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Javier E

What The History of Fossil Fuels Teaches Us About Renewable Energy - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...415749

energy renewable policy economics history

shared by Javier E on 15 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • First, the resources. Pretty much all available energy on the earth comes from energy radiated by the sun.
  • The exceptions to the sunlight rule are: geothermal energy, which comes from the very hot core of the earth (often in the form of volcanoes); tidal energy, which is the result of water interacting with the gravity of the earth, moon, and sun; and nuclear energy
  • Some of these resources are renewable, but at the moment, the dominant suppliers of energy to human civilization (the fossil fuels) are not.
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  • Smil’s “prime movers,” which he defines as “energy converters able to produce kinetic (mechanical) energy into forms suitable for human use.” For most of the time that there have been humans on earth, the best prime movers have been people
  • while Smil agrees with pretty much everyone else that the next big energy transition is from nonrenewable to renewable resources, he is cautious about the timing. At one level, the change is plainly inevitable.
  • Things really kicked off with the invention of the steam engine in the 1700s—the first prime mover powered by fuels (100,000W in 1800; 3,000,000W in 1900). This was followed by the steam turbine (75,000W in 1890; 25,000,000W in 1914). The prime-mover revolution is rounded out by the internal-combustion engine in the later half of the 1800s and the gas turbine in the 1930s
  • Smil is concerned with the series of transitions that have occurred throughout human history, both in terms of resources and prime movers. These transitions are somewhat interrelated, but not completely. For example, you can run a steam turbine off of wood, coal, or nuclear power so a transition between those resources does not necessitate a change in prime movers. On the other hand, you can’t feed an internal-combustion engine with wind or wood. At the moment, all of our best prime movers rely heavily on fossil fuels.
  • how prime movers have increased in power over the course of history. Remember that orange lifted to a counter? If you expend that effort over a second, that's 1W (a watt) of work. Smil calculates that the average healthy human can sustain 60W–100W of work throughout a working day. At some point in prehistory, people started yoking domesticated animals (250W–800W depending on the breed). Then came sails, then a few thousand years later, waterwheels (2,000W–4,000W in medieval times) and then a thousand years after that, windmills (1,000W–10,0000W in 1900).
  • The barriers to total conversion—much like the problems that plague our energy infrastructure—are a funny mixture of policy, technology, infrastructure, and physics
  • Where he does differ is in his opinion about how quickly it can happen. Where Gore calls for a complete conversion to renewables in 10 years, Smil thinks the transition will take generations.
  • For example, the possibility that nuclear power might take up any of the load in the U.S. seems extremely low, given that no new plants have been built since the 1970s. That’s not a physics problem, that’s a policy problem.
  • As far as converting to wind and solar, Smil sees much bigger technological and infrastructural hurdles. A switch to renewables means a transition in terms of both resources and prime movers.
  • The character of renewable resources is fundamentally different from that of fossil fuels. Where fuels are highly dense stores of energy and relatively easy to reliably transport, the renewables are characterized by the highly fickle ebbs and flows of nature. Some days are sunny, others have clouds.
  • Energy density is sometimes used to discuss the capacity of volumes of batteries and fuel. Smil is interested instead in measuring energy per unit of the earth’s surface. He uses the figure as a means to try to compare the various means of producing energy and the demands for using it.
  • to measure the energy density of coal, you look at how much energy you get from burning coal and divide that by how much of the earth’s surface needs to be given over to coal production to get it.
  • Because the best way of mitigating the irregularity in how they generate power is to create interconnected grids, an energy regime based on wind and solar needs to lay a lot of power lines through a lot of jurisdictions and permitting regimes. Physics meets infrastructure, and policy. Renewables are simply more diffuse.
  • “Mass adoption of renewable energies would thus necessitate a fundamental reshaping of modern energy infrastructures,” Smil writes. We'd go from harvesting energy from concentrated sources and diffusing it outwards, to gathering energy from diffuse sources and concentrating it inwards towards relatively few centers. This is, fundamentally, a very different way of organizing how we use land.
  • This is not impossible, and in the long run it is probably inevitable. But we underestimate the effort required and changes that will be necessary at our peril.
  • The switch from wood to coal ushered in industrialization which completely upended social-structures and human relationships all over the world. The rise of oil transformed geo-politics, turning some countries into energy superpowers overnight. No one knows how deeply our society might be transformed by the transition to renewables. Or whether we'll be able to do it fast enough.
johnsonel7

Climate change has contributed to droughts since 1900, and is likely to get worse, says... - 0 views

www.nationalgeographic.com/...ht-past-century-via-tree-rings

climate change research

shared by johnsonel7 on 19 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • Using studies of tree rings going back centuries, scientists have unearthed clear evidence that the rise of human-generated greenhouse gases was having an effect on global drought conditions as early as 1900.
  • The tree-ring data analyzed in the study highlight three periods over the past 120 years in which a human fingerprint on drought and moisture is, to varying degrees, evident.
  • The last period, from 1981 to 2017, saw a reappearance of the human influence on drought and moisture. The study concludes that this signal is “likely to grow stronger in the next several decades,” adding that the “human consequences of this, particularly drying over large parts of North America and Eurasia, are likely to be severe.”
anonymous

Yellow Fever killed 10 percent in Philadelphia - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...n-percent-residents-still-died

history US

shared by anonymous on 21 May 20 - No Cached
  • In summer 1793, a malignant visitation spread over the nation’s capital, carrying off young and old, poor and prosperous in agonizing ways.People collapsed in the streets untended and died horrible deaths at home, their skin turning yellow, their vomit dark with blood.
  • Families were wiped out. Handshaking stopped. Citizens avoided one another and covered their faces with cloth.Half the residents fled the city, including President George Washington. Schools were closed. Some roads outside town were guarded to keep refugees away.This was Philadelphia, the U.S. capital from 1790 to 1800. Wagons arriving from the city were burned as a precaution. Letters and newspapers from Philadelphia were handled with tongs.
  • During the worst of it, a hundred people were buried a day. Historian J.H. Powell’s classic 1949 account is entitled “Bring Out Your Dead,” after the calls of the roving burial teams.What was destroying them, scientists say, was the first virus found to cause human disease.
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  • “For every death, there’s about 21 other infections,” she said modeling showed. So most of Philadelphia’s 50,000 people probably were infected. “They were either lucky that they didn’t develop disease or had mild disease compared to those that were unlucky and died.”Yellow fever is one of more than 200 known human viruses, according to the National Institutes of Health. They include those that cause HIV/AIDS, Ebola, polio, smallpox, measles, mumps, rabies, the common cold and now the novel coronavirus.
  • In the late 1800s, scientists were just starting to realize that strange microbes smaller than bacteria were causing disorders in plants and animals. Bacteria, which had been discovered in the 1670s, had been associated with human illnesses such as typhoid fever, cholera and tuberculosis.
  • U.S. Army physician Walter Reed reported in 1900 that the leading suspect bacteria was not found in the blood of fever cases he studied in Cuba.There was an alien “parasite” at work, he believed.“At the time they didn’t even call it a virus,” Staples said. “They didn’t know really what a virus was.”
  • In 1900, Reed set up what he called an “experimental sanitary station” in Cuba, where yellow fever was prevalent. He named it Camp Lazear, for Jesse W. Lazear, a medical colleague who had died of the fever that year.
  • After extensive testing on volunteer patients who were infected, Reed confirmed that mosquitoes were the carrier and eliminated bacteria as a cause.
  • The yellow fever virus was isolated in 1927, and scientists soon came up with an effective vaccine, called 17D, a weakened form of the virus itself. It’s still in use, and a recent scholarly paper called it “one of the most outstanding human vaccines ever developed.”
  • But in Philadelphia in 1793, the only remedy would be something that killed mosquitoes.
Javier E

Opinion | Why Did Racial Progress Stall in America? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...race-american-history.html

racial justice progress crisis culture politics

shared by Javier E on 04 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • n the popular narrative of American history, Black Americans made essentially no measurable progress toward equality with white Americans until the lightning-bolt changes of the civil rights revolution. If that narrative were charted along the course of the 20th century, it would be a flat line for decades, followed by a sharp, dramatic upturn toward equality beginning in the 1960s: the shape of a hockey stick.
  • In many ways, this hockey stick image of racial inequality is accurate. Until the banning of de jure segregation and discrimination, very little progress was made in many domains: representation in politics and mainstream media, job quality and job security, access to professional schools and careers or toward residential integration.
  • In terms of material well-being, Black Americans were moving toward parity with white Americans well before the victories of the civil rights era
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  • The Black/white ratio of high school completion improved dramatically between the 1940s and the early 1970s, after which it slowed, never reaching parity.
  • Understanding how and why not only reveals why America is so fractured today, but illuminates the path forward, toward a more perfect union.
  • In measure after measure, positive change for Black Americans was actually faster in the decades before the civil rights revolution than in the decades after
  • The life expectancy gap between Black and white Americans narrowed most rapidly between about 1905 and 1947, after which the rate of improvement was much more modest
  • The racial gap in homeownership steadily narrowed between 1900 and 1970, then stagnated, then reversed
  • Racial integration in K-12 education at the national level began much earlier than is often believed
  • It accelerated sharply in the wake of the 1954 Supreme Court decision, Brown v. Board of Education. But this trend leveled off in the early 1970s, followed by a modest trend toward resegregation.
  • Income by race converged at the greatest rate between 1940 and 1970.
  • However, as of 2018, Black/white income disparities were almost exactly the same as they were in 1968
  • Black Americans on the whole have experienced flat or downward mobility in recent decades.
  • What’s more, after the passage of civil rights legislation, those trends toward racial parity slowed, stopped and even reversed.
  • Long-run data on national trends in voting by race is patchy, but the South saw a dramatic increase in Black voter registration between 1940 and 1970, followed by decline and stagnation
  • nearly all of the gains toward equality with white voter turnout occurred between 1952 and 1964, before the Voting Rights Act passed, then almost entirely halted for the rest of the century.
  • These data reveal a too-slow but unmistakable climb toward racial parity throughout most of the century that begins to flatline around 1970 — a picture quite unlike the hockey stick of historical shorthand.
  • It was Black Americans’ undaunted faith in the promise of the American “we,” and their willingness to claim their place in it, against all odds, that won them progress between the end of Reconstruction in the 1870s and the end of the civil rights movement in the 1970s. Collectively, these migrants and their children and grandchildren steadily narrowed the Black-white gap over those years.
  • Some six decades later all of those upward trends reversed, setting the United States on a downward course that has brought us to the multifaceted national crisis in which we find ourselves today, which bears a remarkable resemblance to the Gilded Age
  • Why was the last third of the 20th century characterized by a marked deceleration of progress, and in some cases even a reversal?
  • We have two answers to these questions.
  • Substantial progress toward white support for Black equality was made in the first half of the 20th century
  • The first is simple and familiar: White backlash
  • when push came to shove, many white Americans were reluctant to live up to those principles. Although clear majorities supported the 1964 Civil Rights Act, a national poll conducted shortly after its passage showed that 68 percent of Americans wanted moderation in its enforcement. In fact, many felt that the Johnson administration was moving too fast in implementing integration.
  • Lyndon B. Johnson’s rejection, in 1968, of the Kerner Commission’s recommendations of sweeping reforms to address racial inequality suggested that his fine-tuned political sensitivity had detected a sea change in white attitudes in the year since he — more than any previous president — had led the project of racial redress
  • as the century turned and the Gilded Age gave way to the Progressive Era, America experienced a remarkable moment of inflection that set the nation on an entirely new trajectory. A diverse group of reformers grabbed the reins of history and set a course toward greater economic equality, political bipartisanship, social cohesion and cultural communitarianism.
  • But if Black Americans’ advance toward parity with whites in many dimensions had been underway for decades before the Civil Rights revolution, why then, when the dam of legal exclusion finally broke, didn’t those trends accelerate toward full equality?
  • These interconnected phenomena can be summarized in a single meta-trend that we have come to call the “I-we-I” curve: An inverted U charting America’s gradual climb from self-centeredness to a sense of shared values, followed by a steep descent back into egoism over the next half century
  • The moment America took its foot off the gas in rectifying racial inequalities largely coincides with the moment America’s “we” decades gave way to the era of “I.”
  • hopes went unrealized as the whole nation shifted toward a less egalitarian ideal.
  • A central feature of America’s “I” decades has been a shift away from shared responsibilities toward individual rights and a culture of narcissism.
  • Contemporary identity politics characterizes an era that could well be described as a “War of the ‘We’s’.” This is a reality that predated the election of Donald Trump, though his presidency threw it into sharp relief.
  • It is difficult to say which came first — white backlash against racial realignment or the broader shift from “we” to “I.”
  • the fact that landmark civil rights legislation passed at the very peak of the I-we-I curve suggests that an expanding sense of “we” was a prerequisite for the dismantling of the color line. Without what the historian Bruce Schulman calls the “expansive, universalist vision” that America had been building toward in the preceding decades, it is hard to imagine that such watershed change — so long and so violently resisted — would have been possible.
  • By the late 1960s, though the work of widening was not nearly complete, America had come closer to an inclusive “we” than ever before. But just as that inclusion began to bear tangible fruit for Black Americans, much of that fruit began to die on the vine.
  • The lessons of America’s I-we-I century are thus twofold. First, we Americans have gotten ourselves out of a mess remarkably similar to the one we’re in now by rediscovering the spirit of community that has defined our nation from its inception
  • we” can be defined in more inclusive or exclusive terms. The “we” we were constructing in the first two-thirds of the last century was highly racialized, and thus contained the seeds of its own undoing. Any attempt we may make today to spark a new upswing must aim for a higher summit by being fully inclusive, fully egalitarian and genuinely accommodating of difference. Anything less will fall victim once again to its own internal inconsistencies.
Javier E

Middle-Class Miami Spends 72%(!) of Its Income on Housing and Transportation - Derek Th... - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...265738

housing transport costs income metro historical trends economics transportation

shared by Javier E on 30 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • Food and clothes consumed 60% of consumer spending in 1900, but as we found more efficient ways to make burgers and socks, that number fell all the way to 17% in 2003.
  • in most major cities, we spend the majority of our income on planes, trains, automobiles, and dwellings.
  • In the Miami metro area, middle-lower-income families spend a whopping 72% of their income on housing and transportation
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  • The Least Affordable Neighborhood in the U.S.? From the report: "In the Philadelphia region, moderate-income households are faced with average housing and transportation costs exceeding 90 percent of their income in some neighborhoods."
  • The Price of Density: Housing in Houston isn't so bad -- it's the 8th most affordable large city to own a home in. But the same thing that helps make it an affordable place to own a home (lots of space!) also raises its commuting costs. Factor in transportation, and it's the 8th least affordable large city to live.
  • dense expensive cities like San Francisco, Boston and New York are considerably more affordable when you add in transportation costs because of their superior public transit.
  • Nationwide, Housing Grew 2X as Fast as Income: Combined H&T expenses average $30,296 for a median-income household, according to the report. But they're growing much faster than median household income.
Javier E

The Smartphone Have-Nots - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...income-inequality.html

inequality technology government policy history comparative international crisis unemployment economic

shared by Javier E on 15 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • Much of what we consider the American way of life is rooted in the period of remarkably broad, shared economic growth, from around 1900 to about 1978. Back then, each generation of Americans did better than the one that preceded it. Even those who lived through the Depression made up what was lost. By the 1950s, America had entered an era that economists call the Great Compression, in which workers — through unions and Social Security, among other factors — captured a solid share of the economy’s growth.
  • there’s a lot of disagreement about what actually happened during these years. Was it a golden age in which the U.S. government guided an economy toward fairness? Or was it a period defined by high taxes (until the early ’60s, the top marginal tax rate was 90 percent) and bureaucratic meddling?
  • the Great Compression gave way to a Great Divergence. Since 1979, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, the bottom 80 percent of American families had their share of the country’s income fall, while the top 20 percent had modest gains. Of course, the top 1 percent — and, more so, the top 0.1 percent — has seen income rise stratospherically. That tiny elite takes in nearly a quarter of the nation’s income and controls nearly half its wealth.
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  • The standard explanation of this unhinging, repeated in graduate-school classrooms and in advice to politicians, is technological change.
  • This explanation, known as skill-biased technical change, is so common that economists just call it S.B.T.C. They use it to explain why everyone from the extremely rich to the just-kind-of rich are doing so much better than everyone else.
  • For all their disagreements, Autor and Mishel are allies of sorts. Both are Democrats who have advised President Barack Obama, and both agree that rampant inequality can undermine democracy and economic growth by fostering despair among workers and corruption among the wealthy
  • The change came around 1978, Mishel said, when politicians from both parties began to think of America as a nation of consumers, not of workers.
  • each administration and Congress have made choices — expanding trade, deregulating finance and weakening welfare — that helped the rich and hurt everyone else. Inequality didn’t just happen, Mishel argued. The government created it.
  • Computers and the Internet, Mishel argued, are just new examples on the continuum and cannot explain a development like extreme inequality, which is so recent. So what happened?
  • David Autor, one of the country’s most celebrated labor economists, took the stage, fumbled for his own PowerPoint presentation and then explained that there was plenty of evidence showing that technological change explained a great deal about the rise of income inequality. Computers, Autor says, are fundamentally different. Conveyor belts and massive steel furnaces made blue-collar workers comparatively wealthier and hurt more highly skilled crafts­people, like blacksmiths and master carpenters, whose talents were disrupted by mass production. The computer revolution, however, displaced millions of workers from clerical and production occupations, forcing them to compete in lower-paying jobs in the retail, fast-food and home health sectors. Meanwhile, computers and the Internet disproportionately helped people like doctors, engineers and bankers in information-intensive jobs. Inequality was merely a side effect of the digital revolution, Autor said; it didn’t begin and end in Washington.
  • Levy suggested seeing how inequality has played out in other countries
  • In Germany, the average worker might make less than an American, but the government has established an impressive apprenticeship system to keep blue-collar workers’ skills competitive.
  • For decades, the Finnish government has offered free education all the way through college. It may have led to high taxes, but many believe it also turned a fairly poor fishing economy into a high-income, technological nation.
  • On the other hand, Greece, Spain and Portugal have so thoroughly protected their workers that they are increasingly unable to compete
  • Inequality has risen almost everywhere, which, Levy says, means that Autor is right that inequality is not just a result of American-government decisions. But the fact that inequality has risen unusually quickly in the United States suggests that government does have an impact
  • Still, economists certainly cannot tell us which policy is the right one. What do we value more: growth or fairness? That’s a value judgment. And for better or worse, it’s up to us.
lindsayweber1

These Colorful Propaganda Maps Fueled 20th-Century Wars - 0 views

news.nationalgeographic.com/...propaganda-war-maps-gallery

world war I propaganda maps wars

shared by lindsayweber1 on 27 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • The map above is a great example. Made in 1900, it portrays Russia as an octopus with tentacles reaching out in all directions, strangling Poland, Finland, and China, and reaching toward Turkey, Afghanistan, and Persia. The map’s creator, British cartographer Frederick Rose, was, in his time, perhaps the most influential maker of what are known as anthropomorphic maps. Though the octopus is the main character of this map, most European countries are depicted as various people, which is where the style gets its name.
Javier E

Richard Rorty's 1998 Book Suggested Election 2016 Was Coming - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-election-2016-was-coming.html

election 2016 leftist Democratic party working class redistribution globalization justice rorty

shared by Javier E on 24 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • Three days after the presidential election, an astute law professor tweeted a picture of three paragraphs, very slightly condensed, from Richard Rorty’s “Achieving Our Country,” published in 1998. It was retweeted thousands of times, generating a run on the book
  • It’s worth rereading those tweeted paragraphs:[M]embers of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers — themselves desperately afraid of being downsized — are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else. At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for — someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots. … One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past 40 years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. … All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.
  • His basic contention is that the left once upon a time believed that our country, for all its flaws, was both perfectible and worth perfecting.
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  • But during the 1960s, shame — over Vietnam, over the serial humiliation of African-Americans — transformed a good portion of the left, at least the academic left, into a disaffected gang of spectators, rather than agitators for change
  • . A formalized despair became its philosophy. The system was beyond reform. The best one could do was focus on its victims.
  • The result was disastrous. The alliance between the unions and intellectuals, so vital to passing legislation in the Progressive Era, broke down. In universities, cultural and identity politics replaced the politics of change and economic justice.
  • at the very moment “socially accepted sadism” — good phrase, that — was diminishing, economic instability and inequality were increasing, thanks to globalization.
  • “This world economy will soon be owned by a cosmopolitan upper class which has no more sense of community with any workers anywhere than the great American capitalists of the year 1900.”
  • This group included intellectuals, by the way, who, he wrote, are “ourselves quite well insulated, at least in the short run, from the effects of globalization.”
  • Which left the white working-class guy and gal up for grabs — open to right-wing populists, maybe even strongmen.
  • “Outside the academy,” he wrote, “Americans still want to feel patriotic. They still want to feel part of a nation which can take control of its destiny and make itself a better place.”
  • “Why could not the left,” he asked, “channel the mounting rage of the newly dispossessed?”
  • Right through the ’90s and into the 2000s, we had left-of-center politicians singing the praises of hope, rather than the hopelessness that Mr. Rorty decries. Bill Clinton explicitly campaigned as the “man from Hope,” and Barack Obama would later campaign on a platform of “hope” and “change.” In passing health care reform, Mr. Obama genuinely did something for the immiserated underclass, and both men, in their ways, rejected identity politics.
  • But it wasn’t enough, obviously. “Under Presidents Carter and Clinton,” Mr. Rorty wrote, “the Democratic Party has survived by distancing itself from the unions and from any mention of redistribution.” Mr. Clinton was particularly guilty of this charge, passing Nafta, appointing Robert Rubin as his Treasury secretary and enthusiastically embracing financial deregulation. Mr. Obama pushed the Trans-Pacific Partnership. And he was one of those fancy elites.
  • People are furiously arguing about what played a key role in this election — whether it was white working-class despair, a racist backlash or terror about the pace of cultural change. It seems reasonable to think that all three played a part.
  • What’s so striking about “Achieving Our Country” is that it blends these theories into a common argument: The left, both cultural and political, eventually abandoned economic justice in favor of identity politics, leaving too many people feeling freaked out or ignored.
  • “It is as if the American Left could not handle more than one initiative at a time,” Mr. Rorty wrote. “As if it either had to ignore stigma in order to concentrate on money, or vice versa.”
Javier E

The world today looks ominously like it did before World War I - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...like-it-did-before-world-war-i

globalization history crisis unemployment trade integration

shared by Javier E on 30 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • A backlash to globalization appears to be gaining strength around the world. U.S. politicians on both the right and left have called for curbing free trade deals they say benefit foreigners or the global elite. President-elect Donald Trump has championed tariffs on imports and limits on immigration, and suggested withdrawing from international alliances and trade agreements. Meanwhile, populist and nationalist governments have gained ground in Europe and Asia, and voters in Britain have elected to withdraw from the European Union
  • To some, it looks ominously like another moment in history — the period leading up to World War I, which marked the end of a multi-decade expansion in global ties that many call the first era of globalization.
  • the world could see a substantial backsliding to globalization in decades to come. After all, he writes, we have seen it happen before, in the years of chaos and isolationism that encompassed the First and Second World Wars and the Great Depression.
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  • “The first great globalization wave, in the half-century or so before WWI, sparked a populist backlash too, and ultimately came crashing down in the cataclysms of 1914 to 1945,”
  • From the mid-19th century to 1914, advances like steamships, the telegraph, the telephone and the Suez and Panama canals dramatically shrunk distances and increased communication, and the world underwent a period of rapid globalization.
  • There are many differences among these eras of globalization and retrenchment, Feinman is careful to say. The World Wars and Great Depression were not just about a rejection of globalization, and that rejection of globalization was as much a result of those events as their cause,
  • Yet there are some strong parallels, Feinman says. “Modern globalization has been spurred by some of the same forces that powered the pre-WWI epoch: New technologies, an open, free-trade, rules-based world economic system underpinned by the leading power of the day, and a period of general peace among major countries.”
  • Today, the free flow of capital and trade exceeds what it was in the pre-World War I era. And the share of Americans who are foreign-born and the share of wealth owned by the richest Americans — an indicator of inequality — have returned to pre-World War I levels, after dipping during the mid-1900s, as the two graphs below show
  • Feinman says that globalization is far from solely responsible for the economic malaise that some in the United States and around the world experience. In addition to globalization, technology, social changes and government policies have all been instrumental in determining who benefits and who loses out from global economic integration in past decades.
  • At this point, the threat to globalization is mostly a risk rather than a reality, says Feinman, and “cooler heads may well prevail.” The global economy is still remarkably integrated, and new techno
Javier E

Angela Merkel and the history book that helped inform her worldview | World news | The ... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...tion-of-the-world-book-germany

merkel history world globalization expert expertise imperialism British Empire

shared by Javier E on 02 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • many sections of the work – on globalisation, migration and technology, to name a few pertinent topics – read differently in the light of decisions she has made since reading it, such as the treatment of Greece at the height of the eurozone crisis
  • If Europe was able to pull ahead of China economically in the 19th century, Osterhammel argues, it was because the Chinese empire was hampered by a “chaotic dual system” of silver and copper coins, while much of Europe had created a “de facto single currency” with the Latin monetary union of 1866.
  • Osterhammel says he can see “she is very serious about the way world order (or disorder) has been evolving in the long run. She seems to understand, for instance, that migration and mobility have a historical dimension.”
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  • Osterhammel, a professor at Konstanz University, who wrote his dissertation on the British empire’s economic ties with China, instead recasts the century as one marked by globalisation, with 1860-1914 in particular “a period of unprecedented creation of networks” that were later torn apart by two world wars.
  • Although his magnum opus is in effect a history of early globalisation, Osterhammel is cautious about using the word. “I rather prefer to talk of globalisations in the plural, meaning that different spheres of life undergo processes of extension at varying speeds, and with specific reach and intensity,”
  • “If we cling to the concept of ‘globalisation’, we should not see it as a continuous and uninterrupted march toward an imaginary ‘global modernity’. It is a bundle of contradictory developments.
  • “While the economy or information may have been globalised, it has not led to a corresponding generalisation of a cosmopolitan morality, if we disregard the tiny layer of an educated and mobile elite.
  • “Globalisation is not a smooth and benign master process such as ‘modernisation’ used to be construed 50 years ago. It is always uneven, discontinuous, reversible, contradictory, producing winners and losers, no force of nature but manmade.”
  • The Transformation of the World shows how free movement between states and continents grew continuously in the first two-thirds of the 19th century, and passports, border controls and trade tariffs were only invented as Europe approached 1900.
  • Osterhammel, who spent four years at the German Historical Institute in London, finds many positive words for Britain’s part in developing global networks in the 1800s in general. While he says he would never go as far as saying the British empire was a good thing, “it is impossible to imagine history minus empires and imperialism”.
  • “The British empire was a major engine of global change in modern history. When you condemn all empires with equal vehemence, you miss at least two important points. First, the British empire was a bit less murderous than the empires of Germany and Japan in the 1930s and 1940s
  • And secondly, it transferred the idea and practice of constitutional government, and the rule of law, to quite a few parts of world. A brief look at present-day Hong Kong will quickly elucidate this point,” he says.
  • One of the book’s recurring themes is that differentiating between occident and orient is often of little use when trying to understand the 19th century, and, as an invention of the 20th century, the distinction is increasingly irrelevant again. “Both the nouveau riche vulgarity of oil-exploiting societies and the atrocities at Aleppo, Baghdad and Kabul put an end to any romantic ‘east’,”
  • “And the ‘west’ as a transatlantic cultural formation is disintegrating before our eyes. It is being reduced to [Vladimir] Putin’s and [Recep Tayyip] Erdoğan’s bogeyman.”
  • Osterhammel warns that there are “very few lessons” she would be able to find in previous eras. “Many major innovations of the 19th century took decades to mature; today, change can be incredibly rapid, not just in IT but also in biotechnology,” he says.
  • Political diatribes against experts and academics like him, he suggests, may be born not so much of genuine disdain but the realisation that politicians are more reliant on them than ever. “Politicians find it difficult to grasp the implications of these changes. They have to rely on experts who, in turn, they deeply distrust
Javier E

The Electoral Wasteland - NYTimes.com - 1 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...the-electoral-wasteland

Republican president nomination process

shared by Javier E on 17 Feb 12 - Cached
  • the small fraction of Americans who are trying to pick the Republican nominee are old, white, uniformly Christian and unrepresentative of the nation at large.
  • The nine states that have held caucuses or primaries to date are home to roughly 28 million total registered voters, of all political persuasions.
  • So far, three million voters have participated in the Republican races, less than the  population of Connecticut.  This means that 89 percent of all registered voters in those states have not participated in what is, from a horse-race perspective, a very tight contest
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  • Less than 1 percent of registered voters turned out for Maine’s caucus. In Nevada, where Republican turnout was down 25 percent from 2008, only 3 percent of total registered voters participated.
  • In Florida, the largest and most diverse state among the nine, turnout was down 14 percent from 2008. And 84 percent of the state’s total registered voters  did not participate in the Republican contest.
  • In the Palmetto State, 98 percent of primary voters were white, 72 percent were age 45 or older and nearly two-thirds were evangelical Christian, according to exit polls. From this picture, you may think South Carolina is an all-white, aging state, full of fervent churchgoers. But the Census says the state is only 66 percent white, with a median age of 36. Exit polls from 2008 put the evangelical vote at 40 percent of total.
  • Whites are 63.7 percent of the total population of the United States; in 1900, they were 88 percent — still more diverse than Republican primary voters today.
Javier E

The End of the Middle Class Century: How the 1% Won the Last 30 Years - Derek Thompson ... - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...262221

class income inequality US trends history research

shared by Javier E on 12 Sep 12 - Cached
  • between 1971 and 2008, real income declined for the bottom 90%. All the growth went to the top 10%, and more than half went to the top percentile.
  • The remarkable gains of the (broadly-defined) "middle class" in the middle of this century stopped cold in the last quarter of the 1900s.
Javier E

Tracing Ancestry, Researchers Produce a Genetic Atlas of Human Mixing Events - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...as-of-human-mixing-events.html

history methods technology ancestry human mixing genome

shared by Javier E on 14 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • geneticists applying new statistical approaches have taken a first shot at both identifying and dating the major population mixture events of the last 4,000 years, with the goal of providing a new source of information for historians.
  • Some of the hundred or so major mixing events they describe have plausible historical explanations, while many others remain to be accounted for.
  • many populations of the southern Mediterranean and Middle East have segments of African origin in their genomes that were inserted at times between A.D. 650 and 1900, according to the geneticists’ calculations. This could reflect the activity of the Arab slave trade,
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • The dating system is based on measuring the length of chromosome segments of a particular ancestry that occur in a population. When people of two different populations intermarry, their children’s genomes carry large chunks of DNA of one parent’s ancestry interspersed with large chunks from the other’s.
  • Another mixing event is the injection of European-type DNA into the Kalash, a people of Pakistan, at some time between 990 and 210 B.C. This could reflect the invasion of India by Alexander the Great in 326 B.C. The Kalash claim to be descended from Alexander’s soldiers
  • Though all humans have the same set of genes, their genomes are studded with mutations, which are differences in the sequence of DNA units in the genome. These mutations occur in patterns because whole sets of mutations are passed down from parent to child and hence will be common in a particular population
  • The lowest amount of African admixture occurs in the Druse, a religious group of the Middle East that prohibited slavery and has been closed to converts since A.D. 1043.
  • from the average size of the chunks in a person’s genome, the geneticists can calculate the number of generations since the mixing event.
  • One of the most widespread events his group has detected is the injection of Mongol ancestry into populations within the Mongol empire, such as the Hazara of Afghanistan and the Uighur Turks of Central Asia.
  • the European colonization of America is recorded in the genomes of the Maya and Pima Indians. And Cambodian genomes mark the fall of the Khmer empire in the form of ancestral DNA from the invading Tai people.
  • They find among Northern Italians an insertion of Middle Eastern DNA that occurred between 776 B.C. and A.D. 550, and may represent the Etruscans, a mysterious people said by the ancient Greek historian Herodotus to have emigrated from Lydia in Turkey.
  • his method cannot yet detect genetic mixing between very similar populations, as was the case with the English and their invaders from Scandinavia and Northern Germany.
  • “In some sense we don’t want to talk to historians,” Dr. Falush said. “There’s a great virtue in being objective: You put the data in and get the history out. We do think this is a way of reconstructing history by just using DNA.”
Javier E

The Great Stagnation of American Education - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...agnation-of-american-education

education US history

shared by Javier E on 14 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • For most of American history, parents could expect that their children would, on average, be much better educated than they were. But that is no longer true.
  • From 1891 to 2007, real economic output per person grew at an average rate of 2 percent per year — enough to double every 35 years. The average American was twice as well off in 2007 as in 1972, four times as well off as in 1937, and eight times as well off as in 1902. It’s no coincidence that for eight decades, from 1890 to 1970, educational attainment grew swiftly. But since 1990, that improvement has slowed to a crawl.
  • The premium that employers pay to a college graduate compared with that to a high school graduate has soared since 1970, because of higher demand for technical and communication skills at the top of the scale and a collapse in demand for unskilled and semiskilled workers at the bottom.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • Growth in annual average economic output per capita has slowed from the century-long average of 2 percent, to 1.3 percent over the past 25 years, to a mere 0.7 percent over the past decade.
  • The gains in income since the 2007-9 Great Recession have flowed overwhelmingly to those at the top, as has been widely noted. Real median family income was lower last year than in 1998.
  • There are numerous causes of the less-than-satisfying economic growth in America: the retirement of the baby boomers, the withdrawal of working-age men from the labor force, the relentless rise in the inequality of the income distribution and, as I have written about elsewhere, a slowdown in technological innovation.
  • Education deserves particular focus because its effects are so long-lasting. Every high school dropout becomes a worker who likely won’t earn much more than minimum wage, at best, for the rest of his or her life.
  • The surge in high school graduation rates — from less than 10 percent of youth in 1900 to 80 percent by 1970 — was a central driver of 20th-century economic growth. But the percentage of 18-year-olds receiving bona fide high school diplomas fell to 74 percent in 2000
  • the holders of G.E.D.’s performed no better economically than high school dropouts and that the rising share of young people who are in prison rather than in school plays a small but important role in the drop in graduation rates.
  • For most of the postwar period, the G.I. Bill, public and land-grant universities and junior colleges made a low-cost education more accessible in the United States than anywhere in the world. But after leading the world in college completion, America has dropped to 16th.
  • The cost of a university education has risen faster than the rate of inflation for decades. Between 2008 and 2012 state financing for higher education declined by 28 percent
  • Two-year community colleges enroll 42 percent of American undergraduates. The Center on International Education Benchmarking reports that only 13 percent of students in two-year colleges graduate in two years; that figure rises to a still-dismal 28 percent after four year
  • Compared with other nations where students learn several languages and have math homework in elementary school, the American system expects too little. Parental expectations also matter: homework should be emphasized more, and sports less.
  • family breakdown is now biracial.” Among lower-income whites, the proportion of children living with both parents has plummeted over the past half-century
  • research has shown that high-discipline, “no-excuses” charter schools, like those run by the Knowledge Is Power Program and the Harlem Children’s Zone, have erased racial achievement gaps. This model suggests that a complete departure from the traditional public school model, rather than pouring in more money per se, is needed.
  • Lacking in the American system is a well-organized funnel between community colleges and potential blue-collar employers, as in the renowned apprenticeship system in Germany.
  • In Canada, each province manages and finances education at the elementary, secondary and college levels, thus avoiding the inequality inherent in America’s system of local property-tax financing for public schools. Tuition at the University of Toronto was a mere $5,695 for Canadian arts and science undergraduates last year, compared with $37,576 at Harvard. It should not be surprising that the Canadian college completion rate is about 15 percentage points above the American rate.
Javier E

Liberal Democratic Legacies in Modern Egypt: The Role of the Intellectuals, 1900-1950 |... - 0 views

www.ias.edu/...democratic-legacies-egypt

egypt liberal Wafd imperialism

shared by Javier E on 18 May 15 - No Cached
  • The second limitation was more substantial. It involved the question: to what extent was such an aim realizable within the colonial or semi-colonial context? Can intellectuals promote a true liberal democracy in a colonized environment?
Javier E

So Bill Gates Has This Idea for a History Class ... - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-idea-for-a-history-class.html

big history history education

shared by Javier E on 06 Sep 14 - No Cached
  • Last month, the University of California system announced that a version of the Big History Project course could be counted in place of a more traditional World History class, paving the way for the state’s 1,300 high schools to offer it.
  • “We didn’t know when the last time was that somebody introduced a new course into high school,” Gates told me. “How does one go about it? What did the guy who liked biology — who did he call and say, ‘Hey, we should have biology in high school?’ It was pretty uncharted territory. But it was pretty cool.”
  • The American high school experience, at least as we now know it, is a relatively recent invention. Attendance did not start to become mandatory until the 1850s, and the notion of a nationwide standardized curriculum didn’t emerge until the turn of the century. But by the early 1900s, most children were taking the same list of classes that remains recognizable to this day: English, math, science and some form of history. For much of the 20th century, this last requirement would usually take the form of Western Civilization, a survey course that focused on European countries from around the rise of Rome through modernity.
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  • “I remember the chain of thought,” he said. “I had to do prehistory, so I have to do some archaeology. But to do it seriously, I’m going to talk about how humans evolved, so, yikes, I’m in biology now. I thought: To do it seriously, I have to talk about how mammals evolved, how primates evolved. I have to go back to multicelled organisms, I have to go back to primeval slime. And then I thought: I have to talk about how life was created, how life appeared on earth! I have to talk geology, the history of the planet. And so you can see, this is pushing me back and back and back, until I realized there’s a stopping point — which is the Big Bang.” He paused. “I thought, Boy, would that be exciting to teach a course like this!”
  • In the wake of McNeill’s rebuke, Western Civ was slowly replaced by World History, a more comparative class that stressed broad themes across cultures and disciplines. Over the past 30 years, World History has produced its own formidable academic institutions and journals; these days, three-quarters of all American students take World History
  • by the early ‘70s, as the Vietnam War heightened interest in nations outside Europe, Western Civ was on the decline. In pedagogical circles, a book called “The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community,” by William Hardy McNeill, a historian at the University of Chicago, persuasively argued that Western Civ was not merely biased against other cultures but also failed to account for the enormous influence that cultures had on one another over the millenniums.
  • Christian, who is 67, now travels the world as something of an evangelist for the spread of the Big History Project. (His TED Talk, “The History of Our World in 18 Minutes,” has been viewed more than four million times online.)
  • They have monitored teacher feedback closely and decreased the course in size, from 20 units to 10. True to Christian’s original style, however, the high-school course links insights across subjects into wildly ambitious narratives. The units begin with the Big Bang and shift to lesson plans on the solar system, trade and communications, globalization and, finally, the future. A class on the emergence of life might start with photosynthesis before moving on to eukaryotes and multicellular organisms and the genius of Charles Darwin and James Watson. A lecture on the slave trade might include the history of coffee beans in Ethiopia.
  • “Most kids experience school as one damn course after another; there’s nothing to build connections between the courses that they take,” says Bob Bain, a professor of history and education at the University of Michigan and an adviser to the Big History Project, who has helped devise much of the curriculum. “The average kid has no way to make sense between what happens with their first-period World History class and their second-period algebra class, third-period gym class, fourth-period literature — it’s all disconnected. It’s like if I were to give you a jigsaw puzzle and throw 500 pieces on the table and say, ‘Oh, by the way, I’m not going to show you the box top as to how they fit together.’ ”
  • Gates has insisted on tracking this venture as he would any Microsoft product or foundation project. The Big History Project produces reams of data — students and teachers are regularly surveyed, and teachers submit the results from classes, all of which allows his team to track what’s working and what isn’t as the course grows. “Our priority,” he told me from across the table, “was to get it into a form where ambitious teachers could latch onto it.”
  • Few schools had teachers who were willing or able to instruct a hybrid course; some schools wound up requiring that two teachers lead the class together. Gates, who had hoped to avoid bureaucracy, found himself mired in it. “You’ve got to get a teacher in the history department and the science department — they have to be very serious about it, and they have to get their administrative staff to agree. And then you have to get it on the course schedule so kids can sign up,” he said. “So they have to decide, kind of in the spring or earlier, and those teachers have to spend a lot of that summer getting themselves ready for the thing.”
  • Perhaps the largest challenge facing the Big History Project, however, is Gates himself, or at least the specter of him. To his bafflement and frustration, he has become a remarkably polarizing figure in the education world. This owes largely to the fact that Gates, through his foundation, has spent more than $200 million to advocate for the Common Core, something of a third rail in education circles
  • Diane Ravitch, an education historian at New York University who has been a vocal critic of Gates, put even it more starkly: “When I think about history, I think about different perspectives, clashing points of view. I wonder how Bill Gates would treat the robber barons. I wonder how Bill Gates would deal with issues of extremes of wealth and poverty.”
  • “It begins to be a question of: Is this Bill Gates’s history? And should it be labeled ‘Bill Gates’s History’? Because Bill Gates’s history would be very different from somebody else’s who wasn’t worth $50-60 billion.”
  • perhaps, Big History might even become a successor to Western Civ and World History.
  • he also noted that Big History — which is already being offered in South Korea, the Netherlands and, of course, Australia — had significant global potential.
  • Sam Wineburg, a professor of education and history at Stanford, told me that although he sees Big History as “an important intellectual movement,” he did not consider the class to be a suitable replacement for an actual history course. “At certain points, it becomes less history and more of a kind of evolutionary biology or quantum physics. It loses the compelling aspect that is at the heart of the word ‘history.’ ”
  • Wineburg’s deepest concern about the approach was its failure to impart a methodology to students. “What is most pressing for American high-school students right now, in the history-social-studies curriculum, is: How do we read a text? How do we connect our ability to sharpen our intellectual capabilities when we’re evaluating sources and trying to understand human motivation?” he asked. “When we think about history, what are the primary sources of Big History? The original scientific reports of the Big Bang?”
  • Barr, the principal in Brooklyn, however, came to feel that Gates’s course was better than the existing alternative. “If you were to interview many, many progressive social-studies teachers, they would tell you that World History is a completely flawed course. It’s spotty. It’s like fact soup. Kids don’t come out of it really having a sense of global history,”
katyshannon

Armed group takes over Oregon wildlife refuge building - CNN.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...oregon-wildlife-refuge-protest

armed group oregon wildlife refuge politics history US crisis

shared by katyshannon on 04 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • Armed anti-government protesters have taken over a building in a federal wildlife refuge in Oregon, accusing officials of unfairly punishing ranchers who refused to sell their land.
  • One of them is Ammon Bundy, the 40-year-old son of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, who is well-known for anti-government action.
  • Asked several times what he and those with him want, he answered in vague terms, saying that they want the federal government to restore the "people's constitutional rights."
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  • Prosecutors said the Hammonds set a fire that burned about 130 acres in 2001 to cover up poaching. They were sentenced to five years in prison.
  • The group is occupying part of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge near Burns after gathering outside for a demonstration supporting Dwight and Steven Hammond, father-and-son ranchers who were convicted of arson.
  • "This refuge -- it has been destructive to the people of the county and to the people of the area," he said. Read More"People need to be aware that we've become a system where government is actually claiming and using and defending people's rights, and they are doing that against the people."
  • The Hammonds, who are set to turn themselves in Monday afternoon, have said they set the fire to reduce the growth of invasive plants and to protect their property from wildfires
  • The Hammonds have been clear in that they don't want help from the Bundy group. "Neither Ammon Bundy nor anyone within his group/organization speak for the Hammond family," the Hammonds' attorney W. Alan Schroeder wrote to Harney County Sheriff David Ward.
  • He said that over the years, law enforcement has learned how to handle a situation like this; one that hasn't erupted in violence and in which a law may be broken, but there's no immediate threat to anyone's life. The best approach now, Roderick said, is to wait the group out and to figure out how to bring a peaceful end to the situation.
  • The protest has prompted Harney County School District 3 to call off classes for the entire week, Superintendent Dr. Marilyn L. McBride said. "Schools will open on January 11," she said. "Ensuring staff and student safety is our greatest concern."
  • After the march Saturday, the armed protesters broke into the refuge's unoccupied building and refused to leave. Officials have said there are no government employees in the building.
  • "We will be here as long as it takes," Bundy said. "We have no intentions of using force upon anyone, (but) if force is used against us, we would defend ourselves."
  • Ammon Bundy said that the group in Oregon was armed, but that he would not describe it as a militia. He declined to say how many people were with him, telling CNN on Sunday that giving that information might jeopardize "operational security."
  • "We are not terrorists," Ammon Bundy said. "We are concerned citizens and realize we have to act if we want to pass along anything to our children."
  • He wouldn't call his group a militia, but others are. "I don't like the militia's methods," local resident Monica McCannon told KTVZ. "They had their rally. Now it's time for them to go home. People are afraid of them."
  • When asked what it would take for the protesters to leave, Bundy did not offer specifics. He said he and those with him are prepared to stay put for days or weeks or "as long as necessary."
  • "We are using the wildlife refuge as a place for individuals across the United States to come and assist in helping the people of Harney County claim back their lands and resources," he said. "The people will need to be able to use the land and resources without fear as free men and women. We know it will take some time."
  • He did not explicitly call on authorities to commute the prison sentences for the Hammonds, but he said their case illustrates officials' "abuse" of power.
  • He said the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge has taken over the space of 100 ranches since the early 1900s. "They are continuing to expand the refuge at the expense of the ranchers and miners," Bundy said.
  • He also said Harney County, in southeastern Oregon, went from one of the state's wealthiest counties to one of the poorest. CNN has not independently corroborated Bundy's claims.
redavistinnell

The Assault on Climate Science - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ssault-on-climate-science.html

assault climate science new york new york times

shared by redavistinnell on 09 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • The Assault on Climate Science
  • State College, Pa. — WITH world leaders gathered in Paris to address climate change, most of the planet seems to have awakened to the reality that the Earth is warming and that we’re responsible.
  • Lamar Smith, the Texas Republican who is chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology
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  • Now he is using his committee chairmanship to go after the government’s own climate scientists, whose latest study is an inconvenience to his views.
  • The study found that the “rate of global warming during the last 15 years has been as fast as or faster than what was seen during the latter half of the 20th century.”
  • In fact, 2014 was the warmest year on record, and this year is likely to end up even warmer.
  • Fortunately, NOAA did not acquiesce to Mr. Smith’s outrageous demands. The agency pointed out that it had provided Mr. Smith’s committee with the scientific briefings, data and studies behind the Science article, as well as two thorough briefings by NOAA scientists
  • At the same time, as NOAA noted, the confidentiality of communications between scientists is “essential to frank discourse.” For that reason, the agency rejected his demand.
  • “implicitly questioning the integrity of the researchers conducting those studies can be viewed as a form of intimidation that could deter scientists from freely carrying out research on important national challenges.”
  • ut he added, ominously, that “this prioritization does not alleviate NOAA’s obligation to respond fully to the Committee’s subpoena.”
  • During his tenure as the committee’s chairman, he has attempted to slash funding for earth sciences research by the National Science Foundation.
  • He has threatened to replace the foundation’s vaunted scientific peer-review process with a system where congressmen like him help choose which scientific grants are funded.
  • And he recently started a congressional investigation into the finances of an environmental institute headed by a climate scientist who was a lead signatory of a letter suggesting that if fossil fuel companies knowingly misrepresented what they knew about climate change, they should be held accountable in the same way the tobacco industry was for hiding its knowledge about the health impacts of tobacco.
  • In 2005, Joe L. Barton, a Texas Republican who was chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, sought all of my personal emails and notes because I had published a study with colleagues showing how the planet’s temperature had shot up after 1900.
  • Senator John McCain, a Republican from Arizona, also weighed in against what he saw as “a kind of intimidation which threatens the relationship between science and public policy” that “must not be tolerated.”
  • While there is no doubt climate change is real and caused by humans, there is absolutely a debate to be had about the details of climate policy, and there are prominent Republicans participating constructively in that discourse. Let’s hear more from these sensible voices. And let’s end the McCarthy-like assault on science led by the Lamar Smiths of the world. Our nation is better than that.
qkirkpatrick

The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 by Margaret MacMillan - review | Books | The... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...eace-margaret-macmillan-review

war WWI history culture

shared by qkirkpatrick on 17 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • This set in train the July Crisis, the moves and counter-moves that would lead to general European war, the "great black tornado", as Theodore Roosevelt called it. Sixty-five million men served in the conflict, 9 million of them died and 20 million were wounded
  • It brought down four European empires and weakened the colonial powers that ended on the winning side, Britain and France; it spawned communism and fascism, and changed relations between Europeans and non-Europeans, town and country, governments and peoples, men and women.
  • The victorious allies stuck the blame on Germany at the Versailles Peace Conference, in the "war guilt clause". The idea that Germany was the prime mover has enjoyed a brilliant, if chequered career ever since.
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  • Besides, the rapidly globalising world of the last pre-war years was meshed together by trade and communications. The War That Ended Peace begins with a scene-setting prologue on the Paris Exposition of 1900, a perfect symbol of contemporary pride in material and moral progress, a gathering "destined" – as the Berlin chamber of commerce wrote to its Parisian counterpart – "to bring the civilised nations of the world nearer to one another in the labours common to them all"
Javier E

Today's Voter Suppression Tactics Have A 150 Year History - Talking Points Memo - 0 views

talkingpointsmemo.com/...actics-have-a-150-year-history

vote suppression history gop Politics democracy

shared by Javier E on 05 Aug 18 - No Cached
  • The tools that broke American democracy were not just the Ku Klux Klan’s white sheets, vigilantes’ Red Shirts, and lynch mobs’ nooses; they were devices we still encounter when we vote today: the registration roll and the secret, official ballot.
  • Along with exclusions of felons and permanent resident aliens, these methods swept the entire United States in the late 19th century, reducing nationwide voter participation from about 80 percent to below 50 percent by the 1920s.
  • turnout in the United States has never recovered; by one 2018 survey, the country ranks 26th of 32 developed democracies in participation.
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  • Once the war came, hundreds of thousands of Irish and German immigrants enlisted in the U.S. Army. For a time this flood of foreign-born soldiers swept nativism away. In the years after the Civil War, 12 states explicitly enfranchised immigrant aliens who had declared their intention to become naturalized but had not yet been made citizens. Voting by non-citizens who planned to become naturalized was “widely practiced and not extraordinarily controversial” in this period, political scientist Ron Hayduk argues.
  • In the early 1800s, as organized political parties began to fight over issues like banking and infrastructure, that changed; turnout rose to 70 percent in local and state elections. Still, presidential polls remained dull and ill-attended. That changed in Jackson’s second run for the presidency in 1828. Heated debates and even-hotter tempers attracted men to the polls
  • Democracy for white men did not, however, spill over to democracy for everyone; in this same period several states rolled back laws that permitted free black men to vote.
  • For white men, the United States became a democracy by degrees, not by design, and it showed in the chaotic voting systems
  • While colonial Americans cast beans, peas, and corn into containers or called their vote aloud, in the 1800s most men either wrote the candidate’s name on a blank sheet of paper or turned in a ballot helpfully printed for them by the local political party or newspaper. Outside of Massachusetts, almost no one registered to vote
  • Today, the ubiquity of voter registration blinds us to its impact. It is a price we all pay for voting and so no longer think of as a price at all. But nineteenth-century Americans understood the costs. Registering in person months before the election minimized the chance of fraud but doubled the difficulty of voting and the possibility of interference
  • Alexander Keyssar’s excellent history of voting called the 1850s a period of “narrowing of voting rights and a mushrooming upper- and middle-class antagonism to universal suffrage.”
  • the flood of 200,000 black men into the U.S. Army and Navy inspired them — and others — to claim the vote as their due. “If we are called on to do military duty against the rebel armies in the field, why should we be denied the privilege of voting against rebel citizens at the ballot-box?
  • Another way to bar African-American men was to expand the number of disfranchising crimes. Cuffie Washington, an African American man in Ocala, Florida, learned this when election officials turned him away in 1880 because he had been convicted of stealing three oranges. Other black men were barred for theft of a gold button, a hog, or six fish. “It was a pretty general thing to convict colored men in the precinct just before an election,” one of the alleged hog thieves said.
  • By the fall of 1867, more than 80 percent of eligible African-American men had registered. During the subsequent elections, at least 75 percent of black men turned out to vote in five Southern states. Democracy has a long history, but almost nothing to match this story.
  • Smalls and his compatriots tore down racial barriers; established public school systems, hospitals, orphanages, and asylums; revised tenancy laws; and tried (sometimes disastrously) to promote railroad construction to modernize the economy. Reconstruction governments also provided crucial votes to ratify the 14th Amendment, which is still the foundation of birthright citizenship, school desegregation, protection against state limits on speech or assembly, and the right to gay marriage.
  • , South Carolina, the counter-revolution was brewing in the upcountry by summer 1868. Ku Klux Klans and other vigilantes there assassinated Benjamin Franklin Randolph, a wartime chaplain, constitutional convention member, and newly elected state senator, as well as three other African-American Republican leaders. Nevertheless black South Carolinians turned out in force, carried the 1868 election, and helped elect Ulysses S. Grant president.
  • In his March 4, 1869 inaugural, Grant called on states to settle the question of suffrage in a new 15th Amendment. Anti-slavery icon Frederick Douglass said the amendment’s meaning was plain. “We are placed upon an equal footing with all other men.” But the 15th Amendment did not actually resolve the question of who could vote or establish any actual right to vote. It merely prohibited states from excluding voters based on “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Its own language acknowledged that states could legitimately strip the vote away for other reasons
  • proposed prohibitions on literacy, education, property, or religious tests died at the hands of northeastern and western Republicans who feared expanding the power of Irish and Chinese immigrants.
  • Nor did the 15th Amendment protect voters against terrorism. As Smalls and other African-American Republicans gained seats in Congress, they and their white allies tried to defend black voting through a series of enforcement acts that permitted the federal government to regulate registration and punish local officials for discrimination. But the Supreme Court soon undercut those laws
  • Without hope of victory, federal prosecutions for voting crimes fell by 90 percent after 1873.
  • Keeping African-American people away on election day was difficult, and potentially bad publicity, so white Democrats over the 1870s and 1880s passed registration laws and poll taxes, and shifted precinct locations to prevent black people from coming to the polls at all. In 1882, the South Carolina legislature required all voters to register again, making the registrar, as one African-American political leader said, “the emperor of suffrage.
  • To disfranchise rural laborers, Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, North Carolina, and other Southern states doubled residency requirements.
  • Using data painstakingly compiled by Philip Lampi, historians have discovered that somewhere between half and three-quarters of adult white males were eligible to vote before the Revolution; by 1812, almost the entire adult white male population could cast a ballot.
  • By the 1880s, this so-called “kangaroo voting” seemed the solution to every political problem. Reformer Henry George and Knights of Labor leaders hoped the Australian ballot would free workingmen from intimidation, while reformers in Boston and New York hoped it might eliminate fraud and make it difficult for illiterate men to fill out ballots.
  • Massachusetts leapt first in 1889, and by the 1892 election a majority of states had passed the bill. In Massachusetts, turnout dropped from 54.57 to 40.69 percent; in Vermont from 69.11 to 53.02. One statistical survey estimated that voter turnout dropped by an average of 8.2 percent. The Australian ballot’s “tendency is to gradual disfranchisement,” the New York Sun complained.
  • by stripping political parties’ names from the ballot, the reform made it difficult for illiterate voters, still a sizable portion of the electorate in the late 19th century. But even more profoundly, the effort to eliminate “fraud” turned election day from a riotous festival to a snooze. Over time many people stayed home
  • In New York, voter participation fell from nearly 90 percent in the 1880s to 57 percent by 1920
  • The 1888 election was almost a very different turning point for voting rights. As Republicans gained control of the House, Senate, and White House for the first time in a decade, they tried to bolster their party by establishing federal control of congressional elections so they could protect African-American voting rights in the south (and, Democrats charged, block immigrant voting in northern cities). The bill’s dual purposes were embodied in its manager, anti-immigrant, pro-black suffrage Massachusetts Congressman Henry Cabot Lodge. Although the bill passed the House, it died in a Senate filibuster. Democrats swept the House in the fall 1890 elections and soon repealed many of the remaining voting rights provisions.
  • African-American registration in Mississippi soon fell from 190,000 to 9,000; overall voter participation dropped from 70 percent in the 1870s to 50 percent in the 1880s to 15 percent by the early 1900
  • “We have disfranchised the African in the past by doubtful methods,” Alabama’s convention chairman said in 1901, “but in the future we’ll disfranchise them by law.”
  • These laws and constitutional provisions devastated voting in the South. When Tennessee passed a secret ballot law in 1889, turnout fell immediately from 78 percent to 50 percent; Virginia’s overall turnout dropped by 50 percent. For African-American voters, of course, the impact was even more staggering. In Louisiana black registration fell from 130,000 to 1,342. By 1910 only four percent of black Georgia men were registered.
  • Poll taxes, intimidation, fraud, and grandfather clauses all played their part, but the enduring tools of registration and the Australian ballot worked their grim magic, too, and made voters disappear.
  • In the landmark case Shelby County v. Holder, Chief Justice John Roberts turned the disfranchisement of the 1890s into a racial and regional exception, one that had since been overwhelmed by the national tide of democracy. “Our country has changed,” Roberts wrote in the majority opinion.
  • This is part of what political scientist Alexander Keyssar critically called the “progressive presumption” that there is an “inexorable march toward universal suffrage” interrupted only by anomalous, even un-American, regional and racial detours.
  • But the tools that disfranchised Jackson Giles were not all Southern and not only directed at African-American men. When the United States conquered Puerto Rico and the Philippines, it imposed the Australian ballot there, too.
  • in 1903, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, a Massachusetts native, denied Giles’ appeal on the grounds that the court could not intervene in political questions. If citizens like Giles suffered a “great political wrong,” Holmes intoned, they could only look for help from the same political system that had just disfranchised them
  • The great writer Charles Chesnutt wrote that “In spite of the Fifteenth Amendment, colored men in the United States have no political rights which the States are bound to respect.” It was a “second Dred Scott decision,” white and black activists lamented.
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