#hundreds of years before this country was founded. second the first colonist to call it massachusetts was fucking john smith in 1610

[jewfrogs]

this post sucks so bad massachusetts takes its name from the indigenous massachusett people who were genocided and whose land was stolen and that would be obvious if you would think for a single second and look up the etymology before posting. mocking a native language that was eradicated for centuries and is only now beginning to be revived is not fucking funny it is ignorant and racist and cruel

[themdamnblues]

Caelus Homebrew: the Aenar

Separated from the Sea of Skerrit by the hills and peaks of the Northern Fracture, the Thundering Plains stretch for hundreds of miles. The grasslands here are prone to thunderstorms that blow in off the Western Sea and give the place its name. The Thundering Plains are ruled by the Aenar, a tall, tanned people with flashing red-brown hair. They are often called the spear maidens, though in truth this refers to only a particular group of young warrior women, the Aenar’s most prolific warriors.

Once subject to the Verinigan Empire, the Aenar were shepherds who domesticated the imposing horses of the grasslands and turned them to war. Legend says it was the goddess Anika herself who taught the first warrior maidens to tame the horses after she subdued the great spirit of the plains, almost 900 years ago. Legends attest these women became the Valmeyr, the ghostly Maidens of the Slain who serve Anika today. With horse and spear they swept the Veringian colonists away and established their rule over the grasslands in a series of three bloody wars that saw the Veringian Empire lose each time. The Aenar’s victory would trigger a series of rebellions that bled the Veringian Empire for seven hundred years. The reputation of the Aenar’s rider women, of howling lancers attacking under clouds of arrows, led many neighboring countries to offer gold in return for their services.

The Aenar revere Anika the Horse-tamer, also called the Shepherd, Battle-mother, and All-mother, but also honor her children. These gods form a tight-knit group, united by an apocalyptic vision that foretells a final battle between the Aenar gods and the orc gods. For the Aenar, a second Sundering is not merely a possibility, it is a prophesied certainty. They and their gods intend to be ready for it. This knowledge of their deaths and glories make the Aenar gods fatalistic, and their people are alike. In battle they are feared for their thundering charges and grim resolve. The spear-maidens believe it is better to die with spear in hand than be conquered by the enemy.

Demand for their martial abilities mean that the Aenar have traveled far and wide. Indeed, there are several Aenar colonies outside the motherland, founded by exiles or land-hungry warriors. They have also made common cause with local powers, when needs be. They fought in coalition with the Rivercrown Confederation and the Marcher Princes when the Temple States attempted their northern expansion, throwing the Holy Army back in the year 1417. Before that their warriors battled alongside the gray elves of the north to check the hobgoblin legions of the Shotahan Empire.

The People

The Aenar largely live in semi-nomadic clans that criss-cross the Thundering Plains. A matriarch, typically the eldest surviving daughter of the leading family, leads the tribe in all things. She is the final word on disputes of any kind, however she is typically advised by a council made up of chosen warrior representatives and the village fathers. Some take counsel with druids as well, but a few reject them from living in their halls.

The Spear Maidens

When foreigners think of the Aenar, it is invariably their howling warrior maidens that come to mind. The spear maidens are roving bands of unmarried young women who gather together to ride the Thundering Plains in defense of their homeland or to offer their services in foreign lands as sellspears. It is expected for the matriarch’s chosen heir to ride as a spear maiden, lest she not be respected as a warrior, but many second and third daughters do so to find service, fame, and coin.

The warrior women typically follow the mightiest or cleverest among them, but each band chooses its leader as its own conscience dictates. When they choose to ride as a spear maiden the women swear to pay special honor to Anika’s warrior daughter, Valfreyj, who commands the ghostly Valmeyr. Each band will have a simple and portable shrine for devotions. Valfreyj’s dark brother, Valoke, is patron to druids and any Aenar men who work magic. As such the spear maidens enjoy the favor of the druids, and it is not uncommon for a band to have a powerful spellcaster in their ranks.

The Druids

While it is true that women fill most of the roles of power among the clans, it is typically men who wear the robes and antlers of the druids. Deserved or not, they often have sinister reputations. This unease is a reflection of the relationship between the Aenar and the spirits, for the Aenar are a godly folk and they once thought the spirits were rivals to their gods. Even when they learned otherwise, there were many among the Aenar who angrily rejected any overtures from the spirits, for the spirits had often borne witness to Aenar’s suffering under the Veringian Empire and rendered no aid. The anger is largely one-sided. The spirits’ power and presence could not be denied, however, so some learned to speak with the spirits and treat with them.

Wary of the warrior women, the spirits instead turned to the village fathers. In time the spirit-speakers split away from the village fathers and retreated into the wild places. It was during this time that Valoke descended to the mortal realm and took up patronage of the spirit-speakers, who eventually became an order of druids and lorekeepers. Stag and Horse are both well-respected by the Aenar, they are both counted friends of Valoke, too. The druids speak for the spirits and with the patronage of the Dark Brother, ensuring their continued credibility. Even the most churlish clan mother does not turn away a druid who speaks for Horse.

[alarawriting]

Writeober #3: Bone

Gerlach Schwartztern cackled maniacally as he felt the bindings keeping him out of the world faltering. He had expected this, ever since he’d seen that the historical building where the ritual had been performed was scheduled to be knocked down. There had been three days of demolition, and finally, the sacred circle at the center had been breached. He was free!

“Hey! You! This is a hardhat area! You can’t be in here!”

Gerlach shuffled around – being bound out of reality, able only to see what was transpiring, without having muscles to move, had done no good for his physique, and all his muscles were stiff beyond belief – to see a man in a bright yellow helmet and a shining orange vest, yelling at him.

“Dost thou know to whom thou speaketh?” he said, smiling cruelly, raising his own bony fingers as he prepared to teach the fool a lesson.

“Come on, asshole. Don’t give me that Scadian shit,” the man said. “You need to get off the grounds. It’s not safe.”

“Unsafe for whom?” Gerlach laughed, and reached out with his power. He called out to the dead buried below and all around to rise from their graves.

Nothing happened.

“Unsafe for you, asshole. You. Did I stutter? Get the hell out of here before I have to call the cops.”

Where were the dead?

Now that he was looking for them, he couldn’t feel them. In the Old World, there had been skeletons everywhere. But he’d had to flee the witchfinders – not the idiots who accused old women with black cats and herbal knowledge of being witches, but the ones with real power, who hunted those with real magic – so he’d taken passage to the New World, four hundred years ago.

Life was hard, then. Many colonists died, and their skeletons became his servants. He’d terrorized the colonists and the natives alike… until mages of both groups had teamed up against him. The natives had used their magic to confine him within a single town, herding him to the colonist mages, who’d bound him and locked him outside the world so long as the runes and symbols they’d carved in the stone under a church floor remained intact.

Now that the church was demolished, and the stone broken, Gerlach was free. He’d been able to see the world from his prison outside it; he’d seen the population explode. Surely the dead must be everywhere! People still died in this brave new world, did they not?

“Very well, knave. I shall leave, if you direct me to a graveyard.”

The man in the yellow hat sighed. “I don’t have to do this,” he said. “You’ve been an ass. But fine. The new church that replaced this one is about two miles down the road, and it has a graveyard. I think you have to turn right on Whitman – or I dunno, maybe it’s Baker? One of those streets. Go in about three blocks, you’ll find the church, and the graveyard’s across the street.”

“Then there I shall go,” Gerlach said, picking up his robes – they were dragging in the dust of the construction – and walking toward the gate in the fence. An interesting fence, that, made of wires woven together loosely.

“Thank you is a thing, asshole!” the man called after him, but Gerlach did not thank his inferiors.

***

It took far longer to find the church than the knave’s directions suggested. Gerlach was calling down curses on the man’s entire family unto the seventh generation by the time he finally found it, his legs and feet screaming at him for making them perform so much work after just being embodied again.

But there it was. The graveyard. And now he could feel the dead, lurking below, waiting for his call. With them at his command, he would rule over this town – and others. As the dead came to answer him, he would grow in power, and he would be able to call more and more of them as his power expanded. Eventually he would rule over this entire nation. Perhaps even the world.

Gerlach took a deep breath, and then called to the dead.

He felt them respond, felt skeletons restless in coffins push against the lids.

And push.

And push.

“What transpires here?” he roared. “You should be rising from your graves! I have called you, and you must come!”

Skeletons still pushed against coffin lids.

“Why can you not come forth?!”

Some skeletons broke their wrists and fingers trying to push open their coffin lids. None of them succeeded in actually opening anything.

Gerlach tried for hours. And then he walked to another graveyard and tried again. Still the dead could not open their coffins. Gerlach was furious. Back in the Old World, only the most wealthy had even had coffins. And they were decorated wooden boxes that a sufficiently motivated skeleton could punch through. Here in the New World, four hundred years after arriving, apparently skeletons were all contained in unbreakable coffins.

He sank to his knees on the ground and screamed, his dreams of conquest dying just like the skeletons trapped in unbreakable coffins, and just as unlikely to rise under his power.

***

Elias Whittaker was furious.

The city had concealed the plans to demolish the old church until he was out of the country, and then gone through with the destruction. He hadn’t known about it until his daughter drove by the place and saw it destroyed. It had been a month.

None of the records of the Whittaker family, passed down from father to son (or daughter in some cases), had said anything about Gerlach Schwarztern being a patient and crafty man. A brilliant necromancer, yes, but he’d named himself Black Star in German for gods’ sake. He was not the type to lay low. So why hadn’t the city fallen to walking skeletons yet?

Could it be that Schwarztern had died in his prison, or perhaps died the moment he re-entered the world and time began for him again? Maybe all the aging he hadn’t done while he was trapped caught up with him at once.

But Elias didn’t think that was likely. From everything he’d read in the family tomes, carefully preserved for four hundred years, the crafters of the spell hadn’t thought it would do that. They had warned, over and over, of the danger should the binding circle they’d carved into the rock ever break or wear. All of them had passed on the knowledge to their children, but between illness, war, and adult children’s desire to strike out west to make a new life for themselves, far away from their parents… Now the Whittaker family was the only one left.

Elias had been on the Board for Historical Preservation, had argued for years that that tiny run-down little church needed to be preserved exactly as the city’s founders had left it, that it was nearly 400 years old and was a view backward into a past that America had almost lost, the early days of the colonies. And what happened? The moment he was out of the country, the rest of the Board caved in like a wet tissue and let the city government have its way. They were going to put up some mixed-use development there, townhomes and offices and retail all mixed together, somehow. And that was worth letting an ancient necromancer free in a world where almost no one remembered that magic existed, or how to invoke it. Right.

But there was nothing Elias could find to indicate that Schwartztern had escaped. No graveyards were disturbed. No records of dead people getting up and walking. No disturbances at the morgue.

His daughter Rebecca found something—a record of an old man who’d been caught in the Jewish graveyard, obviously digging up graves because several graves had shown signs that the dirt had been interfered with, holes and clods and piles of dirt all over the graves. The elderly caretaker for the graveyard was still spry enough to shoot at an anti-Semite committing a hate crime, though. Rebecca reported that the old caretaker didn’t know if he’d actually hit the man in the tattered black coat or not, but that if he had, he must have only winged him, because the man had run without sign of injury. Since then, members of the Jewish community had been taking turns helping him guard the graveyard, with their own guns, and there had been no further disturbance.

Oddly, the fellow hadn’t left a shovel behind, but Ira Friedburg, the caretaker, had never seen him carrying one, either. Maybe it was under his coat, and the bullet had hit it instead of the man.

Of course, Elias knew why Schwartztern hadn’t needed a shovel. The graves had been disturbed from the inside. But why had the Jewish graveyard been affected, and not the much less well-guarded Catholic and Protestant ones? Schwartztern might well have been an anti-Semite, considering that in that time period almost everyone was, but he had never shown a preference for any specific type of corpse.

For the first time in his life Elias was grateful for the Second Amendment. Gerlach couldn’t know of any firearm technology more advanced than maybe a musket. A small weapon that fired deadly ammunition with terrifying accuracy and speed was nothing Gerlach Schwartztern could have any experience with. And the Jewish graveyard had suffered enough hate crimes that the caretaker patrolled it with a gun, regularly, and was small enough that Schwartztern hadn’t managed to raise a single body before being caught at it.

It was frustrating and maddening. He searched for three months. No sign of Schwartztern anywhere. Had the man left town? Was he right now trying to raise the dead in New York City or Washington DC or something? Had he returned to his homeland? Wait, no, he couldn’t have done that without a passport.

In desperation Elias started going around to funeral homes, asking them if they’d seen a man of Schwartztern’s description – long graying hair, a long beard, pale skin, aquiline features, crooked teeth. None of them had.

Until Elias went to Baron and Sons Funeral Home, and was met at the door by a man who looked exactly like the portraits of Schwartztern that had been passed down, if the man had gotten a modern haircut, a shave, and gotten his teeth straightened.

Elias’ eyes widened. “Gerlach Schwartztern?”

The man looked surprised. “There’s not many who know me by that name,” he said, and called back into the funeral home. “Mr. Baron, there’s a man here who wants to speak to me specifically. I’ll take a break to talk to him and then return to the clock.”

“Sure, that sounds fine,” a man’s voice called back.

“How are you – Why are you – What, did you find religion while you were trapped? You were freed almost four months ago,” Elias hissed. “But you’ve raised nothing.”

“Not entirely true,” Schwartztern said. He had a thick accent, but it wasn’t quite placeable – which made sense, because it was from another country 400 years ago. His English, though, sounded plausibly modern for a foreigner. “Let us walk to the back.”

“Where the graves are, and where you can attack me?” Elias snapped.

Schwartztern shook his head. “There is a contemplation garden for the grieving. No funerals are scheduled now, so it is unoccupied. We can talk without interruption.”

Oh. Right. There wasn’t a cemetery anywhere near the funeral home. That was why funeral processions were a thing. He followed the ancient necromancer, bemused, to the garden. “Did you forget your powers? Or lose them?”

“I assume from your knowledge of my name that you were one of the guardians my captors must have left behind to keep me contained,” Schwartztern said. “You may call me Gerlach Schwartz now, though. Or simply Gerlach. Apparently this new age is one of great informality. And yet they don’t even use ‘thou’ anymore.”

“Uh, yeah, we got rid of that a while back,” Elias said. “And you’re correct. My family has been keeping watch. Everything I’ve read said to expect an insane necromancer who would do anything to rule over the living with the power of the dead. But here you are in a building with… maybe two dead people?”

“There are four corpses here, in fact, but you’re correct. Four corpses is far from enough to conquer a town with.”

“What happened?”

“Modern caskets,” Gerlach said simply. “In my day, only the wealthy were even interred in a coffin; most bodies were lowered into the bare ground. Apparently since that time everyone who dies is buried in an impregnable sepulcher called a ‘casket’, or they are burned to ash… except for the Jews, who bury their dead in wooden boxes that I could at least work with, before the Jew fired his weapon at me.”

He shook his head. “The weapons they have in this time! It would never work, raising the dead, not now. I have been watching some of their movies—” He put a strange emphasis on the word. “So many tales of dead rising and biting the living to make them a risen corpse as well. And in these tales, everyone has one of these terrifying weapons, and they can entirely destroy a corpse with them. Perhaps a skeleton would be more difficult to hit, but with sufficient ordinance, they would prevail over my skeletons as well. The creators of these tales added the part where the dead can bite and their bite kills to make it a believable tragedy, else none would believe that enough firepower could not overwhelm even the dead.”

Elias rather thought no one had done anything to the plots of zombie movies to make them believable, but he could see how a necromancer might have a different opinion. “So you’re telling me you’ve given up. That I don’t need to kill you or capture you because you aren’t interested in raising the dead to conquer, anymore.”

Gerlach laughed. “Interested, perhaps. But it will not work, and this I now know. There are far more dead today, but that is because there are far, far more living, and they greatly outnumber the dead. Most of the dead are locked away in boxes far too strong for a skeleton to break open. I know, for I have made them try, and try again.” He shrugged. “So it is not practical. And it is also hardly necessary.”

“Why unnecessary?”

“Men live like kings in your time, young man.” Elias was not a young man – he might actually be older than Gerlach was when he was trapped – but this didn’t seem like something worth arguing to a man born over 450 years ago. “You need no servants to bring you hot water for your bath – simply turn a knob, and hot water comes forth! Food of any kind can be had at any time, no matter the season! Music can play anywhere, whether musicians are there to play it, or not. Entertainments as rich as the plays put on for kings can play endlessly, never repeating, on a box of light in your home – a home which is heated in the winter and cooled in the summer, and both are done evenly, throughout the home, without risk of fire. And there are treatments for lice.”

That explained the shorter hair. “So you’re, what? Trying to be a good tax-paying citizen now?”

“I am told there will be great, great difficulties in becoming a citizen, as I cannot present papers to prove what nation I was born in, or what date, or when I came to this land. Apparently I am an ‘illegal immigrant’, and if I am found by the authorities, they will deport me… somewhere. Since my own nationality no longer even exists, I have no idea where. But my employers here are sympathetic.” He nodded at the funeral home. “I came here because I thought the presence of the dead plus the title Baron meant another necromancer was here, but that was not the case… as I suspect you know well. They’ve arranged for me to work here and learn their trade, for there are many techniques of preserving the dead that exist now but did not, in my day. Apparently they are paying me ‘under the table’, an expression I understand not, except to say it is a means of paying one with no papers to prove their identity.”

“It means they’re paying you in cash and not taking out your taxes, so I guess you’re not a taxpayer after all.”

“In my day, taxes were paid in grain.”

“Sometimes money is referred to as ‘bread’ in this day and age, but the days when you could actually pay tax in grain are long behind us.”

“I do realize that,” Gerlach said. “Have I satisfied your curiosity? Do you understand now that I present no threat to your world?”

“And you use your necromancy here?”

“As God witness, no, why would I do that? They have techniques for moving bodies and they know nothing of magic. If I were to use the power I have over the dead, now, it would perhaps be as a detective, who can hunt down dead bodies after they are murdered and hidden away by the murderer. I have watched many entertainments about detectives,” he said, in a tone as if he were telling a salacious secret. “In my day the profession didn’t exist, but today it seems a very popular job. I wonder that any murderers can go free, with so many detectives.”

“It’s… not actually that popular in real life. People just like stories about detectives. They like to see a mystery presented to them, so they can try to solve it, or enjoy watching the detective solve it.”

“Ah. Well, I have much to learn about this new world before I dare leave this job,” Gerlach said. “They provide me with a room here to live in, upstairs, but for food and clothing and a box for entertainments I must pay my own way.”

Elias shook his head in complete bemusement. All of the effort he’d put into, his whole life, to keep the necromancer contained, and this was what Gerlach did when he got free. “Well, there’s nothing I can charge you with and nothing you’re doing that warrants my interference… but I will be watching you.”

“That would be delightful!” Gerlach said. “It grows tedious sometimes, to have no acquaintances I can share knowledge of the past with, or my necromancy. You would make an excellent companion!”

I have worked all my life to keep this man in prison and he wants to be my friend. Well, it would help Elias make sure that Gerlach was continuing to not be a threat. “Fine, I’ll come take you out to lunch sometime.”

“I look forward to it greatly!”

As Elias left, he wondered how he was going to explain any of this to Rebecca.

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

From @writing-prompt-s, “ An ancient evil awakens to destroy humanity, only to find out he is no match for modern technology, thus forcing him to become a functioning member of society. “

[hms-chill]

Today’s @rwrb-social-isolation prompt is to talk about something from history we love, so I did a deep, deep dive into a near-utopian colony headed by a man who was, truly, an icon. A Byronic hero two hundred years before Byron himself. It got rambly, but at this point, who’s surprised. Please enjoy.

All us good little American drones know the story of how white people came to America. They settled at Plymouth, and they struggled and struggled for years, but with the help of friendly natives, they finally succeeded and murdered millions with biowarfare and also guns built the great country we live in today.

Were there other, non-Plymouth colonies? Jamestown, of course, the Macho Dream that men who are really into WWII love to talk about. Boring. Let’s talk about a fun colony. 

Let’s talk about Merrymount, a town founded on a distrust of Christian Puritanism, the abolition of slavery, popular revolt, equality with natives, a pagan beliefs. Sound fake? See attached bibliography.

History, huh? Let’s get into it.

To talk about Merrymount, we have to talk about Thomas Morton, the Lord of Misrule. He was born in 1579 in Devon, England, a region despised by the more religious parts of the country for still hanging onto some of England’s traditional pagan practices. It was particularly known for celebrating the land and its guiding principles of neighborliness and quietness (the belief that keeping peace was more important than nearly anything else). We don’t know much about his family, but we’re pretty sure he was the second son to a middle-class family, largely because he went to law school in London (something that wouldn’t have been affordable for lower class folks, but that an older son wouldn’t have had to do under the laws of primogeniture). 

The London Morton arrived in was overcrowded, and bouts of plague were not uncommon. The population was booming, and tensions were rising between the deeply Christian Reform movement and the more Pagan Renaissance. In particular, we saw the rise of Puritanism and Separatism, both of which were extreme versions of Christianity (a la those pilgrims we all cosplayed every Thanksgiving in elementary school), and both of which Morton hated. From what we can tell, he was first an observer, and his coursework would have taught him to question what he was told and to argue his own points and beliefs.

Following his time in school and his general disillusionment with established Christian society, he became a traveling lawyer for a time. In his late 30s, Morton began working for Sir Ferdinando Gorges, a major investor in Plymouth, founder of Maine, and “Father of English Colonization in North America”. He first traveled to America in 1622, and in his book, he declared “The more I looked, the more I liked it. And when I had more seriously considered of the beauty of the place, with all her fair endowments, I did not think that in all the known world it could be paralleled”. However, he was back in England in 1623, complaining of Puritan intolerance. 

Following a dissolved engagement, Morton once again set sail for America in 1624, aboard the ship Unity under command of his friend Captain Richard Wollaston and accompanied by 30 indentured servants. They eventually were given land by and began trading with the Algonquin tribes, who were native to the region and whom Morton found more civilized than the Puritans in Plymouth. They named their town, which is now Quincy, MA, “Mount Wollaston”. 

From Morton’s book, we can see that he got to know native culture relatively well. He attended Algonquin dinners and funerals. He learned at least some of the language, and he celebrated their respect for their elders and general family structure. During this time he also had his first interaction with Plymouth, which went much less well than his interactions with Algonquin tribes. He declared that he “found the Massachusetts Indians more full of humanity than the Christians”, and it is after this meeting that he began to furnish native tribes with powder and shot for their guns, often when English colonists couldn’t get any. Needless to say, he doesn’t come off particularly well in Plymouth’s writing about him.

By 1626, Mount Wollaston was booming. Colonists tired of Plymouth’s harsh rules were flocking to the more liberal town when Morton found out that Wollaston had been selling indentured servants as slaves. Outraged, he encouraged them to rebel, and Wollaston fled, leaving Morton the sole leader (or “host”, the term he prefered) of the newly renamed Merrymount (or “Ma-re Mount, which is a pun on the Latin for “ocean”).

(That’s right, this man got control of a town, declared himself just a host, and then renamed it based on a nerdy pun. an icon.)

Merrymount was, generally, from most sources I can find, a pretty chill place to be. People were declared equal, and there was a pretty high degree of integration with Algonquin tribes. Though Morton did do what he could to encourage the Algonquin peoples to settle into a more English lifestyle, he did so not by force, but by providing them with free salt to use in preserving food, therefore negating the need for a nomadic lifestyle. Which... pressuring people to give up their way of life isn’t great. But doing it this way is a lot better than the way that pretty much every other colonizer was doing it. 

The real pinacle of the integration of English and Algonquin peoples was a May Day Celebration. Pretty much everyone celebrated the start of spring, as it meant that you’d survived the winter and life in general would likely start to improve with the warmer weather. May Day was both a celebration of springtime and a unifying holiday, a time when the different cultures came together and often a time when English men would begin to woo Algonquin women. The Puritans of Plymouth called it Bacchic and evil, so I can only assume it was a generally good time. 

However, by 1628, it was all too much for Plymouth. Morton’s general chill vibe, his trading with natives (and the threat it posed to Plymouth’s monopoly), Merrymount’s integration with Algonquin tribes, and just generally the disregard for Puritan ways all exploded when, in celebration of May Day, Merrymount erected an eighty-foot maypole. 

Now, I know eighty feet is hard to visualize. Especially if you’re from somewhere that uses the metric system. But an average story of a building is about ten feet. So just... think of an eight story building. This thing was MASSIVE. It’s as tall as my freshman year dorm. It was clearly visible from Plymouth, and it was the final straw. Morton was arrested and left to die on a rock that could only generously be called an island.

He was back by fall of 1629, but found Merrymount in ruins and a particularly harsh winter greeted him that year, and he was shipped back to England in 1630, a voyage that almost killed him. 

By 1631, he was back in the game suing the Massachusetts Bay Company, the political and financial backers of the Plymouth Puritans. He won in 1635, cutting off much of Plymouth’s English support and causing many to leave it for settlements in Connecticut. 

His book, New English Canaan published in 1637, launched him into celebrity. In 1643, he tried to return to Massachusetts, but was turned away upon arrival. He was exiled to Maine, where he passed away at the age of 71.

And that’s Thomas Morton! I first heard about his story in A Queer History of the United States by Michael Bronski, but I couldn’t remember enough/didn’t find anything in other sources to establish the queer context for Merrymount other than its rejection of Puritanism. 

Attached bibliography (not formatted correctly, because fuck the MLA and the APA).

General overview of his life

Morton’s book, New English Canaan

Spunky bio largely focused on Merrymount/the maypole

Spunky bio two: Maypole boogaloo

His wikipedia, which is just nice and readable

[bountyofbeads]

The 1619 Project https://nyti.ms/2Hjvu0L

The 1619 Project is a major initiative from The New York Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are.

"We asked 16 writers to bring consequential moments in African-American history to life. Here are their poems and stories:"

Published August 14, 2019 | "1619 Project" New York Times | Posted August 16, 2019 |

⬤ August 1619

A poem by Clint Smith

In Aug. 1619, a ship arrived in Point Comfort, Va., carrying more than 20 enslaved Africans, the first on record to be brought to the English colony of Virginia. They were among the 12.5 million Africans forced into the trans-Atlantic slave trade, their journey to the New World today known as the Middle Passage.

Over the course of 350 years,

36,000 slave ships crossed the Atlantic

Ocean. I walk over to the globe & move

my finger back & forth between

the fragile continents. I try to keep

count how many times I drag

my hand across the bristled

hemispheres, but grow weary of chasing

a history that swallowed me.

For every hundred people who were

captured & enslaved, forty died before they

ever reached the New World.

I pull my index finger from Angola

to Brazil & feel the bodies jumping from

the ship.

I drag my thumb from Ghana

to Jamaica & feel the weight of dysentery

make an anvil of my touch.

I slide my ring finger from Senegal

to South Carolina & feel the ocean

separate a million families.

The soft hum of history spins

on its tilted axis. A cavalcade of ghost ships

wash their hands of all they carried.

Clint Smith is a doctoral candidate at Harvard University and the author of the poetry collection “Counting Descent,” as well as a forthcoming nonfiction book, “How the Word Is Passed.” Photo illustration by Jon Key. Diagram: Getty Images.

⬤ March 5, 1770

A poem by Yusef Komunyakaa

In 1770, Crispus Attucks, a fugitive from slavery who worked as dockworker, became the first American to die for the cause of independence after being shot in a clash with British troops.

African & Natick blood-born

known along paths up & down

Boston Harbor, escaped slave,

harpooner & rope maker,

he never dreamt a pursuit of happiness

or destiny, yet rallied

beside patriots who hurled a fury

of snowballs, craggy dirt-frozen

chunks of ice, & oyster shells

at the stout flank of redcoats,

as the 29th Regiment of Foot

aimed muskets, waiting for fire!

How often had he walked, gazing

down at gray timbers of the wharf,

as if to find a lost copper coin?

Wind deviled cold air as he stood

leaning on his hardwood stick,

& then two lead bullets

tore his chest, blood reddening snow

on King Street, March 5, 1770,

first to fall on captain’s command.

Five colonists lay for calling hours

in Faneuil Hall before sharing a grave

at the Granary Burying Ground.

They had laid a foundering stone

for the Minutemen at Lexington

& Concord, first to defy & die,

& an echo of the future rose over

the courtroom as John Adams

defended the Brits, calling the dead

a “motley rabble of saucy boys,

negroes & mulattoes, Irish

teagues & outlandish jacktars,”

who made soldiers fear for their lives,

& at day’s end only two would pay

with the branding of their thumbs.

Yusef Komunyakaa is a poet whose books include “The Emperor of Water Clocks” and “Neon Vernacular,” for which he received the Pulitzer Prize. He teaches at N.Y.U. Photo illustration by Jon Key. Boston Massacre: National Archives. Attucks: Getty Images.

⬤ 1773

A poem by Eve L. Ewing

In 1773, a publishing house in London released “Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral,” by Phillis Wheatley, a 20-year-old enslaved woman in Boston, making her the first African-American to publish a book of poetry.

Pretend I wrote this at your grave.

Pretend the grave is marked. Pretend we know where it is.

Copp’s Hill, say. I have been there and you might be.

Foremother, your name is the boat that brought you.

Pretend I see it in the stone, with a gruesome cherub.

Children come with thin paper and charcoal to touch you.

Pretend it drizzles and a man in an ugly plastic poncho

circles the Mathers, all but sniffing the air warily.

We don’t need to pretend for this part.

There is a plaque in the grass for Increase, and Cotton.

And Samuel, dead at 78, final son, who was there

on the day when they came looking for proof.

Eighteen of them watched you and they signed to say:

the Poems specified in the following Page, were (as we verily believe)

written by Phillis, a young Negro Girl, who was but a few Years since,

brought an uncultivated Barbarian from Africa

and the abolitionists cheered at the blow to Kant

the Negroes of Africa have by nature no feeling that rises above the trifling

and the enlightened ones bellowed at the strike against Hume

no ingenious manufacturers amongst them, no arts, no sciences

Pretend I was there with you, Phillis, when you asked in a letter to no one:

How many iambs to be a real human girl?

Which turn of phrase evidences a righteous heart?

If I know of Ovid may I keep my children?

Pretend that on your grave there is a date

and it is so long before my heroes came along to call you a coon

for the praises you sang of your captors

who took you on discount because they assumed you would die

that it never ever hurt your feelings.

Or pretend you did not love America.

Phillis, I would like to think that after you were released unto the world,

when they jailed your husband for his debts

and you lay in the maid’s quarters at night,

a free and poor woman with your last living boy,

that you thought of the Metamorphoses,

making the sign of Arachne in the tangle of your fingers.

And here, after all, lay the proof:

The man in the plastic runs a thumb over stone. The gray is slick and tough.

Phillis Wheatley: thirty-one. Had misery enough.

Eve L. Ewing is the author of “1919,” the “Ironheart” series, “Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago’s South Side” and “Electric Arches.” She is a professor at the University of Chicago.

⬤ Aug. 30, 1800

Fiction by Barry Jenkins

In 1800, Gabriel Prosser, a 24-year-old literate blacksmith, organized one of the most extensively planned slave rebellions, with the intention of forming an independent black state in Virginia. After other enslaved people shared details of his plot, Gabriel’s Rebellion was thwarted. He was later tried, found guilty and hanged.

As he approached the Brook Swamp beneath the city of Richmond, Va., Gabriel Prosser looked to the sky. Up above, the clouds coalesced into an impenetrable black, bringing on darkness and a storm the ferocity of which the region had scarcely seen. He may have cried and he may have prayed but the thing Gabriel did not do was turn back. He was expecting fire on this night and would make no concessions for the coming rain.

And he was not alone. A hundred men; 500 men; a thousand men had gathered from all over the state on this 30th day of August 1800. Black men, African men — men from the fields and men from the house, men from the church and the smithy — men who could be called many things but after this night would not be called slaves gathered in the flooding basin armed with scythes, swords, bayonets and smuggled guns.

One of the men tested the rising water, citing the Gospel of John: “For an angel went down at a certain season into the pool, and troubled the water: whosoever then first after the troubling of the water stepped in was made whole of whatsoever disease he had.” But the water would not abate. As the night wore on and the storm persisted, Gabriel was overcome by a dawning truth: The Gospel would not save him. His army could not pass.

Gov. James Monroe was expecting them. Having returned from his appointment to France and built his sweeping Highland plantation on the periphery of Charlottesville, Monroe wrote to his mentor Thomas Jefferson seeking advice on his “fears of a negro insurrection.” When the Negroes Tom and Pharoah of the Sheppard plantation betrayed Gabriel’s plot on a Saturday morning, Monroe was not surprised. By virtue of the privilege bestowed upon him as his birthright, he was expecting them.

Gabriel Prosser was executed Oct. 10, 1800. Eighteen hundred; the year Denmark Vesey bought his freedom, the year of John Brown’s and Nat Turner’s births. As he awaited the gallows near the foot of the James River, Gabriel could see all that was not to be — the first wave of men tasked to set fire to the city perimeter, the second to fell a city weakened by the diversion; the governor’s mansion, James Monroe brought to heel and served a lash for every man, woman and child enslaved on his Highland plantation; the Quakers, Methodists, Frenchmen and poor whites who would take up with his army and create a more perfect union from which they would spread the infection of freedom — Gabriel saw it all.

He even saw Tom and Pharoah, manumitted by the government of Virginia, a thousand dollars to their master as recompense; a thousand dollars for the sabotage of Gabriel’s thousand men. He did not see the other 25 men in his party executed. Instead, he saw Monroe in an audience he wanted no part of and paid little notice to. For Gabriel Prosser the blacksmith, leader of men and accepting no master’s name, had stepped into the troubled water. To the very last, he was whole. He was free.

Barry Jenkins was born and raised in Miami. He is a director and writer known for his adaptation of James Baldwin’s “If Beale Street Could Talk” and “Moonlight,” which won the Academy Award for Best Picture. Photo illustration by Jon Key. House: Sergey Golub via Wikimedia. Landscape, right: Peter Traub via Wikimedia.

⬤ Jan. 1, 1808

Fiction by Jesmyn Ward

In 1808, the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves went into effect, banning the importation of enslaved people from abroad. But more than one million enslaved people who could be bought and sold were already in the country, and the breaking up of black families continued.

The whisper run through the quarters like a river swelling to flood. We passed the story to each other in the night in our pallets, in the day over the well, in the fields as we pulled at the fallow earth. They ain’t stealing us from over the water no more. We dreamed of those we was stolen from: our mothers who oiled and braided our hair to our scalps, our fathers who cut our first staffs, our sisters and brothers who we pinched for tattling on us, and we felt a cool light wind move through us for one breath. Felt like ease to imagine they remained, had not been stolen, would never be.

That be a foolish thing. We thought this later when the first Georgia Man come and roped us. Grabbed a girl on her way for morning water. Snatched a boy running to the stables. A woman after she left her babies blinking awake in their sack blankets. A man sharpening a hoe. They always came before dawn for us chosen to be sold south.

We didn’t understand what it would be like, couldn’t think beyond the panic, the prying, the crying, the begging and the screaming, the endless screaming from the mouth and beyond. Sounding through the whole body, breaking the heart with its volume. A blood keen. But the ones that owned and sold us was deaf to it. Was unfeeling of the tugging the children did on their fathers’ arms or the glance of a sister’s palm over her sold sister’s face for the last time. But we was all feeling, all seeing, all hearing, all smelling: We felt it for the terrible dying it was. Knowed we was walking out of one life and into another. An afterlife in a burning place.

The farther we marched, the hotter it got. Our skin grew around the rope. Our muscles melted to nothing. Our fat to bone. The land rolled to a flat bog, and in the middle of it, a city called New Orleans. When we shuffled into that town of the dead, they put us in pens. Fattened us. Tried to disguise our limps, oiled the pallor of sickness out of our skins, raped us to assess our soft parts, then told us lies about ourselves to make us into easier sells. Was told to answer yes when they asked us if we were master seamstresses, blacksmiths or lady’s maids. Was told to disavow the wives we thought we heard calling our names when we first woke in the morning, the husbands we imagined lying with us, chest to back, while the night’s torches burned, the children whose eyelashes we thought we could still feel on our cheeks when the rain turned to a fine mist while we stood in lines outside the pens waiting for our next hell to take legs and seek us out.

Trade our past lives for new deaths.

Jesmyn Ward is the author of “Sing, Unburied, Sing,” which won a National Book Award. She was a 2017 MacArthur fellow. Photo illustration by Jon Key. Landscape: Peter Traub via Wikimedia.

⬤ July 27, 1816

A poem by Tyehimba Jess

In 1816, American troops attacked Negro Fort, a stockade in Spanish Florida established by the British and left to the Black Seminoles, a Native American nation of Creek refugees, free black people and fugitives from slavery. Nearly all the soldiers, women and children in the fort were killed.

They weren’t headed north to freedom —

They fled away from the North Star,

turned their back on the Mason-Dixon line,

put their feet to freedom by fleeing

further south to Florida.

Ran to where ’gator and viper roamed

free in the mosquito swarm of Suwannee.

They slipped out deep after sunset,

shadow to shadow, shoulder to shoulder,

stealthing southward, stealing themselves,

steeling their souls to run steel

through any slave catcher who’d dare

try stealing them back north.

They billeted in swamp mud,

saw grass and cypress —

they waded through waves

of water lily and duckweed.

They thinned themselves in thickets

and thorn bush hiding their young

from thieves of black skin marauding

under moonlight and cloud cover.

Many once knew another shore

an ocean away, whose language,

songs, stories were outlawed

on plantation ground. In swampland,

they raised flags of their native tongues

above whisper smoke

into billowing bonfires

of chant, drum and chatter.

They remembered themselves

with their own words

bleeding into English,

bonding into Spanish,

singing in Creek and Creole.

With their sweat

forging farms in

unforgiving heat,

never forgetting scars

of the lash, fighting

battle after battle

for generations.

Creeks called them Seminole

when they bonded with renegade Creeks.

Spaniards called them cimarrones,

runaways — escapees from Carolina

plantation death-prisons.

English simply called them maroons,

flattening the Spanish to make them

seem alone, abandoned, adrift —

but they were bonded,

side by side,

Black and Red,

in a blood red hue —

maroon.

Sovereignty soldiers,

Black refugees,

self-abolitionists, fighting

through America’s history,

marooned in a land

they made their own,

acre after acre,

plot after plot,

war after war,

life after life.

They fought only

for America to let them be

marooned — left alone —

in their own unchained,

singing,

worthy

blood.

Tyehimba Jess is a poet from Detroit who teaches at the College of Staten Island. He is the author of two books of poetry, “Leadbelly” and “Olio,” for which he received the 2017 Pulitzer Prize. Photo illustration by Jon Key. Cypress: Ron Clausen via Wikimedia

[theswordofpens]

Earth's History in Blood Tournaments (2019-2194)

In the year 2130, mankind had accomplished one of its greatest achievements: Planetary Colonization. Planets and moons once thought inhospitable became thriving Utopias, thanks to the technological wonders and scientific advancements of the Golden Era. With the colonial cities finally constructed, Earth had launched only a tiny fraction of its population to fill its new homes for the rapidly expanding human race.

    Prior to the colonization of our star system, most of the continents had united under single-rule governments. All of Europe became the E.K. (European Kingdom), a constitutional monarchy. Forged from a war waged over unity, the tiny continent was united into a strong kingdom under the rule of King Vincent II. All of North America had become the United Sovereignty of the Americas, shortened to U.S.A., making it the largest democratic country in the entire world. The continent, known as Asia, was torn into three parts. To the north, Russia reformed into the U.S.S.R. To the center of the continent, China had taken over many of its neighboring countries to form the People’s Republic of Asia (P.R.A.). To the south, India became the second home of the Emperor of the United Arabic Empire. Though considered the second smallest nation, this empire touched from the shores of the Mediterranean to the blue waters of the Pacific.

    It didn’t stop there. In the year 2133, the United Sovereignty led the charge to help the third world nations to follow the world power’s example. United by a past filled with strife and struggle, Africa went from a place of poverty and starvation to a power house of industry. The vast islands of the Pacific were united to form the Federation of Oceania (F.O.), becoming the largest nation on Earth in miles. As a sign of peace, the United Sovereignty turned Hawaii and its Pacific territories over to the Federation. South America, however, fell under the dictatorial rule of a single man. Power hungry, Viceroy Fernandez slaughtered millions of protesters and rebels alike in order to unite his continent under a single banner. This new nation, forged in the blood of so many, became known as the Viceroyalty of South America, or V.S.A. for short.

This was seen as a problem to the other powers. Under the direction of Pope Jeremiah II, the newly reformed Knights Templar became the world’s sole police force. Under the urgency of the United Nations, the Treaty of Budapest was signed to ensure that the new super nations would work together rather than waging war for territory. It also stated that war in general was banned, and would be punished with invasion from the other nations. The treaty went on further to ban all nuclear weapons from construction and demanded all nations to turn over their warheads to be disarmed.

When whole continents came under these powers and with the treaty signed, people thought that humanity had finally found peace. Earth flourished, with many new cures and technologies once thought impossible in the past. It appeared that Mother Nature had been defeated. However, she had one more trick up her sleeve - total war.

When the summer of 2135 approached its end, most of the countries had finally finished building passenger spaceships called the “Gallions”,  in order to send thousands of people to the outer colonies. As a sign of peace, most of the countries had all gathered their Gallions together to launch them simultaneously. On November 22, 2135, the U.S.S.R. and the P.R.A. had launched an assault on all the ships as they were leaving the surface of the Earth. At 20,000 feet above ground level, millions of people fell to their deaths from the burning wreckage. Their justification for this atrocity? The conditions of the Treaty of Budapest.

    The Great Continental War had officially began. The U.S.A., the E.K., the F.O., and the Knights Templar had formed an alliance together to destroy the U.S.S.R. and the P.R.A. For the third time in Earth’s history, the whole world was at war with each other.

    At the start, it was only five nations that had gone to war. But as time passed on, more and more countries had joined in the fight. The newly formed Antarctic Republic (A.R.) had seen that the U.S.A. was in a harsh struggle to win this war. They had noticed that almost all of the E.K. had been invaded, and the F.O. was very close to surrender. Even the Knights Templar were on their last leg, having lost so many sons and daughters to the carnage. In the year 2138, the A.R. entered the war on the side of the allies after an assassination attempt made by the Soviets.    

This war was different from the others in the history of the world. There were three sides to this one, with the third side was the Kingdom of Africa and the United Arabic Empire. They were on most of the war fronts, and treated the battlefields as if they were mere playgrounds. They may had come into the war later than the others, but they were the two most threatening armies the world had ever seen. Whole cities, towns, and villages would be annihilated by advancing tanks and the screaming sounds of incoming mortar fire.

    The original engineers that were launched for the construction of the planetary colonies saw that there was no going back to Earth, so they decided to populate what was to be the colonists’ home. The people of those colonies had decided to focus on their survival rather than Earth’s, and they thrived while blood continuously was shed on their home planet. They had erected huge domes and constructed giant cities, never minding the war that carried on. While they were busy making technological discoveries and exploring the vast unknown of the universe, their home world seemed doomed to its own destruction.

    In the year of 2142, the U.S.S.R. and the P.R.A. had surrendered. The allies had won again, but the lives lost in both the tragedy that sparked the war and the war itself, were far too costly for any celebration. The war had dragged on for a bloody addition of eight years, ending finally in 2150. Only one billion people remained on the face of the Earth when the smoke had cleared. Almost all human life had been destroyed by famine, disease, and war.

As the world was busy trying to salvage what they could from the ashes of the war, a single man rose to fame after having developed technology that would help piece the world back together. His name was Doctor Vance Kyne, the head scientist and successful developer of the first human genetic modifications. For years, he had found cures for diseases, discovered new elements, and rebuilt thousands of destroyed cities. But after having discovered the Garden of Eden during the war, Dr. Kyne made a strange and dark ascent to power through what he called his “Blood Tournaments”. It quickly became a popular sport throughout the many nations. Coliseums were constructed all over the world to host the carnage of games that consisted of single matches, team fights, and endless waves of any enemy pounding on a number of players. The only countries who did not participate in the games were the four original allied nations: the U.S.A., the E.K., the F.O., and the A.R.

    In the years that followed, the outer colonies changed completely. The once bare harsh soils now housed hundreds of thousands of crops and homes.    

As time passed, the U.S.A. and the E.K. became closer. Eventually, their relationship as allies became a brother-like closeness. The king of the E.K. and the U.S.A.’s president both signed a pact of friendship, showing the world that at any moment’s notice, they will defend their allies to the death. The president of the A.R. also became a stronger ally of the U.S.A. They, too, joined in the signing of the pact, making them a trio of allies. The premier of the F.O. took notice of this, and decided to align herself with the allies, for the benefit of both her people and vast country.

    On April 16th, 2165, President White of the United Sovereignty of the Americas, President Andrews of the Antarctic Republic, King Vincent II of the European kingdom, and Premier Young of the Federation of Oceania all signed a pact of brotherhood -a pact never before seen- to show the world that peace can be achieved when greed and pride are not at mind when signing a treaty.

    Years have passed since then, and countless smaller wars have been waged. Lines drawn in the sand by the powers that fought on against each other. Over time, humanity’s numbers slowly climbed up to a reasonable number. But as humanity began to grow again, so did the evil in this world.

[rezares]

Sorcerery History & Culture in The Maghreb in the BDRP Universe

In which eight months of McKala’s worldbuilding, research, and bullshitting culminate in this

 History

 Magicks in the Maghreb (Northwest Africa) have always been stigmatized, dating back to even before French and English colonialism in the region. However, the stigma attached to them intensified under colonialism. Colonial oppressors tapped into the existing mystery and distrust surrounding magicks to further suppress them. A magick community under fire from both colonizers and the colonized was ideal in the age of European colonialism of Africa, Asia, and The Americas. Similar models of targeted, brutal oppression of magicks of invaded lands have been noted in historical documents from the Sasanian, Carthaginian, and Roman Empires.

 Pre-colonial opinions of magicks ranged from distrusting tolerance to codified oppression. It should be noted that the first recorded targeted killing of magicks appeared in documents unearthed in Cape Bon (Watan el-kibli) from the Greco-Punic Wars, dated at around 300 B.C. It tells of the wives of Carthaginian soldiers killed in battle in Sicily killing a sorcerer couple who rivaled with their commanding officer, believing them to have cursed their husbands.

 Magicks were subject to system of oppression under the Roman Empire, however, this was only really enforced in the cities. Outlying towns and villages, and the nomadic tribes at the time, operated on their own rules as long as they stayed out of the Romans’ way. Some were more lax, some were more draconian. The Romans themselves were friendly to sorcery. However, oppressing the sorcerers in conquered territory was vital to squashing dissent.

 The next several hundred years, under the Vandals and the Byzantine Empire, magicks lived in a constant cycle of freedom, oppression, freedom, oppression. It varied from leader to leader.

 By 705, the Islamic Conquests had taken over all of modern-day Tunisia. This period provided a degree consistency for magicks. Some Caliphates were harsher than others, however, much of this period is regarded as the Golden Age of Magicks in Tunisia and much of the Maghreb. Caliphates of this period thought it was to their advantage to negotiate with magicks rather than oppressing and slaughtering them. Alliances with magicks proved wise in several documented battles. Tensions were recorded throughout this time period, but generally, magicks could live in peace in often segregated communities.

The early Islamic era came to an end when the Shia Islamic Fatimid Caliphate departed to their newly conquered territories in Egypt leaving the Zirid dynasty to govern in their stead. Normans from Sicily raided the east coast of Ifriqiya for the first time in 1123. After some years of attacks, in 1148 Normans under George of Antioch conquered all the coastal cities of Tunisia: Bona (Annaba), Sfax, Gabès, and Tunis. By the thirteenth-century, the Golden Age of magicks in Tunisia was solidly over, as they were oppressed from all groups in the area blaming them for tensions with each other, plagues, anything that could justify hatred of magicks.

 Under the Ottoman Empire, as the Eyalet of Tunis (1574–1705) and the Beylik of Tunis (1705–1881), Tunisia saw another period of mellowing in magick-mundus relations. However, this was hardly a repeat of the Golden Age. Restrictions on magicks were heavy, prison time and forced servitude were common, but it is interesting to note that the death sentence for magic use introduced in 1280 was lifted in 1610, after falling out of enforcement around the 1520s.

 Tensions were pervasive in the lives of magicks, especially sorcerers who did not have the escape that fairies and were-folk often did. In the last hundred years of the Ottoman Empire’s reign over the region, laws became increasingly more restrictive, anti-magick violence saw a steady spike, and when Tunisia became a French Protectorate in 1881, it escalated.

 As colonists usually did, the French tightened restrictions on magicks in their holdings in Africa. Though Tunisia gained independence in 1956, the effects of French colonialism linger - and for Tunisian magicks, it isn’t just the language they left behind.

 The oppression continued through the 20th century, through all of Ben Ali’s regime until his ousting during the Arab Spring, and has continued under a democratic Tunisia.

 The High Council

Across three countries - Tunisia, Libya, and Algeria, and some outstanding regions - a High Council of sorcerers has existed since before artificial colonial borders were drawn. The Council acts as a governing body, and clear rules for how a sorcerer is to conduct themselves to be granted herd protection are in place. One of these rules is that protecting the community must not come at the cost of rolling back peace progress. Education and peace-making efforts are their favored weapon against danger caused by ignorance-born hatred.

However, this is not always strongly enforced. The Council often neglects to denounce sorcerers unless it brings problems onto the community. Sorcerers that react with violence covertly to defend the community, are often not scolded.

 Sorcerer Culture & Practices

Sorcerer culture in the Maghreb is distinct from sorcerer culture in other parts of the world due to the flip-flopping of the sub-group’s safety. While periods of oppression or enjoying basic rights didn’t just switch overnight, the memory of difficult periods of their history remained alive in good times through oral storytelling, and what historical records were kept.

 There is generally less competition between sorcerers than in some other parts of the world, as there is a strong sense of community among Maghrebi sorcerers. During the era of European colonization of the region, Maghrebi sorcerers often viewed ethnic European sorcerers as more of the “out group” than, say, werewolves or fairies from the Maghreb. European sorcerers were seen as agents of the colonizers, and viewed as, ultimately, more loyal to them. Attitudes toward foreign sorcerers didn’t really begin to shift until the 1980s.

 Since it has typically been unwise to wear one’s magic on their sleeve, any evidence of being a sorcerer must be easily disguisable.

 Tunisian sorcerers of all genders favor daggers as wands. Daggers can be plain or ornate, hand crafted by the individual, or passed down the generations. They can be easily hidden in large pockets, under modern dresses and t-shirts, and within traditional clothing. Algerians and Libyans generally follow the same practice, with regional or personal alternatives. Moroccan sorceresses often wear bracelets that function as their wand.

 Grimoires written in Tunisia are rare and highly valuable. Tunisian sorcerers are often forced to memorize everything from what reagents look and feel like, to complicated multi-page spells, without ever having the luxury of reading or writing them down. It is dangerous to be found with writing pertaining to sorcery. While it is not legally punishable by death, sorcerers do fall victim to mob sentencing; legally, there can be prison time.

 Because it is impossible for any one person to memorize the whole world of magic inside their one brain, sorcerers are not educated by the standard Master-Apprentice system.

 Rather, the community educates apprentices together and everybody brings their unique skills to the table. Master sorcerers still call those under their tutelage apprentices, but they are almost never an apprentice’s sole Master. It would not be uncommon for a relatively young Master sorcerer, say, in their late thirties, to mention having had a dozen or more apprentices. If a Master helps teach a young sorcerer that is one of five siblings, then they probably also helped teach the other four.

 Perhaps the most unique aspect of Maghrebi sorcerer culture, is their use of sign language. Maghrebi Sorcerer Sign is a sign language unique to the sorcerer community, and is mutually unintelligible from Libyan Sign Language, Tunisian Sign Language Algerian Sign Language, and Moroccan Sign Language alike. It also predates the existence of any of these modern sign languages. Deaf and Hearing sorcerers use MSS on a daily basis.

There are sorcerers who only know how to cast certain spells nonverbally, solely using MSS for that spell. MSS is the collective term used to describe what is better described as a collective of localized signed conlangs. There is no official linguistic research done on MSS - naturally, as it is dangerous to reveal oneself as a sorcerer - but it is known that sorcerers from different regions, let alone countries, may have communication hurdles if they try to solely communicate using MSS.

 Sorcerers across the region, however, have a second method of secret communication. There is a secret spoken language as well. Similar to the use of Polari in the United Kingdom, it is an argot meant to prevent outsiders from understanding the conversation. The language - best known as Ahk’hdi - is also used in other neighboring parts of Africa - as far as Ethiopia.

 Ahk’hdi traces its origins back to the 11th century. It comes from a mixture of Mediterranean Lingua Franca, Amazigh languages (primarily Kabyle and Shilha), Arabic, Amharic, and  Ottoman Turkish. Ahk’hdi is full of Arabic, Amharic, Turkish, and broadly Romance words that are given a similar treatment to English words in back slang, and French words in verlan. Like MSS, Ahk'hdi does differ from region to region, however, Ethiopian sorcerers, Tunisian sorcerers, and Algerian sorcerers can easily communicate together in Ahk'di with only occasional slips into a more widely known lingua franca.

[scotianostra]

On June 26th 1695 the company which undertook the Darien Scheme was formed.

I know there will be some of you out there that are unaware of what Darien was, so I will try and give a wee rundown of the project.

ome have said: ‘The Darien venture was the most ambitious colonial scheme attempted in the 17th century…The Scots were the first to realise the strategic importance of the area…” Whilst others claimed: “They were plain daft to try… It was disaster. They never had a chance.” T’is for you to decide!

William Paterson, a Scot who’s other major claim to fame was the foundation of the Bank of England, was born in Tinwald in Dumfriesshire in 1658. He made his first fortune through international trade, travelling extensively throughout the America’s and West Indies.

On July 12th, 1698 five ships carrying 1,200 eager colonists left the Port of Leith in Scotland to a rapturous send-off. Most of the ill-fated emigrants did not know where they were going and did not find out until the sealed orders were opened at Madeira, but they were brimming with enthusiasm anyway.

A voyage of three months took them across the Atlantic to a harbour on the mangrove-studded Caribbean coast of Panama. On November 3rd, they took formal possession of their new territory, confidently naming it Caledonia and laying the foundations of the settlement of New Edinburgh. But it all went horribly wrong. Hundreds died of fever and dysentery before the colony was abandoned.

The idea was to establish a colony in Darien, open to ships of all countries, and to carry the cargoes of the Atlantic and the Pacific across the narrow isthmus of Panama, cutting out the long voyage around Cape Horn. Holding the key to the trade of both oceans, the colony would be hugely profitable and would make Scotland one of the richest nations on the globe.

The Company of Scotland Trading to Africa and the Indies was authorised by the Scottish Parliament, over the years it has been given the name Darien Scheme of Project. It was meant to be a rival to the East India Company, but powerful interests in London did not want a competitor and obstacles were put in the new institution’s way. So fierce was resentment at this treatment by the English that thousands of Scots put their own money into the enterprise. Fervent national pride was aroused and a crowd cheered to the echo as the ships – Caledonia, St Andrew, Unicorn, Dolphin and Endeavour – sailed from Leith. Scores of stowaways who hoped to go along had to be ejected tearfully from the ships before sailing.

The first passenger rightfully on board was William Paterson, with his wife and son, neither of whom would survive the expedition. Many of the others would not survive either. The promoters had failed to allow for the Darien climate, the insuperable difficulties of transporting cargoes through mosquito-infested tropical jungle and the fact that the Spanish considered the territory their own and were not about to tolerate intruders.

Already on the voyage across the Atlantic the expedition’s leaders had started to quarrel among themselves. Once landed, the settlers were treated kindly by the local natives, who enjoyed flying the cross of St Andrew gaily on their canoes, but the Scots were desperately short of food, a prey to disease and riven by feuds. The English colonies in the West Indies and North America were forbidden to communicate with them or send them help by order of the government in London, which had its foreign policy and its relations with Spain to consider. The Spaniards were mobilising against the colony and a ship sent from the Clyde with extra supplies never arrived. In June, the exhausted survivors decided to go home. Paterson himself was now too starved and ill to persuade them otherwise. They sailed painfully back to Jamaica and New York, abandoning ship after ship on the way. Only the Caledonia finally made it back to Scotland.

Unaware of all this, a second consignment of settlers reached Darien at the end of November 1699, but the ship carrying their food supply caught fire and burned, while a Spanish fleet arrived to blockade the harbour. The enterprise was abandoned in March 1700 and a capitulation was signed with the Spaniards in pelting rain while a solitary piper played a lament. Traces of the settlement were found in 1979 at what is still called Caledonia Bay.

Scotland blamed the whole fiasco on the English. Paterson himself was bankrupt, but still believed in his scheme and tried vainly to revive it but to no avail. 

Meanwhile, the Darien disaster seems to have persuaded hard-headed Scotsmen that their country could not prosper by itself, but needed access to England’s empire, and it helped to pave the way for the Act of Union between the two countries in 1707. Under the Act the investors in the Darien scheme were quietly compensated for their losses at taxpayers’ expense.

The pics are the flag the Scots created for the new colony, the map of the area, the third pic is the Frontispiece to the Company of Scotland's first volume of directors' minutes from 1696, The coat of arms at the bottom contains a rising sun to symbolise Scotland’s improving prospects. The motto Qua panditur orbis vis unita fortior means Where the world expands its united strength is stronger. The shield is made up of the saltire, with a ship, an elephant, a llama and a camel. The two supporters are an Indian and an African carrying horns of plenty to represent abundance.

[gaiienpokedex]

Interlude: The People of the Crossing

A/N: I've been hinting at some mythology/worldbuilding in the story so far that this interlude chapter may make more clear. You are totally in the right if you read this and think "god damn Keleri go write some original fiction already", but I think it also helps answer the question in canon of 1) where did humans come from? and 2) why does the pokémon world have such a long history but basic facts about pokémon seem to be poorly understood?

Sometimes it seems like humans (or pokémon?) have just arrived in the pokémon world, and other times people are said to have been there for millennia. (The DPPt games even claim, memorably, that humans and pokémon used to be the same.) Like most competing theories, I propose the answer, Por que no los dos?

Ancient pokémon (or daikaiju, "great strange beasts") are based on the giant pokémon from the first season of the anime.

x.x.x.x.x

Gaia and Terra are two planets connected by an incredible distance and none at all. An enormous amount of power is needed to break through to cross between them, but all around us are, overlaid like pages of a book, other Gaias and other Terras, and other earths yet unnamed by explorers. Humanity has always explored, looking out at land and sea and sky and the stars, and finally our gaze turned toward a new frontier, of new and unexplored planets only a breath away.

But like our ancestors striking out into the vastness of the Pacific Ocean, so too was there danger and deadly forces we could not imagine. The loss of the First Crossing, that deserted Roanoake of those early days, told us as much, and so too were the incredible discoveries of the fractured Second Crossing obtained at great cost. But the people who stayed discovered even more, who we thought were going to their doom, but instead survived in a strange land with new and indispensable allies.

And when we, the Third Crossing, arrived, they showed us how to survive and how to thrive, and how to do more than thrive: to create, for the first time in human history, a society where the vast majority are cared for and do not suffer under food or economic insecurity, where clean water, autonomy, security, and education are human rights, and freely available to everyone under the aegis of a cooperative elected government.

We had a rough start. We vowed not to repeat the sins of the past, but pain and fear got the better of us, as it always does, and as it will again—but we will always fight, and hope, that one day it will not. And the strange life forms of Gaia, these elementals with great and terrible and wonderful powers, who helped the Second Crossing survive and shortly the Third Crossing too, and all the people of Gaia united at last, protected and cared for, they showed us the way, and they will again.

On this fiftieth anniversary of the founding of Saffron City, I thank pokémon once again for putting up with humanity, and I look toward this year's crop of new trainers to learn from the past and to look toward the future, and to put your skills to the test so that they can continue to protect and serve everyone in our beautiful new world. I look forward to sharing this adventure with you. Let's go!

—Speech by Professor Maggie Druyan (Spruce I) at the Saffron City Golden Jubilee, 51 CR

x.x.x.x.x

Partial transcript of HIST202 lecture by Professor Aaron Singh (Holly III)

"The initial assays were done by drones, and the temporal anomalies weren't noticed until much later—they were smaller in magnitude—the drones would go through the breach for an hour and come back with 70 minutes of data, for instance. The First Crossing was a group of about two dozen people, survivalists and wilderness experts who would set up a base camp for the next group, due to arrive in about six months. Six months passed. Then nine. After a year, someone went back—crossing meant opening the breach, which depleted fuel that they used day-to-day, but eventually they decided to risk it—and that person, returning, found that barely a month had passed on the Terra side.

"When they returned through the breach with a rescue party, the First Crossing camp was entirely gone, with only a few scattered items long-disused and overgrown, and no trace was found of the people left there.

"The Second Crossing was better prepared: with the temporal anomalies clear, they set out with more technology and resources to fall back on, and a clearer understanding of what it meant to cross. One could come back, to resource-depleted, climate-changed Terra fairly easily, but years would pass on the Gaia side. And it still wasn't clear what had happened to the First Crossing. They were wary. But months turned into years, and they founded towns on the rich shores and rivers and scarcely had to farm, and the animals were nearly tame and unafraid of them, in a world untouched by humans since its beginning.

"But soon they found that there were more than animals on Gaia: there were monsters, lizards with fire breath and walking plants. Even as they sought to understand these wonders, the first daikaiju appeared, living hurricanes and forest fires that nearly obliterated all they had worked for, and they could guess at last what had happened to the First Crossing.

"Some returned to Terra, but others discovered the secret of befriending monsters instead of fighting them. Some learned to command armies of elementals and people, to tame the aggressive ones, and finally, to subdue the kaiju instead of running. And the Second Crossing made them their war-leaders in a world perpetually at war, their dukes and caesars.

"Centuries later, from their perspective, we arrived—the people of the Third Crossing.

"We were different. The survivors of the Second Crossing had returned a year or two ago, from our perspective, and they told us about monsters. We were people desperate enough for land and skies unmarred by pollution, landless people, people without citizenship, people who didn't exist.

"We came prepared, of course. The best weaponry of modern Terra: guns, drones, cybernetic implants, combat enhancements; doctors filled us with augmentations, the better to survive in a hostile world."

x.x.x.x.x

Excerpt from We Are Explorers by E. Mordvinova and C. Muomelu (Linden II)

The temporal distortion was well-known by the time the Third Crossing was organized, and a new breach was established with stabilizing factors that would allow a large number of colonists, soldiers, supply vehicles, agricultural vehicles, animals, etc. to pass through over the course of about a week without significant disjoint, and option for a quick abort if the same problems with destructive entities arose.

The analogy of dimensional travel is thus: a pencil pierces two sheets of paper to form a path between them; so too does the breach link the sheaves of two worlds. The problem of temporal distortion might be analogous to both those papers rotating out of sync, and so initially the pencil length that joins the papers is very small, but it grows as they twist away from each other. Although the time spent in this "throat" is instantaneous, the "length" of it growing as the dimensions fall out of sync creates dangers that are still poorly understood. "Old" breaches have been used successfully to travel backward to Terra, but they expose the user to what is hypothesized to be a hostile extradimensional environment that is wholly unexplored and uncharacterized.

The Third Crossing was aware that the Second Crossing had survived and that they had established towns and cities. It was not until communications were established that the real extent of the temporal distortion was realized, and how disparate the people were from the original settlers.

The Third Crossing arrived at a time when the people of the Second Crossing were in a period of expansion. The construction of large ocean-going vessels had been forgotten for hundreds of years after the initial destruction, and a long history played out while restricted to a single landmass. However, with the help of pokémon, eventually this technology was rediscovered and the Second Crossing made more and more distant journeys, sparsely colonizing new continents, or returning to bring word of barren, elemental-less lands, or not at all.

The emergence site of the Third Crossing was the Kansai continent. They found a country with only a few Second Crossing villages already established and a generous people living on what came to be called Vermillion Bay. There the inhabitants survived on rich seasonal seafood, and only engaged in a little hunting and farming to add variety.

The Third Crossing had overprepared, ready for disaster and death: they had expected the tougher soils of Terra that required reinvigoration to grow anything, collapsed fisheries, extinct animals, hardship, famine. The richness of the new world caught them off-guard. They did their best to integrate with and learn from the people of the Second Crossing. One of the stated goals of the colonization effort was to avoid the kind of environmental abuse and unsustainable exploitation that had ruined Terra, and their harmony with nature appealed to the Third Crossing's leaders. It was a hopeful attitude, but also a practical one: the people of the Second Crossing had survived for millennia in the face of all the legendary dangers that the original refugees had reported, and so it was vital to learn how they might protect themselves.

Children and adults of the Third Crossing were bonded to pokémon for the first time. In the days before pokéballs, most people could only bond with one or two, if at all, and the search for a compatible monster could be arduous. People who could support four or more were considered "adepts". Traditionally anyone with such abilities was scouted and sent to a master in the capital of Nalea, the main Second Crossing region, but that order had broken down in the distant colonies. Further, the Third Crossing governing body rightly judged that they would be seen as a threat by the lords in Nalea, not as allies and bringers of otherworldly comforts as the Kantonian people did.

The Third Crossing built dense cities in ecologically insignificant areas and preserved vast tracts of virgin wilderness. They were able to survive a handful of ancient pokémon incidents with the help of the Second Crossing and pokémon, as well as modern technology, and became confident that their preparation had been sufficient. The development of nearly-modern pokémon training and the wide adoption of apricorn balls were also progressing at this time. Overall this was an idyllic period, where it seemed that the fears regarding Gaia's "monsters" and the potential for the Third Crossing's arrival to be violent or even genocidal had been assuaged.

The ancient ho-oh that destroyed Saffron Town was a kaiju of kaiju.

Although there existed records of encounters with other ancient legendaries and Primal legendaries that were often fatal, none of them had ever threatened a major human settlement. And not just any easily-evacuated village, but the center of the Third Crossing's activity on Gaia, and the repository of the modern technology and knowledge they had brought from Terra.

The Third Crossing's primary residential, commercial, and industrial areas suffered catastrophic damage. It severely damaged critical infrastructure and left thousands without running water, electrical power, etc. for months. The ho-oh emitted extreme heat that caused marine life die-offs in Vermillion Bay and sterilized the soil along its path, and the water vapor and ash it generated was lifted high into the atmosphere and caused unusual weather all over the globe.

If it had appeared earlier, the operation would have been abandoned, but the damage was severe but recoverable. However, it was immediately obvious that the Third Crossing had been far too centralized. A number of important data backups were lost or almost lost due to their proximity to one another. The Third Crossing governing body immediately began developing plans to spread out throughout Kanto and Johto, so that a similar attack could not again be so decisive. (Unfortunately, Saffron City eventually grew into Gaia's largest and densest metropolis, and it could see severe casualties today if its defenses were to fail.)

This expansion brought the Third Crossing into conflict with the Second Crossing in Kanto, and notably with the powerful steel- and dragon-cults in Johto, leading to decades of back-and-forth aggression. Technological development focused on the rapid evolution of anti-pokémon devices, as well as black-market distribution of modern ordinances to Second Crossing groups, and the militarization of pokémon usage among the Third Crossing. The biological manipulation of pokémon was also explored and led to the creation of the first human-designed pokémon, Mewtwo. Ironically it was this pokémon, designed to be a weapon, who was able to end the conflict through diplomacy.

[wrenchwitch-blog]

Session 0 - Mostly a Lecture

A session 0 is the first time all the players get together, but do not actually play the game.  This serves as a chance to establish schedules, set house rules, establish boundaries, work on characters, and just generally get a sense on if a group of players will gel before we get too terribly committed.

There are a lot of reasons I love adventure paths, but it does mean that there is a lot of baggage and expectation.  There is a line that needs to be carefully walked between allowing players to create characters freely, but also that will not be relevant or a terrible thematic fit.  One of the things that Paizo has published along with their APs are a Player’s Guide.  They offer some setting insights and suggestions for characters that will work well with what is to come.

I have taken this notion a bit further.  On top of the regular session 0 stuff, I get way into the weeds on setting.  In this case, the city of Korvosa.  I told my players that exactly why can be whatever you would want, but every player character needs to care about this city.  But how can you create a character that cares about a place you don’t know anything about?

So I started to discuss the city; the people, places, culture.  An orderly lot, deeply colored by the military outpost that predated the city proper.  Primarily a human city, three ethnic groups make up most of the populous.

Most in charge are the Chelaxians.  They are the descendants of colonists from hundreds of miles to the south.  They came to this land as part of their campaigns to take the world back from the giants and dragons that run over the north.  They saw themselves as benevolently raising the region up.  Things have changed in the few hundred years since the city’s founding.  Largely seen as invaders and abusers, taking advantage and looking down at everyone else.

Second are the native Varisians.  Traditionally Varisians are nomads, travelling in their carriages the paths their fore bearers tread for thousands of years.  Lovers of music and dancing, they value their freedoms above almost all else.  But the travelling life is hard on many.  For whatever reasons, some Varisians set down their roots.  Seen by the Chelaxians as liars and thieves, the Varisians are not seen as equals, even if their family’s have been Korvosan for generations.  The real fact of the matter is, more than half of the human population is of mixed Chellish and Varisian heritage.  The more obvious one’s Varisian heritage, the more scrutiny and dirty looks they are likely to get from authorities.

While far less numerous than the previous groups, extremely important are the Shoanti.  The Shoanti were the natives to the lands Korvosa now stands on.  A huge, ancient ziggurat from pre-history is their holy site.  A deeply traditional people, nature and family are paramount to the Shoanti.  The local Shoanti fought bloody wars with Chellish invaders from the moment boots struck the ground until they no longer had the numbers to meaningfully attack walls of mortar and stone.  While the Chellaxian people look Varisians with suspicion, the Shoanti are looked upon with scorn.

While ‘civilized’ non-humans are present and welcome, they are not especially numerous, not enough to pull culture in a big way.  The exception are the dwarves.  The closest city to Korvosa is the dwarven sky citadel of Janderhoff.  A bustling mining and forging town, the dwarves are often called upon as a third party to broker disputes between the three main human factions.

Korvosan law is strict, and the guard numerous.  Those that are caught breaking the law are dealt with severely.  Jail time tends to be 15-25% longer than most places.  Aside from the norms of thievery and violence, guilds are illegal in Korvosa.  Labor cannot organize, moguls can only hold one of any given type of business.  The system is not set up with economic mobility in mind.  The tension between those that have and those that do not may be coming to a head.

The church of Abadar, god of cities and commerce, is the largest and brightest shining cathedral in Korvosa.  They are instrumental in infrastructure and taxes, working closely with the government  The remaining churches will be listed in order of influence.

Asmodeus, archdevil of tyranny, pride, and contracts

Sarenrae, goddess of the sun, healing, and redemption

Pharasma, goddess of death, birth, and fate

Shelyn, goddess of art, beauty, and love

The Pantheon of the Many is the only church rivaling the Bank of Abadar.  A nondenominational building holding shrines for 17 of the 20 major deities of Golarion.  Those excluded are the god of destruction and entropy, the god of strength and battle, and the goddess of monsters and corruption.

Three armed forces secure the city streets and the country side surrounding Korvosa.  Most numerous are the Korvosan Guard, an organization leading all the way back to the founding of the city.  The guard are a mix of police force and standing army for the city.  Most of the time, they are patrolling around keeping order, but they can be marshaled to fight the cities enemies when war is declared.

The Sable Company take to the skies on their trained hippogriffs.  A mercenary company, their sole contract for hundreds of years has been with the city of Korvosa.  Their charge, to keep monsters away from the city.  As such, they do not really have jurisdiction within the walls of Korvosa.

The Hellknight Order of the Nail are the shocktroops for when the Korvosan Guard is not enough.  Hell bent on enforcing order and willing to go to extreme measure to that end.  The Order of the Nail marches through the streets with their fullplate and halberds seeking to quell chaos.  The Hellknights are far less numerous and have a weaker connection with the Korvosan government, but are often utilized like modern swat teams.

The ruler of Korvosa is King Eodred Arabasti II.  A lecherous old man, he has spent his several decades keeping out of the lives of most Korvosans.  He has kept taxes low and has not rocked the boat with too many amendments to the city charter, the majority of complaints about him are related to him either not doing enough, or the ever rotating harem he keeps.  Eodred has been making strides to do some good and leave some legacy as his age advances.  He has vastly expanded the number and quality of the city’s orphanages, and has solely bankrolled the construction of the Pantheon of the Many.  While neither loved nor hated by most, news of his health suffering has not been taken well by the city.

Korvosan’s relative ambivalence to Eodred absolutely does not extend to his wife, Queen Ileosa Arabasti.  Born to a high noble family, she was expected to marry someone more rich and influential than Eodred.  She instead traveled out to the far reaches to peruse a ‘royal’ in a backwater city of no meaningful import to the Chellish court.  Barely of age to marry, she is seen as a strumpet, that she ensorcesselled Eodred with her voice.  She is also seen as an outsider and invader, someone trying to take advantage of the lack of clear heir to the Crimson Throne.  In spite of how much she is loathed, she has not really done much of anything in the year and a half she has been married to King Eodred other than being a patron to the arts.

Finally, the titular curse.  No Korvosan monarch has died of natural causes, nor have they managed to have a child while ruling.  Eodred had the good fortune of being born before, his mother took power, but he has not had any children himself.  Prior to his marriage, there was no heir apparent.  This is almost certainly the biggest reason Ileosa is seen as an opportunist.

If the Curse of the Crimson Throne is a true curse, or an unfortunate coincidence, perhaps we will find out together.

That wraps up most of my session 0 discussion.  In practice, it was a back and forth, people would kick in questions or direct for additional detail.  While not the best example of showing in place of telling, I hoped this would set the stage for what would probably be hundreds of hours of game play to come.  I promise that these are going to get shorter from here on out.

[walloona]

Field Notes: Cuamba

“Opening this window in this part of the world… I had to get to one city in Congo and then figure out to hire a plane to then to get this little village that almost no foreigners ever go into, and then from there we had to hire a team of motorbikes and we went flying off through the rainforest. Huge trees bending over us, absolutely beautiful virgin rainforest, to get to these areas that had been affected by this rebel group.” Jeffrey Gettleman, Pod Save the World

From the mountainside, the view stretched out in front hundreds of kilometers. Off, hazy in the sunset, in the distant horizon towered a toothy saw-like range of peaks, slightly in front graceful green hills rolled towards us and then flattened themselves into an immense plain, a river bed of immeasurable breadth between our vantage point and the mountains yonder. Grasslands, farms, forests, riverbeds, tesselate and shift across the landscape. The sight appears unreal, it’s “big sky” country taken to the extreme, too much land to take in in one look.

A breeze lifts my head up from the ground, the trail is old, uneven, steep. It is also wide enough that hiking up it, we were prevented from any shade by the angle of the sun and the steepness of the slope. On the downhill side of the trail we were often walking at the level of the treetops, sprouting beneath a rock face or boulder field that dropped away amongst the bushes below.

Higher up, closer to where we had ascended, the trail flattened, the trees began to tower over us and as we turned onto a southern facing slope, away from the sun, the sheer greeness of the place overtook us. The Polish journalist, Ryszard Kapuściński, once wrote that the first thing you notice in Africa is the sun. It blankets everything in its light, including oneself, in a blinding, bleaching effect. Here, higher above the dry plains and sun-burned river beds of the plains and dusty plateaus, it was not the light but the color of that overwhelmed. The sky, the trees, the dirt, the flowers, the bushes, the tall grass, the boulders, the scree, the cliffs jutting out through the trees and converging downwards around the river, which seen through the undergrowth might reflect a golden lance of light, a reminder of that aimlessly gliding above us.

Before I came here, I had an image of what life might be like in the tropics. I had ideas of dusty grasslands, savannah and sand dunes as well. These gave way in my imagination to tree clusters and oases, perhaps a verdant coast line. And, in a sense, in theory, my expectations were not wrong. The majority of Mozambique is made up of tropical savannah, with the rest mainly consisting of a “humid subtropical climate.” But the images that I associated with the East and Southern Africa, albeit concocted from my imagination and therefore unsurprisingly, bare little semblance to the landscape stretching out before me. It is lush, it is verdant, it is dusty, it is rocky, mountains rise up out of flatlands as though someone had pushed these cone and oblong shaped rocks through the earths crust at sporadic intervals from the other side. William Finnegan, the author and writer for the New Yorker, described them as coming straight out a ‘chinese tapestry’. And I understand why, the granite shoots out of the ground with little heed to foothills or foundation. No plain is free of a teeth-like spine or tooth-like spike on the horizon. This is northern Zambezi, southern Niassa and western Nampula, the north central part of the country, the highlands, the mountains, the agricultural zone, the (relatively) high altitude nut, corn, bean, fruit and vegetable farmland, ‘the cellar of the country’ as one motorista told me.  

Our guide and I hiked above the rest of our group on the way up the trail, winding back and forth and eventually over the shoulder of a great peak. There are six mountains in this particular range, forming a ring, and a high valley between them, a thousand or so feet beneath the plains below. In the center of this natural fortress lays a reservoir, formerly a lake, that has been dammed to store water for the towns ad villages below. “Who build this road?” Our guide is an elderly man, he’s dressed in baggy pants, a navy blue but faded polo, a crumpled baseball cap, a satchel over his shoulder, he had caught up to me earlier to ask for a cigarette, he is now smoking his second of the climb. “Noruegas” he responds. Norwegians. The road is little more than a clearing in the forest, a boulder strewn and broken path towards the sky. A small cement drainage shoot, at times cracked, at times gone completely, runs along the side - evidence of something. We swap stories in Portuguese. “Eu nao sou Macua” he tells me, he is not Makua, a member of the community that makes up the largest indigenous language group in Mozambique. No, I ask, what are you? He doesn’t know but he explains that he speaks Nianja or Chichewa, a language spoken by 12 million people across Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Malawi and Zambia but only by about 600,000 in Mozambique. I told him I speak a little of Elomwe, another local language, more common to a region south of us. He smiles and nods, yes, he says, they spoke that to in Malawi. Malawi, I ask? Why Malawi?

He pauses, yes, he says, he was in Malawi during the time of independence. He trained there, he says, not for FRELIMO and not for RENAMO he emphasizes. He adds, they came later, “aquele foi uma guerra entre irmaos.” He continues, they trained in Malawi, which gained its independence the same year that Mozambique’s War for Independence began. It would last a little over a decade, before amidst the transition and birth of a new nation a civil war would break out that would last some 16 years. After independence, he said, he came back to the mountains that he grew up in. He had been here, guarding and guiding people around the lake since then. I say, the mountains are always a place for people to go during trouble, my state is in the mountains. Yes, he agrees, many people fled to the mountains during the wars. We fall silent, pad along, wipe our sleeves.

Mozambique began its war for independence in 1964, when several liberation and anti-colonial groups unified in Tanzania to form FRELIMO or the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (Frente para liberacao de Mozambique). There were a number of groups that also fought against the colonial Portuguese, some based in other parts of the country (FRELIMO’s leadership largely consisted of Maconde, a community in the North of the country).

The war lasted from 1964 until 1975. Upon victory, FRELIMO established themselves as a socialist and, by many accounts, authoritarian government. Following this and the flight of 370,000 Portuguese colonists who made up much of the country’s knowledge base, Mozambique descended into Civil War. The struggle for independence claimed 63,500 lives by one estimate. The Civil War, between the party-state FRELIMO and the Mozambique Resistance Movement (RENAMO) would claim over a million lives and displace another five million (in a country that today only has a population of 27 million, some thirty years later). RENAMO, although there is some ambiguity in the historical record, was most likely founded by the Rhodesian intelligence service, the Central Intelligence Organization (CIO), and placed under the command of a former FRELIMO prisoner and dissident. The war would drag on until 1992, and arguably continues until this day. Systematic war crimes were committed by RENAMO including summary executions, rape and mutilations of civilians. At times, their widespread terrorism prevented food, basic services, and public health from functioning. Even more so in the hinterland where it had hardly reached under negligible colonial development. Meanwhile FRELIMO could hardly claim to be innocent, as they forcibly relocated the population at gunpoint into communal village and even re-education camps. When William Finnegan travelled the country towards the end of the civil war wrote that for many of the people living there, “Mozambique seemed to be a fairly hazy idea.”

 We travel through a grove of high trees that I don’t know the name of, we turn on the shoulder of the mountain, we come to a flat long approach along the side of a valley, I can no longer see the plains below as we have twisted around to the interior of the range. “We’re close” the old man says. An opening appears, the road grows wider and grass, green grass, spread along it. Ahead, a valley widens to the length of a long earthen levy. It is the height of a few stories and won the far end of it, across a forested gulch, a spillway leads down to the stream which has kept us company thus far. We reach the edge of it and a lake, pristine, calm, blue, reflecting the sky above, stands before us. The mountains rise above, encircle us, dominating the skyline and giving the whole scene a sense of intimacy. A sense of oneness, we are guests to an unused living room. A museum of nature, untouched. The breeze rustles the trees, calms, and travels out behind us, making the journey from this hidden vale to the plains beyond.

It’s mid-afternoon, the sun burning off the dust and the dim of the forest, and the peaks around us, faces of granite walls, leer over us. The place is grand, I know no other place to put it, it harkens back, like some refuges high in the Rockies and Smokies, to a different era. It is too rugged to be developed, evident by the broken and twisted road we take. I begin to wonder, how many people have walked this road. Relative to the well-traversed trails of my home, Colorado, the number can’t possibly compare. And yet, here high among the peaks is a community of people that come and go, grow and sell, travel the heights and depths to make a living and a life. This brings a whole new sense of the word commute.

I remember studying something called transhumanism in some Ancient History course when I was at university. It was the academization of the fact that people move; they travel.  And being in the mountains brings that to mind very poignantly. In times of struggle, people flee. Refugees take flight to protect themselves. Similarly, but altogether more routinely, people move day to day to constitute a means of living. That Ancient History course noted the regular meanderings of shepherd in the ancient world, overseeing their flock from pasture to pasture. And more contemporarily, there is the daily walk, bus, train or car ride to and fro wherever we may have to go. It is, it would appear, an endless necessity to human life. Therefore, it strikes me as altogether healthy and human, that we should elaborate on this to bring ourselves happiness.

Because, hiking high into this mountain valley, and even the act of trekking across the plains and grasslands to get to the hike, that is precisely how I felt. Travel it seems, or the journey, the motion, is so very human. It is a form of sustenance, yes, but also success.

[sensitivefern]

T’ville, June 16 [1968]. Mary drove me up from the airport. [...] My Showy Lady Slippers are almost all blooming: five are in flower and bud... Bob —— is a good gardener. He has weeded out Mother’s peonies, which are splendidly blooming now, as well as the currant and gooseberry bushes – more gooseberries now than we have ever had before.

...says that the Salamanca Indians, who were driven out of their homes by the dam, now have $18,000 houses, with splendid bathrooms and sandalwood finishings, and a longhouse with many electric plugs, so that they can have radio or television or anything there.

[Edmund Wilson]

===

—— was the classic architect-intellectual for the new age; young, slender, soft-spoken, cool, ironic, urbane, highly educated, charming with just the right amount of reticence,... able to mix plain words with scholarly ones, historical references of the more esoteric sort... with references of the more banal sort...

[From Bauhaus to Our House]

===

During the century after Verrazzano Europeans were regular visitors to the Dawnland, usually fishing, sometimes trading, occasionally kidnapping natives as souvenirs. (Verrazzano had grabbed one himself, a boy of about eight.) By 1610 Britain alone had about two hundred vessels operating off Newfoundland and New England; hundreds more came from France, Spain, Portugal, and Italy. With striking uniformity, these travelers reported that New England was thickly settled and well defended. In 1605 and 1606 Samuel de Champlain... visited Cape cod, hoping to establish a French base. he abandoned the idea. Too many people already lived there. A year later Sir Ferdinando Gorges... tried to found a community in Maine. It began with more people than the Pilgrims’ later venture in Plymouth and was better organized and supplied. Nonetheless, the local Indians, numerous and well armed, killed eleven colonists and drove the rest back home within months.

[1491]

===

Second-generation Puritans could already sense that oysters augered profound and dire portents. The first environmental protection law ever ratified in this country was passed in 1679:

To protect the destruction of oysters in South Bay, by the unlimited number of vessels employed in the same.

And oysters became central players in America’s first litigation over private property, public waterways, and government regulation.

[A Short History of the American Stomach]

===

Feb. 21 [1855]. PM – To Fair Haven Hill via Cut. A clear air, with a northwesterly, March-like wind... [...] When I have entered the wooded hollow on the east of the Deep Cut, it is novel and pleasant to hear the sound of the dry leaves and twigs, which have so long been damp and silent... When I perceive this dryness under my feet, I feel as if I had got a new sense, or rather I realize what was incredible to me before, that there is a new life in nature beginning to awake, that her halls are being swept and prepared for a new occupant. It is whispered through all the aisles of the forest that another spring is approaching. The wood mouse listens at the mouth of his burrow, and the chickadee passes the news along... I see the peculiar softened blue sky of spring over the tops of the pines... The snow on the mountains has... a singular smooth and crusty appearance, and by contrast you see even single evergreens rising here and there above it and where a promontory casts a shadow along the mountains’ side. I saw what looked like a large lake of misty bluish water on the side of the further Peterboro mountain, its edges or shore very distinctly defined. This I concluded was the shadow of another part of the mountain. And it suggested that, in like manner, what on the surface of the moon is taken for water may be shadows.

I saw a train go by, which had in front a dozen dirt-cars from somewhere up country, laden apparently with some kind of earth (or clay?); and these, with their loads, were thickly and evenly crusted with unspotted snow, a part of that sugary crust I had viewed with my glass, which contrasted singularly with the bare tops of the other cars, which it had hitched on this side, and the twenty miles at least of bare ground over which they had rolled. It affected me as when a traveler comes into the house with snow on his coat, when I did not know it was snowing.

[Thoreau, Journal]

===

❚make shift (third-person singular simple present makes shift, present participle making shift, simple past and past participle made shift) (dated) To contrive; to invent a way of surmounting a difficulty

Gambling houses all over the world are taking in action on whether President Trump will resign or be impeached

Mediterranean diet with virgin olive oil may... Mediterranean Diet, Olive Oil and Nuts Can Help Reverse Metabo...

Jones: J Lo Should Go to Somalia and Get Gang Raped

Carlos Santana says Beyoncé is 'not a singer' Carlos Santana has angered the Beyhive.

By any measure, Michael Flynn’s brief stint as White House national security adviser was not a success. After barely more than three weeks on the job, he resigned in disgrace late Monday thanks to reports that he had discussed lifting U.S. sanctions on Russia with a Moscow representative prior to President Donald Trump’s inauguration and then misled White House officials about the exchange.

NYTimes: Trump Campaign Aides Had Repeated Contacts With Russian Intelligence

27 years ago today, Voyager 1 took its last photos ever. Turning its cameras inward toward the sun, it captured the only portrait of our solar system. Including the famous "Pale Blue Dot".

Repeated contacts with Russian intelligence throughout the campaign, you say?

David Frum Seriously, Republican congress members: you do not want to be covering for accusations of Russian penetration of US govt.

Michael Moore What part of "vacate you Russian traitor" don't you understand? We can do this the easy way (you resign), or the hard way (impeachment).

David Frum This isn’t about the Logan Act. It’s about the appearance of payback to the Russians to reward them for tipping the election to Trump

David Frum Not a parody account, blue check mark & everything WikiLeaks @wikileaks Trump's National Security Advisor Michael Flynn resigns after destabilization campaign by US spies, Democrats, press

Michael Moore Let's be VERY clear: Flynn DID NOT make that Russian call on his own. He was INSTRUCTED to do so.He was TOLD to reassure them. Arrest Trump.

[topworldhistory]

From the earliest Fall feasts to the first Thanksgiving football game to the Macy's Day parade, here's the full background on how the U.S. holiday evolved to the tradition it is today.

There’s no holiday that’s more quintessentially American than Thanksgiving. Learn how it has evolved from its religious roots as Spanish and English days of feasting and prayer to become the football-watching, parade-marching, gut-stuffing event it is today.

1541: Spanish Explorers Hold a Feast

English settlers weren’t the first to celebrate a thanksgiving feast on American soil. According to the Texas Society Daughters of the American Colonists, the very first thanksgiving was observed by Spanish explorer Francisco Vasquez de Coronado. Accompanied by 1,500 men in full armor, Coronado left Mexico City in 1540 and marched north in search of gold. As the company camped in Palo Duro Canyon in 1541, Padre Fray Juan de Padilla called for a feast of prayer and thanksgiving, beating out the Plymouth Thanksgiving by 79 years.

1598: A Second Early Feast Among Spanish 

A second Texas town claims to have been the real site of the first Thanksgiving in America. In 1598, a wealthy Spanish dignitary named Juan de Oñate was granted lands among the Pueblo Indians in the American Southwest. He decided to blaze a new path directly across the Chihuahua Desert to reach the Rio Grande. Oñate’s party of 500 soldiers, women and children barely survived the harrowing journey, nearly dying of thirst and exhaustion when they reached the river. (Two horses reportedly drank so much water that their stomachs burst.)

After 10 days of rest and recuperation near modern-day San Elizario, Texas, Oñate ordered a feast of thanksgiving, which one of his men described in his journal: "We built a great bonfire and roasted the meat and fish, and then all sat down to a repast the like of which we had never enjoyed before…We were happy that our trials were over; as happy as were the passengers in the Ark when they saw the dove returning with the olive branch in his beak, bringing tidings that the deluge had subsided."

August 9, 1607: Colonists, Native Americans Feast in Maine

There are also competing claims as to what was the first feast of thanksgiving actually shared with Native Americans. In 1607, English colonists at Fort St. George assembled for a harvest feast and prayer meeting with the Abenaki Indians of Maine.

But some historians claim that the Spanish founders of St. Augustine, Florida shared a festive meal with the native Timucuan people when their ships came ashore way back in 1565.

READ MORE: Did Florida Host the First Thanksgiving?

First Thanksgiving Meal (TV-G; 2:38)

November 1621: The Plymouth Feast

According to American tradition, this is when Thanksgiving really began. Archival evidence is slim, but according to a letter from Plymouth colonist Edward Winslow dated December 11, 1621, the colonists wanted to celebrate their first good crop of corn and barley grown with generous assistance from the native Wampanoag Indians.

So the English colonists sent out four men to kill “as much fowl” as they could in one day, and invited King Massasoit and 90 of his men “so we might after a more special manner rejoice together.” The king brought five deer to the three-day party, which 19th-century New Englanders would later promote as the origin of modern Thanksgiving.

READ MORE: Who Was at the First Thanksgiving?

November 23, 1775: Boston Patriots Call for Thanksgiving

In the run-up to the Revolutionary War, a group of Boston patriots published a pointedly anti-British proclamation for a “Day of public Thanksgiving” throughout the Massachusetts Colony to be held November 23, 1775:

“That such a Band of Union, founded upon the best Principles, unites the American Colonies; That our Rights and Priviledges . . . are so far preserved to us, notwithstanding all the Attempts of our barbarous Enemies to deprive us of them. And to offer up humble and fervent Prayers to Almighty GOD, for the whole British Empire; especially for the UNITED AMERICAN COLONIES."

READ MORE: Who Were the Sons of Liberty?

December 18, 1777: 13 Colonies Celebrate a Thanksgiving

To celebrate the victory of American Continental forces over the British in the Battle of Saratoga, commander-in-chief George Washington called for Thursday, December 18 to be set aside for “Solemn Thanksgiving and Praise.” It was the first time that all 13 colonies celebrated a day of thanksgiving in unison.

How the Battle of Saratoga Turned the Tide (TV-14; 2:22)

READ MORE: The Battle of Saratoga

November 26, 1789: George Washington Calls for Day of Thanksgiving

George Washington, now serving as the first President of the United States, took Congress’s recommendation to call for a national day of thanksgiving and prayer in gratitude for the end of the Revolutionary War. Washington observed the holiday by attending church and then donating money and food to prisoners and debtors in New York City jails.

November 1846: Sarah Josepha Hale Lobbies for National Holiday

Sarah Josepha Hale, who started championing a national Thanksgiving holiday in 1827 as the editor of Gody’s Lady’s Book, began her 17-year letter-writing campaign in 1846 to convince American presidents that it was time to make Thanksgiving official.

READ MORE: How the 'Mother of Thanksgiving' Lobbied for a National Holiday

Sarah Josepha Hale.

September 28, 1863: 'Mother of Thanksgiving' Appeals to Lincoln

Hale, now 74 years old, penned an impassioned plea to President Abraham Lincoln to set aside a specific day for annual Thanksgiving celebrations nationwide. "It now needs National recognition and authoritive fixation, only, to become permanently, an American custom and institution." Hale wrote a similar letter to Secretary of State William Seward, who may have been the one to convince Lincoln it was a good idea.

October 3, 1863: Lincoln Proclaims Thanksgiving Holiday

To a country torn apart by the Civil War, President Lincoln proclaimed the last Thursday of November to be Thanksgiving Day, according to Hale’s longstanding wish.

“I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States… to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens,” read the proclamation, written by Seward, “and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquillity and Union.”

November 30, 1876: First Thanksgiving Football Game

The very first Thanksgiving football game was played between Princeton and Yale in 1876. American football was in its infancy, but the sport and the Thanksgiving tradition quickly caught on. By 1893, 40,000 spectators showed up to watch the Princeton-Yale Thanksgiving game in New York’s Manhattan Field.

READ MORE: Why Do Americans Watch Football on Thanksgiving?

November 27, 1924: First Macy's Parade

Originally called the “Christmas Parade,” Macy’s department store in New York City launched its first-ever parade on Thanksgiving Day, 1924. The six-mile parade route featured live elephants and camels from the Central Park Zoo. The animals were replaced by oversized rubber balloons in 1927.

‘Andy the Alligator’ in the 1933 parade seems dwarfed in size compared to the balloons of today.

View the 13 images of this gallery on the original article

READ MORE: The First Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade

November 23, 1939 - FDR Moves the Date

In 1939, Thanksgiving was set to fall on November 30, leaving only 24 shopping days until Christmas. Fearing that the shortened Christmas season would impact the economy, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order moving it a week earlier to November 23. Critics called it “Franksgiving” and Congress officially moved the holiday back to its current place in 1941.

WWII Thanksgiving (TV-PG; 1:01)

READ MORE: Thanksgiving History Facts and Trivia

November 19, 1963: First Turkey Pardon

While claims have been made that Abraham Lincoln or Harry Truman were the first presidents to pardon a Thanksgiving turkey, the credit belongs to John F. Kennedy, who spared the life of a 55-pound gobbler in 1963. “We’ll just let this one grow,” joked JFK. “It’s our Thanksgiving present to him.” The impromptu turkey reprieve was just days before Kennedy’s fateful trip to Dallas.

While Kennedy was the first to send a gift turkey back to the farm, it was President George W. Bush in 1989 who began the annual White House tradition of officially pardoning a Thanksgiving turkey. 

READ MORE: A Brief History of the Presidential Turkey Pardon

Get the history behind the holiday. Access hundreds of hours of commercial-free series and specials with HISTORY Vault.https://ift.tt/2OwTRdT

from Stories - HISTORY https://ift.tt/35tW54R November 22, 2019 at 12:26AM

[austenmarriage]

New Post has been published on Austen Marriage

New Post has been published on http://austenmarriage.com/commemorating-40-years-and-400/

Commemorating 40 Years, and 400

Today’s blog provides a capsule of the recent Annual General Meeting of the Jane Austen Society of North America, in Williamsburg, VA. The week involved history, pageantry, and good manners—and that was outside the conference halls. It was the 40th anniversary of the founding of JASNA, and the 400th commemoration of major events in Virginia’s history.

My wife and I enjoyed Williamsburg, a town that keeps its eighteenth-century history front and center. This was our first visit, and I thought perhaps we’d see a history museum here and an old house or forge there. Instead, the entire town is a living museum (and proud of it). It boasts more than forty historic sites and two art museums.

The governor’s palace (house) included a full panoply of weapons intended to impress colonists with the power of the British crown. The colonists rebelled anyway, and the last governor spent much of his time on the James River, avoiding capture.

Historic Williamsburg comprises almost all the town center, perhaps a mile on each side. Modern services and shops are confined to one area on the west side of the town. You can walk or ride a bus to all sites. We did a mix of both. We started early because of the forecast for hot weather. Hot it was. The official temperature was in the high 90s but the effective temperature was 100 degrees. (Wind-chill factor makes temperatures feel colder. In the South, the humidity makes temperatures feel warmer.) We benefited from a bright, knowledgeable tour guide at the governor’s palace (house) and learned about early crafts from several artisans doing their craft work in the shops. Though it was mid-week in October, there were plenty of visitors to keep tradespeople busy answering questions.

Williamsburg was more meaningful to us, I think, because we saw Jamestown the day before. Jamestown, the site of the first successful English colony in North America, is both an historical and an archeological site. Excavations have uncovered the foundations of early buildings and the fort.

This church, from the early 1900s, is built on the foundation of the original statehouse from hundreds of years earlier in Jamestown.

This year, 2019, makes for two important anniversaries. One is the 400th anniversary of the founding of the town’s governing council, which was the first democratic institution set up by British settlers. By the time of the American Revolution, colonists had more than 150 years of experience in self-government. The second anniversary was the 400th anniversary of most anti-democratic institution imaginable, slavery. The institution came by accident, when a British privateer captured a Portuguese ship carrying “20 and odd” enslaved Africans. The British ship traded the lives of these people for “victualls” at Jamestown.

Jamestown’s museum is well done, providing a thorough history of the creation of the colony and its difficult early years. It honors the sacrifice and hardships of the British settlers while also explaining the history of the native peoples and the fate of the enslaved people.

Weavers and other craftspeople not only practice their wares, they explain to visitors how they do their trades in Williamsburg.

Now, on to the AGM itself. Jocelyn Harris gave the opening plenary talk. As usual with Jocelyn, it was well-researched and well-presented. Her point was to defend the intelligence of Catherine Morland, the heroine of Northanger Abbey. I agreed with all her points, but it took me a few moments to get in synch with her commentary because it never occurred to me to doubt Catherine’s intelligence.

Naïve, yes. Gullible, yes. Prone to harmless fantasizing, certainly. Unschooled in dating politics and proprieties, yes—as only a girl from a small country village could be once she lands in the big city. But I’ve never considered Catherine anything less than sharp. Her arguments with her love interest, Henry Tilney, attest to the mental agility of both parties.

Catherine also shows backbone, refusing to buckle under pressure to act in a way that would hurt her new friends. She stands up to what Harris calls Henry’s sexism and arrogance. Here, we have a slightly different take. Henry does open with funny sexist challenges. It’s in the nature of young males to test someone they’ve just met, male or female. It’s how young men gauge the world around them.

If Catherine had accepted his presumptions, or responded angrily, Henry would have walked away. Instead, they either pass over her head (the naïveté) or she responds with good humor. Their first long dialogue is a series of funny back-and-forths that prove that she can engage his mind, but in a way that will not grate on his ears. The only time she’s at a disadvantage is when he teases her over her Gothic imaginings. Caught up in the story he spins, Catherine may not realize he’s funnin’ her.

Janine Barcas gave the next plenary, which was on the publication history of Austen’s lower-class books—the cheap, mass-produced ones. She gave particular examples from Northanger Abbey, the book which was the theme of the conference. Barchas’s topic, which is also the subject of her newly released The Lost Books of Jane Austen, was to demonstrate that the inexpensive, nonacademic versions of Austen’s books did more to cement her reputation with the general public than all the fancy ones did.

Jeanne Talbot of San Diego visits with one of the AGM’s distinguished guests, Thomas Jefferson.

I had seen Barchas’s similar presentation last year and was impressed by how much she has developed it since. In tracing the history of cheap editions read by ordinary people, Barchas came upon fascinating and sad tales. As shown by inscriptions, one surviving book had been won by a young reader in school and was passed down to her younger sister. As it happened, the book had a happier life than its owners. … Even more thoughtful anecdotes grace Barchas’s book. The presentation was funny in the right places, academic in the right places, and thoughtful and respectful where the “gritty” lives of the book owners required it to be.

My wife and I had to leave before Sunday’s plenary, “Northanger Before the Tilneys: Austen’s Abbey and the Religious Past.” I heard great reviews from several friends. Moore took a fairly harsh view of the eighteenth-century owners of various abbeys, which had begun as Catholic abbeys, were given over to the big supporters of Henry VIII, and then passed down to the grantees’ descendants. General Tilney, Henry’s father, was an example of the financially entitled, and self-entitled, owners who luxuriated in their perceived superiority.

Another talk worth noting is one presented by Diana Roome, a direct descendant of Francis Lathom of The Midnight Bell. This one of the seven “horrid” novels mentioned in Northanger Abbey. Roome discussed Lathom’s life and writing. After early plays and some Gothic novels, he was banished from the life of his wife and children not only by her father but by his. His children took the mother’s name. He disappeared from the family record. A relative of hers found the connection a few years ago, sending her into serious research. No one knows what happened. Homosexuality? Incest? … He lived hand to mouth, wandered over to America, finished his life in a remote area of the British Isles. Diana looked at his situation from every angle. A mystery to this day.

—

The Marriage of Miss Jane Austen, which traces love from a charming courtship through the richness and complexity of marriage and concludes with a test of the heroine’s courage and moral convictions, is now complete and available from Amazon and Jane Austen Books.

[bountyofbeads]

The 1619 Project https://nyti.ms/2Hjvu0L

New York Times Magazine has a project called the '1619 Project' in commemoration of the first slaves brought to Jamestown, Virginia. The project provides a different perspective, from prominent African-Americans and others, than what most of us have been taught or told. Included are essays, photojournalism and poetry.

I will post several pieces from the series as I am a subscriber to my timeline. If possible please take time to READ 📖 and SHARE their stories.

"The 1619 Project is a major initiative from The New York Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are."

Our Democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written.  Black  Americans have fought to make them true.

By Nikole Hannah-Jones | August 14, 2019 | New York Times Magazine | Posted August 16, 2019 |

My dad always flew an American flag in our front yard. The blue paint on our two-story house was perennially chipping; the fence, or the rail by the stairs, or the front door, existed in a perpetual state of disrepair, but that flag always flew pristine. Our corner lot, which had been redlined by the federal government, was along the river that divided the black side from the white side of our Iowa town. At the edge of our lawn, high on an aluminum pole, soared the flag, which my dad would replace as soon as it showed the slightest tatter.

My dad was born into a family of sharecroppers on a white plantation in Greenwood, Miss., where black people bent over cotton from can’t-see-in-the-morning to can’t-see-at-night, just as their enslaved ancestors had done not long before. The Mississippi of my dad’s youth was an apartheid state that subjugated its near-majority black population through breathtaking acts of violence. White residents in Mississippi lynched more black people than those in any other state in the country, and the white people in my dad’s home county lynched more black residents than those in any other county in Mississippi, often for such “crimes” as entering a room occupied by white women, bumping into a white girl or trying to start a sharecroppers union. My dad’s mother, like all the black people in Greenwood, could not vote, use the public library or find work other than toiling in the cotton fields or toiling in white people’s houses. So in the 1940s, she packed up her few belongings and her three small children and joined the flood of black Southerners fleeing North. She got off the Illinois Central Railroad in Waterloo, Iowa, only to have her hopes of the mythical Promised Land shattered when she learned that Jim Crow did not end at the Mason-Dixon line.

Grandmama, as we called her, found a house in a segregated black neighborhood on the city’s east side and then found the work that was considered black women’s work no matter where black women lived — cleaning white people’s houses. Dad, too, struggled to find promise in this land. In 1962, at age 17, he signed up for the Army. Like many young men, he joined in hopes of escaping poverty. But he went into the military for another reason as well, a reason common to black men: Dad hoped that if he served his country, his country might finally treat him as an American.

The Army did not end up being his way out. He was passed over for opportunities, his ambition stunted. He would be discharged under murky circumstances and then labor in a series of service jobs for the rest of his life. Like all the black men and women in my family, he believed in hard work, but like all the black men and women in my family, no matter how hard he worked, he never got ahead.

So when I was young, that flag outside our home never made sense to me. How could this black man, having seen firsthand the way his country abused black Americans, how it refused to treat us as full citizens, proudly fly its banner? I didn’t understand his patriotism. It deeply embarrassed me.

I had been taught, in school, through cultural osmosis, that the flag wasn’t really ours, that our history as a people began with enslavement and that we had contributed little to this great nation. It seemed that the closest thing black Americans could have to cultural pride was to be found in our vague connection to Africa, a place we had never been. That my dad felt so much honor in being an American felt like a marker of his degradation, his acceptance of our subordination.

Like most young people, I thought I understood so much, when in fact I understood so little. My father knew exactly what he was doing when he raised that flag. He knew that our people’s contributions to building the richest and most powerful nation in the world were indelible, that the United States simply would not exist without us.

In August 1619, just 12 years after the English settled Jamestown, Va., one year before the Puritans landed at Plymouth Rock and some 157 years before the English colonists even decided they wanted to form their own country, the Jamestown colonists bought 20 to 30 enslaved Africans from English pirates. The pirates had stolen them from a Portuguese slave ship that had forcibly taken them from what is now the country of Angola. Those men and women who came ashore on that August day were the beginning of American slavery. They were among the 12.5 million Africans who would be kidnapped from their homes and brought in chains across the Atlantic Ocean in the largest forced migration in human history until the Second World War. Almost two million did not survive the grueling journey, known as the Middle Passage.

Before the abolishment of the international slave trade, 400,000 enslaved Africans would be sold into America. Those individuals and their descendants transformed the lands to which they’d been brought into some of the most successful colonies in the British Empire. Through backbreaking labor, they cleared the land across the Southeast. They taught the colonists to grow rice. They grew and picked the cotton that at the height of slavery was the nation’s most valuable commodity, accounting for half of all American exports and 66 percent of the world’s supply. They built the plantations of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, sprawling properties that today attract thousands of visitors from across the globe captivated by the history of the world’s greatest democracy. They laid the foundations of the White House and the Capitol, even placing with their unfree hands the Statue of Freedom atop the Capitol dome. They lugged the heavy wooden tracks of the railroads that crisscrossed the South and that helped take the cotton they picked to the Northern textile mills, fueling the Industrial Revolution. They built vast fortunes for white people North and South — at one time, the second-richest man in the nation was a Rhode Island “slave trader.” Profits from black people’s stolen labor helped the young nation pay off its war debts and financed some of our most prestigious universities. It was the relentless buying, selling, insuring and financing of their bodies and the products of their labor that made Wall Street a thriving banking, insurance and trading sector and New York City the financial capital of the world.

But it would be historically inaccurate to reduce the contributions of black people to the vast material wealth created by our bondage. Black Americans have also been, and continue to be, foundational to the idea of American freedom. More than any other group in this country’s history, we have served, generation after generation, in an overlooked but vital role: It is we who have been the perfecters of this democracy.

The United States is a nation founded on both an ideal and a lie. Our Declaration of Independence, approved on July 4, 1776, proclaims that “all men are created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” But the white men who drafted those words did not believe them to be true for the hundreds of thousands of black people in their midst. “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” did not apply to fully one-fifth of the country. Yet despite being violently denied the freedom and justice promised to all, black Americans believed fervently in the American creed. Through centuries of black resistance and protest, we have helped the country live up to its founding ideals. And not only for ourselves — black rights struggles paved the way for every other rights struggle, including women’s and gay rights, immigrant and disability rights.

Without the idealistic, strenuous and patriotic efforts of black Americans, our democracy today would most likely look very different — it might not be a democracy at all.

The very first person to die for this country in the American Revolution was a black man who himself was not free. Crispus Attucks was a fugitive from slavery, yet he gave his life for a new nation in which his own people would not enjoy the liberties laid out in the Declaration for another century. In every war this nation has waged since that first one, black Americans have fought — today we are the most likely of all racial groups to serve in the United States military.

My father, one of those many black Americans who answered the call, knew what it would take me years to understand: that the year 1619 is as important to the American story as 1776. That black Americans, as much as those men cast in alabaster in the nation’s capital, are this nation’s true “founding fathers.” And that no people has a greater claim to that flag than us.

In June 1776, Thomas Jefferson sat at his portable writing desk in a rented room in Philadelphia and penned these words: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” For the last 243 years, this fierce assertion of the fundamental and natural rights of humankind to freedom and self-governance has defined our global reputation as a land of liberty. As Jefferson composed his inspiring words, however, a teenage boy who would enjoy none of those rights and liberties waited nearby to serve at his master’s beck and call. His name was Robert Hemings, and he was the half brother of Jefferson’s wife, born to Martha Jefferson’s father and a woman he owned. It was common for white enslavers to keep their half-black children in slavery. Jefferson had chosen Hemings, from among about 130 enslaved people that worked on the forced-labor camp he called Monticello, to accompany him to Philadelphia and ensure his every comfort as he drafted the text making the case for a new democratic republic based on the individual rights of men.

At the time, one-fifth of the population within the 13 colonies struggled under a brutal system of slavery unlike anything that had existed in the world before. Chattel slavery was not conditional but racial. It was heritable and permanent, not temporary, meaning generations of black people were born into it and passed their enslaved status onto their children. Enslaved people were not recognized as human beings but as property that could be mortgaged, traded, bought, sold, used as collateral, given as a gift and disposed of violently. Jefferson’s fellow white colonists knew that black people were human beings, but they created a network of laws and customs, astounding for both their precision and cruelty, that ensured that enslaved people would never be treated as such. As the abolitionist William Goodell wrote in 1853, “If any thing founded on falsehood might be called a science, we might add the system of American slavery to the list of the strict sciences.”

Enslaved people could not legally marry. They were barred from learning to read and restricted from meeting privately in groups. They had no claim to their own children, who could be bought, sold and traded away from them on auction blocks alongside furniture and cattle or behind storefronts that advertised “Negroes for Sale.” Enslavers and the courts did not honor kinship ties to mothers, siblings, cousins. In most courts, they had no legal standing. Enslavers could rape or murder their property without legal consequence. Enslaved people could own nothing, will nothing and inherit nothing. They were legally tortured, including by those working for Jefferson himself. They could be worked to death, and often were, in order to produce the highest profits for the white people who owned them.

Yet in making the argument against Britain’s tyranny, one of the colonists’ favorite rhetorical devices was to claim that they were the slaves — to Britain. For this duplicity, they faced burning criticism both at home and abroad. As Samuel Johnson, an English writer and Tory opposed to American independence, quipped, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?”

Conveniently left out of our founding mythology is the fact that one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery. By 1776, Britain had grown deeply conflicted over its role in the barbaric institution that had reshaped the Western Hemisphere. In London, there were growing calls to abolish the slave trade. This would have upended the economy of the colonies, in both the North and the South. The wealth and prominence that allowed Jefferson, at just 33, and the other founding fathers to believe they could successfully break off from one of the mightiest empires in the world came from the dizzying profits generated by chattel slavery. In other words, we may never have revolted against Britain if the founders had not understood that slavery empowered them to do so; nor if they had not believed that independence was required in order to ensure that slavery would continue. It is not incidental that 10 of this nation’s first 12 presidents were enslavers, and some might argue that this nation was founded not as a democracy but as a slavocracy.

Jefferson and the other founders were keenly aware of this hypocrisy. And so in Jefferson’s original draft of the Declaration of Independence, he tried to argue that it wasn’t the colonists’ fault. Instead, he blamed the king of England for forcing the institution of slavery on the unwilling colonists and called the trafficking in human beings a crime. Yet neither Jefferson nor most of the founders intended to abolish slavery, and in the end, they struck the passage.

There is no mention of slavery in the final Declaration of Independence. Similarly, 11 years later, when it came time to draft the Constitution, the framers carefully constructed a document that preserved and protected slavery without ever using the word. In the texts in which they were making the case for freedom to the world, they did not want to explicitly enshrine their hypocrisy, so they sought to hide it. The Constitution contains 84 clauses. Six deal directly with the enslaved and their enslavement, as the historian David Waldstreicher has written, and five more hold implications for slavery. The Constitution protected the “property” of those who enslaved black people, prohibited the federal government from intervening to end the importation of enslaved Africans for a term of 20 years, allowed Congress to mobilize the militia to put down insurrections by the enslaved and forced states that had outlawed slavery to turn over enslaved people who had run away seeking refuge. Like many others, the writer and abolitionist Samuel Bryan called out the deceit, saying of the Constitution, “The words are dark and ambiguous; such as no plain man of common sense would have used, [and] are evidently chosen to conceal from Europe, that in this enlightened country, the practice of slavery has its advocates among men in the highest stations.”

With independence, the founding fathers could no longer blame slavery on Britain. The sin became this nation’s own, and so, too, the need to cleanse it. The shameful paradox of continuing chattel slavery in a nation founded on individual freedom, scholars today assert, led to a hardening of the racial caste system. This ideology, reinforced not just by laws but by racist science and literature, maintained that black people were subhuman, a belief that allowed white Americans to live with their betrayal. By the early 1800s, according to the legal historians Leland B. Ware, Robert J. Cottrol and Raymond T. Diamond, white Americans, whether they engaged in slavery or not, “had a considerable psychological as well as economic investment in the doctrine of black inferiority.” While liberty was the inalienable right of the people who would be considered white, enslavement and subjugation became the natural station of people who had any discernible drop of “black” blood.

The Supreme Court enshrined this thinking in the law in its 1857 Dred Scott decision, ruling that black people, whether enslaved or free, came from a “slave” race. This made them inferior to white people and, therefore, incompatible with American democracy. Democracy was for citizens, and the “Negro race,” the court ruled, was “a separate class of persons,” which the founders had “not regarded as a portion of the people or citizens of the Government” and had “no rights which a white man was bound to respect.” This belief, that black people were not merely enslaved but were a slave race, became the root of the endemic racism that we still cannot purge from this nation to this day. If black people could not ever be citizens, if they were a caste apart from all other humans, then they did not require the rights bestowed by the Constitution, and the “we” in the “We the People” was not a lie.

On Aug. 14, 1862, a mere five years after the nation’s highest courts declared that no black person could be an American citizen, President Abraham Lincoln called a group of five esteemed free black men to the White House for a meeting. It was one of the few times that black people had ever been invited to the White House as guests. The Civil War had been raging for more than a year, and black abolitionists, who had been increasingly pressuring Lincoln to end slavery, must have felt a sense of great anticipation and pride.

The war was not going well for Lincoln. Britain was contemplating whether to intervene on the Confederacy’s behalf, and Lincoln, unable to draw enough new white volunteers for the war, was forced to reconsider his opposition to allowing black Americans to fight for their own liberation. The president was weighing a proclamation that threatened to emancipate all enslaved people in the states that had seceded from the Union if the states did not end the rebellion. The proclamation would also allow the formerly enslaved to join the Union army and fight against their former “masters.” But Lincoln worried about what the consequences of this radical step would be. Like many white Americans, he opposed slavery as a cruel system at odds with American ideals, but he also opposed black equality. He believed that free black people were a “troublesome presence” incompatible with a democracy intended only for white people. “Free them, and make them politically and socially our equals?” he had said four years earlier. “My own feelings will not admit of this; and if mine would, we well know that those of the great mass of white people will not.”

That August day, as the men arrived at the White House, they were greeted by the towering Lincoln and a man named James Mitchell, who eight days before had been given the title of a newly created position called the commissioner of emigration. This was to be his first assignment. After exchanging a few niceties, Lincoln got right to it. He informed his guests that he had gotten Congress to appropriate funds to ship black people, once freed, to another country.

“Why should they leave this country? This is, perhaps, the first question for proper consideration,” Lincoln told them. “You and we are different races. ... Your race suffer very greatly, many of them, by living among us, while ours suffer from your presence. In a word, we suffer on each side.”

You can imagine the heavy silence in that room, as the weight of what the president said momentarily stole the breath of these five black men. It was 243 years to the month since the first of their ancestors had arrived on these shores, before Lincoln’s family, long before most of the white people insisting that this was not their country. The Union had not entered the war to end slavery but to keep the South from splitting off, yet black men had signed up to fight. Enslaved people were fleeing their forced-labor camps, which we like to call plantations, trying to join the effort, serving as spies, sabotaging confederates, taking up arms for his cause as well as their own. And now Lincoln was blaming them for the war. “Although many men engaged on either side do not care for you one way or the other ... without the institution of slavery and the colored race as a basis, the war could not have an existence,” the president told them. “It is better for us both, therefore, to be separated.”

As Lincoln closed the remarks, Edward Thomas, the delegation’s chairman, informed the president, perhaps curtly, that they would consult on his proposition. “Take your full time,” Lincoln said. “No hurry at all.”

Nearly three years after that White House meeting, Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox. By summer, the Civil War was over, and four million black Americans were suddenly free. Contrary to Lincoln’s view, most were not inclined to leave, agreeing with the sentiment of a resolution against black colonization put forward at a convention of black leaders in New York some decades before: “This is our home, and this our country. Beneath its sod lie the bones of our fathers. ... Here we were born, and here we will die.”

That the formerly enslaved did not take up Lincoln’s offer to abandon these lands is an astounding testament to their belief in this nation’s founding ideals. As W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, “Few men ever worshiped Freedom with half such unquestioning faith as did the American Negro for two centuries.” Black Americans had long called for universal equality and believed, as the abolitionist Martin Delany said, “that God has made of one blood all the nations that dwell on the face of the earth.” Liberated by war, then, they did not seek vengeance on their oppressors as Lincoln and so many other white Americans feared. They did the opposite. During this nation’s brief period of Reconstruction, from 1865 to 1877, formerly enslaved people zealously engaged with the democratic process. With federal troops tempering widespread white violence, black Southerners started branches of the Equal Rights League — one of the nation’s first human rights organizations — to fight discrimination and organize voters; they headed in droves to the polls, where they placed other formerly enslaved people into seats that their enslavers had once held. The South, for the first time in the history of this country, began to resemble a democracy, with black Americans elected to local, state and federal offices. Some 16 black men served in Congress — including Hiram Revels of Mississippi, who became the first black man elected to the Senate. (Demonstrating just how brief this period would be, Revels, along with Blanche Bruce, would go from being the first black man elected to the last for nearly a hundred years, until Edward Brooke of Massachusetts took office in 1967.) More than 600 black men served in Southern state legislatures and hundreds more in local positions.

These black officials joined with white Republicans, some of whom came down from the North, to write the most egalitarian state constitutions the South had ever seen. They helped pass more equitable tax legislation and laws that prohibited discrimination in public transportation, accommodation and housing. Perhaps their biggest achievement was the establishment of that most democratic of American institutions: the public school. Public education effectively did not exist in the South before Reconstruction. The white elite sent their children to private schools, while poor white children went without an education. But newly freed black people, who had been prohibited from learning to read and write during slavery, were desperate for an education. So black legislators successfully pushed for a universal, state-funded system of schools — not just for their own children but for white children, too. Black legislators also helped pass the first compulsory education laws in the region. Southern children, black and white, were now required to attend schools like their Northern counterparts. Just five years into Reconstruction, every Southern state had enshrined the right to a public education for all children into its constitution. In some states, like Louisiana and South Carolina, small numbers of black and white children, briefly, attended schools together.

Led by black activists and a Republican Party pushed left by the blatant recalcitrance of white Southerners, the years directly after slavery saw the greatest expansion of human and civil rights this nation would ever see. In 1865, Congress passed the 13th Amendment, making the United States one of the last nations in the Americas to outlaw slavery. The following year, black Americans, exerting their new political power, pushed white legislators to pass the Civil Rights Act, the nation’s first such law and one of the most expansive pieces of civil rights legislation Congress has ever passed. It codified black American citizenship for the first time, prohibited housing discrimination and gave all Americans the right to buy and inherit property, make and enforce contracts and seek redress from courts. In 1868, Congress ratified the 14th Amendment, ensuring citizenship to any person born in the United States. Today, thanks to this amendment, every child born here to a European, Asian, African, Latin American or Middle Eastern immigrant gains automatic citizenship. The 14th Amendment also, for the first time, constitutionally guaranteed equal protection under the law. Ever since, nearly all other marginalized groups have used the 14th Amendment in their fights for equality (including the recent successful arguments before the Supreme Court on behalf of same-sex marriage). Finally, in 1870, Congress passed the 15th Amendment, guaranteeing the most critical aspect of democracy and citizenship — the right to vote — to all men regardless of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”

For this fleeting moment known as Reconstruction, the majority in Congress seemed to embrace the idea that out of the ashes of the Civil War, we could create the multiracial democracy that black Americans envisioned even if our founding fathers did not.

But it would not last.

Anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country, as does the belief, so well articulated by Lincoln, that black people are the obstacle to national unity. The many gains of Reconstruction were met with fierce white resistance throughout the South, including unthinkable violence against the formerly enslaved, wide-scale voter suppression, electoral fraud and even, in some extreme cases, the overthrow of democratically elected biracial governments. Faced with this unrest, the federal government decided that black people were the cause of the problem and that for unity’s sake, it would leave the white South to its own devices. In 1877, President Rutherford B. Hayes, in order to secure a compromise with Southern Democrats that would grant him the presidency in a contested election, agreed to pull federal troops from the South. With the troops gone, white Southerners quickly went about eradicating the gains of Reconstruction. The systemic white suppression of black life was so severe that this period between the 1880s and the 1920 and ’30s became known as the Great Nadir, or the second slavery. Democracy would not return to the South for nearly a century.

White Southerners of all economic classes, on the other hand, thanks in significant part to the progressive policies and laws black people had championed, experienced substantial improvement in their lives even as they forced black people back into a quasi slavery. As Waters McIntosh, who had been enslaved in South Carolina, lamented, “It was the poor white man who was freed by the war, not the Negroes.”

Georgia pines flew past the windows of the Greyhound bus carrying Isaac Woodard home to Winnsboro, S.C. After serving four years in the Army in World War II, where Woodard had earned a battle star, he was given an honorable discharge earlier that day at Camp Gordon and was headed home to meet his wife. When the bus stopped at a small drugstore an hour outside Atlanta, Woodard got into a brief argument with the white driver after asking if he could use the restroom. About half an hour later, the driver stopped again and told Woodard to get off the bus. Crisp in his uniform, Woodard stepped from the stairs and saw the police waiting for him. Before he could speak, one of the officers struck him in his head with a billy club, beating him so badly that he fell unconscious. The blows to Woodard’s head were so severe that when he woke in a jail cell the next day, he could not see. The beating occurred just 4½ hours after his military discharge. At 26, Woodard would never see again.

There was nothing unusual about Woodard’s horrific maiming. It was part of a wave of systemic violence deployed against black Americans after Reconstruction, in both the North and the South. As the egalitarian spirit of post-Civil War America evaporated under the desire for national reunification, black Americans, simply by existing, served as a problematic reminder of this nation’s failings. White America dealt with this inconvenience by constructing a savagely enforced system of racial apartheid that excluded black people almost entirely from mainstream American life — a system so grotesque that Nazi Germany would later take inspiration from it for its own racist policies.

Despite the guarantees of equality in the 14th Amendment, the Supreme Court’s landmark Plessy v. Ferguson decision in 1896 declared that the racial segregation of black Americans was constitutional. With the blessing of the nation’s highest court and no federal will to vindicate black rights, starting in the late 1800s, Southern states passed a series of laws and codes meant to make slavery’s racial caste system permanent by denying black people political power, social equality and basic dignity. They passed literacy tests to keep black people from voting and created all-white primaries for elections. Black people were prohibited from serving on juries or testifying in court against a white person. South Carolina prohibited white and black textile workers from using the same doors. Oklahoma forced phone companies to segregate phone booths. Memphis had separate parking spaces for black and white drivers. Baltimore passed an ordinance outlawing black people from moving onto a block more than half white and white people from moving onto a block more than half black. Georgia made it illegal for black and white people to be buried next to one another in the same cemetery. Alabama barred black people from using public libraries that their own tax dollars were paying for. Black people were expected to jump off the sidewalk to let white people pass and call all white people by an honorific, though they received none no matter how old they were. In the North, white politicians implemented policies that segregated black people into slum neighborhoods and into inferior all-black schools, operated whites-only public pools and held white and “colored” days at the country fair, and white businesses regularly denied black people service, placing “Whites Only” signs in their windows. States like California joined Southern states in barring black people from marrying white people, while local school boards in Illinois and New Jersey mandated segregated schools for black and white children.

This caste system was maintained through wanton racial terrorism. And black veterans like Woodard, especially those with the audacity to wear their uniform, had since the Civil War been the target of a particular violence. This intensified during the two world wars because white people understood that once black men had gone abroad and experienced life outside the suffocating racial oppression of America, they were unlikely to quietly return to their subjugation at home. As Senator James K. Vardaman of Mississippi said on the Senate floor during World War I, black servicemen returning to the South would “inevitably lead to disaster.” Giving a black man “military airs” and sending him to defend the flag would bring him “to the conclusion that his political rights must be respected.”

Many white Americans saw black men in the uniforms of America’s armed services not as patriotic but as exhibiting a dangerous pride. Hundreds of black veterans were beaten, maimed, shot and lynched. We like to call those who lived during World War II the Greatest Generation, but that allows us to ignore the fact that many of this generation fought for democracy abroad while brutally suppressing democracy for millions of American citizens. During the height of racial terror in this country, black Americans were not merely killed but castrated, burned alive and dismembered with their body parts displayed in storefronts. This violence was meant to terrify and control black people, but perhaps just as important, it served as a psychological balm for white supremacy: You would not treat human beings this way. The extremity of the violence was a symptom of the psychological mechanism necessary to absolve white Americans of their country’s original sin. To answer the question of how they could prize liberty abroad while simultaneously denying liberty to an entire race back home, white Americans resorted to the same racist ideology that Jefferson and the framers had used at the nation’s founding.

This ideology — that black people belonged to an inferior, subhuman race — did not simply disappear once slavery ended. If the formerly enslaved and their descendants became educated, if we thrived in the jobs white people did, if we excelled in the sciences and arts, then the entire justification for how this nation allowed slavery would collapse. Free black people posed a danger to the country’s idea of itself as exceptional; we held up the mirror in which the nation preferred not to peer. And so the inhumanity visited on black people by every generation of white America justified the inhumanity of the past.

Just as white Americans feared, World War II ignited what became black Americans’ second sustained effort to make democracy real. As the editorial board of the black newspaper The Pittsburgh Courier wrote, “We wage a two-pronged attack against our enslavers at home and those abroad who will enslave us.” Woodard’s blinding is largely seen as one of the catalysts for the decades-long rebellion we have come to call the civil rights movement. But it is useful to pause and remember that this was the second mass movement for black civil rights, the first being Reconstruction. As the centennial of slavery’s end neared, black people were still seeking the rights they had fought for and won after the Civil War: the right to be treated equally by public institutions, which was guaranteed in 1866 with the Civil Rights Act; the right to be treated as full citizens before the law, which was guaranteed in 1868 by the 14th Amendment; and the right to vote, which was guaranteed in 1870 by the 15th Amendment. In response to black demands for these rights, white Americans strung them from trees, beat them and dumped their bodies in muddy rivers, assassinated them in their front yards, firebombed them on buses, mauled them with dogs, peeled back their skin with fire hoses and murdered their children with explosives set off inside a church.

For the most part, black Americans fought back alone. Yet we never fought only for ourselves. The bloody freedom struggles of the civil rights movement laid the foundation for every other modern rights struggle. This nation’s white founders set up a decidedly undemocratic Constitution that excluded women, Native Americans and black people, and did not provide the vote or equality for most Americans. But the laws born out of black resistance guarantee the franchise for all and ban discrimination based not just on race but on gender, nationality, religion and ability. It was the civil rights movement that led to the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which upended the racist immigration quota system intended to keep this country white. Because of black Americans, black and brown immigrants from across the globe are able to come to the United States and live in a country in which legal discrimination is no longer allowed. It is a truly American irony that some Asian-Americans, among the groups able to immigrate to the United States because of the black civil rights struggle, are now suing universities to end programs designed to help the descendants of the enslaved.

No one cherishes freedom more than those who have not had it. And to this day, black Americans, more than any other group, embrace the democratic ideals of a common good. We are the most likely to support programs like universal health care and a higher minimum wage, and to oppose programs that harm the most vulnerable. For instance, black Americans suffer the most from violent crime, yet we are the most opposed to capital punishment. Our unemployment rate is nearly twice that of white Americans, yet we are still the most likely of all groups to say this nation should take in refugees.

The truth is that as much democracy as this nation has today, it has been borne on the backs of black resistance. Our founding fathers may not have actually believed in the ideals they espoused, but black people did. As one scholar, Joe R. Feagin, put it, “Enslaved African-Americans have been among the foremost freedom-fighters this country has produced.” For generations, we have believed in this country with a faith it did not deserve. Black people have seen the worst of America, yet, somehow, we still believe in its best.

They say our people were born on the water.

When it occurred, no one can say for certain. Perhaps it was in the second week, or the third, but surely by the fourth, when they had not seen their land or any land for so many days that they lost count. It was after fear had turned to despair, and despair to resignation, and resignation to an abiding understanding. The teal eternity of the Atlantic Ocean had severed them so completely from what had once been their home that it was as if nothing had ever existed before, as if everything and everyone they cherished had simply vanished from the earth. They were no longer Mbundu or Akan or Fulani. These men and women from many different nations, all shackled together in the suffocating hull of the ship, they were one people now.

Just a few months earlier, they had families, and farms, and lives and dreams. They were free. They had names, of course, but their enslavers did not bother to record them. They had been made black by those people who believed that they were white, and where they were heading, black equaled “slave,” and slavery in America required turning human beings into property by stripping them of every element that made them individuals. This process was called seasoning, in which people stolen from western and central Africa were forced, often through torture, to stop speaking their native tongues and practicing their native religions.

But as the sociologist Glenn Bracey wrote, “Out of the ashes of white denigration, we gave birth to ourselves.” For as much as white people tried to pretend, black people were not chattel. And so the process of seasoning, instead of erasing identity, served an opposite purpose: In the void, we forged a new culture all our own.

Today, our very manner of speaking recalls the Creole languages that enslaved people innovated in order to communicate both with Africans speaking various dialects and the English-speaking people who enslaved them. Our style of dress, the extra flair, stems back to the desires of enslaved people — shorn of all individuality — to exert their own identity. Enslaved people would wear their hat in a jaunty manner or knot their head scarves intricately. Today’s avant-garde nature of black hairstyles and fashion displays a vibrant reflection of enslaved people’s determination to feel fully human through self-expression. The improvisational quality of black art and music comes from a culture that because of constant disruption could not cling to convention. Black naming practices, so often impugned by mainstream society, are themselves an act of resistance. Our last names belong to the white people who once owned us. That is why the insistence of many black Americans, particularly those most marginalized, to give our children names that we create, that are neither European nor from Africa, a place we have never been, is an act of self-determination. When the world listens to quintessential American music, it is our voice they hear. The sorrow songs we sang in the fields to soothe our physical pain and find hope in a freedom we did not expect to know until we died became American gospel. Amid the devastating violence and poverty of the Mississippi Delta, we birthed jazz and blues. And it was in the deeply impoverished and segregated neighborhoods where white Americans forced the descendants of the enslaved to live that teenagers too poor to buy instruments used old records to create a new music known as hip-hop.

Our speech and fashion and the drum of our music echoes Africa but is not African. Out of our unique isolation, both from our native cultures and from white America, we forged this nation’s most significant original culture. In turn, “mainstream” society has coveted our style, our slang and our song, seeking to appropriate the one truly American culture as its own. As Langston Hughes wrote in 1926, “They’ll see how beautiful I am/And be ashamed —/I, too, am America.”

For centuries, white Americans have been trying to solve the “Negro problem.” They have dedicated thousands of pages to this endeavor. It is common, still, to point to rates of black poverty, out-of-wedlock births, crime and college attendance, as if these conditions in a country built on a racial caste system are not utterly predictable. But crucially, you cannot view those statistics while ignoring another: that black people were enslaved here longer than we have been free.

At 43, I am part of the first generation of black Americans in the history of the United States to be born into a society in which black people had full rights of citizenship. Black people suffered under slavery for 250 years; we have been legally “free” for just 50. Yet in that briefest of spans, despite continuing to face rampant discrimination, and despite there never having been a genuine effort to redress the wrongs of slavery and the century of racial apartheid that followed, black Americans have made astounding progress, not only for ourselves but also for all Americans.

What if America understood, finally, in this 400th year, that we have never been the problem but the solution?

When I was a child — I must have been in fifth or sixth grade — a teacher gave our class an assignment intended to celebrate the diversity of the great American melting pot. She instructed each of us to write a short report on our ancestral land and then draw that nation’s flag. As she turned to write the assignment on the board, the other black girl in class locked eyes with me. Slavery had erased any connection we had to an African country, and even if we tried to claim the whole continent, there was no “African” flag. It was hard enough being one of two black kids in the class, and this assignment would just be another reminder of the distance between the white kids and us. In the end, I walked over to the globe near my teacher’s desk, picked a random African country and claimed it as my own.

I wish, now, that I could go back to the younger me and tell her that her people’s ancestry started here, on these lands, and to boldly, proudly, draw the stars and those stripes of the American flag.

We were told once, by virtue of our bondage, that we could never be American. But it was by virtue of our bondage that we became the most American of all.

[96thdayofrage]

Patrice Lumumba was prime minister of a newly independent Congo for only seven months between 1960 and 1961 before he was murdered, fifty-six years ago today. He was thirty-six.

Yet Lumumba’s short political life — as with figures like Thomas Sankara and Steve Biko, who had equally short lives — is still a touchstone for debates about what is politically possible in postcolonial Africa, the role of charismatic leaders, and the fate of progressive politics elsewhere.

The details of Lumumba’s biography have been endlessly memorialized and cut and pasted: a former postal worker in the Belgian Congo, he became political after joining a local branch of a Belgian liberal party. On his return from a study tour to Belgium arranged by the party, the authorities took note of his burgeoning political involvement and arrested him for embezzling funds from the post office. He served twelve months in prison.

Congolese historian Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja — who was in high school during Lumumba’s rise and assassination — points out that the charges were trumped-up. Their main effect was to radicalize him against Belgian racism, though not colonialism. Upon his release in 1957, Lumumba, by now a beer salesman, was more explicit about Congolese autonomy and helped found the Congolese National Movement, the first Congolese political group which explicitly disavowed Belgian paternalism and tribalism, called unreservedly for independence, and demanded that Congo’s vast mineral wealth (exploited by Belgium and Euro-American multinational firms) benefit Congolese first.

For Belgian public opinion — which played up Congolese ethnic differences, infantilized Africans, and in the late 1950s still had a thirty-year plan for Congolese independence — Lumumba and the Congolese National Movement’s pronouncements came as a shock.

Two months after his release from prison, in December 1958, Lumumba was in Ghana, at the invitation of President Kwame Nkrumah who had organized the seminal All Africa People’s Conference. There, as a number of other African nationalists pushing for political independence listened, Lumumba declared:

The winds of freedom currently blowing across all of Africa have not left the Congolese people indifferent. Political awareness, which until very recently was latent, is now becoming manifest and assuming outward expression, and it will assert itself even more forcefully in the months to come. We are thus assured of the support of the masses and of the success of the efforts we are undertaking.

The Belgians reluctantly conceded political independence to the Congolese, and two years later, following a decisive win for the Congolese National Movement in the first democratic elections, Lumumba found himself elected to prime minister and with the right to form a government. A more moderate leader, Joseph Kasavubu, occupied the mostly ceremonial position of Congolese president.

On June 30, 1960, Independence Day, Lumumba gave what is now considered a timeless speech. The Belgian king, Boudewijn, opened proceedings by praising the murderous regime of his great-great uncle, Leopold II (eight million Congolese died during his reign from 1885 to 1908), as benevolent, highlighted the supposed benefits of colonialism, and warned the Congolese: “Don’t compromise the future with hasty reforms.” Kasavubu, predictably, thanked the king.

Then Lumumba, unscheduled, took the podium. What happened next has become one of the most recognizable statements of anticolonial defiance and a postcolonial political program. As the Belgian writer and literary critic Joris Note later pointed out, the original French text consisted of no more than 1,167 words. But it covered a lot of ground.

The first half of the speech traced an arc from past to future: the oppression Congolese had to endure together, the end of suffering and colonialism. The second half mapped out a broad vision and called on Congolese to unite at the task ahead.

Most importantly, Congo’s natural resources would benefit its people first: “We shall see to it that the lands of our native country truly benefit its children,” said Lumumba, adding that the challenge was “creating a national economy and ensuring our economic independence.” Political rights would be reconceived: “We shall revise all the old laws and make them into new ones that will be just and noble.”

Congolese congressmen and those listening by radio broke out in applause. But the speech did not sit well with the former colonizers, Western journalists, nor with multinational mining interests, local comprador elites (especially Kasavubu and separatist elements in the east of the country), the United States government (which rejected Lumumba’s entreaties for help against the reactionary Belgians and the secessionists, forcing him to turn to the Soviet Union), and even the United Nations.

These interests found a willing accomplice in Lumumba’s comrade: former journalist and now head of the army Joseph Mobutu. Together they worked to foment rebellion in the army, stoke unrest, exploit attacks on whites, create an economic crisis — and eventually kidnap and execute Lumumba.

The CIA had tried to poison him, but eventually settled on local politicians (and Belgian killers) to do the job. He was captured by Mobutu’s mutinous army and flown to the secessionist province of Katanga, where he was tortured, shot, and killed.

In the wake of his murder, some of Lumumba’s comrades — most notably Pierre Mulele, Lumumba’s minister of education — controlled part of the country and fought on bravely, but was finally crushed by American and South African mercenaries. (At one point Che Guevara traveled to Congo on a failed military mission to aid Mulele’s army.)

That left Mobutu, under the guise of anticommunism, to declare a one-party, repressive, and kleptomanic state, and govern, with the consent of the United States and Western governments, for the next thirty-odd years.

In February 2002, Belgium’s government expressed “its profound and sincere regrets and its apologies” for Lumumba’s murder, acknowledging that “some members of the government, and some Belgian actors at the time, bear an irrefutable part of the responsibility for the events.”

A government commission also heard testimony that “the assassination could not have been carried out without the complicity of Belgian officers backed by the CIA, and it concluded that Belgium had a moral responsibility for the killing.”

Lumumba today has tremendous semiotic force: he is a social media avatar, a Twitter meme, and a font for inspirational quotes — a perfect hero (like Biko), untainted by any real politics. He is even free of the kind of critiques reserved for figures like Fidel Castroor Thomas Sankara, who confronted some of the inherent contradictions of their own regimes through antidemocratic means.

As such, Lumumba divides debates over political strategy: he is often derided as a merely charismatic leader, a good speaker with very little strategic vision.

For example, in the famed Belgian historical fiction writer David van Reybrouck’s much-praised Congo: An Epic History of a People, Lumumba is characterized as a poor tactician, unstatesmanlike, and more interested in rebellion and adulation than governance. He is faulted for not prioritizing Western interests.

Lumumba’s denunciation of the Belgian king in June 1960, for example, only served to embolden his enemies, argues Van Reybrouck. Lumumba is also criticized by his Western critics for turning to the Soviet Union after the United States had spurned him.

But as the writer Adam Shatz has argued: “It’s not clear how . . . in his two and a half months in office, Lumumba could have dealt differently with a Belgian invasion, two secessionist uprisings, and a covert American campaign to destabilize his government.”

More powerful perhaps is how Lumumba operates unproblematically as a figure of defiance. As the disappointment with national liberation movements in Africa (in particular, Algeria, Angola, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and more recently South Africa’s African National Congress) sets in, and new social movements (#OccupyNigeria, #WalktoWork in Uganda, the more radical #FeesMustFall and struggles over land, housing, and health care in South Africa) begin to take shape, references to and images of Patrice Lumumba serve as a call to arms.

In Lumumba’s native Congo, ordinary citizens are currently fighting President Joseph Kabila’s attempts to circumvent the constitution (his two terms were up in December, but he refused to step down). Hundreds have been killed by the police and thousands arrested. Kabila, who inherited the presidency from his father, who overthrew Mobutu, exploits the weakness of the opposition, especially the power of ethnicity (via patronage politics) to divide Congolese politically. In this, Kabila is merely emulating the Belgian colonists and Mobutu.

Here Lumumba’s legacy may be helpful. Lumumba’s Congolese National Movement was the only party offering a national — rather than ethnic — vision and a means to organize Congolese around a progressive ideal. Such a movement and such politicians are in short supply in Congo these days.

But Lumumba’s story offers not just an invitation to revisit the political potential of past movements and currents, but also opportunities to refrain from projecting too much onto leaders like Lumumba who had a complicated political life and who did not get to confront the messiness of postcolonial governance. It also means treating tragic political leaders as humans. To take seriously political scientist Adolph Reed Jr’s advice about Malcolm X:

He was just like the rest of us — a regular person saddled with imperfect knowledge, human frailties, and conflicting imperatives, but nonetheless trying to make sense of his very specific history, trying unsuccessfully to transcend it, and struggling to push it in a humane direction.

It is perhaps then that we can begin to make true Patrice Lumumba’s critical wish, perhaps as self reflection, that he wrote in a letter from prison to his wife in 1960:

The day will come when history will speak. But it will not be the history which will be taught in Brussels, Paris, Washington or the United Nations. It will be the history which will be taught in the countries which have won freedom from colonialism and its puppets. Africa will write its own history and in both north and south it will be a history of glory and dignity.