"Some rich countries have all public insurance, some use private coverage, but they have a few things in common: They insure pretty much everybody, their systems cost less money, and whether you have health care has nothing to do with whether you’re employed...In the United States, however, 57 percent of Americans under 65 get insurance through their jobs, and attempts to reform that system have all failed."
Today is the 250th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party. Stop rolling your eyes, this isn't a patriotic post! You know me better than that.
This is about spilling the tea... about the British East India Company's spilled tea, and what that had to do with Bengal, textile workers, and famine.
See, BEIC was using its private armies to open markets around the world to their trading policies, and to install local rulers who would keep the goods and money flowing. They did this in Bengal, one of the world's biggest producers of textiles in the mid-1700s.
Then, in 1768, drought hit Bengal and crops failed. People began to go hungry, but the BEIC's puppet rulers just continued to collect taxes--and, in some cases, to profiteer off the sale of food. Over the next two years, these practices exacerbated the food shortages, leading to the Great Bengal Famine of 1770, in which 7 - 10 million people are estimated to have starved to death. That's at least 25% of the entire Bengali population of the time.
This put a big dent in the profits of the BEIC (oopsie, who knew famine profiteering could have negative economic impacts?), leading to a financial crisis in England. This is also why BEIC was unloading tea for cheap in the American colonies, to get some of those revenues back.
So yeah, "no taxation without representation" was the rallying cry, but isn't it interesting that we (USians, I mean) were never taught that the REASON colonists were worried about this is because they felt they had something in common with starving Bengalis: namely, the vulnerability to a multinational corporation which clearly demonstrated its depraved indifference to human suffering in pursuit of profit.
The canning industry was one of the most important in #USNorthwest & Alaska before #WorldWarII & Chinese workers were majority of workforce while enduring harsh conditions & #discrimination.
Constitution Quiz of the Week!
🔴 ⚪ 🔵
July is French-American heritage month!
Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de #Lafayette visited Montpelier twice during the 2 yrs he toured the country – all 24 states!
What 2 yrs did Lafayette’s grand U.S. tour take place?
A. 1777-1778
B. 1797-1798
C. 1824-1825
D. 1840-1841
Created in collaboration w. the Robert H. Smith Center for the Constitution at James Madison's Montpelier.
#histodons can anyone recommend anything on the intersectionality of thr abolitionist and suffragette movements? And how the suffragettes came to exclude Black liberation from their work?
There are more than 180,000 historical markers throughout America, and many of them tell only partial truths. Over the past year, NPR has analyzed crowdsourced data to uncover some of those errors. Many were strange, funny or silly — like a sign that marks the home of a world-famous Santa Claus school in Albion, New York, and a marker in Arizona that pays tribute to a donkey that drank beer. But many paint a fractured version of history: 70% of markers that mention plantations do not mention slavery, and there are 500 markers that describe the Confederacy in glowing terms. Here's more.
I've been yelling from the rooftops, READ EDWARD E. BAPTIST! Specifically his book, "The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism". And of course many people don't have the time or interest for a history book, no matter how compelling. Well, good news! Vox has an interview with Dr. Baptist, about the book, which gives a good overview of his themes and arguments. READ IT!!
"Of the many myths told about American slavery, one of the biggest is that it was an archaic practice that only enriched a small number of men.
The argument has often been used to diminish the scale of slavery, reducing it to a crime committed by a few Southern planters, one that did not touch the rest of the United States. Slavery, the argument goes, was an inefficient system, and the labor of the enslaved was considered less productive than that of a free worker being paid a wage. The use of enslaved labor has been presented as premodern, a practice that had no ties to the capitalism that allowed America to become — and remain — a leading global economy.
But as with so many stories about slavery, this is untrue. Slavery, particularly the cotton slavery that existed from the end of the 18th century to the beginning of the Civil War, was a thoroughly modern business, one that was continuously changing to maximize profits."
Was reading through a UK newspaper from 1890, there's a factual report on police in America arranging a lynching.
The way it's reported, it doesn't sound anything like a civilian police force, more like a faction from a genocidal civil war. This isn't a 21st Century view of 19th Century morality, it's a contemporary 19th Century report from a disinterested foreign reporter in a mainstream paper.
The US seems to have exceptionally poor foundations for any kind of civilian law enforcement if this is a typical example. It doesn't sound like a civilian organisation at all, more like a death squad.
Deeply disturbing.
I don't know what could be done about it, but just as an outsider it seems like the US has never fully resolved its civil war?
For thousands of years, the Klamath River has been a cornerstone of #Yurok culture, providing its people with a bounty of #chinook salmon, #coho salmon & #steelhead trout.
From @KevinMKruse last month, writing about the Chaney-Goodman-Schwerner murders in 1964 noted something I had not realized
"Their activism, of course, did not go unchallenged. White supremacists formed a new version of the KKK styled “the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi” in February of that year."
Well, it's President's Day in the US, which begs the question: is there any US president worth actually celebrating? Is there a single one that wasn't an absolute mass-murdering shitheel scumbag?
(Note: if you respond, you need to cite the historical record, not just vibes. And we are DEFINITELY counting all the bad shit they did, regardless of how much perceived good shit they did.)
(Second Note: if you name ANY of the slave-owning Presidents, you're blocked.)
Last night I dreamed [energy drink brand] released a limited edition "Milk" flavor. The can had Nixon on it. Looked at the ingredients and it had pineapple in it, referencing his last White House meal.
Obama was the best president of my lifetime, but a lot of Democrats don’t seem to know that.
The influence of GOP media has a long reach. In subtle ways, such as language and framing, it seeps into everything from the New York Times to liberal social media. It seems to have convinced a number on the left that Obama was evil.
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1/3 #ushistory#politics#observation#progressive#media
Useful history on US housing and economy from the great depression since to today’s deeply messed up housing and economic structure. Also the US housing market can be fixed through local measures. Cities have taken the first step to loosen zoning laws; financing remains a challenge.
Really enjoying this. It's both an impressively erudite and remarkably accessible retelling of #USHistory that centers #Indigenous peoples and obliterates a number of national myths. Highly recommended and worth imitating for historians (like me!) working in other national contexts. #history#AmericanHistory#histodons@histodons
How did the losers end up writing the #history of the #CivilWar and spreading the popular lie of a heroic #Confederacy in a war about states' rights instead of slavery?
"Oddly, the explanation reaches back to the pro-Confederate Dunning School of Reconstruction history at #ColumbiaUniversity... installed a white-supremacist curriculum at Columbia and dispatched doctoral students to set up pro-Confederate #USHistory departments at Southern universities." #GiftArticle https://wapo.st/3NBV7vA
Today, I started reading How to Hide an Empire by Daniel Immerwahr. I will admit that I'm a bit raw because my sister is in the hospital, but JFC, this is brutal!
Between what we weren't told as kids and details on things that we were sort of told, it's incredibly informative and interesting, but I can't stop crying about things in it.
Like, I never knew the Philippines had been an American territory.
“What we’re hearing from some teachers is that they often struggle with getting students to understand the standards because the materials they’re using, the texts that they’re using, are either abstract, or have a different relevance, and so there’s an added sort of translational work that needs to happen in the classroom to talk about how to get to the standards and learning objectives,” Chang said.
"Between 1890 and 1950, public school systems in the deep South were racially segregated by law. Disenfranchisement of Black voters enabled White-dominated state and local governments to funnel substantially fewer resources to schools for Black students than to those for Whites. One consequence was a large pay gap between Black teachers, who worked in schools attended by Black students, and White teachers, who taught only in schools for Whites" https://www.nber.org/digest/20231/impact-naacp-lawsuits-racial-gaps-teachers-pay
— #economics#ushistory
How One Robber Baron's Gamble on Railroads Brought Down His Bank and Plunged the U.S. Into the First Great Depression (www.smithsonianmag.com)
In 1873, greed, speculation and overinvestment in railroads sparked a financial crisis that sank the U.S. into more than five years of misery