is impossible to know anything for certain,” he reported to London, “in a regime where all depends on the will of a single individual whom one does not see.” The terrifying repressions of a total police state made the most innocuous efforts at penetrating the German regime’s secrets arduous and dangerous; no one seemed to know for certain who Hitler’s chief advisers were; and even those intimates were frequently caught off guard by the führer’s last-minute changes of mind, guided as much by instinct and temperament as any rational calculation. His decision to reoccupy the Rhineland in 1936 was made just two weeks before issuing the order to march. “We needed the secrets of a country,” recalled Czechoslovakia’s spy chief, “where people spoke in whispers.”
In early 1939, as the world stood on the brink of war, British intelligence officials were deluged by so many contradictory rumors—Hitler was merely bluffing; Hitler would attack the East first; Hitler would begin the war within two weeks in a barrage of bombs and poison gas on London—that Britain’s chief of naval intelligence, Adm. John Godfrey, observed, “Whatever happened, someone could say ‘I told you so.’ ”
R.T. Howard’s “Spying on the Reich” examines >>prewar<< intelligence efforts against Germany by Britain, France, Czechoslovakia, Poland and other of Hitler’s victims, and the puzzles it presents will no doubt seem familiar to today’s intelligence officials, who similarly struggle to penetrate the intentions of one-man regimes in Russia and North Korea. Though many of the spy stories Mr. Howard recounts are well known, he >>perceptively<< frames them as case studies that illuminate enduring dilemmas in >>intelligence gathering<<, >>intelligence analysis<<, and the employment of intelligence by governments. As he shows, successful intelligence operations are built as much on imagination, tolerance for ambiguity and a finely honed understanding of bureaucratic warfare as they are on derring-do.
A journalist by training, Mr. Howard is especially good at bringing out the complex, shifting and mutually suspicious relationships that kept the allies who would find themselves fighting Hitler from effectively **pooling resources** and sharing intelligence. Such conflicts also complicated cooperation among competing intelligence services within individual nations, Britain most notably. Mr. Howard’s decision to write exclusively on the >>prewar era<<—and not the war itself—brings the contingency of history front and center. The catastrophe of World War II and the Holocaust makes it easy for a reader today to regard earlier **failures** to unite and confront Hitler as incomprehensible, or at least tragic, blundering. “Spying on the Reich” makes clear this was business as usual in the tangled affairs of nations trying to balance >>national interests<< amid a web of uncertain future possibilities.
The author places the problems of intelligence against a finely wrought tapestry of competing diplomatic challenges. Britain, worried more about Bolshevism than a rearmed Germany, persisted into the 1930s in spending most of its limited intelligence budget targeting the Soviet Union. The French, worried about British undercover skulduggery in its North African colonies as late as the spring of 1938, invested considerable effort monitoring the operations of the “notoriously anti-French” and “very dangerous” British intelligence services. The Poles, who as the historian James Stokesbury observed, hated the Russians more than they feared the Germans, also loathed the Czech government and made no secret of their designs on pieces of Czech territory. The British, meanwhile, distrusted the Czech secret service because of Prague’s growing ties with Moscow. Holland and Denmark, both well positioned to collect intelligence on the Nazi regime, were hesitant to compromise the neutrality that they believed would protect them. Their governments also had complex economic and political ties to Germany. Some German manufacturers of armaments, for instance, had relocated to evade the constraints of the Versailles Treaty; most notably, the Fokker aircraft company set up in Holland.
In the 1920s and 1930s, the intelligence services of the two major western powers were well behind the game in trying to assess the secretly growing military might of Germany. Until 1927, monitoring of Germany’s armaments production and military establishment was in the hands of the Inter-Allied Military Commission, set up by the Versailles Treaty to oversee German disarmament. Its military experts understood armies and weapons but were innocents about >>deception<< and intelligence, and they were easily hoodwinked. German factory managers, often tipped off about impending inspections, were adept at concealing evidence of illicit arms production from the commission. On other occasions, inspectors were sent off on wild goose chases by deliberately planted false leads (such as baby carriages that could be assembled into machine guns).
The legendary parsimoniousness of the British did not help their spies, according to Mr. Howard: The undersecretary of the Foreign Office recalled having to work his boss “into his best mood” before presenting the intelligence budget for approval. (He would then invariably “pause, sign, and sigh.”) Into this void some of the best intelligence came from >>open sources<< and from military attachés posted to the embassy in Berlin—men whose job, as the historian Wesley Wark notes, was “no less than to acquire intelligence without employing the methods of espionage.” Important intelligence coups came from careful reading of published documents and other >>publicly available<< sources [i.e. = "public data"/"public information"]. Budgets and >>economic data<< were particularly revealing: Prices of commodities like copper, zinc, lead and tin, as well as the stock prices of German firms that imported them, proved an accurate measure of the pace of rearmament [i.e. = "proxies"]; housing shortages in a small town near the Junkers aeroengine plant revealed that the factory had suddenly gone to three shifts, a pace of production far in excess of the demands of civil aviation [i.e. = "discrepancies"/"proxies"].
The secrecy of intelligence created its own problems. For one thing, as Mr. Howard observes, it was all too easy for politicians to simply dismiss or cover up information they did not like. Few British politicians in the early 1930s wanted to buck public sentiment against rearmament; far easier to keep under wraps any secret evidence that counselled otherwise. For the same reason, intelligence was extremely vulnerable to >>political manipulation<< intended to sway allies or public opinion. The French intelligence service, seeking either to justify larger military budgets or counteract British diplomatic moves to ease the Versailles limits on Germany, regularly exaggerated the state of German rearmament and military preparedness. This, in turn, gave British politicians further excuse to dismiss even credible reports of German violations as the product of Gallic hysteria—a hall-of-mirrors distortion that, in 1934, led the British to scornfully reject a completely accurate French intelligence report of the secret German construction of submarines, an egregious lapse. (The British concluded the boats under construction were minesweepers.)
Mr. Howard makes excellent use of materials from the British and French archives, but for other countries he relies almost entirely on secondary sources; his account of the Czech intelligence service’s efforts against Nazi Germany is drawn exclusively from the 1975 memoir of its former head. He does not cover the Soviet Union at all, a major omission.
His treatment of intelligence derived from intercepted and decoded German signals is the weakest part of the book; there is very little discussion of what was learned from this extremely important and highly reliable source, and he makes a serious hash of trying to explain the workings and cryptanalysis of the German Enigma cipher machine. This is not technical nitpicking: The author’s misunderstandings lead him to grossly undervalue the contribution of the small team of Polish mathematicians who scored all of the key >>prewar<< successes in >>breaking<< this seemingly impenetrable code. He incorrectly states that the Poles had built a replica of the German Army Enigma in 1933 using as a model a machine briefly detained by Polish customs officers in 1929. But that intercepted model was merely a commercially sold version of the Enigma, and offered no clues to the crucial internal workings of the rewired and highly secret German Army version.
The cryptanalytic breakthrough that allowed the Poles to successfully build their “duplicate” of the secret German version was a stupendous feat of pure mathematical analysis, which exploited an extremely subtle flaw (not an “almost elementary error”) in the machine’s coding patterns. This permitted them to reconstruct its new internal wiring, sight unseen, employing methods from an arcane field of mathematics known as permutation theory.
Likewise, a change in German operating procedures in September 1938 did not render the Polish duplicates worthless, as Mr. Howard insists; on the contrary, they were as indispensable as ever, thanks to two other brilliant innovations the Poles quickly came up with to overcome this new difficulty—punched paper sheets cataloging all 100,000 or so possible initial settings of the machine, and the first electromechanical machines—or “bombes”—to automate the search. As late as January 1939, British >>codebreakers<< at >>Bletchley Park<< asserted that recovering the Army Enigma’s wiring through mathematical analysis alone was “practically impossible,” and they were astonished when the Poles finally revealed their success at a crash meeting with their British counterparts a month before the outbreak of World War II.
Mr. Howard’s invocation of the Cold War in his subtitle is a stretch, even as a metaphor. The more enduring historical echo of the murky world of uncertainty he skillfully portrays is the one he notes in his introduction, where he observes that “it is hard not to be reminded” of more recent episodes—the 2003 Iraq war most obviously comes to mind—that underscore the pitfalls of intelligence and its vulnerability to **manipulation for political ends**.
]]>'30s Bletchley_Park books book_review codebreaking Czechoslovakia economic_data France Germany history intelligence-gathering intelligence_analysts intelligence_failures interwar_years national_interests Nazis open_source Poland political_manipulation prewar security_&_intelligence sigint United_Kingdom Weimar_Republic WWII perceptiveness public_data public_information discrepancies proxies publicly_available resource_poolinghttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:bc8310df3021/Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair! - Stabroek News2023-04-09T02:57:42+00:00
https://www.stabroeknews.com/2010/08/29/features/look-on-my-works-ye-mighty-and-despair/
jerryking>Ozymandias<<.......Hekataios’s book is now lost but the great >>Roman<< historian, Diodorus, writing in the time of Augustus Caesar, used the description of the great statue in his 40 volume history of the world.........on December 27, 1817, Percy Bysshe Shelley, once he was informed about the the description of the huge, toppled statue, decided to write a sonnet on the subject. ........Shelley started afresh and quickly wrote a >>poem<< that is one of the small masterpieces of English >>poetry<< – a short, eloquent testimony that says all that needs to be said about the >>transitoriness<< and futility of all worldly pride and power.....It is fascinating to consider how that poem came to be written. In about twenty minutes Shelley wrote a great poem. But look how a Pharaoh, a Greek explorer, a Roman historian, and an English banker helped him write it. Genius is being prepared for the moment........ Shelley titled his poem 'Ozymandias'. Perhaps genius is also knowing how to title a poem.
]]>brevity decline Egyptian_Empire history hubris impermanence Memento_mori Ozymandias Percy_Shelley perennial poems poetry Romans self-aggrandizement self-flattery simplicity sonnets statues timeless time_is_your_most_valuable_asset transient never_forever Ian_McDonaldhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:3505efe9f989/DNA Confirms Oral History of Swahili People2023-04-03T10:16:29+00:00
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/29/science/ancient-swahili-dna.html
jerrykingAfrica coastal DNA history Kenya oral_history origin_story Swahili Tanzaniahttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:0c7e7e6d3739/Why should Sir John A. take all the blame for Canada’s injustices to Indigenous peoples? - The Globe and Mail2023-03-14T04:07:38+00:00
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-why-should-sir-john-a-take-all-the-blame-for-canadas-injustices-to/
jerryking>indignity<< visited upon the memory of Canada’s first prime minister, Ottawa’s National Capital Commission has announced plans to substitute an Indigenous name for what is now the >>Sir John A. Macdonald<< Parkway.
Why does everyone pick on Sir John A. and not Sir Wilfrid?
>>Wilfrid Laurier<<, one of Canada’s most beloved prime ministers, expanded the residential-school system and suppressed a 1907 report that revealed the schools were cruel and unsafe. His interior minister, Clifford Sifton, dispossessed First Nations of their lands in order to promote settlement in the Prairies. His governments also blocked Black and Chinese immigrants from entering Canada......although Ryerson University has been renamed Toronto Metropolitan University on the grounds that Egerton Ryerson helped establish the residential-school system, Wilfrid Laurier University has no plans to change its name. Laurier streets across the nation remain untouched. Renaming Ottawa’s Chateau Laurier hotel is unthinkable.
Macdonald’s likeness has been banished from the 10-dollar bill, replaced by Viola Desmond. Laurier remains on the five.
Macdonald statues have been toppled or removed in Charlottetown, Montreal, Kingston, Hamilton, Regina, Victoria and elsewhere. But I can find no record of a Laurier statue being carted off to storage......Tearing Indigenous children from their parents and forcing them to attend schools far from their communities, where they were subjected to disease, abuse and efforts at assimilation, and where some died, was an act of >>cultural genocide<< by our lights. But by the lights of both Macdonald and of Laurier – and, for that matter, of >>Robert Borden<<, >>Mackenzie King<<, >>R.B. Bennett<<, >>Louis St. Laurent<<, >>John Diefenbaker<< and >>Lester Pearson<< – it was sound policy.
But Macdonald and a handful of others also gave us Canada.[i.e. = "nation builders"] They crafted a dominion unique in its balance of powers between federal and provincial, English and French. Immigrants from Britain and Eastern Europe came here. Italians and Portuguese and Chinese and South Asians and Filipinos came here. Muslims and Jews came here. Refugees came here, the latest from Afghanistan and Ukraine. Canada is far from perfect, but it is arguably the least >>imperfect<< country on Earth, if the embrace of diversity is your measure.
There are lots of John A. Macdonald things in Ottawa. Replacing one of them with an Indigenous name won’t hurt anyone. Reconciliation will take time and be hard, but we must reach for it.......Let’s be careful, though. Sir John A. is part of who we are, good and bad. Let’s talk to each other about that. Talking is always better than tearing down.
]]>aboriginals Canada cancel_culture Confederation cultural_genocide history imperfections indigenous indignities injustices John_Diefenbaker John_Ibbitson legacies Lester_Pearson Louis_St._Laurent Mackenzie_King naming nation_builders nomenclature Ottawa political_correctness prime_ministers R.B._Bennett reconciliation Robert_Borden scapegoating Sir_John_A._Macdonald Sir_Wilfrid_Laurier statues systemic_racismhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:9c98ddaba334/An Indigenous practice may be key to preventing wildfires2023-03-12T18:33:10+00:00
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/good-fire-bad-fire-indigenous-practice-may-key-preventing-wildfires
jerryking>For thousands of years, North American tribes carefully burned forests to manage the land. The future may lie in a return to that past.<<
Margo Robbins’s home....is one of the nerve centers of a cultural and political struggle that has been slowly changing the North American West. Her living room is where she co-founded the Indigenous Peoples Burn Network, a growing collaboration of Native nations, partnered with nonprofit organizations, academic researchers, and government agencies. It’s focused on a single goal: setting forests on fire..........Her message is simple: You can too fight fire with fire. “There’s good fire and bad fire,” .......“And the good fire prevents the bad.”..........**the North American West**—and especially California—has a fire problem. Almost every year for the past decade, >>wildfire<< has roared through western lands, consuming forests, incinerating homes, drowning huge areas in choking smoke, often for weeks on end............The cause of the problem is no secret. For more than a century, western land managers have fought forest fires to the last ember. The effort was successful.[i.e. = but an unfortunate example of "overtreatment"] Wildfire in the West has been, by historical standards, very rare.......Inconveniently for **firefighters**, forests are living organisms. Underbrush grows as fast as it can. Trees drop leaves, needles, branches. Living and dead foliage piles into drifts—exceedingly flammable drifts. In hot, dry weather, the slightest spark can set off this mass of vegetation. If fires are prevented, the burnable material builds up, becoming ever more prone to explosive ignition. Climate change, which has brought more hot, dry, windy days, is steadily raising the threat. Connoisseurs of >>unintended consequences<<,, will appreciate the irony that practices intended to reduce fire damage instead have increased it dramatically. Every year, more of the West burns.
What if the answer is putting Margo Robbins in charge? Could cadres of Indigenous fire-lighters and those inspired by them help save western forests?
** California 'wanted us gone' **
The fire was the product of choices they and other Indigenous people have been fighting for more than a century.
When the United States took over California in 1850, after winning it in the Mexican-American War, the state had 300-plus Indigenous nations, the Karuk and Yurok among them. In the next two years the U.S. signed 18 treaties with 134 Native societies. The others were ignored. The signatory nations agreed to give up roughly 90 percent of their land, about seven-eighths of the state, in return for 7.4 million acres of reservations.
“That wasn’t enough for California,” the Karuk elder Leaf Hillman told me. “California wanted every inch of our land. … It wanted us gone.” The U.S. Senate, caving in to the state, not only refused to ratify the treaties, it concealed their existence for the next half-century. California simply seized the land [i.e. = "land theft"], and the new state government sponsored death squads that massacred thousands of Indigenous people........tribal land eventually came to be managed by the U.S. Forest Service as national forest. The agency was supposed to wring the maximum amount of >>timber<< from the land. But most of its budget—and its attention—went to preventing fire, which its researchers saw as wasteful and dangerous. In its zeal, the Forest Service enacted a “10 a.m.” policy: Every fire that sprang up on one day had to be controlled by 10 a.m. the next day [i.e. = "overkill"/"over treatment"] ................The anti-flame campaign profoundly altered the American environment. Wildfire had been common in western forests. Much of that burning was due to the area’s first humans, who torched away the undergrowth that fuelled future fires before it could build to dangerous levels. Thousands of years of controlled, targeted combustion created a landscape that was a >>patchwork<< of new and old burns—meadows, berry patches, park-like woodland, and so on. As these flames ceased, a new kind of forest emerged: a nearly fire-free ecosystem that was unlike anything that had existed since the end of the Ice Age......without small, human-controlled burns, there is heightened likelihood of an eventual catastrophic wildfire.[i.e. = "hormetic approaches"]
When something—lightning, a campfire, a downed utility line, a spark from a tool hitting a rock—sets the forest debris on fire, the flames climb the “fuel ladder” to shrubbery and young trees, then jump to the crowns of the older trees, creating a high wall of flame that can be caught by the wind.........the problem was not just that the new forests were flammable. It was that they were “a food desert for animals and people.” The Forest Service and western state governments had managed the forest—had, in effect, farmed it. But the Forest Service and the states had farmed the forest to produce a single commodity: >>timber<<. [i.e. = "monocultures"] While native ancestors had farmed the landscape for many reasons.......the tidal ebb and flow of periodic, native-controlled burns came to an abrupt halt in 1860, when gold-seeking U.S. colonists poured into the state..........Most people have little idea of the difference between >>human-controlled<< fire and >>uncontrolled<< wildfire. The smoke in controlled fires is low to the ground. Set in cool, humid conditions, the fires put themselves out.
Beginning in the 1960s, a growing number of foresters became convinced that their discipline had made a mistake. Native American flame had shaped the landscape for so long, these foresters came to believe, that it had become essential to its health. Fire was a tool to be used for the common good rather than a disease to be eliminated...........“By 1978 the great bunker of the 10 a.m. policy, the Forest Service, had surrendered,” “It was shifting from a policy of universal fire suppression to one of selective fire by prescription.
** Restoring fire **
prescribed fires of a certain acreage are heaving regulated, both federally and by the state, requiring, "“twelve Firefighter Type 2 personnel, a Burn Boss Type 2, a certain kind of water truck—a small fire truck, essentially—and one to two thousand gallons of extra water capacity.”.......In California, would-be burners on private land must have an annual air-quality permit and a smoke-management plan. “You have to outline desired burning conditions, wind directions, and map sensitive receptors—schools, hospitals, airports—within a 20-mile radius,”.......In much of the West, Native societies—the largest reservoir of fire-savvy people in the region—could take over this role. The U.S. pays billions of dollars each year to fly tens of thousands of firefighters from as far away as Canada and Australia to fight fires in the West. Why not pay Indigenous communities a fraction of that to create preventive and cultural fire?......Prescribed burns can cause damage, because these are human endeavors, and humans make mistakes.......“There is a tremendous body of expertise here, and it should be used,”.......Native people with deep knowledge [i.e. = "generational knowledge"/"tacit knowledge"] of place have been struggling to persuade unwieldy bureaucracies to allow them to do something that would benefit all.
]]>aboriginals California catastrophes climate_change cultural_practices firefighting forestry history hormetic_approaches landscapes land_theft monocultures patchwork the_American_West tacit_knowledge timber uncontrolled unintended_consequences wildfires human-controlled overtreatment overkill generational_knowledgehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:52fe8696e80c/“DOWN MEMORY LANE WITH GUYANA RADIO” – By Bernard Heydorn | Guyanese Online2023-03-11T13:13:36+00:00
https://guyaneseonline.net/2019/02/25/down-memory-lane-with-guyana-radio-by-bernard-heydorn/#more-73170
jerrykingGuyana Guyanese history nostalgia radio radio_dramashttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:7f918c271002/Stabroek News Memories of Independence2023-03-11T13:09:51+00:00
https://www.stabroeknews.com/2016/05/26/features/memories-of-independence/print/
jerrykingAlissa_Trotz anniversaries Caribbean George_Lamming Guyana history political_independence retrospectives C.L.R._Jameshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:0e94abebbaef/Don Valley Paper Mill2023-03-05T12:25:27+00:00
https://www.lostrivers.ca/content/points/DonPmill.html
jerrykingDVP history manufacturers ravines Toronto TRCA Don_Riverhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:03304a36decd/The Gildarie - Freddie Kissoon Show. GUEST: Ravi Dev analyses Burnham, Race & Class. - YouTube2023-03-01T01:58:33+00:00
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BkrXCEsGL6w&t=1188s
jerrykingFreddie_KIssoon Guyana history LFSB Ravi_Devhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:e9cbae5392cb/Opinion | Who’s Afraid of Black History?2023-02-17T20:58:34+00:00
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/17/opinion/desantis-florida-african-american-studies-black-history.html
jerryking>Carter G. Woodson<<, who in 1926 invented what has become Black History Month, was keenly aware of the role of politics in the classroom, especially Lost Cause interventions. “Starting after the Civil War,” he wrote, “the opponents of freedom and social Justice decided to work out a program which would enslave the Negroes’ mind in as much as the freedom of the body has to be conceded.”
“It was well understood,” Woodson continued, “that if by the teaching of history the white man could be further assured of his superiority and the Negro could be made to feel that he had always been a failure and that the subjection of his will to some other race is necessary the freedman, then, would still be a slave.”
“If you can control a man’s thinking,” Woodson concluded, “you do not have to worry about his action.”
Is it fair to see Governor DeSantis’s attempts to police the contents of the College Board’s AP curriculum in African American Studies in classrooms in Florida solely as little more than a contemporary version of Mildred Rutherford’s Lost Cause textbook campaign? No. But the governor would do well to consider the company that he is keeping. And let’s just say that he, no expert in African American history, seems to be gleefully embarked on an effort to censor scholarship about the complexities of the Black past with a determination reminiscent of Rutherford’s. While most certainly not embracing her cause, Mr. DeSantis is complicitous in perpetuating her agenda.
As the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. so aptly put it, “No society can fully repress an ugly past when the ravages persist into the present.” Addressing these “ravages,” and finding solutions to them — a process that can and should begin in the classroom — can only proceed with open discussions and debate across the ideological spectrum, a process in which Black thinkers themselves have been engaged since the earliest years of our Republic.
Throughout Black history, there has been a long, sad and often nasty tradition of attempts to censor popular art forms, from the characterization of the blues, ragtime and jazz as “the devil’s music” by guardians of “the politics of respectability,” to efforts to censor hip-hop by C. Delores Tucker, who led a campaign to ban gangsta rap music in the 1990s. Hip-hop has been an equal opportunity offender for potential censors: Mark Wichner, the deputy sheriff of Florida’s Broward Country, brought 2 Live Crew up on obscenity charges in 1990. But there is a crucial difference between Ms. Tucker, best known as a civil rights activist, and Mr. Wichner, an administrator of justice on behalf of the state, a difference similar to that between Rutherford and Mr. DeSantis.
While the urge to censor art — a symbolic form of vigilante policing — is colorblind, there is no equivalence between governmental censorship and the would-be censorship of moral crusaders. Many states are following Florida’s lead in seeking to bar discussions of race and history in classrooms. The distinction between Mildred Lewis Rutherford and Governor DeSantis? The power differential.
Rutherford wished for nothing less than the power to summon the apparatus of the state to impose her strictures on our country’s narrative about the history of race and racism. Mr. DeSantis has that power and has shown his willingness to use it. And it is against this misguided display of power that those of us who cherish the freedom of inquiry at the heart of our country’s educational ideal must take a stand.
]]>African-Americans civics Civil_War Confederacy engaged_citizenry Florida foundational Henry_Louis_Gates high_schools history indoctrination Jim_Crow Lost_Cause political_agendas propaganda public_schools race_relations Reconstruction Rollback Ron_DeSantis segregation slaveholders slavery the_South white_supremacy Black_History_Month book-banning Carter_Woodson historians MLK power_structureshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:8d55697f9339/The Black History Behind the Success Story - WSJ2023-02-06T02:54:26+00:00
https://www.wsj.com/articles/black-african-american-history-ap-florida-desantis-condi-11675614390?mod=opinion_major_pos18
jerrykingAfrican-Americans culture_wars education history political_agendas Ron_DeSantis Condeleeza_Ricehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:a6c399131513/How a Real-Estate Entrepreneur Saved Britain From Itself2023-02-06T02:36:45+00:00
https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-a-real-estate-entrepreneur-saved-britain-from-itself-labor-strike-margaret-thatcher-11675454757?cx_testId=3&cx_testVariant=cx_171&cx_artPos=0&mod=WTRN#cxrecs_s
jerryking'70s '80s deregulation entrepreneur history Margaret_Thatcher real_estate Thatcher_Revolution United_Kingdom Daniel_Yergin privatizationhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:8441f6fe4ab1/Scholars also build a nation2023-02-04T13:13:47+00:00
https://www.stabroeknews.com/2011/09/11/features/scholars-also-build-a-nation/
jerryking>posterity<< a great poet’s work in definitive form, has squeezed every last scintilla of authentic beauty out of the original text. Such scholarship is achievement of high and pure quality. It delights me to read about it.
What partly spoils my pleasure, however, is a thought that keeps obtruding – the state of our own scholarship. How compare the treatment of our written record with the meticulously careful, loving, scholarly care of historical material which these books about Hopkins represent? There is, of course, no comparison unless you wish to compare turgid night with bright day – or trash heap with a spacious and cultivated garden. Every time I read anything to do with deep and worthwhile historical research, scholarly attention paid to old authors and the elucidation of a country’s past, I at once get heart-burn thinking of how we neglect the records of our great men and women – except, perhaps, in the case of Dr Jagan whose Red House repository [i.e. = "private records"] does his memory proud.
But what is the current position? Every few years an expert in the preservation and organization of historical material visits to advise on the keeping and utilizing of our nation’s records. It may be, miraculously, that the latest of these may actually have caused some action to be taken to rescue our history from >>philistine<< neglect and time’s inexorable >>vandalism<<. I think we would all like to know exactly what action has been and is being taken. It merits at least a ministerial statement or GINA media release.
I understand that the National Archives are in better shape these days. I am sure that those in day-to-day charge of the national records try their little noticed and under-remunerated best to improve the archives’ state and status. Their work and what they need to do the job properly deserves publicity. Does anyone care that they are keepers of the eternal flame? What is the state of the national archives? What preservation and >>cataloguing<< work is going on? Who is ultimately responsible for safeguarding and extending the archives? Are they open to the public? On what basis do scholars have access to them? What plans are there for the archives? What is in the 2011 budget for work on the archives? What steps are currently being taken to preserve them, augment them, organize them, and store them with a minimum of scholarly decency? In particular, what is being done, on an organized basis, to acquire, catalogue, safely store and make available for scholarly analysis the papers and >>memorabilia<< of those men and women – and certainly not just the politicians – who have made outstanding contributions to our history?
We can’t expect the devotion that a Norman MacKenzie has given to the Hopkins archive, and a poor country can’t afford too many Infra-red Image Converters – but we should at least take that minimum of national pride to do the basic work of constantly improving, preserving, rehousing, augmenting and properly staffing our national archives so that current and future scholars are left with the material from which to seek the true history of Guyana and its people.]]>academic_achievement academic_rigor archives books dedication documentation editing Guyana historical_amnesia historical_preservation history manuscripts organizing_data poetry private_records record-keeping scholars nation_building Ian_McDonald cataloguing Guyanese memorabilia Cheddi_Jagan posterity Philistine vandalismhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:1f73b7c6654b/New Toronto development points to a shift in land and consumer car use2023-01-31T18:25:40+00:00
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/industry-news/property-report/article-new-toronto-development-points-to-a-shift-in-land-and-consumer-car-use/?login=true
jerrykingcondominiums dealerships Don_Mills DVP E.T._Seaton Eglinton_Crosstown green_spaces history mixed-use North_York parks property_development ravines redevelopments Serena_Gundy Sunnybrook_Park Wilket_Creekhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:4b269d53d5de/Hazel McCallion, Mississauga’s ‘Hurricane,’ rode the winds of public opinion2023-01-30T13:37:03+00:00
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/toronto/article-hazel-mccallion-mississaugas-hurricane-rode-the-winds-of-public/
jerrykingHazel_McCallion history longevity mayoral Mississauga obituaries Peel_Region politicianshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:ce1b2338287f/Opinion | Tyre Nichols and the Legacy of Police Abuse in Memphis2023-01-29T22:42:19+00:00
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/28/opinion/tyre-nichols-memphis-police-violence.html
jerrykinghistory legacies Memphis police_abuse police_violence Tyre_Nichols Ida_B._Wells lynchingshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:0ff314ff534e/This Old Man, He Teaches History -2022-11-18T00:27:28+00:00
https://www.wsj.com/articles/this-old-man-he-teaches-history-past-present-english-methods-technology-perspective-survey-courses-college-11668607811
jerryking>People of a certain age have the perspective and wisdom to make sense of the events and works of the past.<<
]]>elderly historical_lessons history teachers teaching elder_wisdomhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:7d9846c805c5/Inside the library of financial mistakes2022-11-14T13:57:03+00:00
https://www.ft.com/content/b1aa763e-592a-49e8-99a2-e836a31df8b9
jerryking>"Boom and Bust, by John Turner and William Quinn."<<
In 1772 Douglas Heron & Co, more popularly known as the Ayr Bank, after the town where its head office was located (aptly spelt “Air” in some contemporary documents), went spectacularly bust....... In 1857 the Western Bank of Scotland, which had ridden the industrial boom in Glasgow to expand its lending book aggressively — again using paper and borrowed money — was caught out by a downturn in the market that exposed the poor quality of its lending. In addition to the failure of its biggest customers at home, the bank had been caught up in the frenzy of the American railroad mania, investing in mortgages of dubious value.......... In 1878 the City of Glasgow Bank . . . but you get the picture by now. A seemingly solid bank, which had grown much faster than its rivals, suddenly failed, triggering a chain of bankruptcies among its shareholders and creditors........Stories such as that of Ayr Bank and the Western Bank of Scotland have been familiar to a small band of academics brave enough to specialize in >>financial history<<, but they are seldom taught as >>cautionary tales<< in business schools or economics faculties and are practically unknown in the City of London or on Wall Street. >>Institutional memory<< is also short in government. Prime Minister >>Rishi Sunak<< was not even in parliament, let alone in government, during the financial collapse of 2008. His administration’s intention to soften regulatory requirements and remove the cap on bankers’ bonuses to make London’s financial services more competitive shows no understanding of the role weak >>regulation<< played in the banking collapse only 14 years ago, nor the failure to >>claw back<< the vast bonuses paid to top bankers on the basis of profits that proved to be illusory.
The man at the heart of the administration who had experienced the crash at first hand, Sir Tom Scholar, was sacked as permanent secretary at the Treasury in September. The move was described as “challenging Treasury orthodoxy”, but it might just as well have been labelled “history has nothing to teach us”...... Does it? If the politicians, the regulators or the boards and executives of any of the banks and other financial institutions on both sides of the Atlantic that were brought down by the subprime crisis of 2008 had known about past banking failures [i.e. = "institutional memory"], would it have made any difference?
“Absolutely yes,” says Russell Napier, founder and keeper of the Library of Mistakes, a financial history library in Edinburgh. “What these banks had in common with the casualties of 2007-08 is that they were expanding their balance sheets much faster than their peers. Had their boards known a little history, they would have learnt that an institution that grows like a weed is a weed. Any bank that consistently grows faster than the economy in which it operates must be at risk. It is an indicator only lately recognized by regulators, but there are plenty of historical precedents.”.......reading history provides a scepticism about the growing fashion for the “mathematization” of finance — the belief that human behaviour (the buying and selling of stocks and bonds) could be reduced to an equation. That faith persisted even after the collapse in 1998 of the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management, [i.e. = LTCM"] despite having two Nobel Prize-winning economists on its board.........Napier’s studies convinced him that there were lessons to be learnt from the past. Despite innovation, very little is new in finance: someone, somewhere, will have faced similar circumstances before. We could learn by their experience, yet too often fail to do so — the same >>patterns<< of causes and effects [i.e. = "causality"] are repeated time after time. Napier is fond of apposite quotations. One of his favourites is from the American author James Grant: ++“Progress is >>cumulative<< in science and engineering, but cyclical in finance.”++ [i.e. = "cyclical learning"].......If we know the mistakes made in the past, can we avoid them in the future? Napier believes so......“Market myopia” suppressed demand, and few were interested in the failures of the past when it was easy to make money........The financial history course led to the Library of Mistakes. “People were asking, ‘where can we read about this stuff?’ But books of financial history had largely disappeared from libraries. You can do a course in finance at almost any business school without having to learn any financial history at all,” says Napier.......there is a growing trend to teach financial history more widely, but just as the Library of Mistakes would be less attractive to readers if it was plainly branded as the Financial History Library, so courses in business schools sometimes have to be “smuggled in by the back door”.................. “I’m a believer that there should be a place in the curriculum for history,” Turner adds. “ In asset pricing or insurance, for example, the long-run experience is really important. There is growing interest in the UK and the US in long-run data series — the prices of stocks, corporate bonds, government securities [i.e. "financial data"] and so on — and the longer the series, the more its value. The problem is that once you go back further than the 1980s, then definitions start to change and the way of doing things was different. That’s where you need a historian to help you understand the data.”........The question asked at the beginning of this article has been posed before. “There are several questions banks should ask themselves. Do they really pay attention to the lessons of history — for example the property crisis of the early 1970s? Did they really monitor the credit criteria which had served them well in the past?”.......The speaker was the governor of the Bank of England, but not in 2008 or following recent scandals such as the collapse of Greensill or of Wirecard. It was Robin Leigh-Pemberton in 1993, shortly after another banking crisis. His answer was clearly “no”. In finance, knowledge is >>cyclical<<.
]]>banks books boom-to-bust bubbles cautionary_tales causality central_banks cyclicality economic_downturn economic_history economics economists Edinburgh false_sense_of_objectivity finance financial_crises financial_data financial_failure financial_history historical_lessons history institutional_memory lessons_learned libraries LTCM mistakes patterns policymakers quotes recessions regulations regulators Rishi_Sunak Scotland smart_people myopic short-sightedness claw_backs cumulative cyclical_learninghttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:a8340086b0ec/Letter: Harking back to the good old days of productivity2022-11-11T17:34:00+00:00
https://www.ft.com/content/ec0a9dbe-dd4c-413a-be14-2737ae9a71ce
jerryking>complex task<< than laying the first railway lines.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
During the period of intense productivity mentioned in the letter, Britain was extremely rich through pillaging much of the rest of the world. This made it somewhat easier to build expensive infrastructure and fund R&D at home.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Much of the infrastructure was built with Irish labour - cheap labour driven to England by poverty and starvation. Also the capital employed didn’t just magic itself into being - sugar / slavery and exploitation of India were significant factors. It takes more than just engineers to get things built.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Ultimately, a favourable window of time,[i.e. = "contingency"/"luck"/"windows of opportunity"] not a genie that can be summoned by a state.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
]]>Crossrail engineering epidemics history letters_to_the_editor London national_initiatives productivity shipbuilding tunnels United_Kingdom Victorian warfare Westminster steam_engine industrial_age industrial_revolution railways contingency luck windows_of_opportunity complex_taskshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:4ed0a2966ac6/Society: Waking the dead - Stabroek News2022-11-08T17:06:39+00:00
https://www.stabroeknews.com/2010/07/29/guyana-review/society-waking-the-dead/
jerrykingDavid_Granger Clarence_Ellis Emancipation Guyana historyhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:985146572cbf/An industrial ballet preserves a 1960s IBM complex in North York2022-11-06T23:10:02+00:00
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/real-estate/toronto/article-an-industrial-ballet-preserves-a-1960s-ibm-complex-in-north-york/
jerrykingCelestica Don_Mills Eglinton_Crosstown history IBM North_York redevelopments Sunnybrook_Park '60shttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:9d042a1a3e78/A Smart, Playful Book About the Underappreciated Index - The New York Times2022-10-30T19:28:33+00:00
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/09/books/review-index-history-of-dennis-duncan.html
jerryking>INDEX, A HISTORY OF THE: A Bookish Adventure From Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age
By Dennis Duncan<<
An index is thought of, if at all, as little more than a tool — a handy list of subjects and proper names, typically at the end of a nonfiction book, guiding me to the page(s) where I might find the information I seek...........some indexes that make you want to linger..........But we usually turn to an index as a “convenience” and “timesaver.” It’s like a >>map<<. In fact, it is a map — an indicator of a >>spatial relationship<<. It points (like an index finger) to a place (a page number), showing you the way. [i.e. = pathfinding"] ...........If all of this sounds obvious and unobjectionable, Duncan’s smart, playful book will encourage you to think again. The straightforward utility of the index turns out to be what made it such a disruptive innovation in the first place. “A history of the index is really a story about time and knowledge and the relationship between the two,”.......“Today, the index organizes our lives.” The morass of the digital world is indexed and served up to us by >>search engines<<.......This book is, on one level, a history of information science, but it’s also a history of reading and writing and everything those actions entail — communication, learning and imagination,..........Like so many technologies we now >>take for granted<<, the index was slow to become embedded so seamlessly in our lives.
Duncan gives a surprisingly vivid explanation of how the two foundations of the contemporary index — >>alphabetical order<< and >>pagination<< — themselves had to be invented. Alphabetical order requires us to pay attention not to meaning but to spelling, ensuring it would stay rare through the Middle Ages, disdained as an arbitrary imposition that was “the antithesis of reason.”
As for numbering pages, the notion of something so “ruthlessly disinterested” from the text — impertinently insisting on a number for every page, regardless of its tendency to cleave paragraphs, sentences, even words — made it an intrusion that took some getting used to; the number’s allegiance wasn’t to the argument or the story but to the physical book itself.
the origins of the index lie in the 13th century, when the English >>polymath<< Robert Grosseteste — poet, lecturer, preacher, statesman — created his “Tabula,” so that he could efficiently access the many sources for his vast store of knowledge. The “Tabula” was ordered conceptually [i.e. = "categorization"/"organizing principle"/"sorting"], broken down into 440 topics, starting with God. It was a device born of necessity, bringing “cosmos out of chaos,”[i..e. = "order amid disorder"] Duncan writes. “An encyclopedic mind needs an encyclopedic index to provide it with structure.” [i.e. = "encyclopedias"]...........Duncan also includes examples of fictional indexes in order to draw attention to the form’s peculiarities..........But part of what makes an index so useful is that its sequence isn’t aligned with the structure of the work it refers to at all. This incongruence, a splitting apart of content and form, is part of what used to cause so much hand-wringing: Would readers of an intimidatingly big book decide only to skim [i.e. = "shallowness"/"skimming"] the >>simulacrum<< — the bite-size summary offered by the index — instead of immersing themselves in the real thing?.............Duncan finds analogous anxieties in our Age of Search — the suspicion that by making it ever easier to access information, Google might in fact be making us lazier and dumber, allowing us to glide along the shallows instead of forcing us to venture into the depths. Duncan is less worried. “It is good for the nerves, I think, to have some historical perspective,” he writes. But he allows that our infatuation with digital search has perhaps endangered something else — the art of the index, which has traditionally borne the imprint of the human being who compiles it.
]]>alphabetical_order books book_reviews categorization history indices manuscripts mapping medieval order-amid-disorder organizing_principle pagination pathfinding polymaths search_engines shallowness simulacrum skimming sorting spatial_awareness tools under_appreciated 13th_century cosmos encyclopedias take_for_grantedhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:68648e870fbe/Review: George McCullagh created the Globe and Mail, but he wielded more power than just the press - The Globe and Mail2022-10-08T17:23:33+00:00
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books/reviews/article-george-mccullagh-created-the-globe-and-mail-but-he-wielded-more-power/
jerrykingJohn_Ibbitson '30s '40s biographies bipolar_disorder books book_reviews entrepreneur founders George_Brown Globe_&_Mail history hypomanics journalists mental_health newspapers Ontario politicians premiershttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:a7d6cf95362d/Life and times of Beterverwagting/Triumph2022-10-05T14:36:39+00:00
https://www.landofsixpeoples.com/news402/nc4050913.htm
jerrykingAfrican_Guyanese_Villages Afro-Guyanese Guyana history oral_historyhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:4208d43151a5/“Iron and Blood” questions the story of German militarism | The Economist2022-09-30T12:12:36+00:00
https://www.economist.com/culture/2022/09/29/iron-and-blood-questions-the-story-of-german-militarism
jerrykingbooks book_reviews carpe_kairos concentrated_forces foreign_policy Germany hard_power history militarism Prussia Prussian statesmen von_Bismarck warfare military_historyhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:66ca61430b45/Opinion: The Queen is dead. Time for Canada, finally, to talk about becoming a republic. We owe it to ourselves - The Globe and Mail2022-09-19T04:40:41+00:00
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-the-queen-is-dead-time-for-canada-finally-to-talk-about-becoming-a/
jerrykinghistory monarchieshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:4f33085225e8/A Journey Through Black Nova Scotia2022-09-13T22:12:54+00:00
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/12/travel/a-journey-through-black-nova-scotia.html?action=click&module=Well&pgtype=Homepage§ion=US%20News
jerryking>The 400-year history of African culture in this maritime Canadian province is expansive, but it’s a story that’s been tucked into the shadows of Canadian history. Now, grass-root initiatives are changing that.<<
]]>African_Canadians Black_Loyalists forgotten historical_amnesia history Nova_Scotia sculptures symbolism the_American_Revolution travel Revolutionary_Warhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:00906098e060/Letter: History teaches that you ignore rhetoric at your peril2022-08-18T11:08:35+00:00
https://www.ft.com/content/e28c51b6-98b2-4a76-8eab-446de126735a
jerrykingBalkans Croatians historical_lessons history letters_to_the_editor rhetoric Simon_Schama Slobodan_Milošević Slovenians Yugoslavia unthinkablehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:3801a58e997e/David McCullough, Best-Selling Explorer of America’s Past, Dies at 892022-08-09T09:54:20+00:00
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/08/books/david-mccullough-dead.html
jerryking>think for oneself.<<”
]]>authors bestsellers books David_McCullough Founding_Fathers historians history nation_builders obituaries Pulitzer_Prize think_for_yourself writershttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:5db45b39ace1/Wismar 1964 was a blot on the nation2022-08-07T15:01:41+00:00
https://www.kaieteurnewsonline.com/2022/08/07/wismar-1964-was-a-blot-on-the-nation/
jerryking'60s Afro-Guyanese atrocities belligerence ethnic_cleansing ethnic_communities ethnic_tensions expulsions Guyana history Indo-Guyanese lawlessness Linden looting Mackenzie massacres political_violence pre-Independence racial_violence reprisals sexual_violence LFSB banditry Wismar_Massacre X-13https://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:1966777d64d0/The Pernicious Characteristics Of Monocultures2022-08-05T10:15:34+00:00
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/hackers/blame/threat.html
jerryking>interconnectivity<< that makes a universal systems [i.e.="system-wide"] crash feasible. All that will be required is inducement of a widespread information infrastructure collapse through a deliberately executed and pre-planned act of >>information warfare<<. The risk from a software monoculture has increased due to the shift from custom-made software to packaged applications residing on an integrated family of Microsoft operating systems. As a result, the risks from planned subversion of a software monoculture now overwhelm the demonstrable benefits of >>standardization<< of an otherwise chaotic software environment.
The future of Microsoft should not be judged only by antitrust criteria or the commercial merits of its software. It should be also reflected in the unprecedented security risks to our civilization that a software monoculture generates. The Microsoft defense that it was only maximizing profits using common competitive methods is insufficient. Business practices that may be tolerable for a small competitor become perilous whenever scaled up to security-threatening proportions to global computer networks.[i.e. = "network risk"]
Our computer-based information society is still in its early stages of development. Its resilience and dependability is still not adequately understood. If history teaches anything, it is the insight that monocultures of any kind--especially if they can propagate in a matter of seconds--should not be allowed to flourish without adequate safeguards.
]]>'90s 19th_century agriculture farming history Ireland market_dominance market_power Microsoft monocultures overdependence overreliance paradoxes perniciousness platforms potatoes software threats vulnerabilities cyber_warfare information_warfare interconnections network_risk standardization system-widehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:b5dee2d92f99/Out of the Sun: On Race and Storytelling | Esi Edugyan's CBC Massey Lectures | CBC Radio2022-08-03T18:27:44+00:00
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/out-of-the-sun-on-race-and-storytelling-esi-edugyan-s-cbc-massey-lectures-1.6319381
jerrykinghistory race storytelling blackness CBC erasureshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:bea7b5aa2051/Emancipation, the legacy of white supremacy and the African Guyanese2022-08-01T02:17:34+00:00
https://www.stabroeknews.com/2022/07/31/sunday/emancipation-the-legacy-of-white-supremacy-and-the-african-guyanese/
jerrykingAfro-Guyanese Emancipation Guyana Guyanese history legacies white_supremacyhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:d0a7c55ae253/Some of the heroes and architects of Independence - Guyana Chronicle2022-07-31T02:38:54+00:00
https://guyanachronicle.com/2022/05/26/some-of-the-heroes-and-architects-of-independence-2/
jerrykingGuyana heroes historyhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:686aab8cae07/Don't Read History for Lessons - Commonplace - The Commoncog Blog2022-07-11T02:05:53+00:00
https://commoncog.com/blog/dont-read-history-for-lessons/
jerryking>path-dependent<<, idiosyncratic, and prone to >>narrative fallacy<<. This is a thought-provoking essay on what we should and shouldn’t learn from the past.]]>historical_lessons history lessons_learned narrative_fallacy path_dependencehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:62f102cdd173/Decoding the Defiance of Henry VIII’s First Wife - The New York Times2022-07-09T23:00:35+00:00
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/07/arts/ciphers-henry-viii-catherine.html
jerryking>Using a process she called “early modern Wordle,” a scholar claims to have uncovered a hidden message from Catherine of Aragon in a book of jewelry designs.<<
It has long been a beguiling and mysterious treasure of the British Museum: a collection of sketches for jewelry and other lavish ornaments, commissioned during the reign of Henry VIII from the artist Hans Holbein.....Some of the designs are ciphers, or coded symbols, entangling the initials of Henry and his many paramours. Some of the most elaborate have never been decoded.........This spring, while finishing a chapter of her dissertation, Vanessa Braganza, a Ph.D. candidate in English at Harvard and a self-described “book detective,” became fascinated by one particularly dense tangle of letters.........By the end of the afternoon, Braganza thought she had figured it out in her notebook, via a trial-and-error process she compared to “early modern Wordle.” The cipher, she concluded, spelled out HENRICVS REX — Henry the King — and KATHERINE — his first wife, Catherine of Aragon.........Nothing remarkable there, perhaps. But Braganza argues that the pendant was commissioned not by Henry but by Catherine during the period when he was trying to divorce her and marry Anne Boleyn, as a brazen assertion of her lifelong claim to be his one true wife and queen.
“It’s a gateway into her thinking,” Braganza said of the pendant. “It’s just sitting there, daring you to see it.”......The Tudor court and its ruthless intrigues have been a source of public fascination long before Hilary Mantel’s best-selling “Wolf Hall” trilogy.......generations of scholars have studied the way codes and ciphers shaped nearly every aspect of Renaissance culture (as a 2014 exhibition at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington put it), from diplomacy and warfare to the rise of postal systems and the art of literary interpretation itself.......the subject isn’t just academic. In our own time, Renaissance scholarship helped inspire World War II code breaking, while military cryptology techniques were in turn adapted as tools of literary analysis.........Braganza’s work is part of what can be seen as a more feminist turn, as scholars have increasingly considered how ciphers and other forms of hidden communication preserve the lost voices of women. “What’s especially compelling, and often moving, is the fact that Vanessa is focusing on voices that would’ve been otherwise silenced or caricatured,”.....Scholars have also examined the messages encoded in women’s needlework, miniatures, interior design, even the colour of silk floss used to “lock” letters to protect them from prying eyes. “It’s not a surprise that women exercised their agency in unusual and creative ways in this period.........women exercised their agency in unusual and creative ways in this period,”.......“They did have to work outside the normal channels to get their messages out.”........Untangling a knotty 16th-century monogram is hardly cracking the Enigma code. Braganza describes it as a matter of noticing “what’s hiding in plain sight.”...........As an undergraduate, Braganza wrote her senior thesis on the word “cipher” in Shakespeare’s plays. As a graduate student, she became interested in the things themselves.........The Catherine/Henry cipher came to her attention this spring, through a similar moment of serendipity. When completing a chapter on the proliferation of ciphers at Henry’s court, she looked up the digitized images from the “Jewellery Book,” as the collection of drawings by Holbein at the British Museum is known.......Braganza sees the pendant — which she argues, based on a small loop at the top, was meant to be worn in public — as an act of “secrecy courting revelation.”
“It really helps us understand Catherine as a really defiant figure,”.....While the pendant in the “Jewellery Book” may not radically change the story, Braganza said, it does suggest how much more of the silenced voices of Henry’s wives — and other women of the period — remains to be found.
“That’s the thing about ciphers — you set them loose, and then you can’t eradicate them all,” she said. “They wait to be discovered, centuries later.”]]>16th_century art ciphers clandestine codebreaking curiosity decoding defiance encryption Henry_VIII hidden Hilary_Mantel history individual_agency jewellery Renaissance scholars secrecy secrets smart_people surreptitious Tudors Wolf_Hall women Communicating_&_Connecting in_the_know in_plain_sighthttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:467b57436f08/Plague of Justinian - Wikipedia2022-07-01T00:57:17+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plague_of_Justinian
jerrykingbacteria disease flu_outbreaks history Mediterranean pandemics plagueshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:c5c63aaaa110/Toronto’s housing crisis of 1922 was rooted in policies that still make homes unaffordable in 20222022-06-18T02:19:05+00:00
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-how-torontos-housing-crunch-of-1922-was-rooted-in-policies-that-still/
jerryking>When the Protestant, straight-laced Toronto of the 1910s banned apartments in much of the city, housing shortages and soaring prices soon followed. What happened next still has consequences in the red-hot market of today<<
One hundred years ago, Toronto was in the midst of an acute housing shortage.
Although 6,000 new homes were expected to be added that year, the “immense contribution to the city’s bulk of homes” was simply not going to be enough, decried an article published in The Globe and Mail on June 16, 1922. ........The lack of housing wasn’t a new phenomenon. By the turn of the century, Toronto had become Canada’s second-largest urban centre, after Montreal, putting a strain on its existing stock of homes. Military manufacturing boomed during the First World War, and when it was done the city bulged with returning soldiers, immigrants and rural folks, drawn by the promise of work in the city’s new harbour and financial districts.
The problem then, as now: For Torontonians without significant wealth, finding housing was a challenge. But at a time when affordable rental properties were needed most, of the 3,000 new dwellings that had been built since the beginning of the year, just five – less than 0.17 per cent – were apartment buildings.
That’s because, for the most part, they were banned outright..........On May 14, 1912, motivated by moral concerns, the City of Toronto passed By-Law No. 6061, which meant no apartment buildings could be built on the majority of the city’s residential streets.
While it’s certainly not the only factor that has led to Toronto’s dearth of low-rise, affordable rental properties – indeed, many buildings were erected despite the law – experts say the city is still grappling with the bylaw’s effects on its urban fabric and zoning, not to mention the NIMBYism toward multiunit housing generally.
“Early land-use regulations have had a major impact, still very perceptible today,”
“Large parts of the city that exist today were built a century ago, under the influence of the regulations on the books at the time.”
Unlike many European cities and even Montreal, Toronto lacks elegant low-rise density, which provides a spectrum of sizes and affordability in smaller-scale neighbourhoods. These housing options, particularly beneficial for people who are often left out of the market – renters, people living alone, young families, the elderly – offer a sense of community and contribute to the character that makes cities pleasant to live in.
While Toronto became largely a city of single-family homes, Dr. Fischler said, Montreal developed as a city of duplexes and triplexes. As a result, he said, the latter now offers a wider range of housing options. “It’s fair to say that Montreal displayed a greater tolerance for density and for the mixing of uses than many North American cities,” he said..........Turn-of-the-century Torontonians had a complicated relationship with apartment buildings.
On the one hand, early developments typically upheld the gentility demanded by the city’s elite. Unlike today’s towering condo buildings, the “apartment-houses” of the early 19th century were often no more than four floors high and blended in nicely with the surrounding neighbourhood.
Residents of the city’s first apartment buildings – the St. George Mansions, completed in 1904 near the current site of Robarts Library – included professors, barristers and two bank managers, according to Richard Dennis, a University College London geographer considered the authority on Toronto’s early apartment history.
But despite that pedigree, the predominantly Protestant city found the negative moral associations hard to shake. Apartment-dwelling families were expected to have fewer children, and this was considered an unethical constraint on the natural order. Meanwhile, dwellings that offered in-house kitchen and cleaning services were seen as degrading the traditional role of a wife.
“Unsurprisingly, there was negative reaction from both wealthy neighbours and city administrators who were reviewing building permits and were not familiar with this new building type,” ...........Experts have often noted that the turning point was set in 1911 by physician Charles Hastings with the publication of his report exposing the unsanitary conditions of those living in the Ward, the inner-city slum located next to City Hall.
Fearing that Toronto might fall victim to the scourge of these “human packing cases,” so rife in New York, Dr. Dennis wrote, the report reinforced the belief that shared dwellings were immoral and not fit for Toronto.
“If Toronto becomes a city of closely-packed tenements,” one Globe journalist wrote on April 27, 1912, “it will become a city of stunted children and of unhappy adults. Its morals will suffer as well as its health.”
In response to these mounting concerns, and after a slate of lesser measures were deemed inadequate, in 1912 city council passed the apartment ban by 18 votes to nil.........While experts agree that By-Law No. 6061 has left a mark on the city’s building story, many argue its more significant legacy is the attitude it initiated. According to Richard Harris, an urban historical geographer at McMaster University, Toronto’s early 20th-century policies led to its ingrained resistance to development in residential neighbourhoods.
“That’s where the ‘not-in-my-backyard’ consideration comes in,” Dr. Harris said. “Once the built environment has been built in a particular way, property owners resist any kind of density.”
By-Law No. 6061 limited the construction of apartment buildings to a few arterial roads.
]]>'10s affordable_housing apartment_buildings built_environment bylaws history housing land_uses legacies medium-density moral_codes neighbourhoods NIMBYism rental_housing Toronto zoning immoralityhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:ec21611ea90e/Becoming Ivey - Brand Identity | Ivey Business School2022-06-16T10:42:32+00:00
https://www.ivey.uwo.ca/about/history/virtual-history/archives/becoming-ivey-1969-1995/
jerrykingalumni brands branding Colleges_&_Universities history Iveyhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:d2bcce53ac27/The Root of Haiti’s Misery: Reparations to Enslavers -2022-05-21T20:23:17+00:00
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/20/world/haiti-history-colonized-france.html
jerrykingFrance Haiti history imperialism reparations slavery slaveholdershttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:2a47bbde7fa3/Opinion | What Oprah Winfrey Knows About American History That Tucker Carlson Doesn’t - The New York Times2022-05-19T13:28:48+00:00
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/19/opinion/sunday/buffalo-oprah-winfrey-tucker-carlson.html
jerrykinghistory Oprah_Winfrey replacement_theoryhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:a9f7d8e687e7/Opinion | The Right Weaponizes America Against Itself2022-05-18T14:23:17+00:00
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/17/opinion/replacement-theory-us.html
jerryking1965_Immigration_and_Nationality_Act aboriginals African-Americans anti-immigration Bret_Stephens Brooklyn_Tech Buffalo Chinese_Exclusion_Act_1882 Christianity demographic_changes Dutch_West_India_Company elitism ethnonationalism far-right history identity_politics immigration massacres mass_shootings NAFTA nativism New_York non-whites race_relations racial_resentment Replacement_Theory slavery the_American_dream WASPs white_identity working-class dangershttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:80afca7d2dd8/Opinion | The Supreme Court as an Instrument of Oppression - The New York Times2022-05-09T04:11:04+00:00
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/08/opinion/supreme-court-oppression.html
jerryking> Slavery by Another Name by Douglas A. Blackmon <<
The court is a permanent council that answers to no one. It can behave as it chooses. The robes can go rogue.
This is the power Republicans want — the power to overrule the will of the majority [i.e. = "judicial power"/"minority authoritarian rule"] — and the courts are one of the only areas where that power can be guaranteed. Conservative activists have fought for decades for this moment. Two Republican presidents, George W. Bush and Donald Trump (neither of whom won the popular vote when he was first elected), appointed five of the nine justices on the current court......Republicans and their judges may well have just ushered in a new age of oppression.
]]>Charles_Blow Donald_Trump Dred_Scott GOP history judges Mitch_McConnell Obama oppression persecution Thurgood_Marshall U.S._Supreme_Court Voting_Rights_Act constitutions minority_authoritarian_rule judicial_powerhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:8f19f1dedbe9/Simon Schama: when history is weaponised for war2022-05-09T01:40:39+00:00
https://www.ft.com/content/25a57741-34e6-403b-b216-1704448afc0a
jerrykinghistory myths Russia Simon_Schama Ukraine Vladimir_Putin warfarehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:50247a6fe3ad/Documentary On One: Roger Casement's 'Apocalypse Now'2022-05-08T09:45:16+00:00
https://www.rte.ie/culture/2022/0505/1296259-documentary-on-one-roger-casements-apocalypse-now/
jerrykingAfrica Belgium civil_war colonialism Congo DRC exploitation history mining reparations restitution sub-Saharan_Africahttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:0c7a8ac03d22/Books that will make you love medieval literature - The Globe and Mail2022-03-26T22:52:42+00:00
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books/article-medieval-literature-books-reading-list/
jerrykingbooks drinks food historical_fiction history medieval Middle_Ages reading_lists videogameshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:95138f28ed43/Opinion | Democrats Are Making Life Too Easy for Republicans - The New York Times2022-03-24T05:34:57+00:00
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/23/opinion/democrats-republicans-2022-midterms.html
jerrykingcritical_race_theory white_grievances bad-faith far-right GOP historyhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:19617194041e/Summarising the 1856 ‘Angel Gabriel’ Guyana Riots - Stabroek News2022-03-20T10:38:01+00:00
https://www.stabroeknews.com/2022/03/20/sunday/summarising-the-1856-angel-gabriel-guyana-riots/
jerrykinghistoryhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:50f827fbde2d/A Nobel memorial prize for turning statistics into insight | Tim Harford2022-03-15T20:22:38+00:00
https://timharford.com/2021/10/a-nobel-memorial-prize-for-turning-statistics-into-insight/
jerrykingstatistics economics history data economists insights Tim_Harford Nobel_prizes causality controlled_environments correlations big_ideas radical_ideashttps://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:012f1dc80c71/Dictators snatch your freedom – Kaieteur News2022-03-15T17:50:15+00:00
https://www.kaieteurnewsonline.com/2022/03/15/dictators-snatch-your-freedom-2/
jerryking'70s authoritarianism censorship Guyana history LFSB political_violencehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:295f5cb28c94/Globe editorial: Who gets to define what a Canadian Conservative is: our history, or Fox News? - The Globe and Mail2022-03-11T22:21:58+00:00
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/editorials/article-who-gets-to-define-what-a-canadian-conservative-is-our-history-or-fox/
jerrykingCanadian conservatism Conservative_Party editorials Fox_News history Jean_Charesthttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:a143d132eb32/Splitting History | World Civilization2022-03-02T05:02:10+00:00
https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-hccc-worldcivilization/chapter/splitting-history/
jerrykingcategorization history periodization themeshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:a5e517effd45/Blood and Iron (speech) - Wikipedia2022-02-26T00:29:17+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_and_Iron_(speech)
jerrykingforeign_policy Germany hard_power history von_Bismarck warfare via:muneebtatar Prussian carpe_kairos concentrated_forces statesmenhttps://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:c218f0114654/The distinctive features of the 1823 Demerara slave rebellion - Stabroek News2022-02-25T11:14:05+00:00
https://www.stabroeknews.com/2013/08/01/news/guyana/the-distinctive-features-of-the-1823-demerara-slave-rebellion/
jerryking1823 Afro-Guyanese Demerara Guyana Guyanese history insurrection rebellions slavery uprisingshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:8513a0eb308f/Commemoration - Stabroek News2022-02-25T11:10:05+00:00
https://www.stabroeknews.com/2011/02/27/opinion/editorial/commemoration/
jerryking1763 18th_century Afro-Guyanese anniversaries archives Berbice books book_reviews commemoration Cuffy Dutch Guyana Guyanese heroes history Holland plantations rebellions self-liberation self-salvation slavery storytelling uprisings visionarieshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:160dc0328929/Opinion | This Is Putin’s War. But America and NATO Aren’t Innocent Bystanders. - The New York Times2022-02-22T11:52:03+00:00
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/21/opinion/putin-ukraine-nato.html
jerrykinghistory NATO Tom_Friedman U.S. Ukraine Vladimir_Putinhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:57a3d40f2caf/Ontario's Priceville was a small, thriving Black community — until it wasn't | CBC Radio2022-02-21T18:05:02+00:00
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/priceville-ontario-black-history-1.6333960
jerrykingAfrican_Canadians churches community-minded cultural_heritage culture_keepers heritage heritage_preservation history iconic landmarks legacies preservation private_records slavery Underground_Railroad women Grey_County southwestern_Ontario Black_Loyalistshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:24f624a6c8d3/Opinion | ‘The Gilded Age’ Is Depicting Black Success. More TV Should. - The New York Times2022-02-20T20:37:46+00:00
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/18/opinion/the-gilded-age.html
jerryking> Brooklyn <<, where a community of prosperous >> Black families << took hold......I like this depiction of the era and have a hope: that we accept it, and others like it, as a win, rather than engaging in a dutiful exercise of contesting and finding fault with this show (and others) for not pointing its camera at Black misery........However, it isn’t fanciful to imagine such an objection emerging, as the series goes forth, when you consider that for years there was debate about whether the “The Cosby Show,” with its upper-middle-class Brooklynite Black family, was a realistic portrayal of Black life in America. Or when “Our Kind of People: Inside America’s Black Upper Class” (the inspiration for last year’s eponymous Fox series) was published in 1999 and its author, Lawrence Otis Graham, found himself described as a guileless chronicler of the Black elite. Or when the general zeitgeist seems to teach us that resenting white power and privilege is more interesting than examining how some people get past them.
But given that Black struggle is these days portrayed rather richly in film and theater, “The Gilded Age” lends a service in showing, beyond museum exhibits and magazine articles, that Black people in another age could triumph despite the obstacles. It brings onscreen life to one of many Black truths, and the one it has chosen to show is of a kind that a truly proud people must not be denied.
]]>African-Americans Gilded_Age HBO_Max history inspiration John_McWhorter Lawrence_Otis_Graham NAACP New_York_City racial_humor second-class_citizenship sitcoms stereotypes television upliftment bourgeois black_families Brooklynhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:68e9f0440004/The Fraught Legacy of Denmark Vesey2022-02-19T06:43:42+00:00
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-fraught-legacy-of-denmark-vesey-11645192709
jerrykingAfrican-Americans Emancipation legacies slavery South_Carolina the_South uprisings Frederick_Douglass historical_amnesia history martyrs heroeshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:0d036d0b1f47/White Debt by Thomas Harding review – the history they didn’t want you to know2022-02-18T15:19:23+00:00
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/jan/07/white-debt-by-thomas-harding-review-the-history-they-didnt-want-you-to-know
jerrykingbooks book_reviews Demerara erasures Guyana Guyanese historical_amnesia history plantations slavery sugar uprisings slaveholdershttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:324b11d91902/