Group items tagged

the salmonella enterica bacterium, of the Paratyphi C variety

“We cannot say with certainty that S enterica was the cause of the cocoliztli epidemic,” said team member Kirsten Bos. “We do believe that it should be considered a strong candidate.”

The complex and its buildings vaguely recall a Southwest landmark frequently mistaken for the city of the future: Arcosanti, the architect Paolo Soleri’s 1970 “urban laboratory” nestled in the mountains north of Phoenix. It’s oddly fitting: Soleri imagined a sustainable desert utopia, as well as speculative space “arcologies”—self-sustaining architectural ecologies, delicately rendered as hypothetical asteroid-belt cities or prototype ships

The only spacecraft we see on the tour is a model of Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo, glimpsed from a distance in an otherwise empty hangar. Even the spacecraft isn’t real.

the name Spaceport America suggests theatrics. There are several commercial spaceports throughout the United States, some of which sport more activity and tenants. Most of Virgin Galactic’s testing has happened at the Mojave Air and Space Port; Virginia’s Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport recently signed on the SpaceX competitor Vector as a customer.Others, like Oklahoma’s Air and Space Port, seem to be even more like ghost towns than this one. But New Mexico’s gambit suggests we are at the spaceport of the nation. It doesn’t feel like the frontier of private space travel so much as a movie set.

Many promises for technologies of future urbanism start as desert prototypes

New Mexico examples tend to include slightly more dystopian rehearsals: Much of the state’s existing science and defense industries emerged from bringing Manhattan Project scientists to what, at the time, was the middle of nowhere to test nuclear weapons—essentially, to practice ending the world.

most of my fellow tourists take the premise of ubiquitous space travel to colonies on Mars as a fait accompli. I’m not sure why people in a desert would fantasize about going somewhere even harder to inhabit

Humanity dreams of going to space for many of the same reasons some people went to the desert: because it is there, because they hope to get rich extracting natural resources they find there, and because they suspect mysterious, new terrains can’t be any worse than the irredeemable wreckage of the landscape they’re leaving behind

believing in the inevitability of Mars colonies is maybe no less idealistic than believing in the Southwest itself

The romance and promise of the American West was built, in part, on federal land grants to private corporations that promised to bring boomtowns to places previously otherwise deemed uninhabitable wastelands. Cities rose and fell with the rerouting of railroads

To manifest destiny’s proponents, to doubt the inevitability of technological and social progress via the railroad was tantamount to doubting the will of God. Today, questioning the value of (mostly) privately funded space development likewise feels like doubting human progress

I wonder if the future always feels like rehearsal until it arrives, or if it is always rehearsal, only seeming like it has arrived when the run-through loses its novelty. Maybe all of the impatient skeptics will be proven wrong this year, and the future will finally arrive at Spaceport America. Here in the desert, a better future always seems to be right around the corner

conversos—or people who shared ancestry with them—came to the Americas in disproportionate numbers

the Spanish Inquisition reached into the colonies, too. Those found guilty of observing Jewish practices in Mexico, for example, were burned at the stake.

Nearly a quarter of the Latin Americans shared 5 percent or more of their ancestry with people living in North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean, including self-identified Sephardic Jews. DNA alone cannot prove that conversos were the source of this ancestry, but it fits with the historical record. This pattern of widespread but low North African and eastern Mediterranean ancestry in the population suggests that its source is centuries old, putting the date around the early days of New Spain. In contrast, more recent immigration to Latin America from Italy and Germany in the late 19th century show up concentrated in relatively few people in a few geographic areas.

By the 17th century, Graizbord says, most conversos had assimilated and lost any connection to Jewish customs. Today, some of their descendants are reclaiming their Jewish identity. They can join Jewish genealogy groups. Some have even converted to Judaism. DNA tests are fanning interest, too. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the New York politician whose family comes from Puerto Rico, recently revealed during a Hanukkah event that she has Sephardic Jewish ancestry.

The late historian David J Weber and other Borderlands scholars have shown the relative weakness of the Spanish compared with the Indigenous people of the southwest. In 1680, for example, after a century of missions, settlement and violence, the Pueblo drove thousands of settlers out of the province of Santa Fe de Nuevo México and killed hundreds more. These were peoples who had lived in their lands for centuries, even after the arrival of Europeans in the Western hemisphere, and only in the 19th century did ‘Mexico’ and ‘the United States’ take shape around them.

a crucial piece of research infrastructure for early American history, as well as the related histories of South America, Africa and the Caribbean

there are also new ways to see subjects and people that had always been understood as inherently Atlantic, particularly the slave trade, slavery and enslaved people. Scholars engaging these vitally important subjects involving violence inflicted on millions of people have innovated both new methods and new resources. The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, for example, began to be shared with libraries and scholars all over the world in the late 1990s as a CD-ROM. Now Slave Voyages, a website containing information from that database, holds information on more than 36,000 individual slaving expeditions conducted between the early 1500s and the mid-1800s, as well as in addition thousands of trips in the intra-American slave trade.

The persistence of Indian power from the vantage of Indian country has now captured the attention of a new generation of historians. This is a change from scholarship looking to understand how colonial officials and settlers had wrested control of North American spaces – or perhaps shared control

Research is also showing just how deeply embedded slavery was in early New England. Households from Puritan Boston to Connecticut River Valley towns to the Patriot strongholds enslaved African-descended people. The Atlantic slave trade was massive in scale: many millions of African-descended people were enslaved, and so many people were directly involved in the trade as buyers and sellers of human beings that it is hard to overstate the extent to which slavery pervaded the political economy of early America. What people ate, what they wore, where they lived and how they worked were, in most cases, all touched by the effects of the slave trade and the labour of enslaved people.

The slave trade reshaped Native warfare and captive-taking, such that Native Americans were enslaved and traded away out of North America, just as Africans were brought on to the continent. In the aftermath of King Philip’s war, for example, hundreds of Native Americans who surrendered to the English colonists were sold to the Caribbean as slaves. In the upper Midwest and French Canada in the same period, Native warfare ended up providing captives to the Europeans eager to buy, trade and sell Native people into slavery. In short, the enslavement of Native Americans was responding to the plantation economy fuelled by the enslavement of Africans.

how were Native Americans counted in that first census? It’s hard to say. Some of the regions where the census was incomplete were places with more Native people. Some argued that the sovereignty of Native Americans placed them outside the census. And in places where we know there were Native Americans, such as New England, where a rhetoric as well as a policy of erasing their existence was well underway, they might have been counted in the category of ‘other free persons’ or in some cases, ‘slaves’.

Historians do not typically think of their research in this way; our research reveals the world as it was, before we knew what it would become. Perhaps this also means that historians often seem to be working at odds to the needs of the nation. Certainly in the US, research historians have been delivering a very different picture of the American past than official commemoration, monuments and the appetite for popular history suggest that the American public wants. What is on the shelves or bestseller lists is decidedly not what scholars are producing, and the longstanding claim is that this divergence is indicative of a public desire for patriotic and straightforward history. But is it? The success of the 1619 Project, even if measured solely in sales and readership, suggests otherwise. And still the most shocking feature of this project is neither the assertion that slavery and race are central, even foundational, to American history, nor the reaction to decentring liberty, but that this would be controversial at all, given the weight of decades of historical research documenting it.

In addition to being good history from a historian’s vantage, based on fresh research, new methods and new perspectives, that deeper, richer, fuller past is better suited to explaining our complex present

“Trust in this British government’s good faith, never high, is now minimal … on all sides in Northern Ireland.” 

Johnson declared recently that Northern Ireland is a part of the U.K. in exactly the same fashion as are its other constituent parts: England, Scotland and Wales. This is simply untrue. No U.K. prime minister since Irish Partition in 1921 has sought to pretend such a thing. Modern British governments have acknowledged that Northern Ireland remains a part of the U.K. — as long as that is the wish of its own people. And polls have shown a majority in the north now favors holding a referendum on exactly that proposition.

Unless Britain treads very carefully indeed, which recent events suggest that this government is not good at, militant Irish Republicanism could revive, the killing on the streets resume.

In the grand scheme of things — compared with U.S. confrontation with China, Afghanistan threatened with anarchy, Russian disruption of the democratic West — none of the friction points between Britain and the EU threatens an immediate or severe crisis. It was always inevitable that Brexit would generate issues and disputes. But the tensions involving Gibraltar, migration and Northern Ireland highlight the perils facing Johnson’s nation as a consequence of having made the historic choice to go it alone. The standard-bearers for Brexit made grandiose claims that it would “set Britain free” to develop its full potential. But freedom can also bring loneliness. Johnson is accumulating foreign adversaries — not quite enemies, but people who do not wish him well — much faster than he is winning allies and admirers.

Throughout the five-hundred-year history of Western empires, the security of European colonizers has trumped the security and independence of the colonized.

The historical record shows that, however terrible, violent anticolonial uprisings were invariably smashed with far greater violence than they unleashed. The violence of the “civilized” is far more effective than the violence of the “barbarians” and “savages.”

civilian destruction tends to be greatest when security retaliation reaches the level of what I have called “permanent security”—extreme responses by states to security threats, enacted in the name of self-defense. Permanent security actions target entire civilian populations under the logic of ensuring that terrorists and insurgents can never again represent a threat. It is a project, in other words, that seeks to avert future threats by anticipating them today.

to ensure that Palestinian militants can never again attack Israel, its armed forces are subjecting two million Palestinians to serial war crimes and mass expulsion

If Western states support this solution for Israeli permanent security—as the United States appears to be with its budgeting of refugee support in neighboring countries under the guise of a “humanitarian” gesture—they will be continuing a venerable tradition. During, between, and after both twentieth-century world wars, large-scale population transfers and exchanges took place across the Eurasian continent to radically homogenize empires and nations. Millions of people fled or were expelled or transferred from Turkey, Greece, Austria, Italy, India, Palestine, Central and Eastern Europe. Progressive Europeans reasoned then that long-term peace would be secured if troublesome minorities were removed. This ideology—which the governments of Russia, China, Turkey, India, and Sri Lanka share today—maintains that indigenous and minority populations must submit to their subordination and, if they resist, face subjugation, deportation, or destruction. Antiterrorism operations that kill thousands of civilians are taken to be acceptable responses to terrorist operations that kill far fewer civilians

Jabotinsky’s famous “Iron Wall” argument from 1923, in which the Revisionist Zionist leader argued that Palestinian resistance was understandable, inevitable—and anticolonial. Speaking of Palestinians, Jabotinsky wrote that “they feel at least the same instinctive jealous love of Palestine, as the old Aztecs felt for ancient Mexico, and their Sioux for their rolling Prairies.” Because Palestinians could not be bought off with material promises, Jabotinsky wanted the British Mandate authorities to enable Zionist colonization until Jews, then a tiny minority of Palestine, reached a majority. “Zionist colonisation must either stop, or else proceed regardless of the native population,” he concluded. “Which means that it can proceed and develop only under the protection of a power that is independent of the native population—behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot breach.”

Hamas thus reasons that Palestinians have nothing to gain by conforming to a U.S.-led “rules-based international order” that has forgotten about them.

When state parties to the UNGC negotiated in 1947 and 1948, they distinguished genocidal intent from military necessity, so that states could wage the kind of wars that Russia and Israel are conducting today and avoid prosecution for genocide. The high legal standard stems from the restrictive UNGC definition of genocide, which was modeled on the Holocaust and requires that a perpetrator intend to “destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such” (the dolus specialis) in at least one of five prescribed ways (the actus reus). The words “as such” are widely regarded as imposing a stringent intent requirement: an act counts as genocide only if individuals are targeted solely by virtue of their group membership—like Jews during World War II—and not for strategic reasons like suppressing an insurgency.

Together, the United States and Russia have killed many millions of civilians in their respective imperial wars in Korea, Vietnam, and Chechnya; so have postcolonial states like Nigeria and Pakistan in fighting secessions. Genocide allegations were leveled in some of these cases in global campaigns like the one we see now, but none stuck, and they are largely forgotten in the annals of mass violence against civilian

Adding to the difficulty of establishing genocidal intent is the uncertainty in international humanitarian law about the legality of civilians killed “incidentally” in the course of attacking legitimate military targets. While the majority of international lawyers agree that civilian deaths are acceptable so long as they are not disproportionate in relation to the military advantage sought, others argue that bombing crowded marketplaces and hospitals regardless of military objective is necessarily indiscriminate and thus illegal.

They go far in excusing all Israeli conduct in the name of its legitimate self-defense; the US even seems to have demurred on whether the Geneva Conventions are applicable to Palestinian territories. It is thus unsurprising that they have not pressed the Israeli government to explain how cutting off water, food, and power to Gaza—a “war of starvation” as the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor put it—is a legitimate military tactic, one not covered by the UNGC, which declares one genocidal predicate act to be “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” But if so-called humanitarian pauses are occurring to allow in a little, if grossly inadequate, aid, and the “total siege” is lifted after the military defeat of Hamas (should it happen), it will be difficult to argue in a legal context that Israel’s strangling of Gaza was a genocidal act.

the “Dahiya Doctrine,” which, they argue, dictates “disproportionate attacks, including against *civilian* structures and infrastructure.” This is clearly illegal.

Excessive reprisals, we should recall, are a staple of colonial warfare and state consolidation

Since genocide is a synonym for the destruction of peoples, whether the killing and suppression of their culture is motivated by destruction “as such” or by deterrence, the experience is the same: a destructive attack on a people, and not just random civilians. But the UNGC does not reflect the victim’s perspective. It protects the perpetrators: states that seek permanent security.

Unless the conditions of permanent insecurity are confronted, permanent security aspirations and practices will haunt Palestinians and Israelis.