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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,
  • ...38 more annotations...
  • 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

United States presidential election, 1896 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views

en.wikipedia.org/...es_presidential_election,_1896

united states election Bryan Populist farmer

shared by Kay Bradley on 13 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • One month after McKinley's nomination, the silverites took control of the Democratic convention held in Chicago on July 7–11. Most of the Southern and Western delegates were committed to implementing the free silver ideas of the Populist Party.
  • An attorney, former congressman, and unsuccessful U.S. Senate candidate named William Jennings Bryan filled the void
  • Bryan hailed from Nebraska and spoke for the farmers who were suffering from the economic depression following the Panic of 1893.
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  • Bryan delivered one of the greatest political speeches in American history, the "Cross of Gold" Speech
  • Bryan presented a passionate defense of farmers and factory workers struggling to survive the economic depression, and he attacked big-city business owners and leaders as the cause of much of the economic suffering.
  • He called for reform of the monetary system and an end to the gold standard, and promised government relief efforts for farmers and others hurt by the economic depression.
  • Several third parties were active in 1896. By far the most prominent was the Populist Party
  • Formed in 1892, the Populists represented agrarian interests in the South, West, and rural Midwest.
  • In the 1892 presidential election Populist candidate James B. Weaver had carried four states, and in 1894 the Populists had scored victories in congressional and state legislature races in a number of Southern and Western states.
  • By 1896 some Populists believed that they could replace the Democrats as the main opposition party to the Republicans.
  • At their national convention in 1896, the Populists chose Bryan as their presidential nominee.
  • With this election, the Populists began to be absorbed into the Democratic Party; within a few elections the party would disappear completely
Kay Bradley

Cattle, Frontiers, and Farming - AP U.S. History Topic Outlines - Study Notes - 0 views

www.apstudynotes.org/...cattle-frontiers-and-farming

agriculture farmer Populist

shared by Kay Bradley on 13 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • During that same time, however, over two million families purchased land from the railroads, land companies, or state governments. Homesteading was difficult since 160 acres on the dry plains were often not enough to support a family. The land was cheap, but livestock, equipment, and seed were expensive.
  • Transportation to haul produce to market was expensive, and interest rates on loans and mortgages were high
  • Unscrupulous companies often acquired the best timber and mineral properties through fraudulent practices including using “dummy” homesteaders and fake improvements
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  • Much of the public domain land passed quickly from the original homesteaders to promoters, not farmers.
  • Railroads had made it possible to sell crops at great distances, and farmers began to think in terms of a single cash crop rather than general farming to produce their families’ needs. Railroads benefited from this trade and sent agents to Europe to promote western settlement.
  • pecial steel plows were developed
  • sodbusters
  • fertile
  • barbed wire.
  • By 1883, Joseph Glidden’s company was making 600 miles of his patented wire each day.
  • In the late 1880s and early 1890s, a drought drove all but the most stubborn out.
  • “lifter” to cultivate rather than a plow to break up the soil
  • Dust Bowl years of the 1930s.
  • With the Homestead Act of 1862, a settler could claim as much as 160 acres (a quarter section) on the condition that he (occasionally she) lived on the land for five years, improved it, and paid a fee of $30. Alternatively, land could be bought after only six months’ residence at $1.25 per acre.
  • Special plows and new machinery such as threshers and hay mowers all allowed a farmer to produce more, but the expense of the devices often put him into debt.
Kay Bradley

The Granger Revolution - 0 views

www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/...dangers_grangers.html

railroad magnates monopoly agriculture farmer Populist

shared by Kay Bradley on 13 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • The Grangers, an organization of farmers formed in the late 1860s, were being oppressed by the dominance and ubiquitous influence of the railroads
  • Since there was no regulation of big business, and the nature of the economy necessitated high volume transportation of crops, these farmers had no choice but to give in to the whims of the railroad tycoons. When the burden became too great to endure, the Grangers organized a revolt, which eventually led to government regulation of the railroads and other monopolies.
  • The popularity of the Grangers was "less for its social and educational advantages than for the opportunity it presented for farmers to unite against the monopolistic practices of railroads and elevators and to institute for themselves cooperative methods of buying and selling.
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  • This meant that they had to rely on corporately owned railroads and grain elevators for the transport of their crops. To make matters worse, "elevators, often themselves owned by railroads, charged high prices for their services, weighed and graded grain without supervision, and used their influence with the railroads to ensure that cars were not available to farmers who sought to evade elevator service."
  • the Grangers read their Farmer's Declaration of Independence, which cited all of their grievances and in which they vowed to free themselves from the tyranny of monopoly
  • Munn v. Illinois
  • Following this ruling, several pieces of legislation,
  • were passed. Though they were soon repealed, they represented the first attempts at regulating a private monopoly
  • collectively known as the Granger
  • Laws,
Kay Bradley

History of Agriculture and Farm Machinery - 0 views

inventors.about.com/...blfarm.htm

history agriculture farm machinery AgTechnology timeline inventions farmers land

shared by Kay Bradley on 13 Feb 13 - Cached
  • In 1879, Anna Baldwin patented a milking machine that replaced hand milking
  • Cyrus H. McCormick
  • reaper
Kay Bradley

History of American Agriculture - Farmers and the Land - 0 views

inventors.about.com/...blfarm4.htm

AgTechnology timeline inventions farmers land

shared by Kay Bradley on 13 Feb 13 - Cached
  • Total population: 31,443,321
  • Total population: 38,558,371
  • Total population: 50,155,783
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • Total population: 62,941,714
  • Total population: 75,994,26
  • Total population: 91,972,266
  • 31% of labor force
  • 8% of labor force
  • 43% of labor force
  • Farmers made up 49% of labor force
  • 53% of labor force
  • Drought reduced settlement on the Great Plains
  • 1887-97
  • The sharecropping system in the South replaced the old slave plantation system
  • Homestead Act granted 160 acres to settlers who had worked the land 5 years
  • Cattle boom
  • range wars
Kay Bradley

History of American Agriculture - Farm Machinery and Technology - 0 views

inventors.about.com/...blfarm1.htm

AgTechnology agriculture timeline inventions

shared by Kay Bradley on 13 Feb 13 - Cached
  • commercial fertilizer: 6,116,700 tons
  • ommercial fertilizer: 3,738,300
  • commercial fertilizer: 1,845,900 tons
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • improved technology and resulting increases in farm production
  • 75-90 labor-hours required to produce 100 bushels of corn (2-1/2 acres)
  • 35-40 labor-hours required to produce 100 bushels (2-1/2 acres) of corn with 2-bottom gang plow, disk and peg-tooth harrow, and 2-row planter
  • with walking plow, harrow, and hand planting
  • About
  • commercial fertilizer: 6,845,800 tons
  • commercial fertilizer: 6,599,913
  • 15-20 labor-hours required to produce 100 bushels (2-1/2 acres) of corn with 2-bottom gang plow, 7-foot tandem disk, 4-section harrow, and 2-row planters, cultivators, and pickers
Kay Bradley

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz - 0 views

www.amphigory.com/oz.htm

Wizard of Oz Baum Gilded Age literature WizardOfOz

shared by Kay Bradley on 13 Feb 13 - Cached
  • publication in 1900
  • The Wizard of Oz is an entity unto itself, however, and was not originally written with a sequel in mind
  • Born near Syracuse in 1856, Baum was brought up in a wealthy home and early became interested in the theater. He wrote some plays which enjoyed brief success and then, with his wife and two sons, journeyed to Aberdeen, South Dakota, in 1887. Aberdeen was a little prairie town and there Baum edited the local weekly until it failed in 1891
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  • For many years Western farmers had been in a state of loud, though unsuccessful, revolt. While Baum was living in South Dakota not only was the frontier a thing of the past, but the Romantic view of benign nature had disappeared we well. The stark reality of the dry, open plains and the acceptance of man's Darwinian subservience to his environment served to crush Romantic idealism
  • prices
  • grasshoppers
  • drought
  • blizzards
  • juggling of freight rates
  • Baum's stay in South Dakota also covered the period of the formation of the Populist party, which Professor Nye likens to a fanatic "crusade".
  • Western farmers had for a long time sought governmental aid in the form of economic panaceas, but to no avail. The Populist movement symbolized a desperate attempt to use the power of the ballot[8].
  • Moreover, he took part in the pivotal election of 1896, marching in "torch-light parades for William Jennings Bryan"
  • could have been unaffected by Bryan's campaign. Putting all the farmers' hopes in a basket labeled "free coinage of silver," Bryan's platform rested mainly on the issue of adding silver to the nation's gold standard. Though he lost, he did at least bring the plight of the little man into national focus[11].
  • Nevertheless, Professor Nye quotes Baum as having a desire to write stories that would "bear the stamp of our times and depict the progressive fairies of today.
  • Yet the original Oz book conceals an unsuspected depth
  • children's story with a symbolic allegory implicit within its story line and characterizations
  • subtle parable, Baum delineated a Midwesterner's vibrant and ironic portrait of this country as it entered the twentieth century.
  • orothy, who was an orphan
  • Dorothy's house has come down on the Wicked Witch of the East, killing her
  • Notice that evil ruled in both the East and the West; after Dorothy's coming it rules only in the West.
  • The Wicked Witch of the East had kept the little Munchkin people "in bondage for many years, making them slave for her night and day.
  • In this way Eastern witchcraft dehumanized a simple laborer so that the faster and better he worked the more quickly he became a kind of machine. Here is a Populist view of evil Eastern influences on honest labor which could hardly be more pointed.
  • There is one thing seriously wrong with being made of tin; when it rains rust sets in.
  • Tin Woodman had been standing in the same position for a year without moving before Dorothy came along and oiled his joints
  • he Tin Woodman's situation has an obvious parallel in the condition of many Eastern workers after the depression of 1893
  • While Tin Woodman is standing still, rusted solid, he deludes himself into thinking he is no longer capable of that most human of sentiments, love
  • the country is divided in a very orderly fashion. In the North and South the people are ruled by good witches, who are not quite as powerful as the wicked ones of the East and West
  • Emerald City ruled by the Wizard of Oz
  • Dorothy is Baum's Miss Everyman
  • Dorothy sets out on the Yellow Brick Road wearing the Witch of the East's magic Silver Shoes
  • Silver shoes walking on a golden road
  • orothy becomes the innocent agent of Baum's ironic view of the Silver issue.
  • neither Dorothy, nor the good Witch of the North, nor the Munchkins understand the power of these shoes. The allegory is abundantly clear
  • William Allen White wrote an article in 1896 entitled "What's the Matter With Kansas?". In it he accused Kansas farmers of ignorance, irrationality and general muddle-headedness.
  • the Scarecrow displays a terrible sense of inferiority and self doubt, for he has determined that he needs real brains to replace the common straw in his head
  • the Cowardly Lion
  • As King of Beasts he explains, "I learned that if I roared very loudly every living thing was frightened and got out of my way."
  • Born a coward, he sobs, "Whenever there is danger my heart begins to beat fast
  • The Lion represents Bryan himself
  • In the election of 1896 Bryan lost the vote of Eastern Labor, though he tried hard to gain their support.
  • "struck at the Tin Woodman with his sharp claws." But, to his surprise, "he could make no impression on the tin, although the Woodman fell over in the road and lay still.
  • Baum here refers to the fact that in 1896 workers were often pressured into voting for McKinley and gold by their employers.
  • The magic Silver Shoes belong to Dorothy
  • ilver's potent charm, which had come to mean so much to so many in the Midwest, could not be entrusted to a political symbol
  • All together now the small party moves toward the Emerald City. Coxey's Army of tramps and indigents, marching to ask President Cleveland for work in 1894, appears no more naively innocent than this group of four characters going to see a humbug Wizard, to request favors that only the little girl among them deserves.
  • Those who enter the Emerald City must wear green glasses
  • The Wizard, a little bumbling old man, hiding behind a facade of paper mache and noise, might be any president from Grant to McKinley
  • he symbolizes the American criterion for leadership -- he is able to be everything to everybody.
  • the Wizard assumes different shapes, representing different views toward national leadership. To Dorothy he appears as an enormous head, "bigger than the head of the biggest giant
  • The Wizard has asked them all to kill the Witch of the West
  • he golden road does not go in that direction and so they must follow the sun, as have many pioneers in the past
  • The Witch of the West uses natural forces to achieve her ends; she is Baum's version of sentient and malign nature.
  • Baum makes these Winged Monkeys into an Oz substitute for the plains Indians.
  • Baum's monkeys are not inherently bad; their actions depend wholly upon the bidding of others. Under the control of an evil influence, they do evil. Under the control of goodness and innocence, as personified by Dorothy, the monkeys are helpful and kind, although unable to take her to Kansas. Says the Monkey King, "We belong to this country alone, and cannot leave it" (p. 213). The same could be said with equal truth of the first Americans.
  • The Witch assumes that proportions of a kind of western Mark Hanna or Banker Boss, who, through natural malevolence, manipulates the people and holds them prisoner by cynically taking advantage of their innate innocence.
  • Dorothy destroys the evil Witch by angrily dousing her with a bucket of water. Water, that precious commodity which the drought-ridden farmers on the great plains needed so badly, and which if correctly used could create an agricultural paradise, or at least dissolve a wicked witch.
  • What a wonderful lesson for youngsters of the decade when Benjamin Harrison, Grover Cleveland and William McKinley were hiding in the White House.
  • Formerly the Wizard was a mimic, a ventriloquist and a circus balloonist
  • our little Wizard comes from Omaha, Nebraska, a center of Populist agitation
  • Current historiography tends to criticize the Populist movement for its "delusions, myths and foibles
  • Their desires, as well as the Wizard's cleverness in answering them, are all self-delusion. Each of these characters carries within him the solution to his own problem, were he only to view himself objectively.
  • Like any good politician he gives the people what they want
  • hroughout the story Baum poses a central thought; the American desire for symbols of fulfillment is illusory. Real needs lie elsewhere.
  • In this way Baum tells us that the Silver crusade at least brought back Dorothy's lovely spirit to the disconsolate plains farmer. Her laughter, love and good will are no small addition to that gray land, although the magic of Silver has been lost forever as a result.
  • Thereby farm interests achieve national importance, industrialism moves West and Bryan commands only a forest full of lesser politicians.
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