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route22ny · 3 years

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Visitors to the McKeesport Regional History and Heritage Center are encouraged upon arrival to enter a corridor and enjoy a ‘walk through time.’ The corridor, lined with outlandish fashions and records taped to the walls, features exhibits on McKeesport’s former department stores, its now shuttered daily newspaper, and a former landmark hotel. Perhaps atypically for a former steel town, the images featured focus not on smokestacks or furnaces, but on McKeesport’s former central business district, and the pleasant Boomer memories of post-Second World War prosperity.

McKeesport today bears little resemblance to the city commemorated in its history museum. It’s no longer the nation’s leading producer of steel pipes, nor the commercial and industrial center of the Mon Valley Region, but rather a small suburban community on Pittsburgh’s periphery. The city’s poverty rate is more than double the state and Pittsburgh metro levels, at more than thirty-one percent, with forty-nine percent of children under the age of eighteen living in poverty. Its median home value, $48,000, is a quarter of the state’s and a third of the rest of the Pittsburgh metro. Twenty percent of housing units are vacant, and half the population moved between 2000 and 2014. In 2019, a national trade association for the home security industry ranked McKeesport America’s fourth-most dangerous city.

The story of what happened to McKeesport, like so many places in the Rust Belt, is a story of the relationships between labor and industry, of the collective power of communities to shape their circumstances, and of the forces that conspire to keep this power at bay. Its history is shaped by two ‘Great Depressions’—first, the one everybody knows about, in the 1930s, and again in the 1970s and 80s, when the oil crisis led to a downturn in steel production and a tremendous loss of jobs and industry (cumulative job losses since the mid-1970s are estimated at 175,000).

The Mon Valley and the community of McKeesport never recovered from that second crisis. This contrasts sharply with the first, when organized labor succeeded, albeit briefly, in securing for steel industry workers the wages, benefits, and job security that had so long been denied them by U.S. Steel and its local political allies. That hard-won prosperity and security would ultimately last only two decades before a combination of factors conspired to undermine and overwhelm what was once the beating heart of the American steel industry—but it carries important lessons for those who hope to rebuild thriving communities in the Rust Belt.

Well into the third decade of the twentieth century, working conditions in the large industrial concerns that defined the McKeesport community bordered on intolerable. Most workers toiled for excessively long hours in dangerous conditions for pitiful wages. Discipline in the mills could be enforced with beatings or firing without cause. Complaints could result in losing one’s job, as could sickness or even an injury incurred while at work; in 1910, in more than half of the workplace accidents resulting in injury or death in Pittsburgh, the employer bore absolutely no responsibility whatsoever. There was no recourse outside of organizing, and even that brought with it serious challenges. In Pittsburgh specifically, union organizers were harassed and beaten by Pinkerton detectives working for the major steel companies, and meeting halls were closed by the Board of Health for unsanitary conditions. (Duquesne mayor James Crawford famously boasted that Jesus Christ himself couldn’t hold a union meeting in his town.)

Engraving of the manufacture of steel tubing pipe mills at the National Tube Works, as printed in Scientific America, McKeesport, PA, 1897. American Stock Archive/Archive Photos/Getty Images.

Though the American steel worker had secured a modicum of job security and a reprieve from this brutal exploitation during the First World War, at the war’s conclusion the steel industry sought its own ‘return to normalcy’ and an elimination of all the benefits that had been gained to keep the industry running. The Great Steel Strike of 1919 demonstrated that there was considerable labor unrest in the immediate aftermath of the First World War.

McKeesport was at the center of considerable labor organizing during the 1920s and 1930s. This was the era of the Red Scare, and anti-union sentiment was widespread. Phil McGuigan, a McKeesport worker, recalled that private detectives spied on employees to prevent unionizing. McGuigan also remembered an informal system of patronage was the primary means for gaining employment, and that Mayor George Lysle forbade the renting of halls for union meeting purposes. In 1923, several members of the Workers’ Party were fined for holding an outdoor meeting on private property after being denied the right to rent a hall for the same purpose. After the meeting, McKeesport’s major employers went about dismissing “…all employees who were known to have attended the meeting or to have been identified in any way with it or the Workers’ Party.”

McKeesport resident Junious Brown, interviewed in 1983 by the McKeesport Oral History Project, recalled that the steel mills of the Mon Valley largely fell silent during the Great Depression, noting that McKeesport’s primary employer, National Tube, ceased operation during the Great Depression, as did the nearby Duquesne Works. Nearly all the locals interviewed for the said that jobs, food, and money were all in short supply, but that most people didn’t leave their homes or the community unless they were forced out. Those interviewed, Brown included, spoke in glowing terms about the union movement, which helped the citizens of the Mon Valley weather the storm of widespread economic collapse.

Labor organizers, including communists, were known for taking direct action to help people in trouble. Rocky Doratio, who was active with the Unemployment Council (UC) movement prevalent in the Mon Valley at the time, said when peoples’ utilities were shut off, UC members would “go around turning the gas on; water and electric too,” and that UC’s membership would show up in force in case one of their members were threatened with eviction. Similar tactics were employed to ensure the prompt distribution of welfare checks. (Joseph Odorcich, who became vice president of the Steelworkers’ Union in the 1980s, told interviewers: “I said in the ‘30s we were that close to going communist. One of the reasons was, in those days they were the only ones who would help you. If the company shut off the gas, the commies come in at night and turned it back on.”)

Several of the interviewees related how social solidarity during the Great Depression knocked down interracial and inter-ethnic barriers that had been previously exploited by major employers and the political class alike. Junious Brown recalled that the unions improved his job prospects, such that he and other Black people were no longer limited to “…the hardest, dirtiest jobs.” Andrew Jakomas, who served three terms as mayor of McKeesport from 1953 to 1965, recalled McKeesport during the Depression was a multi-ethnic melting pot, but that politically the city was a “closed corporation” where “ethnics and Blacks” had no chance of holding political office. Jakomas summarized the general support of citizens for the various federal government ‘make-work’ initiatives of the New Deal, stating that “…we all became Democrats with Roosevelt.”

As McKeesport native and veteran labor reporter John P. Hoerr relates, the ‘good old days’ of working in the steel mills was in the post-World War II period, when organized labor had secured a good deal for the working man. The postwar period witnessed considerable labor action on the part of the United Steelworkers (USW), which contrasts sharply with the stereotypical image of postwar domestic tranquility and social conservatism. In fact, in the fifteen years that followed the Second World War the USW went on strike five times (in 1946, 1949, 1952, 1956 and 1959), the last of which involved more than half a million workers and lasted 116 days.

The steel industry employed about eighty thousand people in the late 1940s, with most of the jobs concentrated in the Mon Valley. While the majority of principle employers were involved in steel (and U.S. Steel was without question the dominant employer in and around McKeesport), the city had a sufficiently diversified economy that it had emerged into a regional center and not merely a mill town. Despite this economic diversity, and despite increased labor activism that led to the formation of the United Steelworkers, U.S. Steel remained both locally and nationally dominant, such that major changes to the industry were bound to have a serious and negative ‘trickle down’ effect on mill-dependent communities and the various industries involved in steel.

In 1947, the Taft-Hartley Act, one of the most sweeping pieces of anti-union legislation in U.S. history, was passed over the veto of Harry Truman. Among the act’s various provisions was the right for states to pass ‘right to work’ legislation, which outlawed “closed shop” union organizing and allowed non-union workers to hire in—a major blow for union power, and perhaps the singular aspect that secured bipartisan support from the ‘Dixiecrats’ and curtailed union organizing in the South.

By the middle of the century, as the economic foundation of the Mon Valley was being hollowed out, so too was its urban environment. Whole sections of the city, including much of its antique affordable housing stock, was razed to make way for large-scale urban renewal projects that never materialized, and the land was ultimately handed over to the steel firms. Population displacement was motivated first by a desire to ‘clean up the slums’ and ‘reduce crime,’ but ultimately served to provide inexpensive land to massive corporations. While communities across the country wiped the slate clean of urban neighborhoods, they were simultaneously losing residents and their tax bases to new suburbs.

The racial characteristics of McKeesport were also changing, with the Black population representing about twenty-one percent of the total by 1971 (it’s about thirty-six percent today). After the city desegregated public housing in April of 1971, white people began distributing thousands of crude racist pamphlets. Anti-Black racism in McKeesport and the Mon Valley Region was not limited to the distribution of pamphlets or lethargy in the integration of public housing, however; Black people generally had few options for employment and fewer still for advancement, and were first to be laid off from the mills.

By the time of the second oil crisis, in 1979, a global recession was brewing and analysts started warning of the possibility of an oil glut. By 1981, the American economy was in full recession, and demand for American steel, like McKeesport’s tubes and pipes, was plummeting. The company laid off more than six thousand workers in the Mon Valley by November of that year. The following month, it used $6.3 billion in federal aid to purchase Marathon Oil as part of an economic diversification strategy meant to satisfy the interests of shareholders; steelworkers complained the funds should have been used to upgrade mills to make steel products more internationally competitive.

More than five hundred companies declared bankruptcy in America during one week in June 1982, with more than fifty thousand businesses failing across the county in that fiscal year. Unemployment in the Pittsburgh Metropolitan Area reached nearly sixteen percent in 1983, with 168,000 people seeking work. Though the rate declined to under eight percent by the end of 1986, in mill towns the numbers often exceeded twenty percent in terms of real unemployment. Research from the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Social Work revealed that between 1981 and 1986, in one out of three Mon Valley households, at least one member had been jobless for a year or more.

McKeesport, Pennsylvania. Photo via Flickr (creative commons).

In October of 1986, twenty-two thousand USW members walked off the job as negotiations broke down; the strike would last six months. When the strike ended in February of 1987, the 189 remaining employees who reported back to work at McKeesport’s National Tube Works were told their plant, in operation continuously since the 1870s, would not re-open. Twenty-one employees were retained to conclude the last shipments and assist in stripping the plant of its remaining useful technology and equipment. (U.S. Steel would transfer its tube and pipe operations to Fairfield, Alabama, where union organizing was more difficult.)

By 1986, population loss had left five hundred abandoned homes throughout McKeesport and over half a million dollars lost in tax income. Young people had been moving out in droves for some time; seventy-four percent of the 1986 graduating class of Duquesne High reported they would leave the Mon Valley for better opportunities elsewhere. Public services, from police and firefighters to street cleaners and public works employees, were cut in communities large and small throughout the region. Though McKeesport would experience a brief resurgence of activism in an effort to save the community in the mid-late 1980s, their efforts were largely unsuccessful. With the loss of the economic foundation of the region, those who could afford to move elsewhere did so, and the population of McKeesport continued to shrink and grow older.

It’s hard to be hopeful walking past the endless rows of abandoned storefronts and the crumbling buildings of McKeesport’s once bustling downtown, and yet, a century ago, at a time in which nearly all hope had been lost, the people of this city secured for themselves a new and better deal. Though McKeesport transitioned from a bustling regional commercial and industrial center to a declining residential suburb over the course of the last century, there may yet be a stable foundation for renewal.

The community that remains occupies land once reserved for the local elites, stretched along Eden Park Boulevard and focused on the few remaining community institutions, such as the local high school, Renziehausen Park, and the churches that proudly boast of their ethnic heritage—Polish, Ukrainian, Hungarian. Down the hill, toward what was once McKeesport’s central business district, is an abundance of open lots and derelict buildings. Racial divisions seem to remain, with the upper part of the community noticeably whiter and better off than the segment that lives down the hill; McKeesport’s Black population has increased substantially over the past decade, like the other communities of the Mon Valley, as Black people are displaced from Pittsburgh’s gentrifying urban neighborhoods.

In the Mon Valley, the organization of municipalities still reflects the preferences of U.S. Steel from more than a century ago. Communities remain disconnected from one another, despite geographic proximity and near socio-economic uniformity; McKeesport is only about twelve miles from downtown Pittsburgh, but the drive can take as long as forty-five minutes. This planning was often deliberate, as major industrial concerns like U.S. Steel simply didn’t want their employees mixing with the employees of other mills for fear they may unionize.

Politicians often say there are no simple solutions for what to do with America’s devastated industrial cities, but the beleaguered citizens of these communities are under no illusion that easy solutions exist. Despite baked-in divisions, the workers of the 1930s found common cause, and learned, as did working people across the country, that the power of the industrial bosses was largely an illusion. It was easy to stop evictions when masses of people showed up to stare down the sheriff, and relatively simple to turn the utilities back on with the help of the neighborhood electrician or plumber. The likelihood of police violence and suppression fell with every new person attending an outdoor rally right in the middle of town. Churches and schools, street corners and shops became the venues for impromptu meetings, discreet sharing of information, and the ever-increasing organizing web.

Residents of today can take a powerful lesson from McKeesport’s first Great Depression. The strength of the town in the twentieth century was built on an infrastructure of connection and organizing across differences—geographic and otherwise—and offers a compelling blueprint for rebuilding strong Rust Belt communities in the future. The steel mills may not be coming back to the valley, but that’s no matter–they weren’t really what brought these communities together in the first place. ■

The author, Taylor C. Noakes, is an independent journalist and public historian currently based in Pittsburgh. He is a graduate of Duquesne University’s MA Public History program and is currently working on preservation and rehabilitation projects for a Pittsburgh-based architectural firm.

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Belt Magazine is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. To support more independent writing and journalism made by and for the Rust Belt and greater Midwest, make a donation to Belt Magazine, or become a member starting at just $5 a month.

#mckeesport PA #rust belt #western pennsylvania #belt magazine #long reads

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etirabys · 4 years

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This post is my attempt to simplify what I learned from Who We Are And How We Got Here into a timeline I have a shot of remembering for years, with some padding from Wikipedia where I thought it would help me.

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As a backdrop to the specifics that follow: humans and human cousins have been sort of ambling out of Africa and back in waves of migration and interbreeding and extinction, for the past two million years.

Around 650K years ago, humans split from the group that will further split 200K years later into Neanderthals and Denisovans. These are the two 'archaic human' populations that contributed some genetic material to modern humans, whose DNA we got our hands on. This is also maybe the divergence point of humans and another archaic population in Africa that later mixed back into humans, that we don’t have DNA evidence for.

200K years ago, zoom in on the ambling in and out of Africa, because now some of the ambling groups are what we’d call anatomically modern humans – that is, their phenotypes fit within existing human populations. At this point, the split between the San population (the most different-from-everyone-else population alive today, whose descendants currently live in South Africa) and the rest of living humanity begins.

50K years ago, a period of great interest. We see behavioral modernity starting hereish, at the beginning of a period (lasting ~40K years) we call the Upper Paleolithic. The rate of stone toolmaking innovation speeds up from ‘glacial’ to ‘every few thousand years’. (If that seem like an odd setting change, I agree.) We see the first known jewelry and representational art. Likely we’ll never have a satisfactory explanation of what exactly changed. We almost certainly had language by this point.

Human colonization of Australia and New Guinea happens, while ocean levels are low. This is part of a radiation of a hunter-gatherer lineage spreading out all over Asia. Some of them will eventually go to Siberia and the Americas. Some of them will become the Yangtze River population and some the Yellow River population, who will later mix to produce the majority of mainland East Asians.

40K years ago. After several thousands of years of contact with modern humans, Neanderthals and some other branches more closely related to modern humans go extinct. There’s an Italian supervolcano eruption nowabouts whose climate disruptions in Europe may have intensified competition.

One thing this book has taught me is that it’s misleading to talk about ‘population splits’ outside of the Americas, because lineages diverged and met again many times, but insofar as it’s meaningful to talk about when the European and East Asian lineages diverged, it’s now.

30K years ago. The archaic humans in Africa mix back with humans and contribute 2% of ancestry to some modern African populations.

Around this time, there exists a population called Ancient North Eurasians. Some of them go east, and contribute to the population that will give rise to Native Americans (who are ~1/3 Ancient North Eurasian, ~2/3 ancestors-of-East-Asians). Some of the rest will remain and contribute ancestry to various Eurasian hunter gatherers, as well half the ancestry of the Yamnaya people of the Eurasian steppe, who will later invent horse-and-wagon way of life and become massively successful in Europe.

15K years ago, there are two migrations to America over the Bering land bridge: (1) The First Americans (the Ancient North Eurasian - East Asian group) account for the majority of Native American ancestry. These newcomers quickly zoom through the Americas. They also may have had a startlingly small effective population size – like 250. (2) A mysterious population that contributes some ancestry to a handful of groups in the Amazon, a population whose closest known descendants today are, intriguingly, Australasian. We don’t know much about them.

10K years ago, agriculture arises in the Middle East. Some Anatolian farmers spread out into Europe. Some Iranian farmers spread out to India. A thousand years later, agriculture also begins in China, in the Yangtze River and Yellow River populations.

5K years ago. The horse-and-wagon Yamnaya sweep from the eastern European steppe into northern Europe and largely replace the population there, and account for 25~45% of current European ancestry. The Yamnaya culture is the strongest candidate for the source of the Proto-Indo-European language (which has an elaborate shared vocabulary for wagon-parts). A large part of their success may have been that they were relatively immune to diseases that the rest of Europe was not – they brought plague with them, heretofore unknown to Europe. With the Yamnaya, the Bronze Age; we have evidence of much more social inequality than ever seen before, evident both from archeology and genetics, which tell us that the highest-reproducing individual men starting now are more reproductively successful than ever before.

Around the same time, there’s another wave of migration from Asia to North America – the Paleo-Eskimo lineage – that leaves a ~30% imprint in some parts of North America. The Paleo-Eskimos will be displaced 4K years later by a final wave from Asia, the Neo-Eskimos, who are the ancestors of modern day Inuits.

The Yangtze and Yellow River populations are also spreading out nowish. Their collision produces much of modern East Asians. The Yellow River people are associated with the Han, and the Tibetans. The Yangtze population, where they spread south, provides much of modern Southeast Asian ancestry.

4K years ago, the Indus Valley civilization is hit by a wave of migration for Europeish, by a steppe people who bring Proto-Indo-European culture and language. These steppe people are about half Yamnaya-related, and half ‘the Iranian farmer related populations the steppe people encountered on their way south’. The natives are about three quarters local hunter-gatherers, and one quarter Iranian farmers who mingled in ~2K years earlier. The natives and Yamnaya-ish migrants mix over the next 2K years to form a modern Indian population that’s a mixture of the two, ranging from 80% Yamnaya-ish (especially in the north, and in higher-caste groups) to 20%.

Around now, the first of four great migrations and mixing events of Africa starts – most significant among them is the Bantu migration south, out of Nigeria and into west-central Africa. Most of the present-day population structure of Africa is shaped by these relatively recent expansions, making it hard to tease out ancient splits.

#rambl #eti reads stuff #eti reads who we are and how we got here #qdq

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go-redgirl · 3 years

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OLDEST AMERICAN CITIES -

Our History

Founded in 1565, St. Augustine is the oldest continuously occupied settlement of European and African-American origin in the United States. Forty-two years before the English colonized Jamestown and fifty-five years before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, the Spanish established at St. Augustine this nation's first enduring settlement.

Architecture

The architectural legacy of the city's past is much younger, testimony to the impermanent quality of the earliest structures and to St. Augustine's troubled history. Only the venerable Castillo de San Marcos, completed in the late seventeenth century, survived destruction of the city by invading British forces in 1702. Vestiges of the First Spanish Colonial Period (1565 to 1764) remain today in St. Augustine in the form of the town plan originally laid out by Governor Gonzalo Méndez de Canzo in the late sixteenth century and in the narrow streets and balconied houses that are identified with the architecture introduced by settlers from Spain. Throughout the modern city and within its Historic Colonial District, there remain thirty-six buildings of colonial origin and another forty that are reconstructed models of colonial buildings. St. Augustine can boast that it contains the only urban nucleus in the United States whose street pattern and architectural ambiance reflect Spanish origins.

Discovery of Florida

Historians credit Juan Ponce de Leon, the first governor of the Island of Puerto Rico, with the discovery of Florida in 1513. While on an exploratory trip in search of the fabled Bimini he sighted the eastern coast of Florida on Easter Sunday, which fell on March 27 that year. Ponce de Leon claimed Florida for the Spanish Crown and named it Florida after the Easter season, known in Spanish as Pascua Florida. This newly claimed territory extended north and west to encompass most of the known lands of the North American continent that had not been claimed by the Spanish in New Spain (Mexico and the Southwest).

Settlement

In the following half century, the government of Spain launched no less than six expeditions attempting to settle Florida; all failed. In 1564 French Huguenots (Protestants) succeeded in establishing a fort and colony near the mouth of the St. Johns River at what is today Jacksonville. This settlement posed a threat to the Spanish fleets that sailed the Gulf Stream beside the east coast of Florida, carrying treasure from Central and South America to Spain. As Don Pedro Menéndez de Avilés was assembling a fleet for an expedition to Florida, the French intrusion upon lands claimed by Spain was discovered. King Philip II instructed Menéndez, Spain's most capable admiral, to remove the French menace to Spain's interests.

Naming St. Augustine

On September 8, 1565, with much pomp and circumstance and 600 voyagers cheering, Menéndez set foot on the shores of Florida. In honor of the saint whose feast day fell on the day he first sighted land, Menéndez named the colonial settlement St. Augustine. Menéndez quickly and diligently carried out his king's instructions. With brilliant military maneuvering and good fortune, he removed the French garrison and proceeded to consolidate Spain's authority on the northeast coast of Florida. St. Augustine was to serve two purposes: as a military outpost, or Presidio, for the defense of Florida, and a base for Catholic missionary settlements throughout the southeastern part of North America.

Military Colony

Maintaining St. Augustine as a permanent military colony, however, was a mighty task. Without the courage, perseverance, and tenacity of the early settlers, it is doubtful that the community would have survived. English pirates and corsairs pillaged and burned the town on several occasions in the next century. Clashes between the Spaniards and the British became more frequent when the English colonies were established in the Carolinas, and later, in Georgia. As a consequence, the Spanish moved to strengthen their defenses, beginning in 1672 construction of a permanent stone fortress. The Castillo de San Marcos was brought to completion late in the century, just in time to meet an attack by British forces from the Carolinas in 1702. Unable to take the fort after a two-month siege, the British troops burned the town and retreated.

Underground Railroad

British attacks continued, however. Plantation and slave owners in the English colonies resented the sanctuary that Spanish Florida afforded escaped slaves who successfully made their way to St. Augustine, which became a focal point for the first Underground Railroad. There, escaped slaves were given their freedom by the Spanish Governor if they declared allegiance to the King of Spain and embraced the Catholic religion. In 1738 the first legally sanctioned free community of former slaves, Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose, was established as part of the presidio’s northern defenses. In 1740, an even stronger attack on St. Augustine was mounted by the Governor of the British colony of Georgia, General James Oglethorpe. He also failed to take the fort.

Treaty of Paris

The Treaty of Paris in 1763, ending the French and Indian War, gave Florida and St. Augustine to the British, accomplishing by the stroke of a pen what pitched battles had failed to do. St. Augustine came under British rule for the first time and served as a Loyalist (pro-British) colony during the American Revolutionary War. A second Treaty of Paris (1783), which gave America's colonies north of Florida their independence, returned Florida to Spain, a reward for Spanish assistance to the Americans in their war against England. Upon their return, the Spanish in 1784 found that St. Augustine had changed. Settlers from a failed colony in New Smyrna (south of St. Augustine) had moved to St. Augustine in 1777. This group, known collectively as Minorcans, included settlers from the western Mediterranean island of Minorca. Their presence in St. Augustine forever changed the ethnic composition of the town.

Second Spanish Period

During what is called by historians the Second Spanish Period (1784 to 1821), Spain suffered the Napoleonic invasions at home and struggled to retain its colonies in the western hemisphere. Florida no longer held its past importance to Spain. The expanding United States, however, regarded the Florida peninsula as vital to its interests. It was a matter of time before the Americans devised a way to acquire Florida. The Adams-Onîs Treaty, negotiated in 1819 and concluded in 1821, peaceably turned over the Spanish colonies of East and West Florida and, with them, St. Augustine, to the United States.

Florida Becomes a State

For the next twenty-four years, East Florida and with it St. Augustine remained a territorial possession of the United States. Not until 1845 was Florida accepted into the union as a state. The Territorial Period (1821-1845) was marked by an intense war with native Indians, the so-called Second Seminole War (1835-1842). The United States Army took over the Castillo de San Marcos and renamed it Fort Marion.

Civil War

In 1861, the Civil War began. Florida joined the Confederacy, but Union troops loyal to the United States Government quickly occupied St. Augustine and remained in control of the city throughout the four-year long war. St. Augustine was thus one of the few places in the United States where Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, issued in 1862, actually freed any slaves. After the war, land was leased to freed slaves on what was then the west bank of Maria Sanchez Creek. Initially called Africa, the settlement later became Lincolnville and is today listed in the National Register of Historic Places, along with three other historic districts in the city.

Vacation Town

Twenty years after the end of the Civil War, St. Augustine entered its most glittering era. Following a visit to the crumbling old Spanish town, Henry Flagler, a former partner of John D. Rockefeller in the Standard Oil Company, decided to create in St. Augustine a winter resort for wealthy Americans. He owned a railroad company that in 1886 linked St. Augustine by rail with the populous cities of the east coast. In 1887, his company began construction of two large and ornate hotels and a year later added a third that had been planned and begun by another developer. Flagler's architects changed the appearance of St. Augustine, fashioning building styles that in time came to characterize the look of cities throughout Florida. For a time, St. Augustine was the winter tourist mecca of the United States.

Newport of the South

In the early twentieth century, however, the very rich found other parts of Florida to which they could escape. With them fled Flagler's dream of turning St. Augustine into the "Newport of the South." St. Augustine nevertheless remained a tourist town. As Americans took to the highways in search of a vacation land, St. Augustine became a destination for automobile-borne visitors. The tourism industry came to dominate the local economy.

Restoration

The city celebrated its 400th anniversary in 1965 and undertook in cooperation with the State of Florida a program to restore parts of the colonial city. The continuation of an effort actually begun in 1935, what became known as the "Restoration" resulted in preserving the thirty-six remaining buildings from the colonial era and the reconstruction of some forty additional colonial buildings that had previously disappeared, transforming the appearance of the historic central part of St. Augustine. It was in great part a tribute to such efforts that King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofia made this small city a part of their 2001 visit to the United States.

Civil Rights Era

In 1964, St. Augustine played a role in America’s civil rights struggle when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. led a local campaign to dramatize national efforts designed to secure Congressional approval of what became the landmark Civil Rights Act of that year. The city now contains a series of historical markers noting sites associated with the civil rights movement here.

Flagler's Hotels

The first of Henry Flagler's three great hotels, the Ponce de Leon, was adapted for use as an institution of higher learning in 1971. As Flagler College, it expanded to embrace a student body of some 1,700 by the end of the century, offering a traditional four-year arts and science degree program. The second of his hotels, the Alcazar, has since 1948 contained the Lightner Museum, (and in 1973 the City of St. Augustine municipal offices). The third Flagler hotel, originally called the Casa Monica, stood vacant for thirty-five years before St. Johns County converted it for use a county courthouse in 1965. In 1999, under private ownership, the building was restored to its original function, and is now the only one of Flagler's three great hotels still serving that purpose.

St. Augustine Attracts Visitors

Some 2 million visitors annually make their way to St. Augustine, lured by the sense of discovering a unique historic part of America. While the venerable Castillo de San Marcos remains the traditional magnet for visitors, there are many other appealing historical sites and vistas. The City of St. Augustine maintains architectural control over the colonial city, insuring that the inevitable change which occurs in a living urban area respects the past.

Historical Timelines

View the Periods of History in St. Augustine

Before 1492: Pre-Columbian or Pre-Historic Period

1513 to 1565: Discovery Period

1565 to 1763: First Spanish Colonial Period

1763 to 1784: British Colonial Period

1784 to 1821: Second Spanish Colonial Period

1821 to 1845: U.S. Territorial Period

1845 to 1861: Early Statehood Period

1861 to 1865: U.S. Civil War

1865 to 1885: Post-Civil War Period

1885 to 1913: Flagler Era

1913 to 1919: World War I Era

1920 to 1926: Boom Time

1926 to 1941: Depression Era (Florida)

1941 to 1945: World War Two\\\

NOTE: We bet our current President couldn’t answer that question nor could the so-called Vice President Ms. Harris

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bridgingdimensions · 4 years

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An Assembled History of the United States

The following contains a timeline of the history of the United States within my dimension. Information sourced from Gravity Falls Library, very roughly summarized.

1400s and prior - Various tribes and cultures lived on this land, but unfortunately written histories of these times are difficult to find. The earliest information found within the library was spare mentions of local history of the Klamath Tribes.

1492 - Christopher Columbus sailed with three ships, one of which crashed in the shores of America and sank with the only 1 documented injury to himself and no fatalities.

1493 - Columbus sailed again to the American colonies with several ships and a large crew, again the ship Columbus was on sank with him on it and this time reportedly took several hours for him to reach the shore.

1494 - The Treaty of Tordesillas attempted to ratify and establish ownership of the lands for Spain and Portugal. It was not successful.

1496 - John Cabot sails to explore the western hemisphere under authority of King Henry VII of England. signs an agreement for the western hemisphere to be explored under England and makes a second voyage the following year.

1498 - Columbus goes on his third voyage, a select crew willing to stay on the specific ship Columbus was on at the time. During lunch, the crew accidentally stranded him on one of the islands, remembering to turn back after five days.

Cabot embarked on another voyage and mysteriously never returned.

1502 - Columbus on his fourth voyage sails to Central America where his boat gradually disintegrated and he kicked his crew off, he was last sighted on a wooden raft that was overtaken by a wave.

1507 - A world map is made by Martin Waldseemuller, but is never seen, reportedly lost due to ‘his dog eating it.’

1508 - First European colony settlement on United States territory was founded at Caparra, Puerto Rico by Ponce de Leon.

1511 - Catholic Church, Pope Julius II, establishes three dioceses with one in Puerto Rico and two in Hispaniola.

1512 - Ferdinand II of Aragon announces Burgos’ Laws to end exploitation of indigenous people in Hispaniola and Puerto Rico some time after the decimation of smallpox epidemics brought to the people of Hispaniola by Europeans.

1513 - Ponce De Leon looks for the Fountain of Youth. He then lies about finding it, quickly diverting attention by claiming land for Spain.

1524 - Giovanni da Verrazzano enters New York harbor during a French expedition, considered the first European exploration of the Atlantic seaboard in centuries.

1526 - Disagreement over Treaty of Tordesillas defused by marriage, more to follow.

1527 - The Narvaez expedition colonizes Spanish Florida under Panfilo De Narvaez.

1529 - The Treaty of Zaragosa makes a try at clarifying the Treaty of Tordesillas.

1539 - Hernando de Soto travels to Florida where they explore further inland.

Melchior Diaz searches for Lost Cities of Gold. He is unsuccessful and the job is shortly after given to Fernando Vasquez de Coronado, who is also unsuccessful and gets into the Tiguex War as well as burns down a city while continuing further on.

1542 - De Soto reaches his final destination, death.

1550 - The beginning of the forty year Chichimeca War between the Chichimecas Confederation and New Spain.

1551 - The Valladolid debate, discussing treatment and status of Indians in the New World.

1559 - Don Tristan de Lunda y Arellano established Spanish colony, Santa Maria de Ochuse.

Elizabeth I becomes Queen of England.

1562 - Charlesfort is established by Jean Ribault, but is later abandoned.

1564 - Rene de Laudonniere establishes French colony for the Hugeanots at Fort Caroline and befriends the Timucua.

1565 - Pedro Menendez de Aviles founds St. Augustine, the first permanent settlement of the US. Twelve days later his spanish soldiers attack the French colony at Fort Caroline and destroy the fort.

1570 - Abraham Ortelius publishes the first modern world atlas. Descendent of Waldseemuller claims the work was copied off of his ancestor’s lost map and attempts a rebranding scheme of the atlas under his name with minor changes which fails.

1579 - Francis Drake claims lands in California for Great Britain, names it New Albion. Completes circumnavigation of the globe.

1585 - Sir Walter Raleigh organizes expedition to settle Roanoke Island colony. The colony fails.

1587 - Raleigh attempts to colonize Roanoke Island again with governor John White. John White leaves and returns to an empty colony with the words ‘CROATOAN’ and ‘CRO’ left behind, carved. Raleigh doesn’t attempt the colony a third time.

1607 - Jamestown, the first English settlement in the United States is established by over 100 settlers.

1608 - Samuel de Champlain establishes first permanent colony of New France in Quebec City.

1614 - New France colony of Port Royal is destroyed by Samuel Argall and then abandoned.

1618 - Smallpox epidemic wipes out vast majority of Native Americans in Massachusetts Bay.

1619 - The House of Burgesses is elected in Jamestown.

Virginia Company of London establishes new colony at Berkeley Hundred, Virginia.

1620 - The Puritans establish settlement in Plymouth and form the Aprilflower Compact to establish government and laws.

1629 - King Charles I grants royal charter for the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

1630-1670 - Many colonies are founded and settled along with wars between colonists and native tribes. (The number of colonies and wars around this time period are their own lengthy history.)

1670 - Hudson’s Bay Company founded to combat New France in the Canadian fur trade.

1676 - Bacon’s Rebellion that resulted in the burning of Jamestown.

1677 - Treaty of Middle Plantation signed.

North Carolina colonists engage in Culpeper’s Rebellion.

1682 - France claims the lower Mississippi River valley.

1688 - King William’s War begins, lasts for 9 years.

1690 - First paper money issued in North America by the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

The first newspaper issue in the United States was published in Boston, and was then suppressed.

1692-1693 - The Salem witch hunts resulting in the death of nineteen and over a hundred arrests.

1695 - Captain William Kidd is sent on a mission to combat piracy, and goes on to become pirate of the high seas. (If you can’t beat them, join them, I suppose.)

1699 - Jamestown is abandoned.

1701 - New France signs the Great Peace of Montreal with 39 First Nations.

1702 - Royal Colony of New Jersey established by Queen Anne.

1704 - First newspaper that wasn’t immediately taken down publishes its first edition in Boston, started by John Campbell.

1711 - The Tuscarora War begins.

1716 - First theater in the colonies opens in Williamsburg, Virginia.

1763 - French and Indian War ends with peace treaty, the English getting Canada and the American midwest.

1764 - The Sugar Act, a duty is placed on various commodities in the British colonies. Less than a year later the Stamp Act is passed as well.

1765 - The Stamp Act is passed and later nine of the colonies had a Stamp Act Congress and adopted a Declaration of Rights against taxation without representation.

1766 - The Stamp Act is repealed.

1767 - However, then the Townshend Acts are put in place.

1770 - The Boston Massacre, British troops fired into a Boston mob.

The Townshend Acts were repealed on everything except tea. This would notably not turn out well.

1773 - The Boston Tea Party, caused by England allowing a single company to control the tea trade and the actual event being 342 chests of tea being pushed overboard into the harbor.

1774 - British Parliament closes the port of Boston.

The Intolerable Acts are established, the First Continental Congress is held to protest this.

1775 - British government declares Massachusetts in rebellion.

American Revolution is started after 8 minutemen are killed while resisting British were coming to destroy their arms (the guns).

George Washington is appointed commander-in-chief of the Continental Army.

1776 - Thomse Paine publishes ‘Common Sense & Sensibility.’

The Declaration of Independence is penned and approved.

Washington wins in the first Battle of Trenton.

1777 - The Continental Congress adopts the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union.

France signs treaties of alliance and commerce, getting involved in the revolutionary war.

Washington loses at Brandywine and others, marches with Continental Army into Valley Forge.

1778 - South Carolina is the first state to ratify the Articles of Confederation.

France signs the treaty of Amity and Commerce with the United States.

1779 - Benedict Arnold, American general, turns traitor and aids the British in acquiring control of the Hudson River. This was soon after Washington first accompanied Arnold on a drive where Washington made the comment to him while Arnold was driving the horse carriage ‘Okay, you’re safe to go,’ as the pedestrians Arnold had been waiting on had finished crossing the street.

1780 - The British siege Charlseton, South Carolina.

Loyalist troops of Britain lose the Battle of Kings Mountain.

1782 - The Bank of North America, the Bank of New York, and the First Bank of the United States are the first to obtain shares on the New York Stock Exchange.

British troops start to leave the United States.

British Parliament recognizes U.S. independence and signs the Treaty of Paris.

1783 - Congress ratifies the early peace treaty, ending the Revolutionary War.

Massachusetts Supreme Court outlaws slavery.

The Continental Army is disbanded.

1785 - The Continental Navy is disbanded.

1787 - Shay’s Rebellion happens in Massachusetts, but fails. Daniel Shays upon being captured claims evil twin, Schmaniel Shays, was the true mastermind.

The Constitutional Convention adopts the Constitution.

1789 - Washington is elected as the first President of the United States. Frederick A. Muhlenberg becomes the first Speaker of the House of Representatives.

Supreme Court is created.

1790 - First patent of the United States is given to Samuel Hopkins for potash.

1791 - The Bill of Rights takes effect, all twelve amendments pass.

1792 - The United States Post Office Department is established.

Washington is reelected president of the United States with John Adams as his Vice President.

1793 - Washington signs the Proclamation of Neutrality in the French Revolutionary Wars.

1794 - Eli Whitney patents the cotton gin.

The Whiskey Rebellion is suppressed by militia.

Jay’s Treaty is signed.

1795 - The Treaty of Madrid is signed.

1796 - Tennessee joins the Union.

The United States State Department issues the first passport.

Washington gives his final address.

1797 - John Adams becomes President.

The Treaty of Tripoli is signed.

1798 - Congress voids all treaties with France.

The Alien and Sedition Acts go into law.

1800 - The United States Library of Congress is founded.

Slavery ended in the Northwest Territory from the Ordinance of 1787.

1801 - Thomas Jefferson becomes President.

1803 - The Louisiana Purchase is made.

1804 - The Sacagawea Expedition.

Thomas Jefferson is reelected.

1807 - Aaron Burr is arrested for treason in an attempt to annex parts of the United States into an independent republic. He represents himself as his own lawyer and is acquitted after the confusion in court of speaking about himself in the third person.

1808 - The Illinois Territory is created.

1809 - James Madison becomes president.

1811 - The battle of Tippecanoe is won by William Henry Harrison.

1812 - President Madison asks Congress to declare war on the UK.

Madison is reelected.

1813 - The Battle of York.

1814 - The White House is burned by the British during the War of 1812.

The Battle of Lake Champlain is won by the United States.

Peace treaty is signed, ending the War of 1812.

1817 - James Monroe becomes President.

The Rush-Bagot treaty is signed.

1819 - The Panic of 1819 leads to foreclosures, bank failures, and unemployment.

The Shortmadge Amendment is passed.

1820 - the Missouri Compromise bill passes Congress.

Colonel Robert Gibbon Johnson eats a tomato in public to prove it is not poisonous, and then nearly dies due to his undiagnosed tomato allergy.

Tomatoes outlawed in New Jersey for twenty seven years.

Monroe is reelected.

1823 - President Monroe declares the Monroe Doctrine.

1825 - John Quincy Adams becomes President.

Erie Canal is opened to usage.

1826 - Samuel Morey patents the “Gas or Vapor Engine.”

1827 - Slavery is legally abolished in New York.

1829 - Andrew Jackson becomes President.

William Austin Burt patents the typographer.

1830 - Congress approves the Indian Removal Act.

1831 - The first bank robbery in the United States.

1832 - The Black Hawk War.

The Trail of Tears begins.

1833 - The Force Bill is signed into law.

Jackson is reelected.

1836 - The Battle of the Alamo.

The Specie Act is issued.

1837 - Martin Van Buren becomes President.

The Panic of 1837 begins.

1840 - Antarctica is claimed for the United States.

1841 - William Henry Harrison becomes President, shortly after dies and is succeeded by John Tyler.

1843 - The Kingdom of Hawaii is recognized by European nations as an independent nation.

1844 - Samuel B. Morse sends the first telegraph message. His first words were, “Does this work?”

The United States signs the Treaty of Wanghia.

1845 - James K. Polk becomes President.

1846 - The Mexican-American War begins with a conflict north of the Rio Grande River.

California declares independence from Mexico.

1848 - Gold is discovered in California by James W. Marshall who immediately claims he had misspoken and he had instead found coal.

The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ends Mexican-American War.

1850 - The Compromise of 1850 is introduced to Congress.

Millard Filmore becomes President after Zachary Taylor’s death.

1854 - The Kansas-Nebraska act becomes law.

1857 - James Buchanan becomes President.

The Dred Scott decision.

The first elevator is installed in New York City and gets stuck two days later.

1861 - The Confederated States of America is established.

Abraham Lincoln becomes President.

Fort Sumter is attacked by Confederate forces and starts the U.S. Civil War.

The first Battle of Bull Run.

1862 - The Battle of Shiloh.

The Homestead Act is approved.

Preliminary Emancipation Proclaim is issued.

The Battle of Fredericksburg begins.

1863 - The Battle of Gettysburg is won by the Union.

1865 - General Robert E. Lee signs the Confederate forces’ surrender at Appomattox Court House.

President Lincoln is assassinated at Ford’s theatre.

Thirteenth Amendment to abolish slavery takes effect.

1866 - The Civil Rights Act of 1866 passes Congress.

The Metric Act of 1866 passes Congress.

1867 - the Treaty of Cession of Russian America to the United States is signed, Alaska becomes part of the United States.

1868 - The Battle of Washita River ends.

1869 - Ulysses S. Grant becomes President.

The First Transcontinental Railroad is finished.

1870 - The Fifteenth Amendment is ratified.

The Confederacy is officially dissolved.

1871 - The Great Fire of Chicago.

1872 - Roche Jaune National Park is the world’s first national park established.

Susan B. Anthony illegally casts ballot to publicize women’s right to vote.

1875 - The Civil Rights Act is passed by Congress.

Alexander Graham Bell patents the telephone.

1877 - The Nez Perce War begins.

1880 - Construction of the Panama Canal begins.

1881 - James Garfield becomes President. He later dies and is succeeded by Chester Arthur.

1883 - The Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act is passed by Congress.

The Brooklyn Bridge opens.

1885 - Grover Cleveland becomes President.

The Statue of Liberty arrived in New York.

1886 - The Haymarket riot in Chicago.

The Interstate Commerce Act is passed by Congress.

1890 - The Battle of Wounded Knee.

1891 - Lucien and Paul Nunn transmit alternating current for the first time.

1892 - Cleveland returns to presidency.

1893 - New York Stock Exchange collapses resulting in the panic of 1893.

1895 - Plessy v. Ferguson decision by Supreme Court establishes approval of racial segregation.

1897 - The first United States underground public transportation opens in Boston.

1899 - The Open Door Policy with China is declared.

1900 - The Gold Standard Act is ratified.

Carrie Nation continues Temperance Movement to abolish liquor and riding horses, prompted by a dream of a horse rebellion.

1901 - The Platt amendment is passed by Congress.

William H. McKinley becomes President.

President McKinley is shot at the Pan-American Exposition and Theodore Roosevelt succeeds upon his death.

1903 - Wilvur and Orville Wright succeed in their first flight via airplane.

1905 - President Roosevelt is elected for second term of Presidency.

1906 - The Pure food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act passes.

1911 - The first transcontinental airline flight begins in New York.

Henry Ford patents the Automotive Transmission.

1913 - The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Amendments are ratified.

Woodrow Wilson becomes President.

1915 - The United States Coast Guard is established.

1916 - Wilson is reelected.

The United States Congress declares War on Germany, joining World War I.

1918 - President Wilson attends the Paris Peace Conference.

1919 - World War I ends with the Treaty of Versailles signed.

1920 - The Nineteenth Amendment is added to the constitution.

1923 - President Harding dies and is succeeded by Calvin Coolidge.

1925 - Charles Francis Jenkins presents radiovision.

The Scopes Trial.

1928 - Herbert Hoover elected President.

The Great Depression begins.

1930 - The London naval Reduction Treaty is signed.

The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act is signed.

1933 - Franklin D. Roosevelt becomes President.

The New Deal program is passed by Congress.

The Twenty-First Amendment is passed.

1935 - The Social Security Act and the Historic Sites Act are signed into law.

1937 - The Hindenburg erupts in flames.

The Golden Gate Bridge opens.

1938 - The Naval Expansion Act passes.

The National Minimum Wage is signed.

The War of the Worlds, the radio drama, causes immense worry to say the least.

1939 - United States declares neutrality in World War II.

1941 - The Lend-Lease Act is approved.

United States occupies Iceland.

The Atlantic Charter is issued.

Pearl Harbor is attacked resulting in the United States entering World War II.

1942 - The Battle of the Midway.

Arthur Compton and Enrico Fermi oversee the first nuclear chain reaction in the Manhattan Project.

1944 - The Normandy Invasion.

1945 - President Roosevelt dies, Harry S. Truman succeeds upon his death.

Germany surrenders.

President Truman authorizes the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

World War II ends.

1948 - President Truman signs Executive Order 9981.

1949 - NATO is formed.

United States withdraws troops from Korea.

1950 - The Korean War begins, shortly after President Truman orders Air Force and Navy to the country.

1951 - The AZUS Treaty is signed by the United States, Australia, and Zealand.

1953 - Dwight Eisenhower becomes President.

1954 - Brown v the Board of Education.

The Southeast Asia Treaty Organization is formed.

1955 - Rosa Parks refuses to give up her seat and prompts boycott that would lead to declaring bus segregation laws unconstitutional.

1957 - United States attempts to launch satellite, Vanguard, into space. Vanguard exploded on the launchpad.

1958 - The first U.S. space satellite, Explorer I, is launched. Due to an instrument on board that detected cosmic rays, they theorize what would come to be known as the Van Allen Belts which was confirmed by Explorer II.

1959 - Alaska and Hawaii become part of the United States.

1960 - The First weather satellite, Tiros I, is launched by the United States. It was one of NASA’s first attempts to use satellites to study Earth and aid international communications.

Transit 1A was launched and failed to reach orbit. Transit 1B succeeded though and carried an infrared scanner and was the first navigation satellite.

1961 - John F. Kennedy becomes President.

The Bay of Pigs invasion of cuba.

Commander Alan Shepard Jr completes the first United States manned sub-orbital space flight inside a Mercury capsule.

Project Gemini begins.

1962 - Lt. Colonel John Glenn, the first United States astronaut in orbit aboard the Friendship 7 Mercury Capsule. He circled the earth three times and didn’t puke once.

The Cuban Missile Crisis begins.

1963 - The Civil Rights march on the United States’ capitol led by Dr. Martin Luther King.

Kennedy is assassinated, Lyndon B. Johnson succeeds upon his death.

1964 - Roachmania hits the United States from the band the Roaches, the name alluding to drug usage.

Civil Rights Act of 1964 is passed.

Flight of Gemini I.

1965 - Voting Rights Act of 1965 is signed.

The Watts race riots.

1967 - The Outer Space Treaty is signed.

Apollo I ends in tragedy.

1968 - Martin Luther King is assassinated by James Earl Ray.

1969 - Project Apollo completes mission with Neil Armstrong on the moon.

1972 - Watergate crisis begins.

1973 - Roe v. Wade.

1974 - President Nixon resigns, avoiding impeachment, replaced by Gerald R. Ford.

1976 - Viking I lands on Mars, shortly after followed by Viking II. We get color photos of Mars for the first time.

1980 - Mt. St. Helens volcano erupts.

1981 - The first interdimensional communications completed by Stanford Pines via technology using Fiddleford H. McGucket’s invention of the personal computer.

#;united states #;history

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anniekoh · 4 years

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This Indian Country: American Indian Activists and the Place They Made by Frederick Hoxie (2012)

Frederick E. Hoxie, one of our most prominent and celebrated academic historians of Native American history, has for years asked his undergraduate students at the beginning of each semester to write down the names of three American Indians. Almost without exception, year after year, the names are Geronimo, Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. The general conclusion is inescapable: Most Americans instinctively view Indians as people of the past who occupy a position outside the central narrative of American history. These three individuals were warriors, men who fought violently against American expansion, lost, and died. It's taken as given that Native history has no particular relationship to what is conventionally presented as the story of America. Indians had a history too; but theirs was short and sad, and it ended a long time ago.In This Indian Country, Hoxie has created a bold and sweeping counter-narrative to our conventional understanding. Native American history, he argues, is also a story of political activism, its victories hard-won in courts and campaigns rather than on the battlefield. For more than two hundred years, Indian activists—some famous, many unknown beyond their own communities—have sought to bridge the distance between indigenous cultures and the republican democracy of the United States through legal and political debate. Over time their struggle defined a new language of "Indian rights" and created a vision of American Indian identity. In the process, they entered a dialogue with other activist movements, from African American civil rights to women's rights and other progressive organizations.Hoxie weaves a powerful narrative that connects the individual to the tribe, the tribe to the nation, and the nation to broader historical processes. He asks readers to think deeply about how a country based on the values of liberty and equality managed to adapt to the complex cultural and political demands of people who refused to be overrun or ignored. As we grapple with contemporary challenges to national institutions, from inside and outside our borders, and as we reflect on the array of shifting national and cultural identities across the globe, This Indian Country provides a context and a language for understanding our present dilemmas.

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15: My informal quiz is intended to prod students to look beneath the surface of the popular beliefs that define Native people as exotic and irrelevant. I also ask students to consider why it is that Americans so easily accept the romantic stereotype of Indians as heroic warriors and princesses? Why don’t we demand a richer, three-dimensional story? I pose a Native American version of the question the African American writer James Baldwin often asked white audiences a generation ago: “Why do you need a nigger?” My question is the same: Why do Americans need “Indians”—brave, exotic, and dead—as major figures in national culture?

17: This book counters that preference by presenting portraits of American Indians who neither physically resisted, nor surrendered to, the expanding continental empire that became the United States. The men and women portrayed here were born within the boundaries of the United States, rose to positions of community leadership, and decided to enter the nation’s political arena—as lawyers, lobbyists, agitators, and writers—to defend their communities. They argued that Native people occupied a distinct place inside the borders of the United States and deserved special recognition from the central government. Undaunted by their adversary’s military power, these activists employed legal reasoning, political pressure, and philosophical arguments to wage a continuous campaign on behalf of Indian autonomy, freedom, and survival. Some were homegrown activists whose focus was on protecting their local homelands; others had wider ambitions for the reform of national policies. All sought to overcome the predicament of political powerlessness and find peaceful resolutions for their complaints. They struggled to create a long-term relationship with the United States that would enable Native people to live as members of both particular indigenous communities and a large, democratic nation.

The story of these activists crosses several centuries. It opens in the waning days of the American Revolution, as negotiators in Paris set geographical boundaries for the new nation that ignored Indian nations that had fought in the conflict and had been recognized previously in international diplomacy. Native activists take center stage in the 1820s, when nationalistic U.S. leaders abandoned an earlier diplomatic tradition and pressed Indian leaders to surrender their homes to American settlers. The Choctaw James McDonald, the first Indian in the United States to be trained as a lawyer, is the protagonist of chapter two. McDonald became his tribe’s legal adviser and drew on American political ideals to defend Indian rights, thereby laying the foundation for future claims against the United States.A generation after McDonald, the Cherokee leader William Potter Ross developed and widened the young Choctaw’s arguments. During the middle decades of the nineteenth century he traveled among Indian tribes in the West as well as to Washington, D.C., to recruit other Native leaders to defend tribal sovereignty. Among those who followed in Ross’s wake were Sarah Winnemucca, a Nevada Paiute who in the 1880s became a nationally famous writer, lecturer, and lobbyist, and a group of remarkable Minnesota Ojibwe tribal leaders who battled both at home and in Washington, D.C., to preserve their tiny community on the shores of Mille Lacs Lake.In the twentieth century the leading activists were often polished professionals like Thomas Sloan, an Omaha Indian who became an attorney and established a legal practice in Washington, D.C. The first Indian to argue a case before the U.S. Supreme Court, Sloan helped found the Society of American Indians in 1911 (serving as its first president) and encouraged other community leaders to create similar networks of support. In the 1930s, when Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal offered those leaders opportunities to speak out in defense of their tribes, these networks brought forth tribal advocates such as the Seneca Alice Jemison and the Crow leader Robert Yellowtail, as well as a new generation of intellectuals and thinkers, among them the Salish writer and reformer D’Arcy McNickle and the visionary scholar Vine Deloria, Jr., who by the time of his death in 2005 had become the leading proponent of indigenous cultures and tribal rights in the United States.

Vocal opposition to Indian landholding in Mississippi began in 1803, after Napoleon had suddenly decided to sell the entire territory to the Americans. The French emperor’s decision immediately transformed the Choctaw homeland from a distant border area to an inland province that boasted hundreds of miles of frontage on a river that was destined to become the nation’s central highway.15 Secure borders and the lure of plantation agriculture triggered a surge of settlement. The American population in the region doubled between 1810 and 1820 and then doubled again by 1830. New towns clustered along the east bank of the Mississippi as well as on the lower reaches of the Tombigbee River, two hundred miles to the east.The American immigrants were soon calling for the creation of two territorial governments in the area. Congress had first organized Mississippi Territory in 1798 as a hundred-mile-wide swath of unsurveyed land hugging the east bank of the great river and then in 1803, had expanded its borders so that it stretched south from Tennessee to the Gulf. Finally, in 1817, the region took its modern shape when the Tombigbee settlements became the Alabama Territory, Mississippi’s eastern neighbor.Events on America’s northwestern frontier echoed those along the Gulf. Secure borders, a surging settler population, and aggressive local leaders encouraged the rapid organization of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois into territories and states during Jefferson’s presidency. (Ohio became a state in 1803; Indiana in 1816; Illinois in 1818.) Jefferson championed both traditional Indian diplomacy and westward expansion. He understood the value of traditional diplomacy, but he also understood the rising power of western politicians and was far more likely to accommodate them.In 1808 Jefferson supported a major purchase of Choctaw land. He noted that while it was “desirable that the United States should obtain from the native population the entire left (east) bank of the Mississippi,” federal authorities were also determined “to obliterate from the Indian mind an impression . . . that we are constantly forming designs on their lands.” The Choctaws’ current debt of more than forty-six thousand dollars, he explained, provided a solution to this dilemma. Owing to “the pressure of their own convenience,” Jefferson reported, the Choctaws themselves had initiated this sale of five million acres of their land. He wrote that he welcomed this “consolidation of the Mississippi Territory,” and the Senate quickly ratified the agreement.16

...

95: Leaders of the removed tribes were quick to promote the idea of multitribal “international councils” aimed at promoting peaceful relations among the tribes in Indian Territory and the surrounding region. These councils grew out of a tradition of peace conferences that U.S. officials had organized prior to removal to reduce tensions between western tribes (particularly the Osages, Pawnees, Kiowas, and Comanches) and the eastern Indians who had begun to migrate voluntarily to the West early in the century. Fort Gibson, erected in 1822 along the Arkansas River at a spot near the future site of the Cherokee capital of Tahlequah, had been the scene for several of these gatherings. One such meeting in 1834 involved more than a dozen tribes (including recently arrived Delawares and Senecas from the Midwest) that pledged friendship to one another and agreed to meet again to conclude a formal treaty. The 1835 Camp Holmes treaty, negotiated on the prairies west of Fort Gibson, fulfilled that goal. It established peaceful relations between the eastern tribes such as the Cherokees, Choctaws, and Creeks, and local groups such as the Wichitas and Osages. A second gathering the following year extended the Camp Holmes agreement to the Kiowas and Kiowa-Apaches.15In the 1840s the Cherokee tribal government, along with the governments of neighboring groups, began hosting their own intertribal meetings. They took this step both because they were eager to maintain good relations with the powerful tribes that had previously occupied their new homelands—particularly the Osages, Kiowas, and Comanches—and because they were increasingly conscious of threats to their borders. To the south, the new Republic of Texas, dominated by slaveholders, seemed determined to remove its resident tribes and create a homogeneous, independent settler nation on the model of the United States. The Cherokees had little interest in antagonizing these aggressive neighbors, many of whom were recent arrivals from Georgia, Mississippi, and Tennessee. Tribal leaders in Tahlequah were also aware that Mexican officials to the west, still resentful of the Texans’ recent success in their war of independence, were eager to form alliances with Comanches and other groups who had traditionally raided agricultural communities along the Arkansas River. To the north, resettled tribes from the American Midwest—particularly Delawares, Shawnees, Potawatomis, and Wyandots—were making new homes on the Missouri frontier. The disruptions accompanying their arrival triggered yet another round of retaliation and resentment among indigenous groups.16Large intertribal gatherings began in 1843. In June of that year more than three thousand representatives of twenty-two tribes gathered at Tahlequah in response to invitations sent out by John Ross and Roly McIntosh, the chief of the Creeks. For four weeks the delegates made camp across a two-mile-wide prairie and participated in round dances, ball games, and parades. William Potter Ross, barely a year removed from his Princeton graduation, was among them.When the formal sessions began, Chief John Ross reminded the delegates of the serious work before them. “Brothers,” he cried, “it is for renewing in the West the ancient talk of our forefathers, and of perpetuating forever the old pipe of peace . . . and of adopting such international laws as may redress the wrongs done by the people of our respective tribes to each other that you have been invited to attend the present council.” In addition to securing pledges of peace from all who attended, Ross won approval for eight written resolutions that established rules of conduct and included the declaration “No nation party to this compact shall without the consent of all the other parties, cede or in any manner alienate to the United States any part of their present territory.”17One white observer predicted that the 1843 gathering would “disperse without having done anything,” but the resolution regarding land cessions was a clear signal that the men who had been victims of removal had a serious purpose. They wanted to forge an alliance that could hold their enemies at bay.18 Often ignored by outsiders, these gatherings continued throughout the coming decade.

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kshitij1997 · 4 years

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Greetings, people!

Oh, damn I haven't done this in some time.

Well, the life of an engineer is a hectic one and I had written myself into a corner and was blocked for many days as a result. Not anymore. I have decided that I would update this once a week from now on.

We're getting somewhere in this, hopefully you people enjoy it.

All frozen and Tangled characters belong to Disney, all I own is this head-cannon and the original characters.

Let's continue!

Chapter 6: Of children fortunate and not so fortunate

Throughout Europe, the new year was always celebrated with utter pomp and show, what with firecrackers bursting in the city centres and town squares and if there weren't any firecrackers at hand, one could always fire a musket up in the air. Singing, dancing, drunken behaviour, smashing of public property, brawls and general noise. It was comforting to see that even though the major empires were coming up and clawing at each other's throats on a regular basis, nothing would really dampen the typical European spirit even if some drastic changes ever happened.

Which is not to say they didn't have different customs. The Ottoman Sultan for example, would start celebrating three days in advance, binging and drinking while being surrounded by scores of concubines, throwing golden medals and eggs onto the streets for all his citizens to collect. This pious act of charity was ample for the people to forgive the Sultan his misgivings. As for the Tsar, the rumoured massive drinking appetite of the typical Tsar held strong and displayed itself in all its glory during the coming of the new year, singing, jumping on tables, screaming Moktor! a drinking chant he had borrowed from his Arendellian ally, banging a kettle drum while removing his royal tunic and tying it around his forehead, it certainly wasn't a sight the typical Russian nobles would forget easily even as they were busy distributing free beer and bread throughout St. Petersburg. The royal family of the Southern Isles always started as a family dinner but dissolved into everyone getting wasted and threatening to kill each other right then and there. However, for some unexplained reason, they always ended up weeping and caressing each other. One could be forgiven for thinking that it was an Irish wake, unsurprising as the Southern Isles had some sizable Irish ancestry. As for the Duke of Weselton, it was an opium binge, smoking up into the wee hours of the morning. If one made the mistake of asking the duke his plans during such a session, they could be trapped there for the rest of the day and miss the blessed celebrations. Now that his merchants had begun smuggling Marijuana from central America, those plans became more outlandish every passing year as the intoxicant made its way in the duke's habits. The Monarchs of Corona were more chaste and less dramatic in comparison, nevertheless it didn't stop them from holding a quirky national lottery at the end of the year in which save the crown, the state and the Monarchs, nearly everything was for grabs.

It could be a normal brooch, or a kettle, or something outrageous like the ancient Dusseldorf cathedral, or even better, the Munich Palace of Justice. However, short of the royal palace, nothing truly awed the people of Corona as the Mansion, a building so singular and unique in the Rhinelands that it had acquired a legend of its own. How that massive building was built during the earliest crusades in the holy lands, had sheltered thousands of innocents in the mindless massacres which was a hallmark of said crusades, how the same building became a terrible final place for those unfortunates who were accused of witchcraft and found guilty, how said building harboured the Coronian resistance as they battled the Habsburgs for the identity of Corona in the thirty years war. One could see that the Mansion was home to centuries of history both good and bad, a monument to human suffering and human triumph; it was a matter of prestige and honour to those who lived there.

Since the passing of the Patriarch, the Mansion was up for bid for the first time in fifty years. Unfortunately, the Mansion had been burned down, some said it was a careless baker, some said it was a figure as dark as night, yet many believed that it was Flynn Rider, the little boy who cast a gargantuan shadow in all of Rhineland, where some thought he was a hero who avenged someone dear to him and brought down tyranny, while some thought he was a rat bastard, who sold out everyone from his trade to escape the noose and ruined the businesses of the Rhinelands. Ah well, the public could never make up its mind.

Even though the public was upset by the loss of the Mansion, they had to agree that the Monarchs were generally generous in the lottery and accepted the loss with a heavy heart. After all, a cooking pot was much more useful in cooking than an entire monument , no matter how symbolic it was and how brightly it burned into oblivion.

Last but not the least, the kingdom of Arendelle often saw a lot of parades and street performances around that time of the year. Typically the various students who had come from abroad to study would often bring out a procession, banging some drums, beating some cymbals and singing songs in unison in their native languages, becoming a crowd of thousands as they used to go door to door, either offering food and gifts, and inviting those to join them who weren't in severe want. The fact that It always snowed in the final fortnight of the year as if on clockwork never dampened their spirits. The evenings would often see people from all strata of Arendellian society coming together without social barriers. In recent years, the crowds had started becoming rowdier and more rambunctious, but they all settled as the Monarchs addressed them from their pedestal at the Royal Palace, bringing the year to a dignified end and rousing hopes for the new year. The Palace courtyard itself often became a fair ground, with various stalls selling delicacies, trinkets and souvenirs.

Queen Iduna had always enjoyed the fairs at the palace and meeting foreigners in the parades when she was a commoner, and now she loved it even more as she had her husband to share that joy with. It was a common sight to see the royal couple strolling around, meeting the stall owners, trying some exotic foods and relishing them. Now with baby princess Elsa, they had developed a very sweet tooth as well, they had been spoiled for chocolate as the baby girl always went gaga over the sweet. Even though she hadn't yet spoken, by now her parents were well acquainted with sounds of disapproval or enthusiasm coming from her. For example, when Elsa tried to nibble on any sweet, she would always gurgle and moan and form wisps with her tiny fingers, which always succeeded in bringing a smile to the couple's lips. After the exciting parades and stalls of food, the evening had surprisingly become calm as it approached the new year. Princess Elsa had had an active day, and now was sleeping in Queen Iduna's arms in the royal bedroom, her face buried into her mother's bosom.

"I guess Sophia is to take the credit or the blame for this" grinned Agnarr.

"Ha, yes surely. I wouldn't put it past her at all." smiled Iduna "However it's a shame Elsa can't drink the hot chocolate yet. It's getting lonesome drinking it by myself."

"What does that mean? It is OUR drink, right?"

"It was once, but then you got self-conscious about your health and everything." Iduna teased.

"Well, I can't really flaunt my stretch marks for my certification of fatherhood." Agnarr teased back.

"That was rough. Parenthood has changed you for the worse." Iduna laughed after staring at Agnarr for nearly a minute about that comment.

"On the other hand, I think you've become soft, I still remember the day you made the Duke of Weselton shit himself." Agnarr smirked.

"Boo you, I'm with child." Iduna accepted the challenge "I can still drive you around in circles, you know? You remember earlier today, when I made you cook an Artichoke salad for my cravings. Oh god, you were hunched over the damn stove. Good fun. And a story the whole litter would enjoy someday." Iduna finished with a laugh.

"A whole litter? Dammit woman." Agnarr laughed.

"Yeah, better stay in shape." Iduna smirked.

"Alright, I admit defeat. I swear I can still hear the blessed kitchen ladies sniggering." Agnarr backed off "Ah well, another bun hmm?"

"Yes, another bun. Due in early spring, if Dr. Klaus is to be believed."

"I would wager my life under his knife, should the day come." Agnarr said quietly.

"Hush, don't say that." Iduna whispered. "It'll be a new year in a matter of minutes, how can you think of doom at such a precious moment?"

"It's because I know how life can turn out for a lot of people. I tell you Iduna, all things considered we are luckier than most, and I know fate has a way of balancing the scales." Agnarr replied with an inscrutable face natural to kings, but Iduna knew better.

"Look, it's true we have been fortunate. However, we've had our share of suffering as well. We both have lost a lot in order to find each other and come together. You know, I still wake up sometimes looking towards the North, reminiscing what could have been if somehow war didn't break out, and I would have become a herald for the voice, be one with the fifth spirit, who knows? However, I do know that if I hadn't ventured south, I would have never met you. Not to mention the peace we brought together, the people we have allied with, the thousands of opportunities that have opened for the people because we have worked together and a lot more. Sure, we can lament what we were forced to give up, but then we wouldn't have this, and we certainly wouldn't have Elsa." Iduna consoled him.

The king of Arendelle gave a weak smile and continued " That is true, but her abilities do make me nervous. I hope we can mitigate any problems that arise from the fifth spirit's blessing."

"We got some time to figure it out. I know what you're insinuating, no need to say it out loud, anyone could hear us. Look, the key here is proceed carefully, and to make sure she's not afraid of herself. We'll be there every step of the way, and I tell you this, our baby is going to dominate the world." Iduna reassured the king.

"We certainly can't let them do what they did to Rapunzel." Agnarr shuddered at the mere thought of the incident.

"That will certainly not happen, believe me. Elsa's a light sleeper, if anyone other than us dares to take her, she'll shriek and bring the castle down." Iduna tried to ease his worry with some humour.

"Ha, our proud little banshee." Agnarr grinned.

They were interrupted by the fireworks bringing in the new year.

"godt nytt år, Iduna." "godt nytt år, Agnarr." Said the royal couple as they embraced, and Iduna felt Elsa smiling in her sleep.

While Elsa may have been at perfect peace with the world in that moment, another infant was not so lucky.

"Another fucking year gone." Hissed princess Paulina of the former kingdom of Poland, as she tried to rock the five-month-old prince Hans to sleep in his cradle. The baby prince had always had trouble sleeping, but that was to be expected as babies generally need contact to grow properly, however the princess in question didn't believe in it.

"Another year gone to shit, and I am just another windbag for your fucking father, eh kid?" the princess made a point not to join the new year's celebration, citing colic as her cause of worry, but truth be told, she could never tolerate the whole family together at once. She was alone in a strange land, among strange people who didn't think too much of her; Afterall, they had seen many like her come and go over the years. The only joy she found in her life was the one thing or person she could claim to be her own; her infant boy Janus, or Hans as his father preferred to call him.

"Your father professes his love for me, yet betrays me everyday with those loose women that lick his balls all day, his heart condition doesn't flare up then, does it? He doesn't fucking keel over then, does he? Your father promises he'll bring justice to my homeland, and then has the entrails to stab me in the back by sending his fucking lapdogs to participate in the massacre of my poor people?!" She foamed at the mouth. Little did she care that her kid could not console her or understand her yet, her bitter vitriol needed to flow somewhere, and her infant was in the unfortunate way.

"But remember this Janus, someday you will bring glory to all of Warsaw, and bring justice to all of Poland and her murderers." Whispered the princess as she calmed down and reached out to her child. The baby was only too glad for the contact and grabbed it with both hands.

"Good boy" whispered the princess with a smile to her fateful son, but the smile disappeared as she remembered what she had set out to do. The sheer memory of her father's murder by the Russians' firing squad as her family's ancestral home of over three hundred years burned to nothing, made her blood boil to vapour. But she knew better than to make a public display of her misery. No, she would wait, and hold fast as her fateful kid would hopefully bring Europe to heel one day. But for that to happen, the child needed toughening up and foolish superstitions and fancies like love and family had to be quelled before they did any damage to her 'chieftest pearl'. She pulled her hand away from Janus and walked to the window, not caring that the baby prince had started wailing loudly.

"Great, let it out, it's just pain and anguish leaving you, little prince of destiny." Whispered the now inscrutable princess as she witnessed the coming of the new year fireworks and chants from her dark little room.

"Godt nytår, Janus."

More than 900 miles away, a craven boyish figure on a horse had nearly crossed the borders of Corona into France as he approached the city of Alsace, when he decided to take refuge into the chapel two miles ahead of him. The new year celebrations had long ended and everyone had fallen asleep, save for the priest in the chapel. Eugene walked up lead footed and tired from the expedition up to the chapel doors and then he knocked on the door.

The priest opened the door silently and saw the gruff boy and took him in at once. Now, Eugene's week-long ordeal had exhausted him, and anything he could beg for was enough to feed only either him or his horse. More often than not, Eugene chose to feed the worn-out horse. But now, finally some good shelter for both the horse and Rider.

"Comment tu t'appelle?" the priest asked in a language Eugene didn't fully understand. When the priest didn't receive any answer that he could expect, he got up and peaked outside in the direction from which the little boy had ridden in.

"Tu parle Francais? Parlez-vous allemand?" The priest asked.

"Je parle allemand." Eugene replied in the little broken French that he knew.

"Ah, Deutsch." Replied the priest. Then he went in, brought a spare change of clothes and some bread and stew left from the celebration, and a quilt and mattress for the little boy.

"Essen, mein Kind" spoke the priest as her made the bed.

As Eugene bit into the bread, he couldn't hold back any longer, and burst into tears.

The priest patiently waited for him to calm down, then asked him in German "What's your name?"

"Flynn" the kid replied, his voice still raw from sobbing.

"You are far from home, aren't you?"

"I don't have a home, not anymore."

"What happened to your home, your family?"

"It got burnt down, I tried to get help, but it was too late." Flynn lied, fearing what could happen if he answered honestly.

The priest replied "It's alright, my child. Please rest now, you may stay on or leave in the morning if you wish."

"Danke, Vater" Flynn said.

"Frohes neues Jahr, mein Sohn. And don't worry, your horse is safe." The priest smiled and said quietly.

Well, it was a different tempo for me in this chapter, trying to show one day from a lot of different perspectives. I'll just say poor Hans for now.

As always, constructive feedback is always welcome.

#frozen #frozen elsa #frozen angst #hans frozen #frozen fandom #frozen fanfiction #frozenxtangled #eugene tangled #frozen agnarr #frozen iduna

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rewatirchaubey · 4 years

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Tobacco

TOBACCO

The tobacco plant is a coarse, large-leaved perennial, usually cultivated as an annual, grown from seed in cold frames or hotbeds and then transplanted to the field. Tobacco requires a warm climate and rich, well-drained soil. Tobacco is initially grown in outdoor frames called seedbeds. In warm regions, the frames are covered with mulch or a cotton top sheet; in cooler regions, glass or plastic shields are installed to protect the plants. After 8-10 weeks, when the seedlings are almost 10 inches (25 cm) tall, they are transplanted to the fields. Although transplanting machines are available, the vast majority of the world's tobacco plants are still planted manually. As the plants grow, the heads are broken off by hand so the leaves will grow fuller, a process called topping. The plants stay in the field 90-120 days before they are harvested.

HARVESTING

Tobacco plants are harvested by one of two methods, priming or stalk-cutting. In the priming method, the leaves are gathered and brought to a curing bam as they ripen. In the stalk-cutting method, the entire plant is cut and the plants are allowed to wilt in the field before being taken to the curing barn.

CURING THE LEAF

Next, the leaves are carefully, gradually dried in a specially constructed barn by air curing, flue curing, or fire curing. Air curing uses natural weather conditions to dry tobacco. Stalks are hung in a barn with ventilators that can be opened and closed to control temperature and humidity. Artificial heat is used only during cold or excessively humid weather. The stalks are hung for four to eight weeks.

Flue curing is done in small, tightly constructed barns that are artificially heated. The heat comes from flues (metal pipes) that are attached to furnaces. Open oil and gas burners are sometimes used, but this method is problematic because smoke can-not come in direct contact with the tobacco. Flue curing takes about four to six days.

Fire curing dries tobacco with low-burning wood fires whose smoke comes in direct contact with the leaves, thus producing a smoky flavor and aroma. The tobacco is allowed to dry naturally in the barn for three to five days before it is fire-dried for 3-40 days.

MOISTENING AND STRIPPING

Unless humid weather conditions eliminate the need, the brittle, cured tobacco leaves must be conditioned in moistening chambers so they do not break when they are handled. After moistening, the tobacco is stripped. During this process, the leaves are sprayed with additional moisture as a precaution against cracking or breaking.

SORTING AND AUCTIONING

After the leaves are moistened and stripped, they are sorted into grades based on size, color, and quality, and tied in bundles for shipment. The farmers then bring the tobacco to warehouses, where it is placed in baskets, weighed, graded once again by a government inspector and, finally, auctioned to cigarette manufacturers.

CONDITIONING, AGING, AND BLENDING

After they have purchased and transported the material to their factories, manufacturers treat and age the tobacco to enhance its flavor. First, the manufacturer

redries the tobacco. This involves completely drying the leaves by air and then adding a uniform amount of moisture. Packed into barrels called hogsheads, the tobacco is then aged for one to three years, during which period it develops its flavor and aroma. After it is aged, the tobacco leaves are again moistened and the stalks and other wastes removed. Leaves from different types of tobacco are mixed to create a particular flavor.

MAKING THE CIGARETTES

After blending, the tobacco leaves are pressed into cakes and mechanically shredded. Materials such as fruit juices or menthol are added to give additional flavor. The final shredded tobacco is then dispersed over a continuous roll of cigarette paper. A machine rolls the shredded tobacco into the paper and cuts it to the desired length. A device then grabs each cigarette and fastens a filter in one end. Modern cigarette machines can produce 25-30 cigarettes a second.

PACKAGING

The final stage of cigarette manufacture is packaging. The completed cigarettes are packed 20 to a package. The hard or soft packs are mechanically sealed in cellophane and hand-placed in cartons.

TYPES

1. Aromatic fire-cured is cured by smoke from open fires. In the United States, it is grown in northern middle Tennessee, central Kentucky and in Virginia. Fire-cured tobacco grown in Kentucky and Tennessee are used in some chewing tobaccos, moist snuff, some cigarettes, and as a condiment in pipe tobacco blends. Another fire-cured tobacco is Latakia, which is produced from oriental varieties of N. tabacum. The leaves are cured and smoked over smoldering fires of local hardwoods and aromatic shrubs in Cyprus and Syria.

2. Burley tobacco is an air-cured tobacco used primarily for cigarette production. In the U.S., burley tobacco plants are started from palletized seeds placed in polystyrene trays floated on a bed of fertilized water in March or April.

3. Cavendish is more a process of curing and a method of cutting tobacco than a type. The processing and the cut are used to bring out the natural sweet taste in the tobacco. Cavendish can be produced from any tobacco type, but is usually one of, or a blend of Kentucky, Virginia, and burley, and is most commonly used for pipe tobacco and cigars.

4. Turkish tobacco is a sun-cured, highly aromatic, small-leafed variety that is grown in Turkey, Greece, Bulgaria, and Macedonia. Originally grown in regions historically part of the Ottoman Empire, it is also known as "oriental".

5. Perique At one time, the freshly moist Perique was also chewed, but none is now sold for this purpose. It is typically blended with pure Virginia to lend spice, strength, and coolness to the blend.

CIGARS

Cigar is tightly rolled bundles of dried and fermented tobacco, which is ignited so its smoke may be drawn into the smoker's mouth.

Cigarettes are a product consumed through inhalation of smoke and manufactured from cured and finely cut tobacco leaves and reconstituted tobacco, often combined with other additives, then rolled or stuffed into a paper cylinder.

Pipe tobacco typically consists of a small chamber (the bowl) for the combustion of the tobacco to be smoked and a thin stem (shank) that ends in a mouthpiece (the bit). Shredded pieces of tobacco are placed into the chamber and ignited.

HISTORY OF CIGARS

The Indians in South and Central America did not smoke cigars as we know them today. The natives smoked tobacco wrapped in maize, palm or other native vegetation. The Spanish created the cigar industry, and are given credit for creating the modern cigar. The first modern observation of the cigar occurred with the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the New World. On October 28, 1492 Columbus noted in his log reports that the natives of San Salvador burned and inhaled the leaves of a local plant. The Origin of the word cigar comes from the native language of the ancient Mayans. The Mayans called the cigar a "Ciq-Sigan" which the Spanish word "Cigarro" is derived from. The New English Dictionary of 1735 called the cigar a "seegar", and was later adapted into the modern word "cigar".

COMPOSITION

Filler- inner core gives body and shape to the cigar. The leaves of tobacco at the core of the cigar that provide a significant portion of its taste.

Binder- a leaf wrapping the filler. The portion of a tobacco leaf that is rolled around the filler to hold it together.

Wrapper- ribbon like leaf rolled around the bunch. Filler and binder together is called bunch a high-quality tobacco leaf wrapped around the finished bunch and binder. It is very elastic and, at its best, unblemished

MANUFACTURING

Once the tobacco is harvested the leaves are sent to "tobacco barns" where the tobacco is dried. Leaves are tied in pairs and hung for the curing process... The tobacco is kept in the barn for approximately 2 months while the leaves change color from green to yellow to brown. After the leaves are dried, they are carefully laid into large piles for fermentation, where they are kept for several months. The piles are moistened and covered in cloth. The fermentation reduces natural resins, ammonia and nicotine present in the tobacco leaves. The fermented tobacco is taken to warehouses, stored in large bales and allowed to slowly mature. The aging process can last from several months to many years depending on the quality desired.

Once the aged tobacco reaches the factory, the leaves are graded according to size, color, and quality. Leaves that are torn or have holes are set aside and used primarily as filler. Finally the leaves are de-veined by removing the center vein from the leaf. Handmade cigars are composed of filler tobacco bunched together with a binder leave and finally covered with the wrapper leaf. The binder holds the bunch together and is enclosed with the wrapper leaf in an aesthetically pleasing manner. Machine made cigars are generally produced using short filler. A processed tobacco binder which resembles brown paper is used as the binder, and in most cases a natural wrapper is used to complete the cigar. Tragacanth is a viscous, odorless, tasteless, water-soluble mixture of polysaccharides obtained from sap which is drained from the root of the plant and dried. It has traditionally been used as an adhesive in the cigar-rolling process used to secure the cap or "flag" leaf to the finished cigar body.

COLOUR CLASSIFICATION

CCC – CLARO (LIGHT BROWN) A pale-green to light-brown wrapper, usually shade-grown.

CC – COLORADO CLARO (MID BROWN)

C – COLORADO (DARK BROWN)

CM – COLORADO MADURO (VERY DARK BROWN)

M – MADURO (EXCEPTIONALLY DARK BROWN) A wrapper shade from a very dark reddish-brown to almost black. The word means ripe in Spanish. The color can be achieved by sun exposure, a cooking process or a prolonged fermentation.

OSCURO A black shade of wrapper, darker than maduro, most often Brazilian or Mexican in origin.

JUDGING THE CIGAR

CONSTRUCTION - How well is the cigar made? How does it feel to the touch? With a firm, but soft grip feel it from end to end. Does it feel consistent all the way through? Are there any hard or soft spots? A cigar that is too hard, too soft, or inconsistent will not draw properly.

CONDITION - Cigars should be well conditioned before smoking. Cigars should be aged for several months to several years at the proper humidity (70% RH) and temperature (70° F). A dry cigar will burn hot, fast and can taste harsh. A damp cigar will be hard to light and can be hard to draw.

CAUSALITY (CAUSE AND EFFECT) - How does the cigar taste? How does the cigar make you feel? Does the cigar build in taste, flavor and complexity as it burns? Or is it the same all the way through? Do you feel relaxed and calm after finishing it?

TYPES OF CIGAR CUTTERS

The "Guillotine" or "Traditional" Cut: This cutter takes a straight slice across the cigars cap line. It is the best cut to create an easy, well circulated draw; however residue and tar from the burning tobacco will come in direct contact with the smoker's mouth.

THE "BULLET" OR "PUNCH" CUT: A bullet cutter pierces a small hole into the cigars cap. Depending on the diameter of the cutter, air circulation may be restricted and the smokes tar and residue can accumulate around the opening.

THE "V" CUT: The V cutter creates a wedge shaped notice in the cigars cap. This cut allows proper air circulation to occur. The smokes tar and residue accumulate on the sides of the wedge keeping the bitter taste away from the smoker's mouth. It can be difficult to keep a V cutter sharp because of its unique shape.

HOW TO LIGHT THE CIGAR

Tobacco will absorb any aroma or fragrance that it comes in contact with. Paper and sulfur based matches or the use of a fluid based lighter can leave the cigar with an unpleasant taste. The preferred method to light a cigar is the use of butane based lighter. A lit wooden match can be used once it has burned off the chemicals used in the ignition process. Once the cigar is cut hold the open end of the cigar over your flame and slowly rotate it. This will "Toast" the cigar and prime it for lighting. While it is still warm, place the cigar in your mouth and hold it at a 45° angle over the flame. Slowly puff and rotate the cigar while maintaining slight contact with the flame. A Good cigar will light easy and burn evenly.

Cigars are lit with the help of either a wooden match or cedar strip called “spill”.

SIZE AND SHAPE

n CORONA – 5 ½ INCHES The most familiar size and shape for premium cigars: generally straight-sided with an open foot and a closed, rounded head, traditionally measuring approximately 5½ x 43.

n PETIT CORONA - 5 INCHES

n TRES PETIT CORONA – 4½ INCHES

n LONSDALE – 6 ½ INCHES A long cigar; generally 6 to 6 3/4 inches by a 42 to 44 ring gauge, but there are many variations.

n IDEALES – (TORPEDO SHAPED) 6 ½” Torpedo) A cigar shape that features a closed foot, a pointed head and sometimes a bulge in the middle.

n LONDRES-4 ¾ INCHES

n PANATELA-5 INCHES OPEN AT BOTH ENDS.

n A CHEROOT- THIN CIGAR OPEN AT BOTH ENDS.

n RING GAUGE: Definition: The ring gauge of a cigar is a measurement of its diameter expressed in 64ths of an inch. For example, a cigar with a ring gauge of 42 means that it is 42/64 inches thick.

SERVICE OF CIGARS

a. Cigars should be offered in their own boxes.

b. Guest chooses the cigars.

c. Steward should offer to remove the band.

d. Cigar is cut using the cigar cutter.

e. Steward should offer to light the cigar.

STORAGE OF CIGARS

a. Cigar can be stored in cedar wood boxes or in glass case with humidifier.

b. Ideal temperature is 16 – 18˚ c.

c. Relative humidity required is 65 – 70 %.

HUMIDOR

An entire room, or a box, that's designed to preserve and promote the proper storing of fragile cigars. An optimum humidity and temperature level in a humidor is 70/70, or 70 percent humidity and 70 degrees Fahrenheit (21 degrees Celsius).

BRANDS OF CIGARS

i. Macanudo

ii. H. Upmann

iii. Partagas

iv. Cohiba

v. Montecristo

vi. Romeo y Julieta

vii. Habana 2000

viii. Churchill

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sciencespies · 4 years

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Stunning cave discovery just changed the timeline of human presence in North America

https://sciencespies.com/humans/stunning-cave-discovery-just-changed-the-timeline-of-human-presence-in-north-america/

Stunning cave discovery just changed the timeline of human presence in North America

Tools excavated from a cave in central Mexico are strong evidence that humans were living in North America at least 30,000 years ago, some 15,000 years earlier than previously thought, scientists said Wednesday.

Artefacts, including 1,900 stone tools, showed human occupation of the high-altitude Chiquihuite Cave over a roughly 20,000 year period, they reported in two studies, published in Nature.

“Our results provide new evidence for the antiquity of humans in the Americas,” Ciprian Ardelean, an archeologist at the Universidad Autonoma de Zacatecas and lead author of one of the studies, told AFP.

“There are only a few artefacts and a couple of dates from that range,” he said, referring to radiocarbon dating results putting the oldest samples at 33,000 to 31,000 years ago.

“However, the presence is there.”

Stone tool found below the Last Glacial Maximum layer. (Ciprian Ardelean)

No traces of human bones or DNA were found at the site.

“It is likely that humans used this site on a relatively constant basis, perhaps in recurrent seasonal episodes part of larger migratory cycles,” the study concluded.

The stone tools – unique in the Americas – revealed a “mature technology” which the authors speculate was brought in from elsewhere.

Limestone tools found above the above the Last Glacial Maximum layer. (Ciprian Ardelean)

The saga of how and when Homo sapiens arrived in the Americas – the last major land mass to be populated by our species – is fiercely debated among experts, and the new findings will likely be contested.

‘Clovis-first’ debunked

“That happens every time that anybody finds sites older than 16,000 years – the first reaction is denial or hard acceptance,” said Ardelean, who first excavated the cave in 2012 but did not discover the oldest items until 2017.

Until recently, the widely accepted storyline was that the first humans to set foot in the Americas crossed a land bridge from present-day Russia to Alaska some 13,500 years ago and moved south through a corridor between two massive ice sheets.

Archaeological evidence – including uniquely crafted spear points used to slay mammoths and other prehistoric megafauna – suggested this founding population, known as Clovis culture, spread across North America, giving rise to distinct native American populations.

But the so-called Clovis-first model has fallen apart over the last two decades with the discovery of several ancient human settlements dating back two or three thousand years earlier.

Moreover, the tool and weapon remnants at these sites were not the same, showing distinct origins.

“Clearly, people were in the Americas long before the development of Clovis technology in North America,” said Gruhn, an anthropology professor emerita at the University of Alberta, commenting on the new findings.

In a second study, Lorena Becerra-Valdivia and Thomas Higham, researchers at the University of Oxford’s Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit, used radiocarbon – backed up by another technique based on luminescence – to date samples from 42 sites across North America.

Using a statistical model, they showed widespread human presence “before, during and immediately after the Last Glacial Maximum” (LGM), which lasted from 27,000 to 19,000 years ago.

Megafauna wiped out

The timing of this deep chill is crucial because it is widely agreed that humans migrating from Asia could not have penetrated the massive ice sheets that covered much of the continent during this period.

“So if humans were here DURING the Last Glacial Maximum, that’s because they had already arrived BEFORE it,” Ardelean noted in an email.

Human populations scattered across the continent during an earlier period also coincide with the disappearance of once-abundant megafauna, including mammoths and extinct species of camels and horses.

“Our analysis suggests that the widespread expansion of humans through North America was a key factor in the extinction of large terrestrial mammals,” the second study concluded.

Many key questions remain unanswered, including whether the first of our species to wander across the frozen tundra of Beringia made their way south via an interior route or – as recent research suggests – by moving along the coast, either on foot or in boats of some kind.

It is also a mystery as to “why no archaeological site of equivalent age to Chiquihuite Cave has been recognised in the continental United States,” said Gruhn.

“With a Bering Straits entry point, the earliest people expanding south must have passed through that area.

#Humans

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lookingattheedgeoftime · 4 years

Text

The first few chapters of my end of the world novel, written out of boredom while working in Africa many years ago. You will be the first ever to read this if you want.

The World

In 2025 Quebec declared independence from Canada after years long, systematic campaign of terrorism by the separatist movement. This “independence” was deemed unconstitutional buy the Federalists and they refuse to acknowledge Quebec's right to do so. The Federalists attempted to force Free Quebec into submission with an economic embargo and the threat of military occupation. There was a provision in law and precedence set in the 1970's to initiate war measures act. This provision would allow the federalists to occupy the province. Threats were not successful and the in 2026 Prime Minister enacted the War Measures Act and ordered the Military to take control of the government buildings in Hull. The Quebec government declared this to be an invasion of their legal territory and a civil war in Canada was initiated.

By late 2027 the civil war in Quebec is in full swing. The Federalists fighting against the Quebec government in a protracted engagement along the borders and waterways of the former province. The Free Quebec forces were entrenched and working to repel the federalists who searched the length border for weak spots and try to expedite these weaknesses. The indigenous Indian populations (The First Nations) in Quebec have extensive land claims, for a huge portion of Quebec. Particularly long the Quebec / USA borders areas the federalist forces deemed to controversial to attack from. The aboriginal community took umbrage with the French claiming the entire province for themselves. As a result of the conflict the cross border activities were brought to an end and resulted in the collapsing their economy. Historically the First Nations also had justifiable issues with significant history of rejected land claims and had little expectation this conflict would result in better treatment. They saw the victor in this conflict as a winner takes all situation and it became seen as a and time to act against current and future oppressors. They were an well-armed motivated people and engaged in a guerrilla war against both sides. Simultaneously throughout the other Canadian Provinces the First Nations took positive control of as much occupied and disputed lands as possible and blockaded their reservations from the rest of Canada. Other than in Quebec these blockades turned into an impasse rather than out and out war.

The government of the United States of America decides to tried preserve it's considerable assets in Canada and ostensibly to aid in the stabilization the situation by supporting the government of the remaining parts of Canada. This was achieved by with a strong NATO insertion mobilized from the United States. This merely escalated the situation, other provinces with unrealized Independence agendas reacted to the influx of foreign fighters and other guerrilla fronts are formed. Primary in the west the NATO forces are seen as occupiers and were engaged vigorously by the new independence militias. All sides in the conflict take a terrific amount of casualties. This process drags on, it is thought mostly due to the unwillingness of the Canadian government to commit weapons of the types that would damage infrastructure of Quebec. The Free Quebec government has no such qualms and in the areas about to be taken by their opponents were laid to waste.

Radical right in the United States of America were incensed by the NATO involvement in this war with their next door neighbours on two levels. One is that the military power of NATO is being mustered in the eastern The United States of America. They feared that once the forces have quashed the uprising in the North they will be applied to deal with the unruly and becoming more powerful militia movements in the Northern States. The second and the biggest concern is NATO is working against the government of a sovereign state and believe that the sanctity of the free The United States of America is in dire jeopardy by NATO's power.

Mid 2028 the troubles in Quebec have escalated to a peak and both troops from Canada and NATO are fighting against two resistance movements. Within the Provinces in siege, The fighting was bitter and retributions against the general population seen as supporting the resistance movements become more common place. Free Quebec and the First Nations had settled into guerrilla warfare. These two groups are also working outside the borders of Quebec independently to undermine the power of the Government of Canada in the other provinces. The methods of the citizens sympathetic to either cause are terror, sabotage and assassination. The Militia Movement in the United States of America sets up a coalition between like minded groups within the borders of the United States of America (Religious Groups, White Supremacists disgruntled military factions and politicians) and begin a concerted effort to over throw the government of the United States of America.

This starts a domino effect with the plethora of other factions wanting a piece of the pie. Some of these are very strong (African American, Hispanic and Asian Groups). They mobilize forces to control their own areas and protect their people from the Coalition of primarily white forces. Powerful Drug cartels south of the border see this turmoil in the United States as a opportunity to cement their influence in the southern States. The republic of Mexico, long subjected by US policy and a victim of systemic discrimination see this a opportunity and side with the Cartels and set their sights on reclaiming territory lost to them in the past. The slogan adopted by these forces somewhat ironically, is “Remember the Alamo” apparently seen a the event that there loss of power and territory of their nation.

2029 - The rest of Canada not in conflict with Ottawa, is failing under the burden of supplying fuel and manpower to the war in Quebec. As well as having to deal with their own significant problems with the NATO the First Nations and Militias. The result is once loyal provinces to the central government, broker other deals and decided to join the fray in opposition.

2030 - North America is in chaos, the United States of America is suffering huge strife due to the anarchy caused by the tactics of the various combatants within and outside their borders. The Militia and Ethnic groups bombings, attacks and assassinations of government and political detractors to their agendas are common place. The United States recalls it's forces abroad to face the growing crisis. Canada and NATO are still fighting in Quebec and the Western and Maritime Provinces are more than voicing separatist rhetoric, using captured weapons to enforce their ideals. The Aboriginal, French and English populations in Quebec and Ontario are greatly reduced. There is a continued huge backlash from the Native movement in Canada as well as the United States of America. Communities near reservations are attacked and looted. Extremely harsh retribution is dealt out in all cases by the governments of Canada and the United States of America. Europe and Asia cut off diplomatic ties with Canada and the United States of America because of the miss use of NATO forces and the ethnic cleansing being initiated in North America. NATO recalls what is left of the non-American contingent back to Europe and the fight is continued by the Governments Canada and the USA under the same banner.

2029 - Radical groups in the Developing Nations of the world see a golden opportunity to strike against the West. A virulent strain of the Ebola Virus currently rampaging through the poorest parts of Africa is introduced in volume to major Cities throughout the United States of America. Utilizing the returning war fighters from abroad, either infected by Martyrs or on purpose for a never ending list of other reasons. These carriers enter virtually all airports and other points of entry available in the United States, Canada and even through Mexico carefully muled across the borders. The result is huge amounts of first disease cases in North America. The aftermath is the infection and death of 50 % of the population of North America. Through the wonders of air travel and the infiltrators meant for the USA, it spreads immediately into Mexico and South America. Panic ensues in the war torn countries, foreigners not willing to leave are deported and the gift of mutated virus is given back to the rest of the civilized world.

2030 - Total Suspension of Civil Rights in Canada and the United States of America.

Similar situations are have cropped up in Europe and Asia it is a time of illness, war and rumours of war. With the largest health risk in the last several centuries being the mutated contagion most countries in the world close their borders. It is an attempt in vain to stop the spread of this plague. It is for not, throughout the world in very short time and huge portions of the population dying from the effects of the former tropical disease, not before passing it on to their families, first responders and care givers. The WHO and other such agencies are helpless to stem the tide, the need for anti-virus far outstrips the ability to produce it. The dedicated professionals succumb at the same rate as their patients. With the lack of trade the western world, the European, Middle Eastern countries and Asia are thrown into not only a health but financial crisis.

2032 - Collapse of the world economy, anarchy reigns throughout the world. Only the most remote Countries and Areas are surviving mostly by physical separation and systemic eradication of attempted refugees.

2032 - In order to protect its borders from active aggression from the surrounding countries, the now isolated Israel launches low yield nuclear attacks against its neighbours. The neighbours who had spent decades readying themselves for such and attack reply in kind. The result is the Middle East is reduced to a wasteland that will produce little but fusion glass and cancer for generations. The fallout darkens Africa, Europe and most of Asia.

2034 -The world is no longer a highly organized place. In the vast majority of World Nation's organized government are no longer in control of their populace. Pretenders to the power such as separatist movements, expansionist regimes, financial opportunists, religious zealots die just like the rest. City-states are formed around centres that had a military or other power presence. The other cities and towns decline to isolated areas with populations of roving bands, killing and looting to survive. For the first time in several centuries mankind's numbers are declining at a geometric rate.

An event that started in a huge under populated country has been the impetus of the fall of mankind. But like all good infestations the struggle to live is paramount and globally small groups form and eke out a existence. This is the story of one such individual.

Nathaniel's World

At this point in his life, like most of the people of the world, he was not living the best of times. The New World order has receded to the New World chaos. Citizens of all Nations live in isolated pockets struggling to feed their loved ones and trying to find solace in anything that explains the way it has become. They have little protection against their former leaders or organizations powerful enough to become leaders. Although the population as a whole is one-tenth the size it was ten years before. Famine and disease is still pervasive in the Americas, Europe and Asia. The only outpost of relative prosperity is Australia and they have completely isolated themselves from the world. Airlines do not fly, banks no longer exist, worldwide communication has been reduced to Morse coded messages via cable lines between the outposts of civilization. These pockets of structure and organization disappear at a constant rate.

In the now distant past the North American political system ceased to exist and the population has fended it's self. In the past Governments had enacted powers to seize weapons in an attempt to limit the possibility of a revolution or separation by the provinces or random acts of violence. The result of this is after the decline when the need for security is the greatest there was none to be had. It has left the population unable to defend themselves from the basest elements of the society. A similar policy of the seizure of private assets was enacted to fund the war with Quebec and the Aboriginal population. This generally reduced the population of rich or poor to the same level subsistence and a process of survival of the fittest is the standard.

The wars within Canada and the U.S.A. ended eventually not from a victory but because the armies had been reduced to minimum levels and there was not the material to feed them or fill their weapons. When the few fighters that remained returned to their homes they found vulnerable, impoverished, people with not enough food and little desire to continue living. As thanks for the soldiers efforts, they where stoned in the streets by good and bad alike.

Politicians fared worse, they and their families where hunted down like dogs and murdered. The fabric of society was torn, lawlessness reigned as civic control was lost.

The were exceptions to the rule, one sector of the population the was relatively unaffected by this action was the criminal element. At the onset of the decline the organized criminal fraternities initiated actions against the authorities outside of the general mayhem of the many wars that were raging. They took their place in the new world with assassinations, bombings and looting. In the beginning these occurrences where perceived by the authorities as revenge of the rank and file masses against a totalitarian regime. Retribution was dealt out mercilessly against the normal population. This was much easier than dealing with the real instigators because of their organization's strengths. This policy was ineffective for obvious reasons and after the control structure further weakened by these actions. Once these groups held the upper hand, the criminal element concentrated their activities against the people, taking what they wanted.

During this period the constructive elements in the society, the businesses, the people who had managed to continue to work did no better. They had their resources taxed to past the breaking point. The only places to continue to apply their still needed skills was to groups who could pay in food, medicines or protection.

Money, gold, property and any of the other trappings of wealth had no value at all. The criminal elements resorted to harvesting the last natural resources available and this was by the systematic looting and murder of the population. Law and order was a thing of the past and the population was at the mercy of the gangs of looters.

Other than the Criminal elements, other groups with other agendas began to form. These groups unlike the criminal ones in normal times would be considered closer to the norm. The new wealthy, the ones who once were considered paranoia preppers. Built bomb shelters, hoarded food and armaments barricaded themselves into walled continuities and protected them with mercenaries paying them from the stock piles they had hoarded. Religious groups would attempt to hunt for resources in a communal fashion, as would former political and paramilitary forces.

With controls lost in the large centres transportation of the necessities of life had long ceased. Cities with abundant sources of power such as Hydroelectric or Nuclear continued to work on automated systems. Cities that required imported fuels for power and services turned into cold dark ghost towns.

The population in large centres as well as the rural communities had been further reduced not only from disease and violence but by starvation as well. The rural communities that fortified and isolated themselves did the best. They continued to produce the necessities of life for their groups and sometimes were able to fight off the organized bands of looters.

Part one

Something evil this way comes

She could hear them coming up the front stairs, they groaned with the weight of heavy footfalls. No sooner than they had reached the top of the long flight of steps, they began to force open the entrance door. The men were laughing and calling to the two women they knew were inside the house. Defenceless women were there candies to them, they seemed to feed on the terror.

A busy night had been had by the gang, several of the houses in the once upscale cul-de-sac were burning, illuminating the predawn sky. The mother was waiting at the top of a small set of stairs that led down to the entrance landing where the door was being forced open. She was in tears as was her daughter, both of their faces showed fear and rage. From the front window of the house they had seen the marauders execute several of the remaining neighbours and now it was their turn.

The house was a four level back split design. The first level was the garage facing the street, It also contained the mechanical area, spare room and a crawl space. This was directly under the third level. A short set of stairs brought you up from the garage to the second level at the back of the house. This second level was the family room and a large bed room. The kitchen, dining and main living room area comprised the third level. The three main bedrooms occupied the fourth and final level. From the living / dining room on the third level there was a sun deck facing out over the garage. In the better days, a nice feature. On a warm summer night to sit and take in the cool air and view the mountains in the distance. Also allowing one to call down to the kids that would inevitably playing on the drive way that supper was ready. The house was the most elevated on the block and the only access from the street other than the boarded up garage door was the set of front steps. There was a landing at the top to access the main door and a once inside few more steps to take you into the main room. The only other entrance to the house was the back door off the second level. In better times the house was one of the nicer residences in the middle class subdivision. Now like the rest was a derelict, by all intentions soon to be yet another burned out husk.

The house next on the left had mostly collapsed because of a accidental fire in the early years when people first tried to made do in the depths of winter with fire as a replacement for natural gas. There was a large amount of thick undergrowth prohibiting access to the sides and rear of the house. The alley that served the back of the houses on that side of the street had been blocked by wrecks of cars and refuse for years. Like the garage door all the other entrances were boarded over as were the windows. The ones far above ground level were painted over and mostly boarded up with only a slit to look through. The only open access that was not completely sealed was the door to the balcony over the garage, this was the way they came and went with the help of a extension ladder that was carefully hidden.

It was an optimal night for the looters. A cool moonlit night. Cool was important, it was so they could see light from houses and apartments that were not well prepared. The light would be caused be the occupants were trying to warm themselves with a fire. If it was not the flickering of a cozy fire, it was the warm smoke escaping the domicile's chimney. The full moon allowed easy mobility and communication. They were not the sort that wanted to work during the day when people might put up a fight. Better to sneak up in the dead of night when people were alone and boarded up. The menacing laughter and the sounds of burning wood prevailed in the hollow night as they ransacked the houses. This evening they had concentrated the days work thus far, were the more accessible homes who's entrances were on the ground floors and showed signs of life. Although the house was in darkness and looked abandoned, it had attracted the looter's attention when the teen-aged girl had screamed in horror, at the murder of a neighbour's family. She had baby sat the children in the past, a boy and a girl. No longer toddlers, now well into their teens. Regardless, no one in their right mind could bear to see them die, Certainly not Molly. The gang of looters had dragged the family on to the street as they had done the others. So far six houses in the small neighbourhood were ravaged, the occupants life's blood draining into the gutters. Their prized possessions in a growing pile in the centre of the street. Although there was murder, looting and pillaging, strangely at this late point in the night there was no raping. Perhaps the emaciated people they were victimizing were not as desirable as the hangers on to the tribe were, perhaps the blood lust was enough.

The adults were the first , on their knees in the moon light, the mother then the father, both of their throats opened with a long filet knife. The children shrieked in terror at the sight, then the boy, finally the girl. Before the girl rolled onto the pavement another wail pierced the already chaotic night.

When they saw the mother pull the girl away from the balcony window the looter's attention shifted. The focus of their activities became the large blue house across the street.

The boarded up door flew open with their weight and four of the looters stumbled into the entrance with the momentum of the others behind them. Their expectation was to see helpless new victims to play with. However the woman held to her shoulder a Savage side by side 12 gauge shot gun. It's barrels were cut down to just below eighteen inches, the pattern the shot would print the diameter of the base of a good sized coffee tin at eight feet. That was proved by the bloom that appeared on the chest of the first man through the door. He uttered a gasp and fell back against his compatriots, he clawed at the wound in his chest as he collapsed onto the landing. This was a complete surprise to the new occupants of the entry way and to the group on the stairs. Firearms or more importantly ammunition was unheard of, the game had dramatically changed as did the looters desire to enter the house. The explosion of the shotgun in the dark confined space was deafening. In the dark of the entry way the muzzle blast was like a flash of a camera. The second barrel spewed out its projectiles at the next intruder with similar effect. This time the pellets went high on her target and several of the people in the entrance way were hit by the buckshot. This added to their confusion with the blood and tissue being sprayed about in the restricted space. The ones not incapacitated by the pellets and bone fragments wanted out of this kill box in the worst way.

The shotgun was empty, she snapped open the action of the Savage and the two spent twelve gauge shells, were ejected over her right shoulder with a pop. Instead of reloading she slid the shotgun up to the crook of her left arm and she pulled the Smith & Wesson, model 640, five shot, 357 mag pistol from the black nylon belt holster at her hip. She raised the small stainless steel revolver and fired double action into the crowd. She methodically fired with care, picking the centre mass of the dark shapes. Moonlight had turned on them, instead of a big help, it silhouetted them in the entrance way. The pistol jumped in her hand and the results of the shots and the hits were spectacular. The detonations in the confined space were phenomenally loud, the light coloured walls reflected the light of muzzle blasts. The hits by the 158 grain pistol rounds did substantial damage to the first target. But with the retained velocity and energy continued through the first man, on the next and in some cases the next man after that. The wounded and soon dead tried to claw past the still standing, trying to escape her fire but were met with resistance from the balance of their number trying to get inside inside the entrance in panic as well. Apparently they weren't having a good time waiting on the stairs outside.

At the same time the looters forced the front door the teen-aged girl walked out onto the balcony over the garage, well separated from the attacker below her she helped the looters pay for their crimes. She fired her Marlin 1894 lever action, nine shot, 357 mag rifle into the heads and backs of the men on the steps leading into the house. The combined attacks of the two women equated to a crossfire, it chewed up the looters. They fell down the stairs or over the edge of the railing like a water fall of bodies. The Mother's Smith ran out first, she grabbed the still smoking pistol with her left hand as she opened the action of the gun with her right hand. With the cylinder out, she dumped the still smoking spent cases onto the floor, by depressing the plunger several times. With her right hand she reached down to her belt and took out a SKS push / pull speed loader and dropped the new rounds into the cylinder.

With the firing from inside the door way ceasing the remaining few looters stumbled into the entrance to avoid the fusillade from the girl on the balcony. One started to ascend the first set of stairs momentarily forgetting the woman inside. She dropped the speed loader and grabbed the butt of the small revolver, snapping the cylinder in place with her right index finger. She raised the pistol and straighten her arm. She looked down the sight line and fired point blank into the head of the man climbing the stairs. The other men trying to avoid the shooting from outside were sprayed with the brains and skull fragments of their compatriot. The girl on the balcony moved back against the wall of the house and reloaded the rifle. It required both hands and a great amount of concentration to force the shells past the loading gate in the near dark conditions. She could hear the bark of her mother's Smith and the screams of the dying. As the last round exited the two and a half inch barrel of the S&W, young girl leaned over the balcony and fired a round into the top of the head of the last standing bad guy on the stairs. He fell to his knees and added his mass to the pile in front of the broken in door.

She then walked to the front of the balcony and began searching for targets on the street. Like her mother, the young girl had never shot a living thing before but had practised extensively with the firearms, dry firing them to get used of the actions. She had the training to sight the looters on the street and deal them. Her distances where set by her father and in the small circle of houses corrections for elevation were not required. Some of the hits were not lethal blows, but at least they were bad enough to incapacitate the recipients and leave them writhing on the ground in a puddle of their fluids.

Seeing the lack of new opponents, the woman reloaded her Smith and Wesson and placed it in it's holster. Then she picked up the speed loader she dropped and put them in the pouch it had originated from. She stuck her right hand into her pants pocket and pulled out two more shotgun shells and dropped them into the savage and snapped it closed with a quick motion of her left hand.

She turned and ran down the stairs to the second level to the back of the house and carefully looked through a gap between two pieces of wood that covered the window. She could see that no one had ventured into the back yard so far. This was a very good thing from her perspective defending both entrances would most likely lead to failure. As it was was guaranteed that even if they survived the night and the house was still standing, the following night a distinct reversal of this outcome was inevitable. This was scenario that they had discussed for years and now the time had come. It was with great regret that she prepared to leave her home and abandon what remained of their lives.

She pulled two of the three pack sacks that were in the family room on that level of the house, into the bedroom next to it. She knew that it would be unlikely that the third pack would make it through the night but it was the only note she could leave that might be able to tell the story that the two of them had survived.

In the corner of the bed room was a desk, she pulled it away from the wall. It was hinged and pivoted easily away from the recess, revealing a trap door. It led to a hand dug tunnel to the far side of the alley behind the house. Her husband had dug it, shovel full by shovel shoring the walls and roof as he went. It was not big enough to stand but sufficient to bring in supplies and move out of their cul-de-sac clandestinely. It had proved to be structurally sound and weather proof over the years. Designed to be the method they used to come and go when they wanted to avoid detection. Now it was their only salvation and their last hope.

The young girl chose her last target and fired into the centre of the dark shape. She could see the remaining marauders trying to get close with torches with out exposing themselves to the young girl's wrath. After the last case was ejected from the receiver she abruptly turned and walked into the house. She pulled the yellow disposable ear plugs out and even though her ears were slightly ringing she heard her mother calling her from the lower level, “Molly we are out of here”. As she walked through the living room the first torch flew onto the balcony. She reloaded the rifle as she travelled though the house. Looking around at the home she had lived in all her life.

They left through the tunnel and walked north, the supplies in their packs would last a month and they would not stop until then.

#my novel

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pgoeltz · 5 years

Link

istverse.com/2016/02/10/10-secret-cia-prisons-you-do-not-want-to-visit/

10 Secret CIA Prisons You Do Not Want To Visit

TIM BISSELL

175

COMMENTS

The US Central Intelligence Agency has, according to multiple investigative reports from both mainstream media outlets and human rights organizations, operated numerous “black sites” across the world. These locations, according to the reports, are secret prisons used to house “ghost prisoners.” Those sent to these places are held captive without being charged with any crime and are not allowed any form of legal defense.

Ghost prisoners are subject to what the CIA calls “enhanced interrogation tactics”; most others call it torture. The CIA and their operatives’ methods allegedly include waterboarding, sleep deprivation, humiliation, physical beatings, electric shocks, and worse.

These secret prisons, dotted all over the world, might just be the most terrifying places on Earth.

10Diego Garcia Indian Ocean

Photo via

Wikimedia

Diego Garcia is an atoll in the Indian Ocean located around 1,600 kilometers (1,000 mi) south of India and 3,200 kilometers (2,000 mi) east of Tanzania. The locale is claimed by the United Kingdom as part of their British Indian Ocean Territory.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the UK deported the native people of the atoll to Mauritius and the Seychelles in order to allow the United States to construct a large naval and military base now known as Camp Thunder Cove. The installation is currently home to roughly 4,000 military personnel and independent contractors.

Although the UK has long claimed that “ghost prisoners” haven’t been held at Diego Garcia, in a 2015 interview with Vice News, Lawrence Wilkerson (US Secretary of State Colin Powell’s former chief of staff) revealed that terrorism suspects were abducted and brought to the ocean base for special interrogations. Wilkerson stated that this was done by the CIA in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.

9Temara Interrogation Centre Morocco

The Temara Interrogation Centre can be found in a forest 14 kilometers (9 mi) outside of Rabat, Morocco. The facility is operated by a Moroccan government unit known as the Directorate for the Surveillance of the Territory (DST).

In 2003, Morocco was examined by the UN Committee against Torture. The UN considered evidence presented by the Moroccan government as well as by Amnesty International. Their findings were that, although human rights had generally improved in Morocco over recent years, there was also an increase in reported torture cases in the North African nation.

In 2004, Amnesty International alleged that the DST is a recurrent and flagrant abuser of human rights and that many of these offenses have occurred at Temara. Amnesty International’s report stated that Moroccan interrogators had repeatedly beaten, humiliated, electrocuted, burned, and waterboarded inmates at Temara. The alleged goal of the DST torturers was to extract confessions or information from detainees or to have them sign or thumbprint statements (the content of which the detainee may have no knowledge).

In 2010, the Associated Press reported that several US officials had confirmed that the facility was operated by Moroccans but was financed by the CIA. Morocco officially denies that the facility exists.

8Mihail Kogalniceanu Airport Romania

Photo credit:

Crispas

Mihail Kogalniceanu Airport is the main airport for Romania’s southern Dobrogea region, located just a stone’s throw away from popular tourist resorts on the Black Sea coast. In 2015, the airport managed 2,227 flights involving over 63,000 passengers. However, some have alleged that a number of these flights were used to traffic ghost prisoners to and from a secret prison on the airport’s premises.

Romania claims that Mihail Kogalniceanu Airport is only used as a transfer point for CIA prisoners and not for actual detainment or interrogations. However, in 2008, USA Today quoted an unnamed Romanian official who claimed that the military portion of the airport contained three buildings which were strictly off-limits to Romanian officials but were frequented by US agents.

More evidence supporting the airport’s role in CIA detentions arose in 2010 when Der Spiegel reported that the Swiss intelligence agency’s Onyx satellite surveillance system had intercepted a fax between an Egyptian foreign minister and his ambassador in London. The communique described the detention of 23 Iraqi and Afghan captives at the airport.

7Detention Site Green Thailand

Thailand denies the existence of any black sites in its territory, despite multiple reports describing the mysterious Detention Site Green and hinting that it may be located just outside of Bangkok or somewhere in the northern province of Udon Thani.

According to The Guardian, in 2009, the CIA themselves confirmed that they had destroyed 92 tapes of interviews with terror suspects which were filmed somewhere in Thailand. The report also claimed that Site Green was somewhat of an experiment, where the CIA honed their waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation techniques, which would later be used at the larger European sites which the agency would go on to construct.

One of the CIA’s guinea pigs was Abu Zubaydah, a Saudi national captured in Pakistan in 2002. Zubaydah was reportedly waterboarded so severely that bubbles would rise out of his open mouth. Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the alleged mastermind of the USS Cole bombings, was also supposedly held at Site Green. Reports state that he, too, was waterboarded, in addition to being threatened with sodomy.

6Camp Lemonnier Djibouti

Photo credit:

Eduard Onyshchenko

Djibouti is a highly strategic location for the US military, primarily due to its close proximity to terrorist hot zones such as Somalia and Yemen as well as the pirate-filled Gulf of Aden. Located at Djibouti’s Ambouli International Airport is Camp Lemonnier, a US Naval Expeditionary Base. Officially, it is home to the Combined Joint Task Force—Horn of Africa, a US combat unit that was mobilized during Operation Enduring Freedom, aka The War on Terror.

Unofficially, according to a 2014 report from Al Jazeera America, Djibouti’s Camp Lemonnier is also a CIA black site that saw dozens of suspects secretly detained, interrogated, and tortured. The report also stated that the site had been used as recently as 2012 by the Obama administration, despite President Obama signing an executive order in 2009 banning the use of black sites by the CIA.

In 2015, The Intercept revealed aerial shots of Camp Lemonnier showing how the base, which is a crucial takeoff point for Reaper and Predator drones, has been steadily expanding.

5Antaviliai Lithuania

Less than 16 kilometers (10 mi) from the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius is a mysterious former riding school in the village of Antaviliai. According to The Washington Post, the school was converted into a jail by the CIA in 2004. The report continued to state that the site was used to interrogate Al-Qaeda suspects who had been captured in Afghanistan.

The property was purchased in 2004 by Elite LLC, a company registered in Washington, DC. Locals described seeing US contractors digging around the property, creating what they assumed was an underground complex beneath the main building. In 2009, unnamed former intelligence agents told ABC News that the site at Antaviliai was operational for over a year and that during that time, it held at least eight suspected terrorists within its walls. In 2007, Elite LLC sold the property to the Lithuanian government and then disappeared. Since then, the site has been used to train Lithuania’s state security service.

4USS Ashland Various Locations

Photo via

Wikimedia

In 2008, The Guardian reported that human rights organization Reprieve, which claimed that the US has admitted to holding at least 26,000 people in secret prisons, had discovered that the US was operating a fleet of “floating prisons” that span the globe. Reprieve’s research pointed to at least 17 US warships being used as secret CIA black sites.

Among those ships was the USS Ashland, a Whidbey Island–class dock landing ship that weighs 16,000 tons and measures 186 meters (610 ft) in length. The Ashland houses 500 US Marines onboard. Reprieve believes that the ship is connected to a series of abductions carried out by Somali, Kenyan, and Ethiopian forces around 2007. The Guardian also stated that the United States previously admitted that the USS Bataan and the USS Peleliu were also used as prison ships between 2001 and 2002.

John Walker Lindh, aka The American Taliban, is one of the most well-known detainees to sail on the United States’ secret prison fleet.

3Stare Kiejkuty Poland

Stare Kiejkuty is a restricted military area in northeastern Poland that was used as a Nazi SS outpost during World War II. In the 1970s, the area was used by Polish intelligence officers, despite maps naming the site as a holiday resort.

In 2008, a Polish intelligence source revealed to the BBC that Stare Kiejkuty’s facilities were used by the CIA to detain and interrogate “high-value detainees.” The BBC report stated that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the so-called architect of the 9/11 attacks, had been interrogated in Poland, among other places.

In 2014, former Polish President Alexander Kwasniewski confirmed that he had made agreements with the United States to allow the CIA to operate black sites in Poland during his time in office between 1995 and 2005. Kwasniewski stated that a US memorandum informed him that detainees would be treated as prisoners of war and would be afforded the internationally recognized rights that come with such a designation. The sources who spoke to the BBC stated that the Polish president likely had no idea what was really going on at the Stare Kiejkuty base.

2The Salt Pit Afghanistan

The Salt Pit, also known as Cobalt, is a former brick factory located north of Kabul in Afghanistan. In 2002, the site was converted into a detainee center by the CIA, which earmarked more than $200,000 for its construction.

In 2012, The Daily Beast described the Salt Pit as “the CIA’s Sadistic Dungeon” in an article that examined a high-profile death which occurred at the site. On November 20, 2002, Gul Rahman died of hypothermia after being beaten, stripped naked, and chained to the floor during a freezing cold night.

In 2014, the US government declassified a US Senate Report on the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program. That report stated that no CIA officers were ever charged with crimes relating to the death of Rahman. Instead, five months after his death, the lead CIA officer who ordered Rahman be chained up was given a $2,500 bonus for “consistently superior work.”

Of the 119 detainees identified in the US Senate Report on torture, nearly half were detained at the Salt Pit.

1Camp Eagle Bosnia And Herzegovina

In 2005, two Bosnian men, Nihad Karsic and Almin Harbeus, spoke to Bosnia’s public television broadcaster BHTV about their ordeals at Camp Eagle, near Tuzla, close to the Bosnian border with Serbia. Both men stated that they were violently abducted by Bosnian soldiers, who then accused them of being terrorists.

At Camp Eagle, a former Yugoslavian air base, the pair claimed that they were beaten and harassed by soldiers before being held and questioned by Americans in civilian clothing. The men said that they were eventually released and given $500 in compensation. They also said that they were threatened and told not to speak publicly about what had happened to them.

According to the BBC, in 2006, a Swiss investigation into CIA black sites named Bosnia as one of the many countries which had partnered with the CIA to secretly detain suspected terrorists, along with Italy, Sweden, and Macedonia. That same report cited Spain, Turkey, Germany, and Cyprus as “staging posts” and the UK, Portugal, Ireland, and Greece as “stop-off points” for detainees being flown to black sites such as Camp Eagle.

Tim Bissell is a writer and researcher who works in the Canadian television industry. He also writes for online publications such as OZY and Bloody Elbow. Follow him @timothybissell.

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string-cheese-cake · 5 years

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You know what, I'm kinda tired of people misunderstanding what it means to be latinx so I'm just gonna throw my two cents in as Your Local Mexican-American who can't speak for all Latinos (cause all Mexicans are latinos but not all latinos are mexican) but has some decent perspective

First off, I want to acknowledge that while latinos experience oppression (especially as of late) it is different and in many ways less severe than the oppression faced by the black community

Wanna know why? Cause white Latinos are the result of the pairings of south and central native americans and Spanish colonists! However, not all latinos are white latinos, they may be afrolatinx! But my experience is that of a white latino so I'm going to be focusing on that

For some background, the Spanish were not interested in colonizing the Americas (North, central, and south. The rest of Europe was late to the game) as much as it was interested in exploiting it. It was the violent conquistador campaigns and exploitative mining operations that brought the Spanish to the Americas, a new and dangerous world that was seen as unfit for women. With so many Spanish men in the new world and virtually no Spanish women, the colonists took partners from the existing Native populations, with varying degrees of willingness from the natives. From this came a class system based on how Spanish and how wealthy an individual was

After the colonial era which saw exploited labor from both Native American groups and African slaves, the class system slowly began to be based more on an individual's wealth and power rather than their race, but let's not pretend that those with strong Spanish lineages didn't have a huge leg up there.

What really started to change life for Latinos in the modern day United States was the opening up of Texas to Anglos, due to Mexico's difficulty in keeping the territory stable because of its size, distance from Mexico City, and the resistance of Native American groups. The result was the Mexican-American war which resulted in Mexico losing half its territory and the addition of almost the entirety of the American Southwest. As a result, the Mexicans already living in those areas became Americans. Their new government rarely allowed them to keep the land that their families had owned for generations, and at times had grown fairly wealthy from. Their deeds were tossed out and their land split up for white settlers

The Mexican Revolution in the early 1900s saw warfare between Mexican citizens that at times bled into the United States. Certain revolutionaries like Pancho Villa visited terror amd cruelty upon small border towns. This is why many white Americans associate Mexicans with violence and cruelty, even leading some to say that we had a propensity for it due to our race (ok colonizers) . This was also the justification for the indiscriminate murder of hundreds of Mexicans by vigilante citizens, robbers, and sanctioned authorities like the Texas Rangers in the early 1900s

The border between Mexico and America remained open into the nineteenth century, and even into the eighties only a small fee was required to cross, I'm talking dimes and quarters here

However, Latinos were still greatly discriminated against. Segregation era restrictions called out Mexicans by name but lbr, it applied to all latinos. Segregation restricted Latinos in similar ways it restricted Black people. It dictated access to facilities, restaurants, theatres, scools, and even juror seats

During the world wars, latinos along with other poc were sent to the front lines to die over their white counterparts. Even in death, some were denied burial in white graveyards, leading to organizations like the American GI forum

And that was for citizens. Trying to work or live in the us as an immigrant was a long and degrading process. Immigrants were subjected to physical examinations, public bathing, and many were sprayed with carcinogenic pesticides. My grandmother was given an x-ray as part of the immigration process while she was pregnant. She didn't know it could be harmful to the fetus and no one asked if she was pregnant. It resulted in a stillbirth.

Migrant workers were relegated to "low skill" jobs, often as farm workers. They worked long hours for little pay, and were exposed to pesticides that resulted in cancer, birth defects, and in the worst cases, death soon after exposure. Without access to education or childcare, parents brought their children to the feilds, and the cycle of exploitation continued. Thanks to the NFWA, conditions have improved but still aren't ideal, especially for undocumented workers who are at the greatest risk of exploitation

Even through ALL THIS SHIT, Latinos were STILL at risk of deportation, regardless of their citizenship. The American government rounded up Latinos, some of whom had lived in the United States for generations, and deported them to Mexico or South America, places some had never been.

Being a race of mixed people for over five hundred years means that some people have a lot more spanish blood, so much so that they may be blonde, pale, and blue-eyed, and some people have a lot more native blood, so they have broad or prominent noses, dark hair and dark brown skin. And as unpredictable genetics are, appearances may vary wildly even among siblings

In my family alone, which is to my knowledge exclusively descended from Native Americans and Spanish immigrants (with some german in there), we have curly hair, straight hair, auburn and black hair, thin bodies, fat bodies, heights ranging from 6"2' to 5"1', flat and broad noses, hooked noses, arched noses, flat faces, high cheekbones, shades of skin ranging from off-white to cocoa brown, thin lips, full lips, and a wide array of facial and body hair.

And all of these people are equally Latino! Lineages of Spanish colonialists and of Native groups can both validly claim latino heritage, even if they are not mixed

This is why the oppression faced by latinos can be very different depending on the individual. The more non-white you look, the more this history is attached to you. The darker your skin is, the more likely that you will be profiled, deported, arrested, disregarded, assulted, or exploited.

This is why it's inaccurate to say that Latinos are "honorary whites" or "basically white" (this was also an argument used by Anglos to deny that they were oppressing Latinos lmao) Yes, some latinos may be white passing and get preferential treatment over other more visibly non-white minorities, and some even act as oppressors, but there are also many others that are not afforded that luxury. We have a storied past, we have been subjected to A Lot Of Shit, and to loop me in with my oppressors makes me sick to my stomach.

Tldr: some latinos are white passing, but many aren't. We come in all shapes and shades because of our mixed heritage and those who are visibly nonwhite are still subjected to racism so don't equate us to our oppressors because not long ago having a spanish surname meant you couldn't be a cop

#immigration #racisim #mexican #latino #politics #why am i talking #i spent over two hours typing this out please clap and maybe reconsider calling latinos white #OH YEAH AND THIS IS THE ABBREVIATED VERSION i think its fairly comprehensive but i didnt go into detail on ANYTHING

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dinakaplan · 6 years

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Are Sweet Potatoes Good for You? Everything You Need to Know

Sweet potatoes are a favorite fall food. But are sweet potatoes good for you and should you be eating them year-round? Here’s what you need to know about sweet potato nutrition, sweet potato health benefits, and more.

When I was a kid growing up in British Columbia, my kale and turnip-loving parents didn’t feed us processed sugar of any kind.

But once in a while, on a special occasion, we’d have sweet potatoes. When they were baking in the oven, our tiny cabin would fill with warmth (which was its own special treat, especially in the Canadian winter!) and the exquisite smell of sweet-potatoey goodness.

Clearly, I’m extremely fond of sweet potatoes. So when I decided to write an article about them, I had to check all my happy memories at the keyboard and look at the evidence.

Are sweet potatoes good for you? Are there any sweet potato health benefits? Where do they come from?

How can we prepare them, aside from in holiday casseroles and pies? And most confusing of all (to almost everyone), what’s the difference between sweet potatoes and yams?

Meet the Sweet Potato

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Sweet potatoes (Ipomoea batatas) are large, starchy, sweet-tasting vegetables. They actually belong to the morning glory family.

Despite the shared name, sweet potatoes are only distantly related to the potatoes used to make French fries or potato chips. Non-sweet potatoes (including red, white, and Yukon gold varieties) are part of the edible nightshade family. Other members include tomatoes, tomatillos, eggplants, peppers, pimentos, and Goji berries.

Sweet potatoes are root tubers. Other root tubers include beets, carrots, parsnips, celeriac, and turnips. Root tubers store water and energy, like starch and other carbohydrates, underground. They draw upon these resources to feed the aboveground parts of the plant.

The Origin of the Sweet Potato

Sweet potatoes are some of the oldest foods known to humanity.

They are native to Central and South America. We have fossil evidence that sweet potatoes were growing in the Americas 35 million years ago. But very recently, scientists discovered 57-million-year-old leaf fossils in India that appear to be ancient morning glory leaves. This could beat the American claim as the point of origin of the sweet potato family by about 22 million years.

Wherever and whenever they originated, and however they have traveled the globe, I’m incredibly thankful that most of us have sweet potatoes in our lives today.

What’s the Difference Between a Sweet Potato and a Yam?

People often mistakenly refer to sweet potatoes as “yams.” But these two plants aren’t actually related at all.

Yams are related to grasses and lilies and native to Africa and Asia. They’re usually cylindrical with black or brown, rough, bark-like skin, and white, purple, or red flesh. Sweet potatoes have characteristic tapered ends with smoother skin.

You can find sweet potatoes at just about any grocery store. However, in North America and Europe, you will only find true yams stocked at international and specialty markets.

You might be thinking, “but I see yams at my grocery store all the time” — and you’d be right that they’re labeled that way. But this label is deceiving.

There are actually two types of sweet potatoes in most mainstream produce sections: firm and soft. Grocers needed a way to differentiate between the two types. The soft kind, which includes the Garnet and Jewel varieties, resemble yams. This is how they picked up the false name.

How Many Sweet Potato Varieties Exist?

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While most supermarkets carry one or two different types of sweet potatoes, about 25 varieties are available in the United States. And I was amazed to discover that this represents only a tiny fraction of the total diversity of sweet potatoes.

The sweet potato geeks of the world may be fascinated to know that the International Potato Center in Peru maintains a gene bank consisting of over 6,500 varieties of sweet potato. I don’t know about you, but personally, I wish I could try them all!

Sweet potato varieties range in color from dark red to brown to purple to orange-yellow to white. They also have different tastes, sizes, shapes, and textures.

Here are Just a Few of the Most Popular Types of Sweet Potatoes:

Garnet, Jewel, and Beauregard sweet potatoes have reddish-orange skin and deep orange flesh. These are often the ones masquerading as yams at mainstream grocery stores. Who knew sweet potatoes could be so sneaky?

White sweet potatoes are crumbly, with white flesh and golden brown skin. They don’t contain as many antioxidants as orange varieties.

Okinawan sweet potatoes are also known as purple sweet potatoes because of their high anthocyanin content. Anthocyanins are the pigments that give red, blue, and violet plant foods their beautiful colors. Anthocyanins are also what give Okinawan potatoes 150% more antioxidant power than blueberries.

Despite their name, Okinawan potatoes are actually native to the Americas. They were brought over to Japan sometime in the 16th century, where they grow well and have become a staple in Japanese dishes. In North America, you will most likely find true purple sweet potatoes in an Asian supermarket.

Japanese or Satsumaimo sweet potatoes are known for being sweeter than most other types. This is especially true when they start caramelizing in the oven.

Sweet potatoes are very hardy vegetables. They’re able to grow at many altitudes, in many climates, and under compromised soil conditions. Even if you don’t have the greenest of thumbs, sweet potatoes are pretty forgiving with just a little TLC.

What Makes a Sweet Potato Sweet?

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Have you ever smelled a sweet potato caramelize in the oven or used them to make a pie or a cake?

If so, you know that even though they aren’t related to what we think of as potatoes, at least the “sweet” part of their name is entirely appropriate.

When you heat sweet potatoes, an enzyme starts breaking down their starch into a sugar called maltose. Maltose isn’t as sweet as table sugar. But it’s enough to satisfy a sweet tooth that hasn’t been entirely overwhelmed by M&M’s and Hershey’s Kisses.

You can control the sweetness of sweet potatoes somewhat by how you cook them. Cooking sweet potatoes quickly (for instance, by steaming them or cutting them into smaller pieces before roasting) can reduce their ultimate sweetness.

On the other hand, cooking sweet potatoes slowly on low heat will allow that maltose-making enzyme more time to convert the starch into sugar — giving you sweeter sweet potatoes.

Looking for even more control over the sweetness? The sweet potato enzyme is activated once they reach around 135°F and stops working at around 170°F. (That’s 57° to 77°C). So the more time they spend in that range, the sweeter they’ll be.

Are Sweet Potatoes Good for You?

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The people of Okinawa, Japan have traditionally enjoyed one of the highest life expectancies in the world. I discovered this when my dad was researching his book Healthy at 100: The Scientifically Proven Secrets of the World’s Healthiest and Longest-Lived Peoples.

One of those secrets, it turns out, is lots and lots of sweet potatoes. The traditional Okinawan diet consists of minimal meat, dairy, eggs, and processed foods. Instead, they eat mostly whole plant foods. And they get a remarkable 60% of their calories from sweet potatoes alone.

It’s partly because of this high-fiber and antioxidant-rich dietary pattern that Okinawans enjoy such a long lifespan. Living to be one hundred years or older is not uncommon in Okinawa. Okinawans also experience less chronic disease than Americans do — with significantly fewer deaths from heart disease and cancers of the colon, breast, and prostate.

Traditional Papua New Guinea Highlanders have also been known to eat a lot of sweet potatoes. In fact, tubers like sweet potatoes and yams provide 90% of their calories!

They don’t eat much, if any, meat either. How has a sweet potato-based diet affected their health?

A study published in the Journal of Internal Medicine in 1994 found that, when these native groups still followed this traditional way of eating, they enjoyed lower blood pressure and weight than Westerners. And they almost never experienced heart disease, strokes, or other modern chronic diseases.

So are sweet potatoes good for you? Yes, they are!

What makes them so good for you?

Sweet Potato Nutrition

Sweet potatoes are high in fiber, vitamin C, potassium, pantothenic acid (vitamin B5), niacin (vitamin B3), vitamin B6, manganese, magnesium, and copper.

They get their orange color from beta-carotene, which is a pigment and antioxidant. Sweet potatoes also contain a modest but helpful amount of protein — around four grams per cup when cooked.

When compared to white potatoes, sweet potatoes offer more vitamins and antioxidants. Surprisingly, considering their sweeter taste, they also have a mildly lower glycemic index score. This makes them slower to digest.

But the greatest sweet potato nutritional glory of all may be its rich supply of vitamin A. A single sweet potato offers over double the daily value for vitamin A.

Sweet Potatoes Are Remarkably High in Vitamin A

Worldwide, vitamin A deficiency is the leading cause of preventable blindness in children. An estimated 250,000 to 500,000 children become blind every year due to a lack of this critical nutrient. Half of these children die within a year of losing their sight.

Hoping to solve this problem (and with perhaps a few other less noble motives in the mix), over the last several decades, biotechnology companies, governments, foundations, and scientists have spent hundreds of millions of dollars attempting to develop and popularize “golden rice.”

This is a form of rice that’s been genetically engineered to provide beta-carotene (a precursor to vitamin A). Despite decades of effort, the product still hasn’t reached the market.

How ironic that this same effort could have gotten sweet potatoes and the means to grow them into the hands of most of the impoverished families now suffering from vitamin A deficiency. Of course, that wouldn’t have made biotech company, Syngenta, any money. But it would have helped a whole lot more people than golden rice ever has, and most likely, ever will.

News flash: The biotech industry and its supporters have long promoted GMO golden rice as an urgently needed solution to vitamin A deficiency. But in late 2018, in a surprising twist, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) concluded its consultation process on golden rice by informing the current developers, the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), that golden rice does not meet the nutritional requirements to make a health claim.

In effect, the FDA was saying that GMO golden rice offers no meaningful nutritional benefits.

Which again raises the question: How much better off would people be if the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on developing golden rice had instead been used to support the growth of sweet potatoes, carrots, and other vitamin A-rich vegetables in parts of the world where vitamin A deficiencies are a problem?

10 Incredible Sweet Potato Health Benefits

The unique nutritional profile of sweet potatoes makes them powerful allies in preventing disease and supporting overall health.

Here are some health benefits of adding sweet potatoes to your diet.

Sweet Potato Health Benefit #1: They Support Digestive Health

Sweet potatoes are an excellent source of fiber, especially when you eat the skin. Fiber is important for your digestive health, preventing constipation and serious diseases, such as colon cancer.

One medium sweet potato has six grams of dietary fiber. They also contain resistant starch, a type of starch that plays a role in feeding your body’s “good” bacteria.

Sweet Potato Health Benefit #2: They Keep Your Heart Healthy

The high fiber content of sweet potatoes can lower LDL (bad) cholesterol levels, helping to prevent cardiovascular disease.

Sweet potatoes are also high in potassium, which works in balance with sodium in your body to maintain healthy blood pressure.

They’re also high in copper, an essential metal for making red blood cells and keeping your heart healthy. Low levels of copper have been linked to dangerously high homocysteine, blood pressure, and LDL cholesterol levels.

Sweet Potato Health Benefit #3: They Help Stabilize Blood Sugar

The fiber and complex carbohydrates in sweet potatoes can help keep your blood sugar stable. And it can help you feel full longer. Sweet potato varieties also contain other substances that benefit stable blood sugar.

A 2004 study published in Diabetes Care successfully used Caiapo, an extract from white sweet potatoes, to naturally reduce and manage blood glucose in people with type 2 diabetes.

The 30 participants who were given 4 grams of Caiapo every day for 12 weeks saw a decrease in their HbA(1c) (going from 7.21 to 6.68), fasting blood glucose (143.7 vs. 128.5), and two-hour blood glucose (193.3 vs.162.8). The 31 participants who were given a placebo instead saw no such results.

Sweet Potato Health Benefit #4: They Can Boost Your Immunity

Sweet potatoes are rich in antioxidants that prevent free radical damage in your body.

One cup of baked sweet potato contains 52% of your daily value for vitamin C, which is important for wound healing and tissue repair.

And the vitamin A in sweet potatoes helps your body make immune cells that stave off infections and disease and have anti-tumor effects. Purple sweet potatoes contain especially potent antioxidants.

Sweet Potato Health Benefit #5: They Are Good for Your Eyes

Sweet potatoes contain several nutrients that have been linked to improved eye health and vision. Some of the most powerful are the carotenoids. They include alpha-carotene, beta-carotene, lutein, and zeaxanthin.

Beta-carotene, when taken as a supplement in isolation from the other carotenoids, can cause imbalances. But when eaten in foods, where it is always accompanied by, and in balance with, an entire suite of carotenoids, it’s been shown to have powerful anti-cancer and vision-enhancing properties.

Orange sweet potatoes (as well as other orange plants, including carrots) have particularly high concentrations of carotenoids.

It’s not just the orange sweet potatoes that are good for your vision, though. A class of anthocyanins called PSPA, derived from purple sweet potato roots, might also benefit your eyes.

A study published in Food & Nutrition Research in 2015 looked at whether PSPA could influence the health and growth of human retinal pigment epithelial (RPE) cells.

Why does this matter? The RPE is responsible for helping your eyes absorb light. It also directs immune response when faced with a threat to eye health. The researchers found that PSPA promoted DNA synthesis and healthy RPE cell growth and survival. They concluded that PSPA could potentially find use as a supplement for maintaining healthy vision.

Sweet Potato Health Benefit #6: They Fuel Your Brain

Sweet potatoes also contain compounds that help your brain function at its best, including choline and manganese.

Choline is an essential nutrient for brain growth and development, as well as the synthesis of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine that sends messages between cells.

Manganese is also important for brain health. It binds to neurotransmitters and helps move electrical impulses through your body faster. You can find 43% of your daily value of manganese in one cup of baked sweet potato.

The anthocyanins unique to purple sweet potatoes may also have memory-enhancing properties.

Sweet Potato Health Benefit #7: They Can Help Ease Stress and Anxiety

Sweet potatoes may help you relax. They’re high in magnesium, which has been shown to play a role in calming the brain. Magnesium deficiency has been linked to depression, mood disturbances, and headaches.

Other good sources of magnesium include avocados, legumes, tofu, nuts, seeds, and leafy greens.

(I’m dreaming right now of a loaded baked sweet potato piled high with a soft nut cheeze, avocado, a drizzle of flax oil, and a sprinkle of seasoning. It’s also accompanied by some freshly steamed and piping hot leafy greens for a delicious, magnesium-rich meal.)

Sweet Potato Health Benefit #8: They Can Help Boost Fertility

Vitamin A is an essential nutrient for healthy reproduction. And as we know, sweet potatoes are a fantastic source.

Sweet potatoes also offer a rich supply of iron, which has also been shown to be important in supporting fertility.

Sweet Potato Health Benefit #9: They Can Help Fight Cancer

Sweet potatoes are a rich source of cancer-fighting antioxidants, especially in their skin. They have other anti-cancer properties, too.

Up to 80% of the protein in sweet potatoes is a type of storage protein known as sporamin. This unique protein has been studied for anti-cancer ability and found to be effective in several disease types.

Research has been promising in the use of sporamin to inhibit tongue, gallbladder, and colorectal cancers. It has also been shown capable of slowing cancer cell growth and reducing cell migration and invasion in metastatic cancers.

Sweet potato peels, particularly those of the purple varieties, may be especially powerful when it comes to cancer prevention.

A study published in Nutrition and Cancer in 2016 looked at the antioxidant and anti-cancer effects of an extract from sweet potato peels. They found promising anti-cancer activity for cancers of the breast, colon, ovary, lung, and head/neck.

Sweet Potato Health Benefit #10: They Have Anti-Inflammatory Effects

Eating sweet potatoes may also help reduce inflammation.

This is chiefly due to their high levels of beta-carotene, vitamin C, and magnesium. Their abundance of antioxidants doesn’t hurt here, either.

One of the particular antioxidants that’s found most abundantly in purple sweet potato flesh is cyanidin. Cyanidin has been linked to reducing inflammation, especially in the digestive tract.

How to Choose and Store Sweet Potatoes

Next time you shop for sweet potatoes, here are a few things to keep in mind.

When you pick one up, take a close look at its skin (no, you don’t have to pack your magnifying glass). It should all be mostly the same color without visible signs of decay or cracking.

Give it a little squeeze. You don’t want your sweet potato to be squishy anywhere, as this could indicate rotting.

When you get your sweet potatoes home, make them a nice place to rest in a basket on your countertop or pantry. You should keep them dry and cool (room temperature, not refrigerated).

Typically, you should use sweet potatoes within a few weeks of purchase.

The Best Way to Prepare Sweet Potatoes

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Maybe you eat sweet potatoes regularly. Or maybe you only think of them as a seasonal side dish.

Me? I’ve enjoyed a baked sweet potato for breakfast with a delicious organic tofu chive spread on it. Or for lunch with salad dressing or a peanut curry sauce. Or as a base for dinner, or even dessert.

I haven’t tried a steamed sweet potato smoothie (although, come to think of it, maybe I should!). Sweet potatoes are delicious, incredibly versatile, and you can eat them in more ways than you think.

You can prepare them by boiling, steaming, baking, stir-frying, grilling, or cooking and mashing.

But the bottom line is: You just might want to cook sweet potatoes in whatever makes you most likely to eat — and enjoy them.

The only way I’d recommend not preparing sweet potatoes is by deep-frying them. This isn’t the healthiest way to cook food anyway. But for sweet potatoes, it can actually lead to the creation of acrylamide — a potential carcinogen.

If it works well with your recipe, try leaving the skin on for some potent fiber and nutrients. Sweet potato skin is also full of antioxidants. In fact, sweet potato skin may have over 10 times the antioxidant power of the flesh inside.

Including a few grams of fat in your sweet potato recipes can significantly increase the amount of beta-carotene your body absorbs from the meal. Just use a small amount of nut butter, avocado, olive oil (if you use oil), or have a fat source in the same meal.

5 Healthy Sweet Potato Recipes

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My mouth is watering as I think about all the ways you can prepare sweet potatoes.

Check out some of these healthy recipes if you want some delicious ideas.

Oil-Free Baked Sweet Potato Fries from the Conscious Eater

These healthy, seasoned, oil-free fries take little time to prepare and could pair well with just about any meal.

Sweet Potato Casserole with Herbed Mushroom Stuffing from Forks Over Knives

Sweet potatoes provide the base of this filling, nutrient-packed casserole layered with mushrooms, onions, cranberries, and savory herbs.

Berry-Stuffed Breakfast Sweet Potato from Forks Over Knives

Sweet potatoes may not be a traditional breakfast, but this hearty recipe will have you starting your day with a slew of antioxidants and a nice, warm belly.

Sweet Potato Coconut Curry Soup from Minimalist Baker

Here’s a sweet and creamy soup with a little bit of spice and fewer than 10 ingredients.

Healthy Sweet Potato Pie from Chocolate Covered Katie

You don’t only have to reserve your sweet potato pie consumption for the holidays. Enjoy this flavorful, filling, healthier dessert any time of year.

Sweeten Your Health with Sweet Potatoes

Fiber, complex carbohydrates, vitamins, and minerals are essential for good health. And sweet potatoes are a fantastic way to add them to your diet.

Many of us have ancestors who reaped their benefits for a very long time, and there’s certainly no need to stop now. Luckily, sweet potatoes are affordable, easy to use and store, and available in many parts of the world all year long.

Sounds pretty sweet to me!

Tell us in the comments:

Did any of the sweet potato health benefits surprise you?

Will you eat more sweet potatoes now?

What’s your favorite way to enjoy sweet potatoes?

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