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Kay Bradley

Candidates and the Truth About America - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...d-the-truth-about-america.html

america exceptionalism statistics world rank nytimes com

shared by Kay Bradley on 21 Oct 12 - No Cached
  • dismal statistics on child poverty, declaring it an outrage that of the 35 most economically advanced countries, the United States ranks 34th, edging out only Romania
  • educational achievement, noting that this country comes in only 28th in the percentage of 4-year-olds enrolled in preschool
  • 14th in the percentage of 25-to-34-year-olds with a higher education
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  • infant mortality, where the United States ranks worse than 48 other countries and territories,
  • the United States trails most of Europe, Australia and Canada in social mobility.
  • America is indeed No. 1, he might declare — in locking its citizens up, with an incarceration rate far higher than that of the likes of Russia, Cuba, Iran or China
  • in obesity, easily outweighing second-place Mexico and with nearly 10 times the rate of Japan
  • in energy use per person, with double the consumption of prosperous Germany.
  • This national characteristic, often labeled American exceptionalism, may inspire some people and politicians to perform heroically, rising to the level of our self-image
  • Democrats are more loath than Republicans to look squarely at the government debt crisis indisputably looming with the aging of baby boomers and the ballooning cost of Medicare
  • the self-censorship it produces in politicians is bipartisan, even if it is more pronounced on the left for some issues and the right for others.
  • epublicans are more reluctant than Democrats to acknowledge the rise of global temperatures and its causes and consequences.
  • An American politician who speaks too candidly about the country’s faults, she went on to say, risks being labeled with that most devastating of epithets: un-American.
Kay Bradley

Digital History The Great Depression in Global Perspective - 0 views

www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm

Great Depression depression economics history

shared by Kay Bradley on 29 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • International trade fell 30 percent
  • "Beggar-thy-neighbor" trade policies were a major reason why the Depression persisted as long as it did.
  • 30 million people were unemploye
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  • One response to the depression was military dictatorship
  • collapse in raw material and agricultural commodity prices led to social unrest,
  • fascism and militarism
  • Hitler outlawed labor unions
  • restructured German
  • industry into a series of cartels
  • massive program of military rearmament
  • totalitarian communism.
  • Stalin's
  • welfare capitalism
  • Canada
  • Great Britain
  • France
  • Under welfare capitalism, government assumed ultimate responsibility for promoting a reasonably fair distribution of wealth and power and for providing security against the risks of bankruptcy, unemployment, and destitution.
  • the economic decline brought on by the Depression was steeper and more protracted in the United States.
  • European countries significantly reduced unemployment by 1936. However, the American jobless rate still exceeded 17 percent as late as 1939, when World War II began in Europe. It did not drop below 14 percent until 1941.
  • It produced a major political realignment
  • committed, to varying degrees, to interventionist government.
  • he Depression strengthened the federal presence in American life, producing such innovations as national old age pensions, unemployment compensation, aid to dependent children, public housing, federally subsidized school lunches, insured bank deposits, the minimum wage, and stock market regulation.
  • fundamentally altered labor relations
  • national labor policy protective of collective bargaining.
  • transformed the farm economy by introducing federal price supports and rural electrification
  • fundamental transformation in public attitudes.
  • t led Americans to view the federal government as the ultimate protector of public well-being.
Kay Bradley

1491 - Charles C. Mann - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...302445

shared by Kay Bradley on 16 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • It is Erickson's belief that this entire landscape—30,000 square miles of forest mounds surrounded by raised fields and linked by causeways—was constructed by a complex, populous society more than 2,000 years ago.
  • When I went to high school, in the 1970s, I was taught that Indians came to the Americas across the Bering Strait about 12,000 years ago, that they lived for the most part in small, isolated groups, and that they had so little impact on their environment that even after millennia of habitation it remained mostly wilderness.
  • In 1810 Henry Brackenridge came to Cahokia, in what is now southwest Illinois, just across the Mississippi from St. Louis. Born close to the frontier, Brackenridge was a budding adventure writer; his Views of Louisiana, published three years later, was a kind of nineteenth-century Into Thin Air,
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  • Cahokia
  • Bancroft changed his mind about Cahokia, but not about Indians. To the end of his days he regarded them as "feeble barbarians, destitute of commerce and of political connection."
  • Samuel Eliot Morison, the winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, closed his monumental European Discovery of America (1974) with the observation that Native Americans expected only "short and brutish lives, void of hope for any future."
  • 1987 American History: A Survey, a standard high school textbook by three well-known historians, described the Americas before Columbus as "empty of mankind and its works."
  • The story of Europeans in the New World, the book explained, "is the story of the creation of a civilization where none existed."
  • Alfred Crosby, a historian at the University of Texas, came to other conclusions. Crosby's The Columbian Exchange: Biological Consequences of 1492 caused almost as much of a stir when it was published, in 1972,
  • Human history, in Crosby's interpretation, is marked by two world-altering centers of invention: the Middle East and central Mexico,
  • 10,000 years ago. In the next few millennia humankind invented the wheel, the metal tool, and agriculture. The Sumerians eventually put these inventions together, added writing, and became the world's first civilization
  • But in agriculture they handily outstripped the children of Sumeria. Every tomato in Italy, every potato in Ireland, and every hot pepper in Thailand came from this hemisphere
  • Indian crops dramatically reduced hunger, Crosby says, which led to an Old World population boom.
  • Disease was hunger's constant companion. During epidemics in London the dead were heaped onto carts "like common dung" (the simile is Daniel Defoe's) and trundled through the streets.
  • Indians had ailments of their own, notably parasites, tuberculosis, and anemia
  • life-spans in America were only as long as or a little longer than those in Europe
  • Some early colonists gave the same answer. Horrifying the leaders of Jamestown and Plymouth, scores of English ran off to live with the Indians.
  • ather than domesticating animals for meat, Indians retooled whole ecosystems to grow bumper crops of elk, deer, and bison.
  • Millennia of exuberant burning shaped the plains into vast buffalo farms. When Indian societies disintegrated, forest invaded savannah in Wisconsin, Illinois, Kansas, Nebraska, and the Texas Hill Country.
  • Indeed, some anthropologists have called the Amazon forest itself a cultural artifact—that is, an artificial object.
  • This sort of phrase still provokes vehement objection—but the main dissenters are now ecologists and environmentalists.
  • Oxford University Press has just issued the third volume of a huge catalogue of the "cultivated landscapes" of the Americas
  • In recent years one of these caves, La Caverna da Pedra Pintada (Painted Rock Cave), has drawn attention in archaeological circles.
  • Amazonia says that the apparent lushness of the rain forest is a sham. The soils are poor and can't hold nutrients—
  • Green activists saw the implication: development in tropical forests destroys both the forests and their developers. Meggers's account had enormous public impact—Amazonia is one of the wellsprings of the campaign to save rain forests.
  • Moundbuilders of the Amazon (1991), was like the anti-matter version of Amazonia
  • Marajó, she argued, was "one of the outstanding indigenous cultural achievements of the New World," a powerhouse that lasted for more than a thousand years, had "possibly well over 100,000" inhabitants, and covered thousands of square miles. Rather than damaging the forest, Marajó's "earth construction" and "large, dense populations" had improved it: the most luxuriant and diverse growth was on the mounds formerly occupied by the Marajóara.
  • William Balée, the Tulane anthropologist, cautiously estimated that about 12 percent of the nonflooded Amazon forest was of anthropogenic origin—directly or indirectly created by human beings.
  • In the late 1990s Woods and others began careful measurements in the lower Amazon. They indeed found lots of inhospitable terrain.
  • But they also discovered swaths of terra preta—rich, fertile "black earth" that anthropologists increasingly believe was created by human beings.
  • Apparently," Woods and the Wisconsin geographer Joseph M. McCann argued in a presentation last summer, "at some threshold level ... dark earth attains the capacity to perpetuate—even regenerate itself—thus behaving more like a living 'super'-organism than an inert material."
  • "Betty Meggers would just die if she heard me saying this," Woods told me. "Deep down her fear is that this data will be misused."
  • All of this is described as "wilderness" in the tourist brochures. It's not, if researchers like Roosevelt are correct.
  • Within a few hundred yards the human presence seemed to vanish. I felt alone and small, but in a way that was curiously like feeling exalted. If that place was not wilderness, how should I think of it? Since the fate of the forest is in our hands, what should be our goal for its future?
  • A keystone species, according to the Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson, is a species "that affects the survival and abundance of many other species." Keystone species have a disproportionate impact on their ecosystems. Removing them, Wilson adds, "results in a relatively significant shift in the composition of the [ecological] community."
  • In ecological terms, he says, the Indians were the "keystone species" of American ecosystems.
  • When disease swept Indians from the land, Kay says, what happened was exactly that. The ecological ancien régime collapsed, and strange new phenomena emerged
  • Throughout eastern North America the open landscape seen by the first Europeans quickly filled in with fores
  • Cronon's Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (1983) belongs on the same shelf as works by Crosby and Dobyns.
  • Crediting Indians with the role of keystone species has implications for the way the current Euro-American members of that keystone species manage the forests, watersheds, and endangered species of America. Because a third of the United States is owned by the federal government, the issue inevitably has political ramifications. In Amazonia, fabled storehouse of biodiversity, the stakes are global
  • Guided by the pristine myth, mainstream environmentalists want to preserve as much of the world's land as possible in a putatively intact state. But "intact," if the new research is correct, means "run by human beings for human purposes."
  • Kay Bradley on 16 Aug 13
     
    Article about pre-contact Americas
Kay Bradley

YouTube - 2 Million Minutes: A Global Examination (13 Minute Cut) Part 1 - 0 views

www.youtube.com/watch

shared by Kay Bradley on 17 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • Kay Bradley on 17 Nov 10
     
    check this out! Pretty provocative documentary.
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