Thursday Turned Out Well!

     . . . . Thursday, we arose before 7, dressed after not sleeping all night, and went out to the supermarket. Who knew how lovely it is out there under a blue, sunny sky so early?

MW was nearly empty when we got there, but by the time we checked out it was filling right up. $300 of Stuff.

Thank goodness for the wheeled Italian granny shopping cart that has been leaning against a wall here unused for umpity years. Not only could we get so much Stuff at once, we didn't need to use one of MW's carts. We shouldn't have to do this again for another week, I think.

~~~~~~~~~~

     . . . . The reports are that the Zoom courses are immediately becoming a lifesaver for the School's students. And not only here. I'm getting that info from all sorts of friends who doing college and university distance learning. Like the Cuban Music students P's unanimously requested their classes meet twice a week rather than once. They can see each others' faces, they can all talk.

Others we know, too are saying that immediately they felt the students were focused on them and the content in a way they never were in the physical classroom. E has students who say they are so lonely in their isolation from their peers this is keeping them sane.

Plus, the music classes -- afro latin, Cuban classes -- with the music that is the subject, are so cheerful and interesting. For this hour and 15 minutes the students don't have to think about C19.  Also one can have fun in other ways with Zoom.  At one point the students were asked to stand up from where they were sitting in their locations and do some dance steps.  Hilarity ensued as moving has the effect of cutting off heads, leaving other parts of the body moving on the screen, etc.

After trying to do some straightening and putting away the Stuff from the incredibly stressed shopping, and then the class,  we were both chilled. We'd no sleep Wednesday night, stressed about shopping. Our metabolisms were screwed from rushing to dress, not having breakfast or anything before shopping, and then at home trying to get certain things out of the way before 11 AM. and the course meeting

So, after class, el V and I did something we never do. We shut off all the devices except fones and went to bed. We spent the afternoon getting warm and talking and reading and laughing, and answering phone calls.

The heat came up and I began what now I regard as a 'treat' dinner, after four days straight of variations on the main of kidney beans and rice (ya, rationing and frugality from the start, yanmo?), a fresh (not thawed from the freezer)  pork roast from the shopping, in a slow oven with lots of the cheap white wine, onion, some dried 'shrooms, etc. fresh asparagus and yammy yams!  And wine, the good stuff, of which we drank some! And read to each other and talked and laughed some more, while listening to music. I ate whole (smallish) meal. I've been forcing food into me because I know not eating won't do any good. But have had little to no appetite for weeks now.

Then came a phone call, and like so many others, we were saved by our friends!

K and C's hardware store up on Jumel Terrace had a big supply of gloves and masks. They got us some. We could reimburse them via PayPal, in which someone just yesterday deposited exactly the amount they'd spent on us. Dear, beloved B biked up there and did a hand off -- it took him less than 45 minutes, and there's a big hill, that's what kind of biker he is! So B and the mother of his daughter, el V and I all have masks and gloves now. Plus they threw in some quarts of Parmalat, they'd picked up for me earlier because in their neighborhood evidently nobody drinks the stuff and it just sits there on the shelves.

WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!

Plus el V was called to write some press releases and other promotional material for some latin artists -- $work$!

~~~~~~~~~~~

Loaned across-hall neighbor a Hudson Bay wool blanket. It's warm/ish outside but this building's original lack of insulation (the post Civil War era) makes cold accumulate and just hang when the radiators aren't on, at least until the hot weather comes to stay. Wednesday night it was down to 37°.  So ya, it was cold in here.  Plus the blanket, a box of 3-minute oatmeal that she can cover when it sits with a plate -- nor does she have an attention span, I think, longer than that, due to her mental illness and the meds that keep sort of balanced. She still hasn't taken the steps to get some cooking gear -- she does have the mean$ to do so.  Gave her some of our hot mashed yams to add to her soup - beans, along with some boiled eggs. None of the asparagus or pork, because she doesn't eat that. Today I gave her a quart of the Parmalat.

It's not as pretty a day as yesterday was, but I woke this morning for the first time without feeling sick to my stomach. I still haven't listening to the news or even read it, because everyday Death Cult Jim Jones declares something worse, and a greater determination to kill us and all Dems, insuring his reelection.

What Is Lost Is Found: A Novel By Walt Whitman

     . . . . Zachary Turpin. a graduate student at the University of Houston found this long lost novel through digital archives.

The New York Times (behind pay wall) opens its story on the discovery like this:

Readers who picked up The New York Times on March 13, 1852, might have seen a small advertisement on Page 3 for a serial tale set to begin the next day in a rival newspaper.

“A RICH REVELATION,” the ad began, teasing a rollicking story touching on “the Manners and Morals of Boarding Houses, some Scenes from Church History, Operations in Wall-st.,” and “graphic Sketches of Men and Women” (presented, fear not, with “explanations necessary to properly understand what it is all about”).

From the NY Times story:

The The 36,000-word “Life and Adventures of Jack Engle,” which was discovered last summer by a graduate student, is being republished online on Monday by The Walt Whitman Quarterly Review and in book form by the University of Iowa Press. A quasi-Dickensian tale of an orphan’s adventures, it features a villainous lawyer, virtuous Quakers, glad-handing politicians, a sultry Spanish dancer and more than a few unlikely plot twists and jarring narrative shifts.

“This is Whitman’s take on the city mystery novel, a popular genre of the day that pitted the ‘upper 10 thousand’ — what we would call the 1 percent — against the lower million,” said David S. Reynolds, a Whitman expert at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

Everything about this news is pleasing!

First of all though, as much as we studied Leaves of Grass when I was still at university it was never revealed somehow, whether in class or in critical studies, that this great American poet had ever written fiction at all.  I have learned for the first time that not only did he write fiction, he wrote quite a bit of it.  However, as he turned himself in the poet who would spend his life creating ever more types of Leaves of Grass, he tended to bury or obscure that he had done so. Second, whereas I tended to mine the poet's life and his poetry for historical information on culture and mores of the Civil War era generally and New York City's past, scholars will be mining Jack Engle for years for clues to how he turned himself from prose writer to poet -- and an experimental one at that.

Zachary Turpin

Second,  Turpin discovered this lost work through expert searching of several vast online digital archives that include the Walt Whitman Archive and the Library of Congress.  Any of us can do this now!  It's so exciting for research and scholarship!

I particularly like the Guardian's story about the discovery includes this:

 " . . . "rollicking” anti-lawyer revenge fantasy . . . "

The Life and Adventures of Jack Engle has just been published free online by the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review.

Blogged By Daughter Number Three + Richmond, Chestertown, George Mason University & NYU

Did everyone survive Halloween, which is now the year's biggest commercial merchandising holiday, except for Christmas, which goes on much longer than Halloween?  As this is a city of apartment buildings., parents have taken to bringing in their kids to our part of town to shakedown t&t the local restaurants and businesses like the delis, pizza joints, hair salons and even the liquor stores.

I got in everything we needed for dinner by the middle of the afternoon, and having met P for a single martini in the Bistro to celebrate arrival of replacement passport proving I am me again, retired to our apartment and made ravioli. We never went out again.

Watched a bit of the Frank Sinatra / Rat Pack 1958 flick, Some Came Running, adapted from a bit of the enormous James Jones novel by the same name published in 1957 -- perhaps my favorite silly movie about writing and novelists.

However, we soon retired to our lovely bed and read a bit of Bound for the Promised Land:  Harriet Tubman Portrait of an American Hero** (2004) by Kate Clifford Larson.  We were asleep by 10:30.  That's all we really want to do these days is sleep.  We never seem to get enough of it.

Not only is it Sunday, the first day of November, it is the end of Daylight Savings this year, and here is, not only the Sunday morning after the debauchery of Halloween Saturday night, but the running of the annual New York Marathon.

Fountain Bookstore owner since 2008, Kelly Justice
managed the store since 2000.  The store was est. 1978.

More locally, today we prepare to leave town at 6 AM tomorrow and drive to Richmond, where we do Fountain Bookstore at 6:30 PM.  Address, photos etc. can be seen on Fountain Bookstore's website here.

One may wonder if such a long drive to Richmond is worth it, but it is, in ways one cannot know -- as, for instance this "Daughter Number Three" Blogger entry that went up on Oct. 26th by no one we know, describing el V's 11th of October presentation and The American Slave Coast on "Melissa Harris Perry."  What's interesting to me particularly about the woman's entry is her profile says she too grew up on a farm, and now lives in Minneapolis. Her profiles includes sf/f among her interests, with Octavia Butler as a favorite.. -- i.e. someone quite like me.  The "Daughter Number Three" Blogger entry can be seen here.

Tuesday then, we drive from Richmond to Chestertown, where, once we arrive we do two radio program phoners from the Starr Center (where, while in residence as Patrick Henry Writing Fellow, the first part of The American Slave Coast was drafted 2005-2006) ), one of the programs with Baltimore Public

WYPR's Sheilah Kast, Host of "Midday."

Radio WYPR's "Midday," hosted by Sheilah Kast.

The Washington College
presentation by the Starr Center of The American Slave Coast is Wednesday evening.

Early Thursday we drive to Fairfax (a D.C. outlier) and George Mason University, where we do Slave Coast in the AM, and Ned does Cuba in the afternoon, and then drive back to NYC.

Cuban-Angolan platoon attached to 11th Tactical Group, 10th Tank Brigade, Cabinda, Angola, under command of Lt. Gerardo Hernández Nordelo, 1989-90. Cuban troops were instrumental to Angola's fight of liberation and resistence to South Africa's apartheid intervention.

Friday el V is doing an all-day symposium on Cuba and Angola at NYU.

The following Monday we fly to New Orleans for a whirlwind of parties, bookstore signings, and events at Tulane, then to Houston on Friday for more of the same.

--------------------

*   Very, very young el V, still living in Louisiana at the time Some Came Running came out, and obsessed with both television and movies (unlike now, when he actively dislikes almost all movies and television) was inspired by the movie to compose one of his very first song, lyrics and melody.  We sang it at the start of the first time we watched it together years ago at the Film Forum (though we did so very quietly as to not disturb the rest of the audience.  NYers take watching films in places like the Film Forum very seriously.

* *  As must be expected with a study of Harriet Tubman, Larson provides deeply researched and sourced documentation of the Underground Railroad operation. This is something fiction writers should do too, but so seldom do it seems from the proof of utterly incorrect imagined underground railroads -- which most certainly did not operate outside the border states. Novelists seem to get the underground railroad about as right as Hollywood gets writers.

 Something else of which fiction writers tend to be ignorant is that far fewer enslaved African Americans escaped from the vast prison camp that was the antebellum south than self-emancipated and free people of color were kidnapped from the north and sold down south -- despite the constant howling of slave owners that they were in eminent danger of losing all their property to those EviLe northern abolitionist agitator thieves.  Because of course no enslaved person would ever think of changing their status on their own, and all people of color could only be truly happy by serving a master / mistress.  These facts are in the Bible, you know.

Netflix's Narcos

Narcos became available streaming from Netflix on Friday.



I have watched the first three episodes. Narcos is engrossing me specifically from an historical viewpoint (though when our narrator first sees the woman he's going to marry, her hairstyle is at least 40 years out of period -- pure 2014-2015, not 197whatever)  How people who are looking for adventure drama primarily will see it I don't know.

It continues to amaze me to know these events took place in a time long before I ever knew the existence of the places the series , much less seen them, though, so far, I've only seen them through el V's eyes and experience:  Bogotá, Cartegena, Baranquilla, Medellín, etc.  Medillín now is a hip and cool city, capital of salsa music and dancing, with fine hotels, restaurants, shopping and parks.

I particularly appreciate the scenes that have the astounding Spanish baroque architecture of cathedrals and and public buildings as the frame for the latest capitalist extraction out of the New World of a product, cocaine, that is as highly addictive and profitable as sugar and slavery ever were, and remain.

I'm also enjoying the Spanish that is spoken many of the scenes. This is done with nimbleness and skill. An English-only speaker isn't going to be disturbed out of engrossment in the scenes by either the Spanish or the subtitles. As English and Spanish deftly interchange with each other, so too does the smooth insertion of the historic television footage and the newspaper photographs and headlines of Escobar's days.

Some have criticized both Boyd Holbrook, who plays Steve Murphy, the American DEA narrator, and his voice overs, but I like him and the narration very much. For me, this narration contributes to the overall sense of a timeless epic, framed within a Colombian-Amazonia South American perspective: another twist in the knotted saga that is the long, violent, bloody history of  South America's struggles with Strong Men from Cortés to Bolívar to Pinochet, and the Escobars.



The cast is uniformly good, including Steve Murphy's partner, Javier Peña, played by Pedro Pascal.



The critics agree: the principal player, Pablo Escobar's Wagner Maniçoba de Moura (a Brasilian, he needed to learn Spanish for this role) is very, very, very good. He's a little pudgy, a little paunchy.  His eyes alternately reveal a stone cold killer and the dreamer who imagines being president of Colombia and helping  the poor against the established wealthy elite who exploit them and the country. He projects that larger-than-life complexity that makes for the very best of villains -- which is countered with the plainer, simpler, USian good guys, of Peña and Murphy.  But this is el norte going against el sud, something long resented throughout South America, so they and the interests they represent aren't that simple or that plain at all.

Why I am liking Narcos quite a bit so far, the Guardian expressed well. A pull from the review:

"It’s not too much like a history lesson? It’s exactly enough of a history lesson. That most of the story is true is utterly fascinating, especially when it comes so close to melodrama with kidnappings, affairs, extortion, murder and a few devious families controlling insane amounts of wealth. It’s like Empire, but with more Spanish and tons of bloodshed. Chris Brancato (an alum of everything from the original Beverly Hills 90210 to several shows in the Law & Order franchise) makes the episodes compulsively watchable and even though the whole plot could be spoiled with a simple Wikipedia search, there is still plenty of action and suspense."

This isn't a series that is for binge watching so much as watching 2 or 3 episodes at a time  -- partly to absorb the historical aspects and to think about what they signify in terms of contemporary issues, including both Europe's and North America's ongoing immigration, drug and labor (including sex trafficking) crises.



Taking one's time watching the series allows one to properly appreciate the great location vistas and backgrounds, as well as to consider them in connection with what literature gringos insist on quantifying as "magical realism" -- which is NOT how South Americans characterize such works as those by Gabriel García Márquez, nor does Márquez himself, for that matter.*

Márquez grew up in  Aracataca, Colombia, and then lived with his grandfather in Baranquilla, where he began his career as a journalist.  As we see in Narcos, journalists still mattered a great deal, in terms of politics, in Escobar's day -- and, in fact, they still do.

OTOH, that's how it works for me, which doesn't mean that's how it works for everyone.

--------------------

*   I suppose the academic term currently for this might include something that connects to the locution du jour: spacialization, "The Spacialization of Vision in Gabriel García Márquez's Love In TheTime of Cholera."  Every discipline has a form of spacialization now, including the music department, "sound spacialization" and "spatial music," i.e. as on a course syllabus:

"Spatial music is composed music that intentionally exploits sound localization. Though present in Western music from biblical times in the form of the antiphon, ..."

or in Ethnic Studies, "Multi-Ethnic Alliances, or the Spacialization of Race," etc.

or in an anthropology course -- the "spacialization of labor".

You get the picture.

Globalization is as unhip as yesterday.

Splendid! An Interview With Amitav Ghosh

Ghosh's final volume in the Ibis Trilogy, Flood of Fire, is published this week in the UK, and will be here too, at the end of the summer.

I have so enjoyed and admired the first two volumes, Sea of Poppies (2008 and River of Smoke (2011).  This trilogy is what the finest of historical fiction writers, who also respect the history of their subject can accomplish. This subject is something that neither fiction writers or military historians who write in English have much treated: this vast canvas of India, China, the British Empire and the circumstances of the first Opium War.

November 1839: British ships blow up four Chinese junks, initiating the first Opium War.

It's a bit brave these days for a writer to cite Lawrence Durrell as a formative influence, since the revelations that he abused his daughter, but Ghosh does it.

Ghosh, who was about to turn 50 when he embarked on the [Ibis] trilogy, says he found it daunting: “For the next 10 years, this was what I was going to do. But I also knew that I had to set myself something really difficult and ambitious. And that has proved to be the case. I was determined that the individual books should stand alone – it’s indefensible, aesthetically, for it be just one huge book chopped into three. One of my favourite experiences was reading Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet in Alexandria. I love his writing and it is strange how he is kind of forgotten now. He had an incredible range and the books capture all aspects of a cosmopolitan life in the eastern Mediterranean. They do articulate with each other so that you get glimpses of characters across books, but they are not all meshed together. If I had a model, that was it.”

Ghosh gives large credit to Walter Scott, too, as an influence on writing his own historical fiction:

Ghosh was born in Calcutta in 1956 and was brought up in India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka as his family moved around with his ex-soldier father on various secondments to the Indian government. The peripatetic life meant that books became particularly important to him – one early childhood favourite was Richmal Crompton’s Just William series before he moved on to the novels of Sir Walter Scott, for many the inventor of the historical novel as we know it today. “Scott had a huge influence on many early 19th-century Indian writers and I found his books utterly absorbing and remember curling up in bed with them at boarding school”. He was at the prestigious Doon School where Vikram Seth, a pupil a couple of years ahead of him, came back to teach and they talked a lot about writing to each other. “Not long ago I went back there and looked at those same editions of Scott in the library. I was the last person to have checked them out.”

I still have this edition of Fiedler's book on my shelves.  I've read it -- and many of the books he mentions in it -- many, many times. I spent my undergrad sophomore year looking for, and reading, every novel he mentions in this study of American literature and culture. Fortunately the library was that of the U of Wisconsin so the books were to be had.

That last sentence is sad: there's so much contemporary writers could learn from Scott about how to write good historical fiction; yet, not only do these writers not read Scott, many of them don't know who he is/was; if any do know who Scott was all they know is Ivanhoe, sneering at him in second-hand via Mark Twain blaming Scott for the American South.  (Twain also sneers at James Fenimore Cooper, without whom Twain would never have had a writing career from whose classics his own Huck Finn is descended in an undeviating line, as Leslie Fiedler brilliantly traces in Love and Death in the American Novel.)  For these writers, historical fiction is the same as history, and they don't believe in either of these practices as a discipline, with modes and standards.  Like their fiction, to them history is just something to make up, without even observing the realities of the period.

Ghosh is aware of discipline, as he has a Ph.D. from Oxford in Social Anthropology, a subject that demands travel and writing skills.  He's changed off writing fiction (for which he's been nominated for, and won, many awards including the Arthur C. Clarke Award for The Calcutta Chromosome (1997)  with non-fiction on occasion:

. . . . In an Antique Land (1992) was a broadly non-fiction study emerging from his studies that investigated the relationship between Egypt and India, alternating his experiences of living in villages and towns in the Nile Delta with an imagined history of an 11th‑century Jewish trader and his slaves. Different again, The Calcutta Chromosome won the 1997 Arthur C Clarke award, but Ghosh says he never thought of the book “as being science fiction. It is in many ways a historical novel that is projected into the future as well as the past. And what does such labelling achieve anyway? It just separates what is called the literary mainstream from this other kind of writing. Who are among the most memorable writers from the mid to late 20th century? John Wyndham, Arthur C Clarke, Ursula Le Guin, Doris Lessing. And from the supposed mainstream who reads Angus Wilson today? To the literary establishment Lessing’s later books, about planets and so on, were a kind of embarrassment. But she very strenuously resisted that sort of partitioning and these writers have staying power because they were saying things about society that was in many ways more perceptive than what the literary mainstream was saying.”

It does seem odd that Ghosh gives Naipaul so much credit for the surge of India's literary scene, since Naipaul didn't respect India and Indians, of which he wrote

dismissively and pessimistically in his Indian Trilogy: An Area of Darkness (1964), India: A Wounded Civilization (1975) and A Million Mutinies Now (1990). India and Indians were not pleased with him in those days. Nor is Naipaul an Indian, but a Trinidadian. But this seems to have passed from the UK's and India's literary memory.

Now it's with Ghosh -- and Vikram Seth -- that British Indians and India literary writers are liking to be displeased, calling them middle brow hacks who peddle pablum to the white middle class. Nevermind that this so-called white middle-class has shrunk to pathetic size and doesn't much like reading anything anyway, at least books that feature adults facing adult problems which are not solved by a (white) chosen one or a super hero.

However, this reader enjoys and admires both Ghosh and Seth's books, as well as Scott and Cooper, and Durrell's Alexandria Quartet too.  I even admire and enjoy Twain.

Conference

To describe the conference's focus as plainly as possible:

Currently, the revolutionary, game changer in terms of nineteenth century U.S. historical research is the recognition of, and redemption of, the abolitionists, their efforts and actions, black and white. Abolitionists were as much written out of the narrative as until recently slavery had been by the revisionists of the Glorious Lost Cause. If looked at they were considered at best cranks and sidebars.  Without their fanaticism and fire eating. it was said, the war wouldn't have happened, as we saw, for instance, Edmund Wilson going on about with many a sneer, in his Patriotic Gore (1962 -- I talked about this myself, a while back, here), published as part of the centennial war observances.

Interesting too, though nobody made a deal of it, mentioned now and again in passing, currently our government has been taken over by radical extremist aristo plutocrats, just as it was back in the years leading up to the Civil War. (Though, Foxessa observes, currently there's no competing capitalist economic system to counter the current plutocrats, as there was with the northern states' industrialization, transportation and communications explosions.  NOBODY wants to spend money on infrastructure -- which is the ultimate win-win for the Jacksonians, nullifiers and slave power sorts -- they didn't either!)

The coolest thing?  How generationally diverse the conference was. A high school kid, who asked questions in every q&a session after the panels.  In the summing up period, he inquired, "How did anybody buy this shit ever? about slavery being right, that people who wanted to stop it were bad, and that slavery was a good thing for anybody, and nobody should go to war about it?"  The way the Big Dawgs from the unis converged upon him, he's going to be offered some very nice packages at some very nice schools, straight into grad school programs of his choice.

What wasn't cool?  Only one person on the stage / podium, etc., as presenter or moderator, was a person of color, and he was a moderator, i.e. he didn't say anything, other than introductions. There was one woman of color, a great scholar, whom we do quote in The American Slave Coast, presenting.  But she was the only woman and person of color there as one of the "stars", and who talked. There were some female (white) grad students or new faculty who presented terrific material, though mostly bibilographic, especially the one who did it for the Underground Railroad.  She got maybe the biggest round of applause for someone who wasn't a Big Dawg.

The conclusion was that, yes, the War to End Slavery was inevitable. Nothing could have stopped it from taking place.  Recall, historians are not at all fond counter-factuals, as they are irrelevant to what did happen.

The Take Away: it's time for American historians to research deeply the colonization movement, as well as look more at anti-slavery and abolition actions and movements locally.  We must remove the Civil War from the discourse, because nobody knew they were living in the antebellum era and nobody knew there was going to be a war, much less that the abolitionists would win it.  Rather, right up to secession the abolitionists were so depressed by what looked like the Slave Power's ever expanding power (particularly as it had taken over the federal government entirely, which locked down any other progressive action, not even to mention abolition or emancipation), so that not only did Frederick Douglass believe he had to move to Haiti -- self-colonization -- but a movement began to have the north secede from the USA -- which wouldn't have happened, but it does show how high the levels of disappointment and pessimism had risen.

Thomas Jefferson wasn't mentioned once by anybody.

What Matters

The television writer-director-producer tells it true:

DAVID SIMON says:
July 3, 2014 at 11:06 am
The older I get, the more I think a happy family and an earned reputation are the only assets that matter.

Let it be made clear, crystal clear, right here, in the now: David Simon was never ever fired from the Sun; David Simon was never ever accused of ethics violations; David Simon never ever compared The Wire to Moby Dick. And etc. etc. etc. of the bs that patheric excuse for an academic scholar and critic accused David Simon of in that excerpt from her book forthcoming from a university press for which so many of us have had such respect,  on that pathetic aggregate of mindless digital bs that I won't honor by even naming. 

SHAME the writer.. SHAME the press. SHAME the website.

SHAME.  SHAME.  SHAME.

Ebony and Ivy: The Secret History of How Slavery Helped Build America’s Elite Colleges

Amy Goodman of Democracy Now interviews Craig Stevens Wilder, the author of Ebony and Ivy: The Secret History of How Slavery Helped Build America’s Elite Colleges (2013).

Craig Steven Wilder, professor, MIT, author of Ebony and Ivy

It's a brilliant work of scholarship, delving into deep historical detail the close relationship between the most highly ranked of the institutions of higher learning in the U.S., slavery and the African-Atlantic slave trade.  It also shows how institutions such as Harvard, Yale, Columbia and Princeton deliberately formed a 'science' of eugenics to help forge closer bonds between southern and West Indian planters, who had money to endow chairs and legacies, but who by-and-large had no universities of their own.  This is pretty rough stuff.

There is no aspect of the U.S. before the Civil War that wasn't infected with slavery and the slave trade, starting in the colonial era.  New England's Indian wars tended to conclude with the captives being shipped to West Indian slave markets and sold.  There is no institution after the Civil War that wasn't tainted with white supremacy and Jim Crow.  That's depressing.

However, Wilder makes clear there were always members of these institutions too, who throughout this sad history, pushed back against slavery, against white supremacy, eugenics, colonization and the slave trade.  Often they suffered for it, but the antagonists persevered.

AMY GOODMAN: So, talk about America’s most elite universities. What relation do they have to slavery?

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: I think there are multiple relationships. The first and probably most poignant, most provocative, is the relationship to the slave trade itself. In the middle of the 18th century, from 1746 to 1769—fewer than 25 years, less than a quarter century—the number of colleges in the British colonies triples from three to nine. The original three were Harvard, Yale and William & Mary, and all of a sudden there were nine by 1769. And it triples in that 25-year period. That 25-year period actually coincides with the height of the slave trade. It’s precisely the rise and the elaboration of the Atlantic economy, based on the African slave trade, that allows for this sort of fantastic articulation of new growth of the institutional infrastructure of the colonies.

The 11 Nations of North America

In Tufts Magazine, "Up in Arms" by Colin Woodward:

author of American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America. An earlier book, The Republic of Pirates,

is the basis of the forthcoming NBC drama Crossbones.

I don't entirely agree with where he makes the contrast between Chesapeake and Deep South, but he's still right.

This is demographic history, now a foundation tool for researching any history, it seems (it even matters when assessing armies -- from where do the rank-and-file come? who are they?  who are the officers?).  It certainly is for the study of slavery.  El V was at many panels about these matters the last three days at the Demographic Conference at Michigan State University.

In Woodward's article he's employing demographics to explore the historical frequency of gun violence in various sections of the U.S.

In any case, this article is an excellent illustration of the truth which is chronology and geography are the twin pillars on which history is built.

What's Up? Michigan, William Seward and Free Soil

El V arrived home safely.

Get ready, Michigan,  here he comes!

At Western Michigan University:

Tuesday, November 5  U.S. Election Day
Literary reading  - excerpts from ""The American Slave Coast, Ned Sublette, 2028 Brown Hall, 7 to 9 p.m. Free.

Among other activities el V will be playing the Old Dog in Kalamazoo November 9th as part of the WMU Music Therapy Showcase and Fundraiser Applying their talents and raising money for class trip to New York / Chicago. Rock / pop. Cover charge: $5

After that is East Lansing for the Atlantic World Slave Database conference, where there are going to be world-class demographers, including Gwendolyn Midlo Hall.

There is also a tour of Detroit during this visit to Michigan.

I am studying William Seward.

Perhaps all the figures who took over the national stage at the period of the Great Compromise of 1850, aren't as entirely fascinating as so many of those who dominated it between the War of 1812 and 1850. For one thing, among them there aren't Great Monsters such as Calhoun and Jackson. Nor is 5' 4''  Stephen A. Douglas any match for the towering stature of Henry Clay.

Nevertheless I am fascinated with them.  It's in their personal and political lives we see the vast political change overtake the nation, that ends the decades of Jacksonian proslavery, anti-bank, anti-government dominance.

The poor white southerner -- poor, thus excluded from running for political office in most slavery states even at a local level -- these southern Jacksonian Democrats see the Democrats with their intractable demands that slavery be expanded into all the public, government lands, as personal obstacles to their ever getting ahead.

These Are Martin Van Buren and Charles Adams - Yes! the grandson of John Adams - on the Free Soil Ticket

Thus they become a bridge between North and South Free Soil movement and the short-lived Free Soil party, which morphed into the Republican party, that rang the death knell for the Democrats in the country outside the slaveholding states. In this case they mean literally free soil, available from the government lands for nominal prices. By this point all the lands suitable for agriculture in the South are in the hands of the ever shrinking numbers of the huge slaveowning power elite, as they alone have the credit to take over failed plantations, make loans and buy ever more negroes at ever higher prices.

Just because we've finished writing The American Slave Coast, doesn't mean we've finished studying.  Or writing, for that matter.  :)  What a wonderful privilege this has been, to live so immersed in our history.  I'm so glad I get to continue doing it until publication. Then there will be the year of promoting it.