#age of revolutions in Atlantic World

[fatehbaz]

imperialism and science reading list

edited: by popular demand, now with much longer list of books

Of course Katherine McKittrick and Kathryn Yusoff.

People like Achille Mbembe, Pratik Chakrabarti, Rohan Deb Roy, Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, and Elizabeth Povinelli have written some “classics” and they track the history/historiography of US/European scientific institutions and their origins in extraction, plantations, race/slavery, etc.

Two articles I’d recommend as a summary/primer:

Zaheer Baber. “The Plants of Empire: Botanic Gardens, Colonial Power and Botanical Knowledge.” Journal of Contemporary Asia. May 2016.

Kathryn Yusoff. “The Inhumanities.” Annals of the American Association of Geographers. 2020.

Then probably:

Irene Peano, Marta Macedo, and Colette Le Petitcorps. “Introduction: Viewing Plantations at the Intersection of Political Ecologies and Multiple Space-Times.” Global Plantations in the Modern World: Sovereignties, Ecologies, Afterlives. 2023.

Sharae Deckard. “Paradise Discourse, Imperialism, and Globalization: Exploiting Eden.” 2010. (Chornological overview of development of knowledge/institutions in relationship with race, slavery, profit as European empires encountered new lands and peoples.)

Gregg Mitman. “Forgotten Paths of Empire: Ecology, Disease, and Commerce in the Making of Liberia’s Plantation Economy.” Environmental History. 2017, (Interesting case study. US corporations were building fruit plantations in Latin America and rubber plantations in West Africa during the 1920s. Medical doctors, researchers, and academics made a strong alliance these corporations to advance their careers and solidify their institutions. By 1914, the director of Harvard’s Department of Tropical Medicine was also simultaneously the director of the Laboratories of the Hospitals of the United Fruit Company, which infamously and brutally occupied Central America. This same Harvard doctor was also a shareholder in rubber plantations, and had a close personal relationship with the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company, which occupied West Africa.)

Elizabeth DeLoughrey. “Globalizing the Routes of Breadfruit and Other Bounties.”  2008. (Case study of how British wealth and industrial development built on botany. Examines Joseph Banks; Kew Gardens; breadfruit; British fear of labor revolts; and the simultaneous colonizing of the Caribbean and the South Pacific.)

Elizabeth DeLoughrey. “Satellite Planetarity and the Ends of the Earth.” 2014. (Indigenous knowledge systems; “nuclear colonialism”; US empire in the Pacific; space/satellites; the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.)

Fahim Amir. “Cloudy Swords.” e-flux Journal #115, February 2021. (”Pest control”; termites; mosquitoes; fear of malaria and other diseases during German colonization of Africa and US occupations of Panama and the wider Caribbean; origins of some US institutions and the evolution of these institutions into colonial, nationalist, and then NGO forms over twentieth century.)

Some of the earlier generalist classic books that explicitly looked at science as a weapon of empires:

Schiebinger’s Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World; Delbourgo’s and Dew’s Science and Empire in the Atlantic World; the anthology Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World; Canzares-Esquerra’s Nature, Empire, and Nation: Explorations of the History of Science in the Iberian World.

One of the quintessential case studies of science in the service of empire is the British pursuit of quinine and the inoculation of their soldiers and colonial administrators to safeguard against malaria in Africa, India, and Southeast Asia at the height of their power. But there are so many other exemplary cases: Britain trying to domesticate and transplant breadfruit from the South Pacific to the Caribbean to feed laborers to prevent slave uprisings during the age of the Haitian Revolution. British colonial administrators smuggling knowledge of tea cultivation out of China in order to set up tea plantations in Assam. Eugenics, race science, biological essentialism, etc. in the early twentieth century. With my interests, my little corner of exposure/experience has to do mostly with conceptions of space/place; interspecies/multispecies relationships; borderlands and frontiers; Caribbean; Latin America; islands. So, a lot of these recs are focused there. But someone else would have better recs, especially depending on your interests. For example, Chakrabarti writes about history of medicine/healthcare. Paravisini-Gebert about extinction and Caribbean relationship to animals/landscape. Deb Roy focuses on insects and colonial administration in South Asia. Some scholars focus on the historiography and chronological trajectory of “modernity” or “botany” or “universities/academia,”, while some focus on Early Modern Spain or Victorian Britain or twentieth-century United States by region. With so much to cover, that’s why I’d recommend the articles above, since they’re kinda like overviews.Generally I read more from articles, essays, and anthologies, rather than full-length books.

Some other nice articles:

(On my blog, I’ve got excerpts from all of these articles/essays, if you want to search for or read them.)

Katherine McKittrick. “Dear April: The Aesthetics of Black Miscellanea.” Antipode. First published September 2021.

Katherine McKittrick. “Plantation Futures.” Small Axe. 2013.

Antonio Lafuente and Nuria Valverde. “Linnaean Botany and Spanish Imperial Biopolitics.” A chapter in: Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World. 2004.

Kathleen Susan Murphy. “A Slaving Surgeon’s Collection: The Pursuit of Natural History through the British Slave Trade to Spanish America.” 2019. And also: “The Slave Trade and Natural Science.” In: Oxford Bibliographies in Atlantic History. 2016.

Timothy J. Yamamura. “Fictions of Science, American Orientalism, and the Alien/Asian of Percival Lowell.” 2017.

Elizabeth Bentley. “Between Extinction and Dispossession: A Rhetorical Historiography of the Last Palestinian Crocodile (1870-1935).” 2021.

Pratik Chakrabarti. “Gondwana and the Politics of Deep Past.” Past & Present 242:1. 2019.

Jonathan Saha. “Colonizing elephants: animal agency, undead capital and imperial science in British Burma.” BJHS Themes. British Society for the History of Science. 2017.

Zoe Chadwick. “Perilous plants, botanical monsters, and (reverse) imperialism in fin-de-siecle literature.” The Victorianist: BAVS Postgraduates. 2017.

Dante Furioso: “Sanitary Imperialism.” Jeremy Lee Wolin: “The Finest Immigration Station in the World.” Serubiri Moses. “A Useful Landscape.” Andrew Herscher and Ana Maria Leon. “At the Border of Decolonization.” All from e-flux.

William Voinot-Baron. “Inescapable Temporalities: Chinook Salmon and the Non-Sovereignty of Co-Management in Southwest Alaska.” 2019.

Rohan Deb Roy. “White ants, empire, and entomo-politics in South Asia.” The Historical Journal. 2 October 2019.  

Rohan Deb Roy. “Introduction: Nonhuman Empires.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 35 (1). May 2015.

Lawrence H. Kessler. “Entomology and Empire: Settler Colonial Science  and the Campaign for Hawaiian Annexation.” Arcadia (Spring 2017).

Sasha Litvintseva and Beny Wagner. “Monster as Medium: Experiments in Perception in Early Modern Science and Film.” e-flux. March 2021.

Lesley Green. “The Changing of the Gods of Reason: Cecil John Rhodes, Karoo Fracking, and the Decolonizing of the Anthropocene.” e-flux Journal Issue #65. May 2015.

Martin Mahony. “The Enemy is Nature: Military Machines and Technological Bricolage in Britain’s ‘Great Agricultural Experiment.’“ Environment and Society Portal, Arcadia. Spring 2021. 

Anna Boswell. “Anamorphic Ecology, or the Return of the Possum.” 2018. And; “Climates of Change: A Tuatara’s-Eye View.��2020. And: “Settler Sanctuaries and the Stoat-Free State." 2017.

Katherine Arnold. “Hydnora Africana: The ‘Hieroglyphic Key’ to Plant Parasitism.” Journal of the History of Ideas - JHI Blog - Dispatches from the Archives. 21 July 2021.

Helen F. Wilson. “Contact zones: Multispecies scholarship through Imperial Eyes.” Environment and Planning. July 2019.

Tom Brooking and Eric Pawson. “Silences of Grass: Retrieving the Role of Pasture Plants in the Development of New Zealand and the British Empire.” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History. August 2007.

Kirsten Greer. “Zoogeography and imperial defence: Tracing the contours of the Neactic region in  the temperate North Atlantic, 1838-1880s.” Geoforum Volume 65. October 2015. And: “Geopolitics and the Avian Imperial Archive: The Zoogeography of Region-Making in the Nineteenth-Century British Mediterranean.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers. 2013,

Marco Chivalan Carrillo and Silvia Posocco. “Against Extraction in Guatemala: Multispecies Strategies in Vampiric Times.” International Journal of Postcolonial Studies. April 2020.

Laura Rademaker. “60,000 years is not forever: ‘time revolutions’ and Indigenous pasts.” Postcolonial Studies. September 2021.

Paulo Tavares. “The Geological Imperative: On the Political Ecology of the Amazon’s Deep History.” Architecture in the Anthropocene. Edited by Etienne Turpin. 2013.

Kathryn Yusoff. “Geologic Realism: On the Beach of Geologic Time.” Social Text. 2019. And: “The Anthropocene and Geographies of Geopower.” Handbook on the Geographies of Power. 2018. And: “Climates of sight: Mistaken visbilities, mirages and ‘seeing beyond’ in Antarctica.” In: High Places: Cultural Geographies of Mountains, Ice and Science. 2008. And:“Geosocial Formations and the Anthropocene.” 2017. And: “An Interview with Elizabeth Grosz: Geopower, Inhumanism and the Biopolitical.” 2017.

Mara Dicenta. “The Beavercene: Eradication and Settler-Colonialism in Tierra del Fuego.” Arcadia. Spring 2020.

And then here are some books:

Frontiers of Science: Imperialism and Natural Knowledge in the Gulf South Borderlands, 1500-1850 (Cameron B. Strang); Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World (Londa Schiebinger, 2004);

Africa as a Living Laboratory: Empire, Development, and the Problem of Scientific Knowledge, 1870-1950 (Helen Tilley, 2011); Colonizing Animals: Interspecies Empire in Myanmar (Jonathan Saha); Fluid Geographies: Water, Science and Settler Colonialism in New Mexico (K. Maria D. Lane, 2024);  Geopolitics, Culture, and the Scientific Imaginary in Latin America (Edited by del Pilar Blanco and Page, 2020)

Red Coats and Wild Birds: How Military Ornithologists and Migrant Birds Shaped Empire (Kirsten A. Greer); The Black Geographic: Praxis, Resistance, Futurity (Hawthorne and Lewis, 2022); Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture (Britt Rusert, 2017)

The Empirical Empire: Spanish Colonial Rule and the Politics of Knowledge (Arndt Brendecke, 2016); In the Museum of Man: Race, Anthropology, and Empire in France, 1850-1960 (Alice Conklin, 2013); Unfreezing the Arctic: Science, Colonialism, and the Transformation of Inuit Lands (Andrew Stuhl)

Anglo-European Science and the Rhetoric of Empire: Malaria, Opium, and British Rule in India, 1756-1895 (Paul Winther); Peoples on Parade: Exhibitions, Empire, and Anthropology in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Sadiah Qureshi, 2011); Practical Matter: Newton’s Science in the Service of Industry and Empire, 1687-1851 (Margaret Jacob and Larry Stewart)

Pasteur’s Empire: Bacteriology and Politics in France, Its Colonies, and the World (Aro Velmet, 2022); Medicine and Empire, 1600-1960 (Pratik Chakrabarti, 2014); Colonial Geography: Race and Space in German East Africa, 1884-1905 (Matthew Unangst, 2022);

The Nature of German Imperialism: Conservation and the Politics of Wildlife in Colonial East Africa (Bernhard Gissibl, 2019); Curious Encounters: Voyaging, Collecting, and Making Knowledge in the Long Eighteenth Century (Edited by Adriana Craciun and Mary Terrall, 2019)

The Ends of Paradise: Race, Extraction, and the Struggle for Black Life in Honduras (Chirstopher A. Loperena, 2022); Mining Language: Racial Thinking, Indigenous Knowledge, and Colonial Metallurgy in the Early Modern Iberian World (Allison Bigelow, 2020); The Herds Shot Round the World: Native Breeds and the British Empire, 1800-1900 (Rebecca J.H. Woods); American Tropics: The Caribbean Roots of Biodiversity Science (Megan Raby, 2017); Producing Mayaland: Colonial Legacies, Urbanization, and the Unfolding of Global Capitalism (Claudia Fonseca Alfaro, 2023); Unnsettling Utopia: The Making and Unmaking of French India (Jessica Namakkal, 2021)

Domingos Alvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World (James Sweet, 2011); A Temperate Empire: Making Climate Change in Early America (Anya Zilberstein, 2016); Educating the Empire: American Teachers and Contested Colonization in the Philippines (Sarah Steinbock-Pratt, 2019); Soundings and Crossings: Doing Science at Sea, 1800-1970 (Edited by Anderson, Rozwadowski, et al, 2016)

Possessing Polynesians: The Science of Settler Colonial Whiteness in Hawai’i and Oceania (Maile Arvin); Overcoming Niagara: Canals, Commerce, and Tourism in the Niagara-Great Lakes Borderland Region, 1792-1837 (Janet Dorothy Larkin, 2018); A Great and Rising Nation: Naval Exploration and Global Empire in the Early US Republic (Michael A. Verney, 2022)

Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment (Daniela Cleichmar, 2012); Tea Environments and Plantation Culture: Imperial Disarray in Eastern India (Arnab Dey, 2022); Drugs on the Page: Pharmacopoeias and Healing Knowledge in the Early Modern Atlantic World (Edited by Crawford and Gabriel, 2019)

Cooling the Tropics: Ice, Indigeneity, and Hawaiian Refreshment (Hi’ilei Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart, 2022); In Asian Waters: Oceanic Worlds from Yemen to Yokkohama (Eric Tagliacozzo); Yellow Fever, Race, and Ecology in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans (Urmi Engineer Willoughby, 2017); Turning Land into Capital: Development and Dispossession in the Mekong Region (Edited by Hirsch, et al, 2022); Mining the Borderlands: Industry, Capital, and the Emergence of Engineers in the Southwest Territories, 1855-1910 (Sarah E.M. Grossman, 2018)

Knowing Manchuria: Environments, the Senses, and Natural Knowledge on an Asian Borderland (Ruth Rogaski); Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities: Race Science and the Making of Polishness on the Fringes of the German Empire, 1840-1920 (Lenny A. Urena Valerio); Against the Map: The Politics of Geography in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Adam Sills, 2021)

Under Osman’s Tree: The Ottoman Empire, Egypt, and Environmental History (Alan Mikhail, 2017); Imperial Nature: Joseph Hooker and the Practices of Victorian Science (Jim Endersby); Proving Grounds: Militarized Landscapes, Weapons Testing, and the Environmental Impact of U.S. Bases (Edited by Edwin Martini, 2015)

Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World (Multiple authors, 2007); Space in the Tropics: From Convicts to Rockets in French Guiana (Peter Redfield); Seeds of Empire: Cotton, Slavery, and the Transformation of the Texas Borderlands, 1800-1850 (Andrew Togert, 2015); Dust Bowls of Empire: Imperialism, Environmental Politics, and the Injustice of ‘Green’ Capitalism (Hannah Holleman, 2016); Postnormal Conservation: Botanic Gardens and the Reordering of Biodiversity Governance (Katja Grotzner Neves, 2019)

Botanical Entanglements: Women, Natural Science, and the Arts in Eighteenth-Century England (Anna K. Sagal, 2022); The Platypus and the Mermaid and Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination (Harriet Ritvo); Rubber and the Making of Vietnam: An Ecological History, 1897-1975 (Michitake Aso); A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (Kathryn Yusoff, 2018); Staple Security: Bread and Wheat in Egypt (Jessica Barnes, 2023); No Wood, No Kingdom: Political Ecology in the English Atlantic (Keith Pluymers); Planting Empire, Cultivating Subjects: British Malaya, 1768-1941 (Lynn Hollen Lees, 2017); Fish, Law, and Colonialism: The Legal Capture of Salmon in British Columbia (Douglas C. Harris, 2001); Everywhen: Australia and the Language of Deep Time (Edited by Ann McGrath, Laura Rademaker, and Jakelin Troy)

Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, 1500-1676 (Joyce Chaplin, 2001); Mapping the Amazon: The Making and Unmaking of French India (Jessica Namakkal, 2021)

American Lucifers: The Dark History of Artificial Light, 1750-1865 (Jeremy Zallen); Ruling Minds: Psychology in the British Empire (Erik Linstrum, 2016); Lakes and Empires in Macedonian History: Contesting the Water (James Pettifer and Mirancda Vickers, 2021); Inscriptions of Nature: Geology and the Naturalization of Antiquity (Pratik Chakrabarti); Seeds of Control: Japan’s Empire of Forestry in Colonial Korea (David Fedman)

Do Glaciers Listen?: Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters, and Social Imagination (Julie Cruikshank); The Fishmeal Revolution: The Industrialization of the Humboldt Current Ecosystem (Kristin A. Wintersteen, 2021); The Earth on Show: Fossils and the Poetics of Popular Science, 1802-1856 (Ralph O’Connor); An Imperial Disaster: The Bengal Cyclone of 1876 (Benjamin Kingsbury, 2018); Geographies of City Science: Urban Life and Origin Debates in Late Victorian Dublin (Tanya O’Sullivan, 2019)

American Hegemony and the Postwar Reconstruction of Science in Europe (John Krige, 2006); Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Ann Laura Stoler, 2002); Rivers of the Sultan: The Tigris and Euphrates in the Ottoman Empire (Faisal H. Husain, 2021)

The Sanitation of Brazil: Nation, State, and Public Health, 1889-1930 (Gilberto Hochman, 2016); The Imperial Security State: British Colonial Knowledge and Empire-Building in Asia (James Hevia); Japan’s Empire of Birds: Aristocrats, Anglo-Americans, and Transwar Ornithology (Annika A. Culver, 2022)

Moral Ecology of a Forest: The Nature Industry and Maya Post-Conservation (Jose E. Martinez, 2021); Sound Relations: Native Ways of Doing Music History in Alaska (Jessica Bissette Perea, 2021); Citizens and Rulers of the World: The American Child and the Cartographic Pedagogies of Empire (Mashid Mayar); Anthropology and Antihumanism in Imperial Germany (Andrew Zimmerman, 2001)

The Botany of Empire in the Long Eighteenth Century (Multiple authors, 2016); The Nature of Slavery: Environment and Plantation Labor in the Anglo-Atlantic World (Katherine Johnston, 2022); Seeking the American Tropics: South Florida’s Early Naturalists (James A. Kushlan, 2020)

The Colonial Life of Pharmaceuticals: Medicines and Modernity in Vietnam (Laurence Monnais); Quinoa: Food Politics and Agrarian Life in the Andean Highlands (Linda J. Seligmann, 2023) ; Critical Animal Geographies: Politics, intersections and hierarchies in a multispecies world (Edited by Kathryn Gillespie and Rosemary-Claire Collard, 2017); Spawning Modern Fish: Transnational Comparison in the Making of Japanese Salmon (Heather Ann Swanson, 2022); Imperial Visions: Nationalist Imagination and Geographical Expansion in the Russian Far East, 1840-1865 (Mark Bassin, 2000); The Usufructuary Ethos: Power, Politics, and Environment in the Long Eighteenth Century (Erin Drew, 2022)

Intimate Eating: Racialized Spaces and Radical Futures (Anita Mannur, 2022); On the Frontiers of the Indian Ocean World: A History of Lake Tanganyika, 1830-1890 (Philip Gooding, 2022); All Things Harmless, Useful, and Ornamental: Environmental Transformation Through Species Acclimitization, from Colonial Australia to the World (Pete Minard, 2019)

Visions of Nature: How Landscape Photography Shaped Setller Colonialism (Jarrod Hore, 2022); Timber and Forestry in Qing China: Sustaining the Market (Meng Zhang, 2021); The World and All the Things upon It: Native Hawaiian Geographies of Exploration (David A. Chang);

Deep Cut: Science, Power, and the Unbuilt Interoceanic Canal (Christine Keiner); Writing the New World: The Politics of Natural History in the Early Spanish Empire (Mauro Jose Caraccioli); Two Years below the Horn: Operation Tabarin, Field Science, and Antarctic Sovereignty, 1944-1946 (Andrew Taylor, 2017); Mapping Water in Dominica: Enslavement and Environment under Colonialism (Mark W. Hauser, 2021)

To Master the Boundless Sea: The US Navy, the Marine Environment, and the Cartography of Empire (Jason Smith, 2018); Fir and Empire: The Transformation of Forests in Early Modern China (Ian Matthew Miller, 2020); Breeds of Empire: The ‘Invention’ of the Horse in Southeast Asia and Southern Africa 1500-1950 (Sandra Swart and Greg Bankoff, 2007)

Science on the Roof of the World: Empire and the Remaking of the Himalaya (Lachlan Fleetwood, 2022); Cattle Colonialism: An Environmental History of the Conquest of California and Hawai’i (John Ryan Fisher, 2017); Imperial Creatures: Humans and Other Animals in Colonial Singapore, 1819-1942 (Timothy P. Barnard, 2019)

An Ecology of Knowledges: Fear, Love, and Technoscience in Guatemalan Forest Conservation (Micha Rahder, 2020); Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta: The Making of Calcutta (Debjani Bhattacharyya, 2018);  Imperial Bodies in London: Empire, Mobility, and the Making of British Medicine, 1880-1914 (Kristen Hussey, 2021)

Biotic Borders: Transpacific Plant and Insect Migration and the Rise of Anti-Asian Racism in America, 1890-1950 (Jeannie N. Shinozuka); Coral Empire: Underwater Oceans, Colonial Tropics, Visual Modernity (Ann Elias, 2019); Hunting Africa: British Sport, African Knowledge and the Nature of Empire (Angela Thompsell, 2015)

[mrhaitch]

Hello, Mr. Haitch

You mentioned before in one of your answers that "climate and social justice are inextricably linked." Do you mind saying how so?

Thank you!

Our current geological age - the Anthropocene - is inextricably linked to the history of capitalism, no matter how you date it. The three main theories are that it began in 1945 at the close of the second world war and the international trade agreements and advent of nuclear testing; that it began with the industrial revolution; or (and this is the theory I subscribe to) it began between 1492 and 1610 with European colonialism in the Americas.

The anthropocene is defined as an age of globalised human control and impact on the earth's environment, ranging from climate change to biodiversity, and the early history of Europe's colonisation of the Americas fits the bill pretty well. Beginning in 1492 the indigenous population of the Americas collapsed by 95% (population estimates run from 60 million to 120+, the loss represents about a 10% global population loss), along with vast amounts of infrastructure including cities, towns, trading outposts, road networks, irrigation systems, and so on - all in an area (especially equatorial America) where the local flora grows rapidly. The deaths of so many with so few colonisers to replace them saw a rapacious period of reforestation, creating a massive carbon sink which drew down an estimated 13 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, ushering in The Little Ice Age. Global temperatures fell for the first time since the agricultural revolution, and put huge stress on an already fracturing feudal system. Over the course of 200 years Europe went through fits of social and political revolution, where the aristocracy were (sometimes violently) deposed by an ascendant merchant class ushering in our current age of liberal democracy, the enshrining of private property, and fixation on trade and prosperity.

The population collapse also provided a rationale for the Atlantic slave trade, as the enslaved workforce the Europeans had been using up until then were pretty much all dead.

With me so far?

Since the industrial revolution our economic system has been reliant on exponential growth, leading to an ever increasing appetite for raw materials, land, and cheap (or free) labour. The environmental and human costs have increased in lock step with one another - both crises borne of the same root. We cannot address one without addressing the other.

This is a very condensed version of the argument and I'm glossing over a lot here. If you're interested I'd recommend tracking down the following texts (usually available at libraries, particularly University ones):

The American Holocaust, David Stannard

The Human Planet, Lewis and Maslin

The Problem of Nature, David Arnold

The Sixth Extinction, Elizabeth Kolbert

History and Human Nature, RC Solomon

[vanessalocke]

France, America and the Love for 'Liberté'

Warning: wall of text. This post is nearly 5000 words long.

TL; DR: France contributed to the formation of America. Why did Himaruya design France like that? Some relevant information about the relationship between France - UK and France - US.

Part 1: The Love for 'Liberté'

I've talked about this a lot, but now I'll summarize it a bit. Basically, it's not without reason that I assume that France played a huge role in giving birth to America.

The reason the French supported America in the war for independence from Britain included 2 reasons:

1. Competition with England. This is too obvious.

2. The French Enlightenment caused the French to risk their lives in North America. Their help to Americans is to realize their dreams and ideals of liberty and republican government. (Museum of the American Revolution, unknown)

Helping America is not only the French monarchy, but also the French people. The Americans' determination to make a revolution created a great wave throughout France (Office of the Historian, unknown). It can be said that America was born from the French Enlightenment movement. Americans were directly taught by the French about ideas about human equality. At the heart of every American uprising is Enlightenment thought. In addition, precisely because Enlightenment ideas were transmitted directly from France to America, it was from America that this idea was spread across the Atlantic (Marks, 2018).

We can mention some typical French figures who participated in the American Revolution and some Americans who were influenced by France. The most famous Frenchman of the American Revolution was the Marquis de Lafayette. He joined this war at the age of 19, with the belief that he would bring glory and justice to America, even rising to the rank of major general in American army (Shaw, unknown). Pierre Charles L'Enfant, the designer of Washington DC, was French (Museum of the American Revolution, unknown). Thomas Jefferson, America's founding father, a native of England, was a true francophile. He was one of the first US ambassadors extraordinary and plenipotentiary to France, and is extremely passionate about the French lifestyle (The French Life, unknown). Benjamin Franklin was the main factor why the French were inspired and fervently supported the American Revolution (Office of the Historian, unknown). “Give me liberty or give me death!”, Patrick Henry's declaration at the Second Virginia Convention (1775) was influenced by the saying "Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains.” by French writer Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Mcgee, 2020)

The American Revolution is called the Second Hundred Years' War between France and England by some historians (Shaw, unknown). From 1775 to 1777, France secretly supported America by providing weapons and money to America (The Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica, unknown). When the Franco-American Alliance was signed in 1778, France openly supported the United States, and "brought its full military might against Britain" (Shaw, unknown). In terms of the treaty, “peace could be arrived at only by mutual French and U.S. consent" (The Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica, unknown). The British attempted to divide the French-American alliance and failed, and only when Britain and France resolved their differences could the Americans sign the treaty of Paris (Mcgee, 2020). French support played an important role in the British surrender at the Battle of Yorktown in 1781 (Office of the Historian, unknown). In the Siege of Yorktown painting hung in the US Capitol, the Bourbon flag and the American flag are placed parallel to each other. Admiring the French was even considered “a patriotic duty” for American colonists (Kaplan, 1956, p.34).

In order for America to be independent, the French army at that time gathered troops to fight the British army in colonies around the world. Because Britain had to spread human resources and resources across battles in other colonies, America became a secondary problem, meaning that if Britain did not let go of the 13 colonies in North America, the entire British empire would collapse. (Shaw, unknown). In 1776, France transferred to the United States about 300,000 pounds of gunpowder, 30,000 muskets, 3,000 tents, more than 200 cannons and clothes for 30,000 soldiers (Museum at Yorktown, unknown). If only before 1777, the amount of money that France provided to America was 1.3 billion livres, the American army was completely dependent on France. It was the 1778 treaty between America and France that gave the Americans legitimacy, thereby receiving additional support from other European powers. After that, 12,000 French soldiers, 22,000 naval personnel and over 63 warships participated in the war (Mcgee, 2020). In an unofficial source, meaning I read from a group of American friends, the statistics show that more French people died because of the American war of independence than Americans died because of their homeland (I haven't found an official source for this detail yet, so don't take it as fact. I would appreciate it if someone could fill me in on this detail). The costs were poured into North America causing France's economy to collapse and the French Revolution to occur, ending the French monarchy (Shaw, unknown). My opinion that France is a mother who sacrificed her life to give birth to her American child is not without basis.

After the defeat at Yorktown, when the British surrendered, they simply marched back toward the French, thereby denying the efforts and role of the Americans in this war of independence. French Major General de Lafayette was very angry, so he ordered his team to play Doodle Yankee (a song composed by the British to mock the French). Immediately, the British turned around and looked at the Americans. (Fleming, 2013)

At this point I will stop talking about the American Revolution, let's talk about other factors throughout the diplomatic history between America and France:

- The relationship between these two countries is not always smooth, even quite contradictory, but it is a fact that France is the first and oldest ally of America and these two countries have never really conflict with each other.

- French historian Édouard de Laboulaye proposed the idea of ​​gifting the Statue of Liberty to the United States in 1865 to commemorate 100 years of American independence from England (1865 was the year the United States abolished slavery). Then, sculptor Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi designed this statue. Journalist Joseph Pulitzer wrote: “It is not a gift from the millionaires of France to the millionaires of America, but a gift of the whole people of France to the whole people of America.” (Little, 2021)

- Many times America and France almost became enemies, but fate did not let these two countries stand on two different front lines. The most spectacular case of reversal is about New Orleans. After Thomas Jefferson became president, he wrote: “There is on the globe one single spot, the possessor of which is our natural and habitual enemy. It is New Orleans, through which the produce of three eighths of our territory must pass to market.” (Worsham, 2002). That is France, the country that controls all of Louisiana including New Orleans. However, no one expected that the United States only needed to buy the entire Louisiana region from France in 1803 and the problem would be solved. Sold by France to Louisiana, America doubled in size, giving America access to the world's largest inland waterways. Tim Marshall wrote that, thanks to this purchase, “the roadmap to American greatness flowed.” (Marshall, 2016) (I read this in Vietnamese translation, and I translated it into English. Therefore, the quote may not be very accurate. Reading this gave me goosebumps)

- In 1964-1966, conflicts between America and France increased. During these years, France has continuously made statements and policies contrary to US policies, causing America to continuously promote anti-French media. Regarding this move, the French president at that time said: "It is in the United States' interest to have by their side not a satellite, but an independent ally, always by their side in times of danger." (Journoud, 2011) (I read this in Vietnamese translation, and I translated it into English. Therefore, the quote may not be very accurate). In 1966, France withdrew from the NATO military command structure. The French President demanded that all NATO bases leave French territory. NATO headquarters has been moved from Paris to Brussels. (CVCE.eu, unknown)

Keep in mind that most of the sources I read are American and British. There is only one source I got from the French. This means there is no French agenda here.

Part 2: Why, Himaruya?

I will add a little information about the cold period between France and America. I will no longer talk about France and America from Hetalia's perspective, but about France and America in reality. The purpose of part 2 is to answer the question: why did Himaruya design France like that? In this section, I only speak about the knowledge I have gathered without citing sources. I'm too lazy to find the source for this knowledge. So it could be wrong. You can read to learn more for yourself.

Some information I summarized from the book "De Gaulle et le Vietnam" by Pierre Journoud, some information I collected from other articles (which I did not save). The book "De Gaulle et le Vietnam" is a massive work, and an attempt at reconciliation between France and Vietnam, which describes the process of French President de Gaulle from a colonialist to a supporter of Vietnam's independence. This is a book sponsored and published by the French Embassy in Vietnam and recommended by scholars in Vietnam.

Okay, now let's get to the main story:

In official Hetalia, author Himaruya tends to "deny" the character France. The reason is because this person is an international student in New York, so he is greatly influenced by the American perspective on France. A large portion of Americans think of France as a promiscuous, sex-addicted b*tch. Why? This has an unfortunate history. There are 3 factors:

1. World War II. Allied troops landed in France... you know, during wartime, hunger, there will inevitably be prostitution with soldiers to get food. At that time, prostitution was widespread and terrible. I read an article that said this: Anglo-American troops saw the liberation of Paris not only as a symbol of Europe's freedom from Germany, but also as "their entertainment playground". When American troops arrived at France's Petit Palais, the authorities also gave free condoms to American soldiers so they could go with prostitutes there. The impression of such a place of debauchery and prostitution left a very deep impression in the minds of the British and Americans about the image of France being associated with debauchery and prostitution.

But the fact that the Allied troops came to France and brought back to their country such a bad impression of women was not the end. That myth should have disappeared in 1 or 2 generations. Everything continues to the second problem I will talk about later.

2. Indochina War.

That's right, my country is involved. During the First Indochina War, France returned to Vietnam, but after the battle of Dien Bien Phu, it was defeated and withdrew. America jumped in with the anti-communist flag, with the goal of not letting communism encroach on even one inch of land in the world, because they think that if Vietnam becomes a socialist country, the domino effect will turn the entire Pacific Ocean into a communist ocean.

What is worth mentioning here is that, after the French were defeated in Vietnam, they learned from the experience that the Vietnamese people needed independence more than anything and that Vietnamese nationalism was very strong, so the war Indochina was fundamentally wrong from the start. After France had completely accepted that it had lost and was wrong in Vietnam, they saw America jumping into Vietnam as nothing more than a new form of colonialism, and the Republic of Vietnam as nothing more than an American puppet. So at that time, France looked down on the Republic of Vietnam very much, and even that look increased when Ngo Dinh Diem died. President de Gaulle, after France's defeat in Vietnam, began to be more aware of the so-called Vietnamese nationalism and sympathized with the government of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. He has repeatedly advised American presidents that with this situation they will be completely defeated in Vietnam and they should withdraw soon. Kennedy listened but did not withdraw, Johnson showed open hostility towards de Gaulle, Nixon escalated the war to a terrible intensity.

Let's go back to the world war a bit. World War II N4zi Germany occupied France and established the French Vichy government. General de Gaulle could not accept the French Vichy government, so he went to England to gather French forces abroad and in the colonies to establish the France Libre government in exile. Winston Churchill absolutely liked Charles de Gaulle and supported France Libre a lot (Churchill himself was a Francophile), but Roosevelt hated de Gaulle very much, made things difficult for France Libre and even recognized the Vichy government, because Roosevelt felt de Gaulle's nationalism was too strong, and under de Gaulle's influence, France would not "listen to" America after the war ends (and indeed he was not wrong). Britain needed America to fight N4zi Germany, and always advocated peace with America, so Churchill was torn between Roosevelt and de Gaulle. De Gaulle was a proud man, so even though he sought refuge in England as an exile, de Gaulle did not accept Britain's excessive demands about future post-war France for aid in the present. As a result, Churchill and de Gaulle argued a lot, hurled the harshest words at each other, and even almost considered each other enemies even though the two sides were allies and France was more or less relying on Britain.

On one occasion, de Gaulle and Churchill argued with each other. When de Gaulle went back, people asked de Gaulle what he and Churchill had argued about, and de Gaulle said: I asked him, "who did you choose in the end?", then he replied, “between Europe and the ocean, I will always choose the ocean”, I had nothing more to say. When people asked Churchill, Churchill only sadly said that de Gaulle was just losing his temper and needed to cool his head.

America's attitude of rejecting France Libre continued until the communist movement in France grew strong (at that time, France was the place of the largest communist party in Europe) and attempted to overthrow France Vichy. America did not want communists to take power in France, so they reluctantly nodded and supported de Gaulle's France Libre. However, everything was still extremely forced, because the head of France Libre, de Gaulle, was only informed about the D-Day landings two days before. De Gaulle was extremely angry but could do nothing.

Through it all, de Gaulle seemed always to be wary of Anglo-Saxon circles. Since France gained independence, the policy of French president had always been to try not to depend on any country. He advocated for France to independently develop nuclear weapons, withdrew France from command of NATO, forced allied troops to withdraw from French soil, made peace with the Soviet Union, established diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China and vetoed Britain's entry into the EU. America knew de Gaulle did not want to depend on America and this was a friction dating back to the World War.

Returning to the Indochina war and France's opposition to US intervention in Indochina. Through the experience of France's failure, de Gaulle saw very clearly that America would soon be bogged down and defeated in Vietnam. De Gaulle himself did not like the government of the Republic of Vietnam because the Republic of Vietnam was too dependent on the United States. At that time, France bluntly made statements that France did not support US intervention in Indochina, that everything was wrong (something very few capitalist governments dared to do at that time. And according to what I read, at that time about 60-80% of the overseas Vietnamese people there did not like the government of the Republic of Vietnam), and even withdrew France from SEATO, acting as an intermediary diplomatic channel with the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. With de Gaulle's "separation" moves, America lost all patience. To America, France is like a crazy person who never listens to America's wishes. And America believed that France's actions were because France was bitter towards them because they had taken France's place in Indochina, and America also brought up the old story of de Gaulle and Rooselvelt during the World War, claiming that de Gaulle was really a exploitative and ungrateful for America's help, that Roosevelt did not misjudge back then.

America believed that France was a fool, out of date but always liked to criticize America, but America could not take any tough measures or boycott France. France is the gateway to Europe. At that time communism was strong, America could not take such risks. So America used the media. During Johnson's entire period, the media and news always smeared and ridiculed France (The "white flag" meme is one of them). The Republic of Vietnam at that time also had a case of young men attacking the French embassy and destroying the works left by France.

Of course, among the media measures back then was the myth of prostitutes from World War II. America had dug up the prostitution narrative (which I mentioned in part 1), promoting that sexualized agenda in our showbiz world (“Voulez vous coucher avec moi ce soir?” actually from an American movie, not French). Since then, this myth has spread throughout the world and is especially prevalent in Anglo-American and Anglo-Saxon circles.

3. There is one more factor but I haven't learned much about this case. That is a big part of what makes up this stereotype France = b*tch, which also comes from the feudal period of France. At that time, the case of nobility couples getting married but both having affairs and debauchery and luxury started from the French palace of Versailles. King Louis XIV was the reason for this. Louis XIV believed that when he promoted adultery among the nobility, everyone would turn to "fight" with each other, thus no longer having the mind to overthrow him, and his position would be more secure. And the consequences of that debauchery were very horrifying, it gave birth to a series of generations of philosophers and literati who were sick, dissatisfied, and immersed in pleasure, lasting from the feudal period, to the period of Enlightenment philosophy, the French Revolution, flared up again in the 70s and 80s and that disorder and sickness still affects France to this day.

Part 3: Some related information and personal opinions

I would like to add a little more of my thoughts: During World War 2, America was in a position to help France. Because if America had not jumped into the war, instead of the Allies liberating France, it would have been the French Communist Party that would have overthrown the f4scists. France was one of the European countries most sympathetic to the red wave, so much so that at that time the French Communist Party was the largest Communist Party in Europe. There were many famous French philosophers who are Marxist.

Roosevelt clearly considered ignoring France Libre to recognize the Vichy government if the French red wave was not so strong. So at that time, I think, sooner or later France would be able to overthrow the f4scists, but the problem was which side to overthrow, America jumping in was also partly to competed with the French Communist Party. Imagine America jumping in without time and the Communist Party taking power in France, I don't know how much the world situation would change after that.

General de Gaulle was almost obsessed with the saying "between Europe and the ocean, I will always choose the ocean". After he received that answer from Churchill, his attitude towards Britain almost completely changed.

Later, France turned to join hands with its old enemy aka Germany to establish the European Coal and Steel Community mainly to counterbalance the influence of Britain and America, even France was a direct veto country when Britain applied to enter the EEC. This was like a slap in the face of Britain. The British are still very tormented about this case, saying "I saved you from them, I emptied the treasury for you, but in the end you would rather go with them than with me.". But in fact, the fact that France established the EEC with Germany in the first place was due to Britain's previous answer. It's just that the British and American media, when mentioning the EEC and calling France ungrateful, often don't mention Churchill's quote.

When General de Gaulle came to England in exile, the reason General de Gaulle did not compromise with Britain's demands was because France was "too weak to bow" at that time. This sentence makes me think that France is too proud to be submissive or bow its head, when even in exile, France was still determined not to bow to England, and later they did not bow to America the way Britain had bowed to America for nearly a century. Thanks to that, compared to other European countries, France now has a certain independence and is not too dependent on the US, and for the US, France is a relatively "difficult" ally. This is an "ally", not a "junior" labeled an ally, not the type that obediently listens to the US. America was very bitter about this and cursed France for being ungrateful, France only replied: "It is in the United States' interest to have by their side not a satellite, but an independent ally, always by their side in times of danger."

To talk about Churchill's answer, in fact, Britain becoming dependent on America was a rather bitter process for the British empire.

After the end of WW2, it was America that broke Britain's imperial position. If you read about West Asia (also known as the Middle East), a large part of the West Asian conflict took place because the US took over all of Britain's interests in the oil issue in West Asia.

A little background: The essence of the British empire and colonial system was market protection. That means the market between the mother country and the colony is a closed market, the goods of the mother country and the colony will be exported and consumed with each other, but will not export or import additional goods from a third country.

There is a saying that in WW2, the Allies won thanks to "Russian blood, British intelligence and American steel". That means World War II was won thanks to a large amount of weapons produced in the US. During World War II, America gradually realized their production potential, they themselves did not expect they had such great production power. The problem was that after the war ended, they lost their trading market. Their production capacity was still so strong, but they did not know where to export their goods. So they turned their attention to the British colonies: at that time Britain was accounting for 25% of the world market.

25% of that market was monopolized by the UK. So how can the UK released 25% of that market? American answer: Breaking Britain's imperial position, breaking Britain's monopoly on exporting goods to the colonies. At that time, Britain was in debt of more than 200% of GDP, the treasury was completely exhausted, the country was in ruins and British colonies began to rebel. The UK was in a desperate situation. In the end, Britain had to bow to America, aka, from the empire on which the sun never sets came to the Commonwealth. Britain withdrew from that 25% market share, and the former British colonies were now encroached by the United States to gain market share. That's why Britain was so bitter when France created the ESEC/EEC. Because the position from an independent empire to becoming a subordinate of America was something the British were forced to do, not wanted.

Part of the reason why Britain can somewhat accept a junior partnership with the US is because America's leaders are all of British descent. During the American Revolution, even after the revolution was successful, Americans still honored their old "motherland". Why is that, because in fact the leaders of the uprising were all white people from England. England has a characteristic that in any colony that has white British people, the people of British descent in that place are treated well by the mother country. When Churchill told de Gaulle that he would rather choose the ocean than choose Europe, perhaps he himself had the thought that Britain would decline, but would rather be America's subordinate - where there are England's own white British descendants (so somehow England continues its glory) rather than being equals with European countries.

In Charles de Gaulle's War Memoirs, the author said this: before WW2, Berlin was getting stronger and the risk of Germany going to war was in sight, but London ignored Berlin because London wanted that when France and Germany went to war, France would depend on Britain.

That's why when WW2 happened, de Gaulle argued with Churchill a lot and refused to compromise because de Gaulle did not want to fall into the same situation as London thought before, which meant becoming a France dependent on Britain. This has led to the UK moving towards the US, aka a "globalized" UK, while France forms the ESEC/EEC with Germany so that Europe can counter the Anglo-Saxon world. And another point in current French politics is that now there is a large part of the French demanding Frexit, because French agriculture has been severely damaged by the EU.

In general, the more I read about the Anglo-French relationship, the more complicated it became. French assumed that WW2 happened partly because Britain deliberately made France dependent on Britain (I'm not saying that England actually thought that way. I mean that from the French perspective, they felt that way). Then, when things really happened like that, Britain exhausted its national treasury in WW2 (for France and for themselves). However, when questioned by de Gaulle, Churchill replied that Britain would always look to the ocean instead of choosing Europe. Because of receiving such an answer, France would rather establish an EEC with Germany than be pro-British after WW2. Then the British became angry with the EEC. Then Britain asked to join the EEC. France vetoed Britain many times. Britain joined the EU for a while then wanted to leave. Now some French people want to leave as well.

-

Oh, what a long story. I wonder how many people read this entire post. I'm from a country that's not France, England or America, so except for a bit of patriotism that I expressed in part 2, I think this is a perspective that isn't too biased towards either side. Personally, I love America very much, America is strong and brave, that's the truth. America's flaws are obvious, but its strengths are equally beautiful and shining. This is a country with many defects and advantages like any other country. So I don't agree with the way everyone antagonizes America as a villain.

Because more than half of this article is not properly sourced, but is written based on my memory and opinion, I welcome your additional comments and polite corrections. I would like to emphasize again, you should not refer to this post as "fact", always fact check everything in this post.

Thus, the relationship between America and France is more complicated than most people think. Not only England, France also contributed greatly to the birth and shaping of America. Through the above events, we can conclude that the American spirit of Liberty was completely inherited from France. France is the country that America (even if he wanted to) could never hate (and vice versa). Even if you don't look at it from the perspective of France being America's mother, it can at least be affirmed that France is America's "tutor". Without France, there would be no America today. America's existence is a continuation of England's ambition and an honoring dignity of France.

To conclude the post, I would like to mention that I once saw a Japanese artist post a tweet like this:

"I found out that Frank means 'free man'

So, from ancient times until now, he hasn't changed at all."

References:

CVCE.eu (unknown). France and NATO. 31/12/2023: https://www.cvce.eu/en/recherche/unit-content/-/unit/02bb76df-d066-4c08-a58a-d4686a3e68ff/c4bbe3c4-b6d7-406d-bb2b-607dbdf37207

Fleming, T. (2013). A short history of "Yankee Doodle". 31/12/2023: https://allthingsliberty.com/2013/12/short-history-yankee-doodle/

Journoud, P. (2011). De Gaulle et Vietnam. Éditions Tallandier.

Kaplan, L. S. (1956). The philosophes and the American Revolution. Social Science, 31(1), pp. 31-35. https://doi.org/10.2307/41884421

Little, B. (2021). Why the Statue of Liberty Almost Didn't Get Built. 31/12/2023: https://www.history.com/news/statue-of-liberty-funding-pulitzer

Marks, J. (2018). How Did the American Revolution Influence the French Revolution?. 31/12/2023: https://www.history.com/news/how-did-the-american-revolution-influence-the-french-revolution

Marshall, T. (2016). Prisoners of Geography. Elliott & Thompson.

Mcgee, S. (2020). 5 Ways the French Helped Win the American Revolution. 31/12/2023: https://www.history.com/news/american-revolution-french-role-help

Museum at Yorktown (unknown). How did the French Alliance help win American Independence?. 31/12/2023: https://www.jyfmuseums.org/learn/research-and-collections/essays/how-did-the-french-alliance-help-win-american-independence

Museum of the American Revolution (unknown). France and the American Revolution. 31/12/2023: https://www.amrevmuseum.org/france-and-the-american-revolution

Office of the Historian (unknown). French Alliance, French Assistance, and European Diplomacy during the American Revolution, 1778–1782. 31/12/2023: https://history.state.gov/milestones/1776-1783/french-alliance#:~:text=Between%201778%20and%201782%20the,protected%20Washington's%20forces%20in%20Virginia

Shaw, T. (unknown). France in the American Revolution. 31/12/2023: https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/france-american-revolution

The Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica (unknown). Franco-American Alliance. 31/12/2023: https://www.britannica.com/event/Franco-American-Alliance

The French Life (unknown). Thomas Jefferson: Founding Father & Francophile. 31/12/2023: https://www.thefrenchlife.org/2017/10/11/famousfrancophile/

Worsham, J. (2002). Jefferson Looks Westward. 31/12/2023: https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2002/winter/jefferson-message.html

[kaelio]

One of the best Atlantic articles in ages. A must-read.

[kemetic-dreams]

Haitian Immigration : Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

Many Haitians moved to Louisiana during and after the Haitian Revolution, which began in 1791 and lasted for 13 years:

The long, interwoven history of Haiti and the United States began on the last day of 1698, when French explorer Sieur d'Iberville set out from the island of Saint Domingue (present-day Haiti) to establish a settlement at Biloxi, on the Gulf Coast of France's Louisiana possession.

For most of the eighteenth century, however, only a few African migrants settled there. But between the 1790s and 1809, large numbers of Haitians of African descent migrated to Louisiana. By 1791 the Haitian Revolution was under way. It would continue for thirteen years, result in the independence of the first African republic in the Western Hemisphere, and reverberate throughout the Atlantic world. Its impact would be particularly felt in Louisiana, the destination of thousands of refugees from the island's turmoil. Their activism had profound repercussions on the politics, the culture, the religion, and the racial climate of the state.

From Saint Domingue to Louisiana

Louisiana and her Caribbean parent colony developed intimate links during the eighteenth century, centered on maritime trade, the exchange of capital and information, and the migration of colonists. From such beginnings, Haitians exerted a profound influence on Louisiana's politics, people, religion, and culture. The colony's officials, responding to anti-slavery plots and uprisings on the island, banned the entry of enslaved Saint Domingans in 1763. Their rebellious actions would continue to impact upon Louisiana's slave trade and immigration policies throughout the age of the American and French revolutions.

These two democratic struggles struck fear in the hearts of the Spaniards, who governed Louisiana from 1763 to 1800. They suppressed what they saw as seditious activities and banned subversive materials in a futile attempt to isolate their colony from the spread of democratic revolution. In May 1790 a royal decree prohibited the entry of blacks - enslaved and free - from the French West Indies. A year later, the Haitian Revolution started.

The revolution in Saint Domingue unleashed a massive multiracial exodus: the French fled with the bondspeople they managed to keep; so did numerous free people of color, some of whom were slaveholders themselves. In addition, in 1793, a catastrophic fire destroyed two-thirds of the principal city, Cap Français (present-day Cap Haïtien), and nearly ten thousand people left the island for good. In the ensuing decades of revolution, foreign invasion, and civil war, thousands more fled the turmoil. Many moved eastward to Santo Domingo (present-day Dominican Republic) or to nearby Caribbean islands. Large numbers of immigrants, black and white, found shelter in North America, notably in New York, Baltimore (fifty-three ships landed there in July 1793), Philadelphia, Norfolk, Charleston, and Savannah, as well as in Spanish Florida. Nowhere on the continent, however, did the refugee movement exert as profound an influence as in southern Louisiana.

Between 1791 and 1803, thirteen hundred refugees arrived in New Orleans. The authorities were concerned that some had come with "seditious" ideas. In the spring of 1795, Pointe Coupée was the scene of an attempted insurrection during which planters' homes were burned down. Following the incident, a free émigré from Saint Domingue, Louis Benoit, accused of being "very imbued with the revolutionary maxims which have devastated the said colony" was banished. The failed uprising caused planter Joseph Pontalba to take "heed of the dreadful calamities of Saint Domingue, and of the germ of revolt only too widespread among our slaves." Continued unrest in Pointe Coupée and on the German Coast contributed to a decision to shut down the entire slave trade in the spring of 1796.

In 1800 Louisiana officials debated reopening it, but they agreed that Saint Domingue blacks would be barred from entry. They also noted the presence of black and white insurgents from the French West Indies who were "propagating dangerous doctrines among our Negroes." Their slaves seemed more "insolent," "ungovernable," and "insubordinate" than they had just five years before.

That same year, Spain ceded Louisiana back to France, and planters continued to live in fear of revolts. After future emperor Napoleon Bonaparte sold the colony to the United States in 1803 because his disastrous expedition against Saint Domingue had stretched his finances and military too thin, events in the island loomed even larger in Louisiana.

The Black Republic and Louisiana

In January 1804, an event of enormous importance shook the world of the enslaved and their owners. The black revolutionaries, who had been fighting for a dozen years, crushed Napoleon's 60,000 men-army - which counted mercenaries from all over Europe - and proclaimed the nation of Haiti (the original Indian name of the island), the second independent nation in the Western Hemisphere and the world's first black-led republic. The impact of this victory of unarmed slaves against their oppressors was felt throughout the slave societies. In Louisiana, it sparked a confrontation at Bayou La Fourche. According to white residents, twelve Haitians from a passing vessel threatened them "with many insulting and menacing expressions" and "spoke of eating human flesh and in general demonstrated great Savageness of character, boasting of what they had seen and done in the horrors of St. Domingo [Saint Domingue]."

The slaveholders' anxieties increased and inspired a new series of statutes to isolate Louisiana from the spread of revolution. The ban on West Indian bondspeople continued and in June 1806 the territorial legislature barred the entry from the French Caribbean of free black males over the age of fourteen. A year later, the prohibition was extended: all free black adult males were excluded, regardless of their nationality. Severe punishments, including enslavement, accompanied the new laws.

However, American efforts to prevent the entry of Haitian immigrants proved even less successful than those of the French and the Spanish. Indeed, the number of immigrants skyrocketed between May 1809 and June 1810, when Spanish authorities expelled thousands of Haitians from Cuba, where they had taken refuge several years earlier. In the wake of this action, New Orleans' Creole whites overcame their chronic fears and clamored for the entry of the white refugees and their slaves. Their objective was to strengthen Louisiana's declining French-speaking community and offset Anglo-American influence. The white Creoles felt that the increasing American presence posed a greater threat to their interests than a potentially dangerous class of enslaved West Indians.

American officials bowed to their pressure and reluctantly allowed white émigrés to enter the city with their slaves. At the same time, however, they attempted to halt the migration of free black refugees. Louisiana's territorial governor, William C. C. Claiborne, firmly enforced the ban on free black males. He advised the American consul in Santiago de Cuba:

Males above the age of fifteen, have . . . been ordered to depart. - I must request you, Sir, to make known this circumstance and also to discourage free people of colour of every description from emigrating to the Territory of Orleans; We have already a much greater proportion of that population than comports with the general Interest.

Claiborne and other officials labored in vain; the population of Afro-Creoles grew larger and even more assertive after the entry of the Haitian émigrés from Cuba, nearly 90 percent of whom settled in New Orleans. The 1809 migration brought 2,731 whites, 3,102 free persons of African descent, and 3,226 enslaved refugees to the city, doubling its population. Sixty-three percent of Crescent City inhabitants were now black. Among the nation's major cities only Charleston, with a 53 percent black majority, was comparable.

The multiracial refugee population settled in the French Quarter and the neighboring Faubourg Marigny district, and revitalized Creole culture and institutions. New Orleans acquired a reputation as the nation's "Creole Capital."

The rapid growth of the city's population of free persons of color strengthened the "three-caste" society - white, mixed, black - that had developed during the years of French and Spanish rule. This was quite different from the racial order prevailing in the rest of the United States, where attempts were made to confine all persons of African descent to a separate and inferior racial caste - a situation brought about by political reality in the South that promoted white unity across class lines and the immersion of all blacks into a single and subservient social caste.

In Louisiana, as lawmakers moved to suppress manumission and undermine the free black presence, the refugees dealt a serious blow to their efforts. In 1810 the city's French-speaking Creoles of African descent, reinforced by thousands of Haitian refugees, formed the basis for the emergence of one of the most advanced black communities in North America.

Soldiers, Rebels, and Pirates

Many Haitian black males eluded immigration authorities by slipping into the territory through Barataria, a coastal settlement just west of the Mississippi River. Some became allies of the notorious pirates Jean and Pierre Lafitte, white refugees of the Haitian Revolution. Surrounded by marshland and a maze of waterways, Barataria was an effective staging area for attacks on Gulf shipping. The interracial band of adventurers dominated the settlement's thriving black-market economy.

But pirates and smugglers did not make up the whole of Barataria's fugitive residents. Some two hundred free black veterans of the Haitian Revolution, including Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Savary, a former French republican officer, were among them. In 1799 seven hundred soldiers, opposed to Toussaint L'Ouverture fled to Cuba and later migrated to Louisiana. By 1810 this movement of Haitian soldiers from Cuba had created a black military presence in Louisiana that seriously worried Governor Claiborne. He anxiously requested reinforcements. The number of free black men "in and near New Orleans, capable of carrying arms," he wrote, "cannot be less than eight hundred."

Colonel Savary and other republican veterans of the Haitian Revolution remained committed to the French revolution's ideals of liberté, egalité, fraternité (freedom, equality, fraternity.) They regrouped to aid insurgents attempting to establish independent republics in Latin America. In November 1813 Savary offered to send five hundred Haitian soldiers to fight with Mexican revolutionaries. When their effort to establish a Mexican government in Texas failed, Savary and his men returned to New Orleans. Within the year, however, the colonel and other Haitian veterans would be rallying against the forces of the British crown.

As British forces threatened to invade New Orleans in 1814, American authorities sought to win the loyalty of battle-hardened black soldiers like Colonel Savary. They were also well aware of the prominent role that free men had played in slave rebellions. With the English approaching, pacifying them would be strategically sound.

General Andrew Jackson arrived in New Orleans in December 1814 and immediately mustered 350 native-born black veterans of the Spanish militia into the United States Army. Colonel Savary raised a second black unit of 250 of Haiti's refugee soldiers. Jackson recognized Savary's considerable influence and knew of his reputation as "a man of great courage." On Jackson's orders, Savary became the first African-American soldier to achieve the rank of second major.

The Haitians in Barataria also fought in the battle of New Orleans. In September 1814 federal troops invaded their community and dispersed the Lafittes and their followers. Hundreds of refugees poured into the city. Andrew Jackson offered them pardons in return for their support in defending the city. After the victory, he commended the two battalions of six hundred African-American and Haitian soldiers whose presence in a force of three thousand men had proved decisive. He praised the "privateers and gentlemen" of Barataria who "through their loyalty and courage, redeemed [their] pledge . . . to defend the country."

Jackson observed that Captain Savary "continued to merit the highest praise." In the last significant skirmish of the battle, Savary and a detachment of his men volunteered to clear the field of a detail of British sharpshooters. Though Savary's force suffered heavy casualties, the mission was carried out successfully.

Within weeks of the victory, however, Jackson yielded to white pressure to remove the men from New Orleans to a remote site in the marshland east of the city to repair fortifications. Savary relayed a message to the general that his men "would always be willing to sacrifice their lives in defense of their country as had been demonstrated but preferred death to the performance of the work of laborers." Jackson, though not pleased, refrained from taking any action against the troops. In February, the general even lent his support to Savary's renewed efforts to rejoin republican insurgents in Mexico.

Afro-Creoles and Americans

In colonial Louisiana and in colonial Haiti, military service had functioned as a crucial means of advancement for both free and enslaved blacks. After the battle of New Orleans, however, support for the black militia declined among free people of color. The disrespect shown to the soldiers who fought so valiantly, along with their disappointment at not receiving some measure of political recognition, contributed to their disillusionment.

Afro-Creoles' anger mounted as Louisiana's white lawmakers embarked upon an unprecedented and sustained attack upon their rights by formulating one of the harshest slave codes in the American South. In 1830 the legislature reaffirmed the 1807 ban on the entry of "free negroes and mulattoes" and required slaveholders to ensure the removal of freed people within thirty days of their emancipation. In Louisiana, as elsewhere in the South, segregation, anti-miscegenation laws, and the legal ostracism of racially mixed children signified the imposition of a two-category pattern of racial classification that relegated all persons of African ancestry to a degraded status.

Reduced to a debased condition, deprived of citizenship, denied free movement, and threatened with violence, Afro-Creoles, both native-born and immigrant, developed an intensely antagonistic relationship with the new regime. Under the United States government, black Louisianians had anticipated an end to slavery and racial oppression and had looked for the fulfillment of the democratic ideals embodied in the founding principles of the new American republic. But contrary to their expectations, the process of Americanization negated the promise of the revolutionary era. Instead of moving toward freedom and equality, the new government promoted the evolution of an increasingly harsh system of chattel slavery.

From Revolution to Romanticism

Following the example of intellectuals in France and Haiti, Afro-Creole activists in Louisiana - led by Haitian émigrés, their children, and French-speaking native Louisianians - had been nurturing their republican heritage. As political expression was stifled, they poured their energies into a new vehicle of revolutionary ideas, the Romantic literary movement.

New Orleans' highly politicized black intelligentsia thereby tapped into the Atlantic world's ongoing current of political radicalism, protesting injustice in their literary work. Their principal forum was La Société des Artisans. Founded by free black artisans and veterans of the War of 1812, the organization provided local Creole writers the opportunity to exchange ideas and present their numerous artistic works in a friendly setting.

Among these young writers was Victor Séjour. His father, a Haitian émigré, was a veteran of the War of 1812 and a prosperous dry-goods merchant. The young Séjour had been educated at New Orleans' prestigious black school Académie Sainte-Barbe, under the tutelage of Michel Séligny, the most productive Afro-Creole short-story writer. Séjour's audience at La Société proclaimed him a prodigy, and his father, determined to see his son fulfill his artistic potential and anxious for Victor to escape the burden of racial prejudice in Louisiana, sent him to France to complete his education. In Paris, the youth quickly came under the influence of another writer of African-Haitian descent, renowned novelist Alexandre Dumas, author of The Three Musketeers (1844), The Count of Monte Cristo (1844-45), and many other celebrated works.

Séjour made a dramatic debut on the literary scene with the publication, in March 1837, of an impassioned attack on slavery, "Le Mulâtre" (The Mulatto), the first short story by an African-American writer to be published in France.

Following the publication of "Le Mulâtre," Séjour embarked on a remarkably productive artistic career. When he was only twenty-six years old, the famed Théâtre Français produced his first drama; it would be followed by two dozen more. In one season, French theaters produced three of his works simultaneously, and Emperor Napoleon III attended opening nights of two of them.

Ironically, Séjour's first story, though it may have circulated privately within the black community, was never published in New Orleans. It fell within the parameters of an 1830 Louisiana law prohibiting reading matter "having a tendency to produce discontent among the free coloured population . . . or to excite insubordination among the slaves." Violators faced either a penalty of three to twenty-one years at hard labor or death, at the judge's discretion.

Despite such restrictions, the city's free people of color managed to fashion a vibrant literary movement, dominated by Haitian refugees and their descendants. The influence of the French Romantic movement among New Orleans' black intellectuals became more evident in 1843 with the publication of a short-lived, interracial literary journal L'Album littéraire: Journal des jeunes gens, amateurs de littérature (The Literary Album: A Journal of Young Men, Lovers of Literature). Its most prominent black founder was Armand Lanusse, of Haitian ancestry and one of the city's leading Romantic artists. Lanusse and his fellow writers, both émigré and native-born, ignored the 1830 literary censorship law and, like their fellow Romantics in France and Haiti, used their literary skills to challenge existing social evils.

In a series of introductory essays,the anonymous contributors to L'Album deplored "the sad and awful condition of Louisiana society," where the spectacle of rampant greed, unrelieved poverty, and institutionalized injustice "grips our hearts with deep sorrow, showering grief over all our thoughts, filling the soul with terror and despair."

Within a year of its debut, L'Album disappeared from the literary scene after critics attacked the journal for advocating revolt. Lanusse then edited a collection of poems by Creoles of color in 1845; Les Cenelles: Choix de poésies indigènes was the first anthology of literature by African Americans in the United States. Les Cenelles was much more subdued in tone than its predecessor. Still, Lanusse in his preface emphasized the value of education as "a shield against the spiteful and calamitous arrows shot at us." He and his colleagues considered their art form a springboard to social and political reform.

The Haitian Influence on Religion

In 1847 Lanusse and his friends helped to assure the survival of a small Catholic religious order dedicated to charitable work among the city's enslaved people and free black indigents. The congregation of the Sisters of the Holy Family was founded in 1842 by Henriette Delille, yet another prominent Afro-Creole of Haitian ancestry. As Delille's sisterhood struggled to maintain their community during the 1840s, a coalition of Afro-Creole writers, artisans, and philanthropists obtained corporate status and funding for the religious society.

When Delille took her formal religious vows in 1852, she headed Louisiana's first Catholic religious order of black women and the nation's second African-American community of Catholic nuns. Bearing striking testimony to the enormous impact of the Haitian diaspora, the first Catholic community of African-American nuns, the Oblate Sisters of Providence, founded in 1829 in Baltimore, originated in the Haitian refugee movement.

In 1848, Armand Lanusse and other Romantic writers took concrete measures to promote reform by establishing La Société Catholique pour l'Instruction des Orphelins dans l'Indigence (Catholic Society for the Instruction of Indigent Orphans). Through their organization, black activists executed the terms of a bequest by Madame Justine Firmin Couvent, a native of Guinea and a former slave, to establish a school in the Faubourg Marigny for the district's destitute orphans of color. Appalled by the indigence and illiteracy of the children, Couvent donated land and several buildings for an educational facility of which Lanusse became the first principal.

While Lanusse pursued his reform agenda within the existing institutional framework, another contributor to the volume, Nelson Desbrosses, followed a nontraditional path to empowerment and change. He traveled to Haiti before the Civil War, studied with a leading practitioner of Vodou, and returned to New Orleans with a reputation as a successful healer and spirit medium. Desbrosses undoubtedly recognized Vodou's historical significance in Haiti's independence struggle. During the revolution, the religion served as a medium for political organization as well as an ideological force for change. On the battlefield, Vodou's spiritual power proved decisive in reinforcing the determination of revolutionaries in their struggle for freedom. In the North Province, houngans (Vodou priests) sustained the revolt by mobilizing as many as forty thousand enslaved people. 

Vodou thrived in New Orleans until the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, when President Thomas Jefferson and other political leaders sought to undermine Creole predominance by Americanizing the culture of southern Louisiana. The post-1809 influx of Haitian refugees, however, slowed the Americanization process and assured the vitality of New Orleans' Creole culture for another twenty-five years. Immigrant believers in Vodou infused the religion's Louisiana variant with Afro-Caribbean elements of belief and ritual.

In the relatively tolerant religious milieu of antebellum New Orleans, Haitian immigrants joined with Creole slaves, free blacks, and even whites to assure the religion's ascendancy. Through Vodou, practiced in secrecy, Afro-Creoles preserved the memory of their African past and experienced psychological release by way of a religion that served as one of the few areas of totally autonomous black activity.

In transcending ethnic, class, and gender distinctions, Vodou helped to sustain a liberal Latin European religious ethic that recognized the spiritual equality of all persons. Vodou's interracial appeal and egalitarian spirit, reinvigorated by Haitian immigrants, offered a dramatic alternative to the Anglo-American racial order.

Beginning in the 1860s, Vodou assemblies were systematically suppressed, but the famed "Vodou Queen" Marie Laveau continued to exert great influence over her interracial following. In 1874 some twelve thousand spectators swarmed to the shores of Lake Pontchartrain to catch a glimpse of Laveau performing her legendary rites. By that time Laveau and other Afro-Creole Vodouists had fashioned some of the nation's most lasting folkloric traditions, as well as a religion of resistance that endures to the present moment.

The Civil War

Federal forces occupied New Orleans in 1862, and black Creoles volunteered their services to the Union army. The newspaper L'Union - whose chief founders, Dr. Louis Charles Roudanez and his brother, Jean-Baptiste, were of Haitian ancestry - announced its agenda in the premier issue. The editors condemned slavery, blasted the Confederacy, and expressed solidarity with Haiti's revolutionary republicans.

An 1862 editorial written by a newly enlisted Union officer, Afro-Creole Romantic writer Henry Louis Rey, urged free men of color to join the U.S. Army and take up "the cause of the rights of man." Rey invoked the names of Jean-Baptiste Chavannes and Vincent Ogé. Their ill-fated 1790 revolt had paved the way for the Haitian Revolution:

CHAVANNE [sic] and OGÉ did not wait to be aroused and to be made ashamed; they hurried unto death; they became martyrs here on earth and received on high the reward due to generous hearts...hasten all; our blood only is demanded; who will hesitate?

The editors of L'Union described Rey and the Afro-Creole troops as the "worthy grandsons of the noble [Col. Joseph] Savary." The paper insisted that military service entitled them to the political equality that had been denied their ancestors who fought valiantly in the American Revolution and the War of 1812. Furthermore, its editors warned, the men had resolved to "protest against all politics which would tend to expatriate them."

When federal officials undermined their suffrage campaign, Afro-Creole leaders took their case to the highest level. In 1864 L'Union cofounder Jean-Baptiste Roudanez and E. Arnold Bertonneau, a former officer in the Union army, met with President Abraham Lincoln; they urged him to extend voting rights to all Louisianians of African descent.

In L'Union, and its successor, La Tribune, the Roudanez brothers and their allies foresaw the complete assimilation of African Americans into the nation's political and social life. During Reconstruction they called on the federal government to divide confiscated plantations into ten-acre plots, to be distributed to displaced black families. They insisted that the formely enslaved were "entitled by a paramount right to the possession of the soil they have so long cultivated."

The aggressive stance and republican idealism of La Tribune prompted the authors of Louisiana's 1868 state constitution to envision a social and political revolution. The new charter required state officials to swear that they recognized the civil and political equality of all men. Alone among Reconstruction constitutions, Louisiana explicitly required equal access to public accommodations and forbade segregation in public schools.

The Consequences of the Haitian Migration

After Reconstruction collapsed in 1877, Creole activists fought the restoration of white rule. In 1890 Rodolphe L. Desdunes, a Creole New Orleanian of Haitian descent, joined with other prominent rights advocates to challenge state-imposed segregation. Their legal battle culminated in the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court decision. Though the nation's highest tribunal upheld the "separate but equal" doctrine, the decision included a powerful dissent that would be used to rescue the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments in later Supreme Court decisions. The descendants of Haitian immigrants would play key roles in civil rights campaigns of the twentieth century.

Haitians exerted an enormous influence on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Louisiana. Their sustained resistance to Saint Domingue's regime of bondage forced repeated changes in French, Spanish, and American immigration policies as frightened white officials attempted to isolate Louisiana from the spread of black revolt.

The massive 1809 influx of Haitian refugees ensured the survival of a wealth of West African cultural transmissions, as well as a Latin European racial order that enhanced the social and economic mobility of both free and enslaved blacks. In early-nineteenth-century New Orleans, the immigrants and their descendants infused the city's music, cuisine, religious life, speech patterns, and architecture with their own cultural traditions. Reminders of their Creole influence abound in the French Quarter, the Faubourg Marigny, the Faubourg Tremé, and other city neighborhoods.

The refugee population also reinforced a brand of revolutionary republicanism that impacted American race relations for decades. With an unflagging commitment to the democratic ideals of the revolutionary era, Haitian immigrants and their descendants appeared at the head of virtually every New Orleans civil rights campaign. Their leadership role in the struggle for racial justice offers dramatic evidence of the scope of their influence on Louisiana's history. From Colonel Joseph Savary's militant republicanism to Rodolphe Desdunes's unrelenting attacks on state-enforced segregation, Haitian émigrés and their descendants demanded that the nation fulfill the promise of its founding principles.

In his 1911 book Our People and Our History, Rodolphe Desdunes described Armand Lanusse's anthology, Les Cenelles, as a "triumph of the human spirit over the forces of obscurantism in Louisiana that denied the education and intellectual advancement of the colored masses." African Americans in Louisiana triumphed over these forces in their distinguished history of military service, their embrace of artistic and scholarly pursuits, their campaign for humanitarian reforms, and their Civil War vision of a reconstructed nation of racial equality. Their Haitian heritage was central to those victories.

[transmutationisms]

hi can you recommend any books on the histories of medical practices?

ok this is scattershot & disorganised geographically and temporally but, some starting points for medical practice & practitioners:

indian doctors in kenya, 1895–1940: the forgotten history, by anna greenwood & harshad topiwala

migrant architects of the nhs: south asian doctors and the reinvention of british general practice, by julian m simpson

herbs and roots: a history of chinese doctors in the american medical marketplace, by tamara venit shelton

the people's hospital: a history of mccords, durban, 1890s–1970s, by julie parle, vanessa noble, & christopher merrett

nationalizing the body: the medical market, print, and daktari medicine, by projit mukharji

doctors beyond borders: the transnational migration of physicians in the twentieth century, ed. laurence monnais & david wright

physicians, colonial racism, and diaspora in west africa, by adell patton

doctors of empire: medical and cultural encounters between imperial germany and meiji japan, by hoi-eun kim

the emergence of tropical medicine in france, by michael a osborne

the professionalisation of african medicine, ed. murray last & g.l. chavunduka

aaron mcduffie moore: an african american physician, educator, and founder of durham's black wall street, by blake hill-saya

atomic doctors: conscience and complicity at the dawn of the nuclear age, by nolan l james

beyond the state: the colonial medical service in british africa, ed. anna greenwood

before bioethics: a history of american medical ethics from the colonial period to the bioethics revolution, by robert baker

medicine and memory in tibet: amchi physicians in an age of reform, by theresia hofer

domingos álvares, african healing, and the intellectual history of the atlantic world, by james h sweet

pushing silence: modernizing puerto rico and the medicalization of childbirth, by isabel m cordova

the business of private medical practice: doctors, specialization, and urban change in philadelphia, 1900–1940, by james a schafer, jr

the lomidine files: the untold story of a medical disaster in colonial africa, by guillaume lachenal

fit to practice: empire, race, gender, and the making of british medicine, 1850–1980, by douglas haynes

the racial divide in american medicine: black physicians and the struggle for justice in health care, by richard d deshazo

[whencyclopedia]

Southern Europe in the Age of Revolutions

"Southern Europe in the Age of Revolutions" offers a detailed account of the revolutions in Spain, Naples, Portugal, Piedmont, Sicily, and Greece in the 1820s. The author’s focus complements other studies emphasizing revolutions in British North America, France, Haiti, and Spanish America to provide more thorough coverage of the Age of Revolutions. This book, well suited for scholars and students, guides readers through a tumultuous period in southern European history and is highly recommended.

From the outbreak of war in the 13 British North American colonies in 1775 to the conflicts that erupted throughout the Spanish New World colonies in the 1810s, revolutions convulsed the Atlantic World for half a century. The power and consequences of the revolutionary wave that swept throughout the Atlantic should not be understated. Scholars have spent a great deal of time examining the birth of the United States, the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, and the Spanish American Revolutions. However, contends Maurizio Isabella, currently Professor of Modern History at Queen Mary University of London, scholars have spent far less time on revolutions in southern Europe, such as the simultaneous revolutions in Spain, Portugal, Piedmont, Naples, Sicily, and Greece. Although southern Europe has long been absent or minimized in the vast scholarly literature on the Age of Revolutions, Isabella demonstrates that the books that have dismissed or neglected these struggles need revision and argues for a broader understating of a critical period in world history.

Southern Europe in the Age of Revolutions is divided into four parts. Part I, “War, Army and Revolution” contains five chapters that explore the complex relationship between the army, war, and revolution. Chapter Five, “Crossing the Mediterranean,” is particularly noteworthy. Isabella examines three individuals involved in the revolution in Sicily – Sir Richard Church, Emmanuele Scordili, and Andrea Mangiaruva – to illustrate mobility and conflict as well as connected revolutions and counterrevolutions throughout the Atlantic World. Part II, “Experiencing the Constitution: Citizenship, Communities and Territories” includes three chapters about petitions, political culture, and demands from the people. The people did indeed speak. As Isabella notes in Chapter Seven, “Electing Parliamentary Assemblies,” revolutions during the 1820s, in contrast to pre-revolutionary electoral practices, saw national assemblies elected by quasi-universal suffrage. Part III, “Building Consensus, Pracising Protest: The Revolutionary Public Sphere and its Enemies” analyzes, throughout three chapters, the birth of a revolutionary public sphere. Readers will particularly appreciate Chapter Ten, “Taking Control of Public Space,” which discusses revolutionary ceremonies and the fascinating role singing played in this revolutionary moment. Finally, Part IV, “Citizens or the Faithful? Religion and the Foundation of a New Political Order” concludes with two chapters covering the relationship between constitutional culture and religion. Chapter Twelve, “Christianity against Despotism,” cautions against making assumptions about religion and revolution. Indeed, southern European constitutionalism placed a tremendous amount of emphasis on a religious definition of the nation, and religious figures joined both revolutionary and counterrevolutionary camps.

Throughout the book, Isabella contends that revolutions in southern Europe were part of the same global crisis of sovereignty as other revolutions throughout the Atlantic World. Thus, rather than treating them as minor events – as other studies of the Age of Revolutions have done – Isabella offers a detailed and incisive analysis of the revolutions and the people who drove them. That point is also critical. Isabella does not focus exclusively on theoretical debates but, rather, seeks to explore how the population at large experienced constitutions and revolutions. Critically, these revolutions “politicised new sectors of society, generated unprecedented quantities of printed material and fostered the discussion of novel ideas and experimentation with practices such as elections” (28). Isabella introduces readers to a wide array of people – revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries, soldiers and civilians, elites and the masses, religious and non-religious, men and women – and shows how these people experienced the tumult of revolution and new political awareness. Southern Europe in the Age of Revolutions makes an important contribution to scholarly understandings of the Age of Revolutions, and Isabella anchors his analysis in extensive primary and secondary sources. This book will appeal to students and scholars interested in revolutions, politics, and Atlantic history.

Continue reading...

[queering-ecology]

Chapter 11. ‘fucking close to water’: queering the production of the nation by Bruce Erickson (part 2, final)

Land

First ‘canoe’ that European colonists saw were likely Mi’kmaq gwitnn, birchbark boats designed for both ocean and river travel (318)

The colonist’s name is mentioned but the natives in these stories don’t ever get their names so…the colonist realized that to go further inland he would need the gwitn,  he needed “the boat derived of the landscape realities of the new world” (Raffan 1999a, 24) (318)

the ‘canoe’ as a symbol unique to Canada (Jennings 1991, 1) (319), reworks essentialized aspects of indigenous cultures into a symbol of national health and success” (319) and as a “gift” from natives to settlers. The canoe as unique entity, because of the exploration done by canoe, the canoe is the guard that maintains the boundary of Canadian identity.

A vague connection could be made to the American symbol of the cowboy to the American west except the canoe is more ‘natural’ for being of the land and from the native people and further substantiated in its uniqueness by its use in colonialism.

Canada as a nation has ‘perfected’ the canoe; the only way the canoe can be made perfect is through its ability to be incorporated into European expansion (320) the connection of the land to the canoe as a discourse of inevitability illustrates the privileging of the European subject as the natural inheritors (indeed, the rightful inheritor) of First Nations land…and implicitly heterosexual and patriarchal subject (320-321)

Possibility

“We cannot possibly anticipate what might happen, if we were really to consider the ten million bodies at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean "(Shannon Winnubst, 190) (324)

“Rethinking nature that is not bent toward the utility of power” (324) Opening ourselves to the possibilities of history means addressing the ways in which the ideologies and concrete practices that have formed our current understanding of nature represent more about the desired human outcome than they do about anything nonhuman (324)

Similar to really considering 10 million dead bodies in the Atlantic Ocean, this would mean really considering (as a broad list) the malicious wars over land and fur, the forced conversions, the repeated exposure to flu epidemics, the establishment of reservations and classification of First Nations as wards of the state, and the widespread physical and sexual abuse in residential schools designed to assimilate and civilize a supposed “savage” population” (324).

The Kiss of the Fur Queen is a novel by Tomson Highway, Cree playwright and novelist. Two Cree brothers are taken from their parents to a residential school several hundred miles away at the age of six, baptized into the Catholic church and have their names changed, they forbidden to speak their language and are abused by the priests of the school. They are alienated from their parents by the education and sexual predation of the school priests, but also are disconnected from the land, language and culture of their people…(the canoe plays a central role in the story, where difficult conversations about their alienation take place). As they grow up one of the brothers finds “continual inspiration” from the traditional Cree culture and discovered a “need to know the cultures that were suppressed by the residential school”. “As the crowd dances to the migisoo, the eagle, Gabriel realizes its power: ‘Gabriel saw people talking to the sky, the sky replying.” (Highway 1998) (324-326) (this is a poor summary, i apologize.)

“The movement between tradition and innovation is always fluid and uncharted” (327)

“Thus, while as a quirky national joke, the idea of making love in a canoe surely belongs to the post-sexual revolution of the later twentieth century, we need to remember that as a national symbol, the connection it strives to make between the canoe, nature,  and nation signals a sexual politic that was born of the age of imperialism. “

“As Foucault reminds us, the legacy of the Victorian repression of sexuality is held within the resistance of the sexual revolution that fails to move outside the biopower networks of modern sexuality.” (327)

[flagwars]

Video Game Flag Wars: Round 1

Now that the National Pride Fusion Flag Wars has ended, we can return to the Video Game Flag Wars! The prelims decided which flag would represent each series, so now the tournament contains one flag per series. This does not include mods and fangames, as there are multiple flags from Hearts of Iron mods and Roblox games in the tournament. As there are so many flags even after the prelims, there will be 32 polls in the first round rather than the usual 16. Let me know what flag you want to win! See the brackets below.

Round 1:

1. Crimson Cult Banner (Thaumcraft) vs. Flag (Roblox BedWars) vs. Salmon Run Flag (Splatoon)

2. Unnamed Flag (Lego City Undercover) vs. Atlantic Federation (Valkyria Chronicles) vs. Homestead Banner (Palia)

3. Middle Eastern Alliance (Squad) vs. Shadowkin (Raid: Shadow Legends) vs Bilge Rat Adventures Flag (Sea of Thieves)

4. Saker’s Flag (Fable) vs. Novistrana (Republic: The Revolution) vs. Arstotzka (Papers, Please)

5. San Andreas (Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas) vs. Kirin Tor Offensive Banner (World of Warcraft) vs. Alliance of Galactic Travelers (No Man’s Sky)

6. Black Revolt (Kaiserredux) vs. Aquileian Republic (Supremacy) (Equestria at War) vs. Rescue Corps Flag (Pikmin 4)

7. Tropico (Tropico) vs. Sons of Liberty (Metal Gear Solid 2) vs. Commune of Revachol (Disco Elysium)

8. Mawkin Flag (Metroid: Dread) vs. Calchaqui (Europa Universalis 4) vs. Kazan Military Okrug (Thousand-Week Reich)

9. King Dedede’s Flag (Kirby: Triple Deluxe) vs. Meat Flag (Slime Rancher) vs. Flag of the Crown (Cult of the Lamb)

10. Communist Australia (Victoria II) vs. Delian League (Imperator: Rome) vs. Ominous Banner/Illager Banner (Minecraft)

11. Patagonian Worker’s Front (Kaiserreich) vs. Castle Siege (Super Smash Bros.) vs. Yara (Far Cry 6)

12. Stag Beetle Flag (Animal Crossing: New Leaf) vs. Fortnite (Fortnite) vs. Livonia (Arma)

13. Gaul Úr (Red Flood) vs. Strong Badia (Homestar Runner) vs. Super Earth (Helldivers)

14. Alam Melayu (Rise of Nations (Roblox)) vs. Tiki Tak Tribe (Donkey Kong Country Returns) vs. Sea Slide Galaxy (Super Mario Galaxy)

15. Great Lakes Government (Kalterkrieg: Shadow of the Weltkrieg) vs. Principality of Kemerovo (The New Order: Last Days of Europe) vs. Joker Banner (Balatro)

16. Shadow Isles Clash Banner (League of Legends) vs. Rebel Corps, Phantom Thieves Version (Persona 5 Tactica) vs. Antarctica (3D Atlas (1996))

17. Generic Flag (Roblox) vs. Standing Flag (Dragon Blade RPG (Roblox)) vs. Zhu Xi's Legacy (Age of Empires 4)

18. Kitakami (Pokémon Scarlet and Violet) vs. South California (Cyberpunk 2077) vs. Watchers (Overwatch)

19. Avalar (Spyro the Dragon) vs. Union of American People's Republics (Red World) vs. Grey Warden Heraldry (Dragon Age: Inquisition)

20. Eusan Nation (Signalis) vs. Aurelia (Ace Combat) vs. Outer Wilds Ventures (Outer Wilds)

21. Columbia (Bioshock Infinite) vs. Sickle Moon Flag (Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker) vs. Eggmanland (Sonic Unleashed)

22. The Allied Nations (Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3) vs. The Rebellion (Just Cause 3) vs. Federation of the Americas (Call of Duty: Ghosts)

23. Great Lake Revolutionary Council (Extremis Ultimis) vs. Courland (Empire: Total War) vs. Columbia (Crimson Skies)

24. Pontiac Province (Judgement Day: Aftermath of the Red Flood) vs. Communist Iberia (Hearts of Iron IV) vs. International Workers' Armed Forces (Krasnacht: Twilight of the Gods)

25. New California Republic (Fallout) vs. Deep Hollow Valley (Night in the Woods) vs. Victory Flag (Fall Guys)

26. Zheng Fa (Ace Attorney) vs. Golden Deer Banner (Fire Emblem: Three Houses) vs. Warbanner (Risk of Rain 2)

27. Blue Flag (Halo: Combat Evolved) vs. Wario’s House (WarioWare) vs. American Collective (Twilight of the Anthropocene)

28. Niflheim (Final Fantasy XV) vs. Republic of America (Dustborn) vs. American Empire (Pax Britannica)

29. Corvus (Dead Ahead (Roblox)) vs. Banner of the First Fleet (Monster Hunter)

30. Fillydelphia Contingent (Balefire Blues) vs. Federation of Anrakan Isles (Suzerain)

31. Yartar (Baldur’s Gate 3) vs. Hurons (American Conquest)

32. Falkreath Hold (Skyrim) vs. Assassin Jolly Roger (Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag)

[historia-vitae-magistras]

How much would you, based in your head canon, say is nurture as versus nature? I know you don't mean actual "blood relations" with family like Rat Dad and kids, but in general, how much of their relationships with each other is tied to the circumstances of how they were nurtured for as versus how they may be under other circumstances. That is, how much of their family is perception and choice?

Just for example, if Alfred had been raised by Antonio, would his relationship with Maria and Matthew be reversed? As in, would he be the younger sibling to Maria, while Matthew could be a friend but wasn't a sibling?

Oooh, good question. So in my mind, there are at least three major things for nations rather than two. Culture, geography, and privilege.

Privilege is the one that defines their relationship to a 'parent' most. Maria, for example, added so much to the Spanish economy that it collapsed the global economy. She's beautiful and intelligent, and Antonio, with his history as Hispania under Rome, used the word he knew from Lucius and set the precedent. That was a choice on the European part. And it was often a long period of that being unchallenged by those dubbed their offspring because of the respectability that could give.

But the second would be culture. The Anglosphere is a very weird concept. As adults, Zee and Jack have a strange time calling Matt or Alfred 'family,' but they and Matt usually don't outright deny it because they have yet to chuck the limey off the money and still look to Britain in some ways as the mother country. 100 year ago, Matt was extremely culturally British; calling him their elder brother was no problem. Alfred was never a part of their lives in childhood. But now Canada is largely French or Americanized and largely irrelevant in their affairs, and the word 'sibling' doesn't quite sit right, but they've perhaps yet to find a better word. Jack and Zee, however, would have a lot longer to go to break that definition between themselves, being both of British cultural background and geographically close. It's much the same in the Atlantic Archipelago. Rhys and Alasdair are both locked into Arthur with their borders in Britain. And they're locked into Brighid culturally due to their Celtic backgrounds.

So, geography often makes them close regardless of culture. Maria and Alfred will be in close proximity, regardless of their backgrounds. He and Maria shared much the same sense of closeness that he and Matt shared from the get-go, but they're translating nebulous dirt fuck feelings onto much more defined human concepts.

There are also the social mores of the time when these relationships were happening. In Matt's earliest days, there wasn't much English influence at all, and he's mostly a very mixed culture of French-Indigenous. So the cultural aspect of siblings isn't present yet. He's also male presenting. Alfred was trying to use human language to describe a relationship that is only partially human itself. When he was very little, the word others used was 'brother' and at that age it was the most appropriate. But when he was independent, he re-evaluated and wanted to find a word for his intense bond with his northern neighbor. But independent or not, he's taking into account what is acceptable, what is appropriate, and what feels right, and that hasn't changed much despite the revolution. The closest word he could find was the existing one. 'Brother.' Matt has always found it accurate enough to reciprocate, so their relationship remained familial, which was later reinforced by Canada's transformation into a largely Anglo culture and country.

Maria, presenting as female and coming to Alfred's point in life where he's a hormonal, self-righteous teenager, sent absolutely careening from any female attention, and Maria was no exception whatsoever. She was the best read and educated of any New World country then. She was in the throws of the enlightenment before Alfred was in many ways, and he was dumbstruck by her perspectives and knowledge at that age. There's this pull between them, the closeness of the future and their geography, and the best way in both their cultural contexts of the time to view and indulge that feeling was through a romantic and intellectual lens.

All that probably reads like a pretentious way of saying, 'Well, it depends,' but that's the thought process.

[fatehbaz]

Julius Scott’s legendary study tells [...] of the unrest of “masterless” communities, as he terms them, in the late eighteenth-century Caribbean and its implications for the Atlantic World. This unrest was undergirded by what he terms a “common wind” of seditious political news circulating through an increasingly mobile and interconnected region. He deftly sets the context [...] to imperial tensions that culminated in uprisings and revolutions within [...] the French, British, and Spanish Empires. [...] He builds what is this field-defining work from a triangulated analysis of three central hubs of the colonial Caribbean in terms of [...] prosperity in the plantation economy, and political importance to these aforementioned empires: Saint-Domingue [Haiti], Jamaica, and Cuba. But he also explores similar occurrences within [...] Martinique and Guadeloupe for the French, Venezuela and Trinidad for the Spanish, and Dominica and Grenada for the British. He also includes [...] the engagement of the newly formed United States in this network, reinforcing the broader Atlantic impact of the common wind’s radical currents.

---

Chapter 1 explores the upheaval afoot in the mid-1700s colonial Caribbean through a closer look at the movements of a range of actors including enslaved runaways, military deserters, contraband smugglers, free people of color, and poor whites hustling in the islands’ urban centers and surrounding countrysides.

A variety of settings - including the fringes of plantations, maroon settlements, town-based markets, taverns, hospitals, barracks, and wharves - might presumably, if read with the archival grain, illuminate the map of state control. Instead, in Scott’s analysis, these represent the contours of the working class’s unlawful movements and ultimately their fraying of the colonial order, anticipating what Stephanie M. H. Camp [...] would aptly name [...] the “rival geography” of slave society.

---

Chapter 2 shows how sailors’ illicit forms of mobility [...] blurred the bounds between land and sea in this narrative of popular dissent. Their movements [...] as social beings and political dissidents bled into and helped sustain similar kinds of illicit commerce and socializing [...]. Chapters 3 and 4 demonstrate how the common wind consistently blew subversive ideas into and around the Caribbean, much to officials’ chagrin. Scott here homes in on the politically volatile era from the late 1770s through the late 1790s, which saw declarations of war, drastic changes in slavery policy [...] and the emergence of U.S., French, and, most significantly, Haitian revolutionary uprising. [...] [E]nslaved communities everywhere in the region followed as intently as they could as the campaign of the enslaved rebels in Saint-Domingue began in 1791. [...] Political news, no matter how hard officials in the colonies and the metropoles tried to block it, spilled into all levels of society [...]. What flowed through all of these channels animated questions about master-slave relations, mercantilist policy, individual rights [...]. Scott carefully traces the influence of the unfolding Haitian Revolution on well-planned but eventually thwarted uprisings of enslaved people in the Venezuelan port city Coro, the Dutch colony of Curaçao, and the parish of Pointe Coupee in then Spanish Louisiana, all in 1795. He also illuminates the multiple instances of inspiration in the 1790s evidenced in enslaved communities throughout the United States [...].

---

Essentially Scott reveals that the Age of Revolutions cannot be understood without comprehending black resistance in times of war and peace. The tale of Phebe, one of many enslaved Jamaican female runaways who became an itinerant higgler hiding in plain sight in urban spaces like Kingston, or the story of the 1790 mutiny of four enslaved sailors who overtook the Saint Kitts sloop the Nancy with respective origins in the Caribbean, West Africa, and the U.S. South, which Scott called a “microcosm” of the Atlantic, are but two of multiple narratives he includes to show that enslaved people [...] actively built and sustained those circuits via their multilingualism, their savvy, and above all their dedication to achieving a state of masterlessness [...].

This could be achieved not just through formal manumission processes, but through running away and re-creating new lives and livelihoods [...]. The [...] knowledge that these dissidents obtained in their labors allowed them to escape to lives not “off the grid,” but rather in the centers of commercial and state activity, ensconced in communities of opposition and poised to obtain news that prepared them well for their next moves in their albeit precarious existence. [...]

Scott complicates earlier framings of the oppositional working class as strictly of European origin [...]; [...] Scott’s unpublished dissertation [...] influenced the interventions made in Linebaugh and Rediker’s The Many-Headed Hydra [...] years later. [...] He centers enslaved people within the revolutionary Atlantic not just as workers [...] but also as strategic thinkers, and he does so long before it was popular to do so in this field of history. [...] [H]e demonstrates how so many ordinary enslaved women and men regularly engaged in quotidian forms of fugitivity across various imperial territories of the Caribbean [...]. The dissertation also came several years in advance of the still pivotal call advanced by Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s 1995 Silencing the Past, about the denied centrality of the Haitian Revolution to the Age of Revolutions in its time and in retrospect. Scott’s work undeniably influenced many Atlantic historians [...]; it is also a genuinely exciting read.

---

All text above by: Natasha Lightfoot. "The Common Wind: A Masterful Study of the Masterless Revolutionary Atlantic". The American Historical Review, Volume 125, Issue 3, pages 926-930. June 2020. At: doi dot org slash 10.1093/ahr/rhaa230 [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism purposes.]

[maaarine]

Bibliography: articles posted on this blog in 2024

Posted in January

Men Just Don’t Trust Women – And It’s A Huge Problem (Damon Young, Huffington Post, Mar 16 2015)

Amsterdam sex workers protest against plan to move red light district (The Guardian, Oct 19 2023)

They were Israel’s ‘eyes on the border’ - but their Hamas warnings went unheard (Alice Cuddy, BBC News, Jan 15 2024)

The Heteronormativity Theory of Low Sexual Desire in Women Partnered with Men (Sari M. van Anders, Debby Herbenick, Lori A. Brotto, Emily A. Harris, and Sara B. Chadwick, Aug 23 2021)

A new global gender divide is emerging (John Burn-Murdoch, Financial Times, Jan 26 2024)

The secret of OnlyFans: It’s much more than porn (Marta Biino and Madeline Berg, Business Insider, Jan 18 2024)

—

Posted in February

Half of Spanish men feel discriminated against amid feminism backlash (James Badcock, The Telegraph, Jan 16 2024)

Parisians vote in favour of tripling parking costs for SUVs (Angelique Chrisafis, The Guardian, Feb 04 2024)

Ireland kickstarts vote on constitution’s wording about women and family (Rory Carroll, The Guardian, Jan 25 2024)

Divorce rates plummet to lowest level in 50 years ‘due to cost-of-living crisis’ (Kieran Kelly, LBC, Feb 22 2024)

—

Posted in March

‘There are some really extreme views’: young people face onslaught of misogyny online (Clea Skopeliti, The Guardian, March 01 2024)

Johnson: Why men interrupt (The Economist, Jul 10 2014)

France makes abortion a constitutional right in historic Versailles vote (Kim Willsher, The Guardian, March 04 2024)

‘My self-worth plummeted every month’: the hidden disorder that can ruin women’s lives (Chloe Aslett, The Guardian, Oct 16 2023)

The tyranny of the algorithm: why every coffee shop looks the same (Kyle Chayka, The Guardian, Jan 16 2024)

DNA Tests Are Uncovering the True Prevalence of Incest (Sarah Zhang, The Atlantic, March 18 2024)

Finland is world’s happiest country for 7th year while US drops out of top 20 (France 24, March 20 2024)

Swedish pharmacy bans sale of anti-ageing skincare to children (Miranda Bryant, The Guardian, March 20 2024)

Women are being diagnosed with ADHD at unprecedented rates. Here’s why. (Kaelyn Lynch, National Geographic, Jan 16 2024)

5 Takeaways From an Investigation Into Hysterectomies in India’s Sugar Industry (Megha Rajagopalan, The New York Times, March 24 2024)

English Just ‘Badly Pronounced French’, Paris Academic Says (Tom Barfield, Barron’s, March 09 2024)

—

Posted in April

Why are women more prone to long Covid? (David Cox, The Guardian, June 13 2021)

French Revolution: Cyclists Now Outnumber Motorists In Paris (Carlton Reid, Forbes, April 06 2024)

Long Covid may be the body trying to fight off other viruses (Sarah Knapton, The Telegraph, April 08 2024)

The Troubling Trend in Teenage Sex (Peggy Orenstein, The New York Times, April 12 2024)

Sydney knifeman who targeted women ‘was desperate for a girlfriend’ (Andrea Hamblin, The Telegraph, April 15 2024)

Revealed: Israel has sped up settlement-building in East Jerusalem since Gaza war began (Jason Burke, The Guardian, April 17 2024)

‘I was only a child’: Greenlandic women tell of trauma of forced contraception (Miranda Bryant, The Guardian, March 29 2024)

Hormones and their Interaction with the Pain Experience (Katy Vincent and Irene Tracey, 2008)

—

Posted in May

Study suggests injury risk varies in menstrual cycle (Katie Gornall, BBC News, May 01 2024)

‘Urination equality’: Amsterdam women win fight for more public toilets (Ashifa Kassam, The Guardian, April 29 2024)

You can want things you don’t like and like things you don’t want (Shayla Love, Psyche, May 07 2024)

‘A new abyss’: Gaza and the hundred years’ war on Palestine (Rashid Khalidi, The Guardian, April 11 2024)

The important link between eating disorders and past trauma (Giulia Suro, Psyche, May 14 2024)

Hostile Intelligence: Reflections from a Visit to the West Bank (David Graeber, 2015)

—

Posted in June

AfD: How Germany’s far right won over young voters (Hans Pfeifer, Deutsche Welle, June 10 2024)

—

Posted in July

Coloniser le sud du Liban ? Un fantasme d'Israéliens messianiques à prendre au sérieux (Ha'Aretz via Courrier International, 3 juillet 2024)

Tampons found to contain concerning levels of arsenic and lead in world first study (Vishwam Sankaran, The Independent, July 10 2024)

South Korea politician blames women for rising male suicides (Jean Mackenzie, BBC, July 9 2024)

“Violence against women a ‘national emergency’ in England and Wales, police say (Vikram Dodd, The Guardian, July 23 2024)

—

Posted in August

Menopause was a French invention at a time of revolution (Alison M Downham Moore, Psyche, July 30 2024)

Misogyny to be treated as extremism by UK government (Helen Catt and Charlotte Rose, BBC, Aug 18 2024)

—

Posted in September

What Is Synaptic Pruning? (Jacquelyn Cafasso, Healthline, Sep 18 2018)

‘Frightening’ Taliban law bans women from speaking in public (Annie Kelly and Zahra Joya, The Guardian, Aug 26 2024)

Elon Musk suggests support for replacing democracy with government of ‘high-status males’ (Ariana Baio, The Independent, Sep 03 2024)

‘Not our tradition’: calls in Sweden to ban fathers walking brides down the aisle (Miranda Bryant, The Guardian, Aug 31 2024)

Olympic runner Cheptegei defied her violent ex. She lost her life anyway (Ammu Kannampilly, Reuters, Sep 14 2024)

—

Posted in October

The outside world knows Wim Hof as the eccentric Iceman. His family suffered domestic violence (Anneke Stoffelen and Robert van de Griend, De Volkskrant, Sep 28 2024)

The mothers who regret having kids: ‘I wished I were holding a cat and not a baby’ (Adrienne Matei, The Guardian, Sep 26 2024)

At a Loss for Words: How a flawed idea is teaching millions of kids to be poor readers (Emily Hanford, Amp Reports, Aug 22 2019)

Vu d’Allemagne. Le procès Pelicot, une honte pour tous les hommes (Leo Klimm, Der Spiegel via Courrier International, Oct 10 2024)

These Two Rape Cases Are a Lot Closer to Home Than We Like to Admit (Elizabeth Spiers, The New York Times, Sep 22 2024)

How The Netherlands Built a Biking Utopia (Michael Thomas, Distilled, March 09 2023)

It’s not just Trump v Harris: America’s men and women are also locked in battle now (Jonathan Freedland, The Guardian, Sep 27 2024)

Violences routières : « Plus on adhère aux stéréotypes masculins, plus on est enclin à prendre des risques sur la route » (Olivier Razemon, Le Monde, Oct 25 2024)

You Might Not Recover from Burnout. Ever. (Devon Price, Oct 25 2024)

—

Posted in November

Why are British teenage girls so unhappy? Here’s the answer (Caitlin Moran, The Times, Sep 13 2024)

Russia bans ‘child-free propaganda’ to try to boost birth rate (Reuters, Nov 12 2024)

[mishijl]

HISTORY

hello, I am Myiesha Hanne Cortes Quiban from Grade 6-Faith, I like learning, History, Geography, Politics and culture. and I will introduce you Napoleon Bonaparte History is the study of change over time, and it covers all aspects of human society. Political, social, economic, scientific, technological, medical, cultural, intellectual, religious and military developments are all part of history.

later known by his regnal name Napoleon I, was a French military commander and political leader who rose to prominence during the French Revolution and led successful campaigns during the Revolutionary war. He was the leader of the French Republic as First Consul from 1799 to 1804, then of the French Empire as Emperor of the French from 1804 until 1814, and briefly again in 1815. His political and cultural legacy endures as a celebrated and controversial leader. He initiated many enduring reforms, but has been criticized for his authoritarian rule. He is considered one of the greatest military commanders in history, although historians still debate whether he was responsible for the Napoleonic Wars in which between three and six million people died.

Napoleon was born on the island of Corsica into a family descending from Italian nobility. He was resentful of the French monarchy, and supported the French Revolution in 1789 while serving in the French army, trying to spread its ideals to his native Corsica. He rose rapidly in the ranks after saving the governing French Directory by firing on royalist insurgents. In 1796, he began a military campaign against the Austrians and their Italian allies, scoring decisive victories, and became a national hero. Two years later he led a military expedition to Egypt that served as a springboard to political power. He engineered a coup in November 1799 and became First Consul of the Republic. In 1804, to consolidate and expand his power, he crowned himself Emperor of the French.

Differences with the United Kingdom meant France faced the War of the Third Coalition by 1805. Napoleon shattered this coalition with victories in the Ulm campaign and at the Battle of Austerlitz, which led to the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire. In 1806, the Fourth Coalition took up arms against him. Napoleon defeated Prussia at the battles of Jena and Austerlitz , marched the Grande Armée into Eastern Europe, and defeated the Russians in June 1807 at Friedland, forcing the defeated nations of the Fourth Coalition to accept the Treaties of Tilsit. Two years later, the Austrians challenged the French again during the War of the Fifth Coalition, but Napoleon solidified his grip over Europe after triumphing at the Battle of Wagram.

Hoping to extend the Continental System, his embargo against Britain, Napoleon invaded the Iberian Peninsula and declared his brother Joseph the King of Spain in 1808. The Spanish and the Portuguese revolted in the Peninsular War aided by a British army, culminating in defeat for Napoleon's marshals. Napoleon launched an invasion of Russia in the summer of 1812. The resulting campaign witnessed the catastrophic retreat of Napoleon's Grande Armée. In 1813, Prussia and Austria joined Russian forces in a Sixth Coalition against France, resulting in a large coalition army defeating Napoleon at the Battle of Leipzig. The coalition invaded France and captured Paris, forcing Napoleon to abdicate in April 1814. He was exiled to the island of Elba, between Corsica and Italy. In France, the Bourbons were restored to power.

Napoleon escaped in February 1815 and took control of France. The Allies responded by forming a Seventh Coalition, which defeated Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo in June 1815. The British exiled him to the remote island of Saint Helena in the Atlantic, where he died in 1821 at the age of 51.

Napoleon had a lasting impact on the world, bringing modernizing reforms to France and Western Europe and stimulating the development of nation states. He also sold the Louisiana Territory to the United States in 1803, doubling the size of the United States. However, his exploitation of conquered territories, mixed record on civil rights, reintroduction of slavery in France's colonies, and repression of the Haitian Revolution are controversial and adversely affect his reputation. and that's all I hope you enjoyed it thank you

[alex12354]

Turning the Page on Magazine News

The magazine industry has always been synonymous with creativity, culture, and the dissemination of information. For decades, the print magazine was the pinnacle of style and storytelling, offering readers a unique experience that combined visually stunning design with in-depth journalism. But in today’s rapidly evolving media landscape, magazine news is undergoing a dramatic transformation. The digital revolution has fundamentally changed how magazines connect with their audiences, turning the page on traditional print formats and embracing new ways to engage readers. This article delves into the current shift in magazine news and explores what lies ahead.

The Digital Shift: Magazines Embrace the Screen

The decline of print media in favor of digital content is not a new story. As the internet gained traction in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, the magazine industry felt the pressure to evolve. Many publications initially launched online versions of their print editions, but the real disruption came when they began to create standalone digital content tailored specifically for online audiences.

Magazines now offer more than just articles—they provide multimedia experiences. The once-static format of a print publication is now infused with interactivity, video, and audio to captivate the digital reader. News outlets like The New York Times and The Guardian have adopted innovative techniques such as interactive infographics and podcasts, making their magazine sections dynamic and engaging. Meanwhile, fashion magazines such as Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar are investing heavily in video content, creating behind-the-scenes footage, tutorials, and digital covers that entice both print and digital audiences.

The shift to digital is also being driven by convenience. Readers can now access their favorite magazines at any time, on any device. This accessibility has created a broader, more global audience, allowing magazines to reach readers far beyond the boundaries of their traditional distribution areas.

The Rise of Subscription Models and Paywalls

As magazines transitioned online, one of the challenges they faced was finding sustainable revenue models. The ad-supported model that dominated the print era was less effective in the digital age, where users often bypass ads or access content through ad-free subscriptions. This has led to a surge in subscription-based services, many of which offer premium content behind paywalls.

Magazines like The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and The Economist have pioneered digital subscriptions, offering readers exclusive content for a monthly or yearly fee. While paywalls can limit accessibility, they also provide a more reliable revenue stream, ensuring that high-quality journalism and in-depth reporting continue to thrive in a digital world. Furthermore, niche magazines have found success in this model by offering specialized, targeted content that appeals to specific reader interests, from design to science fiction.

Interactive and Engaging Content: Beyond the Page

The traditional concept of magazine news—carefully curated articles paired with captivating visuals—is being enhanced by digital capabilities. With the advent of multimedia, magazine publishers are embracing interactive content that invites readers to engage in new ways. Magazines are now incorporating augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and even gamified elements to deepen the reader experience.

For example, National Geographic has introduced interactive maps and immersive videos, allowing readers to explore the world in ways that print could never achieve. Wired has used AR to bring futuristic tech concepts to life, while Vogue employs 360-degree videos to offer a behind-the-scenes look at fashion shows. These digital innovations transform reading from a passive activity into an immersive, hands-on experience, blurring the lines between print and digital media.

Magazine News on Social Media: Short and Shareable

Another significant shift in the magazine industry has been the embrace of social media. With platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter, magazines are no longer just publishing content—they are becoming active participants in the conversation. Social media has allowed magazines to condense complex stories into bite-sized pieces, making information shareable and accessible in ways print could never compete with.

Social media also enables real-time updates. Where once magazine news was confined to monthly or weekly editions, now readers can access breaking news or trending topics instantly through platforms like Twitter. Teen Vogue uses Instagram to showcase its latest covers and behind-the-scenes content, while The New Yorker shares in-the-moment political analysis through its social channels. The ability to engage directly with readers in real-time is a powerful tool that traditional magazines didn’t have, but digital and social media provide instant interaction and feedback.

The Resilience of Print

Despite the increasing dominance of digital formats, print magazines have not disappeared. In fact, many publications are finding new life in print by focusing on niche markets and high-quality design. Magazines like Monocle, Kinfolk, and The Gentlewoman continue to cater to readers who value the tactile, collectible nature of printed materials. These magazines often offer long-form, beautifully crafted content that digital formats cannot replicate.

The resurgence of print can also be seen in the rise of indie publications. Many independent magazines are focusing on sustainability, design, and curated, niche content that appeals to specific, loyal audiences. These publications often rely on direct sales, crowdfunding, or limited-edition runs, creating a sense of exclusivity and fostering a deep connection with readers.

Looking Ahead: The Future of Magazine News

As technology continues to evolve, the future of magazine news looks increasingly promising. One trend likely to dominate is the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) in content creation and curation. AI-powered algorithms can predict what content will resonate most with readers, offering personalized magazine experiences based on individual preferences and behavior.

We may also see an expansion in the use of voice-activated technologies, where readers can interact with magazines via smart speakers, receiving daily updates or listening to magazine articles. And as virtual reality becomes more advanced, the potential for immersive storytelling could transform the magazine experience once again, making readers feel like they are part of the story itself.

Conclusion

The magazine industry is in the midst of a dramatic transformation. As traditional print fades into the background, the digital frontier opens up new possibilities for storytelling, engagement, and accessibility. Whether through interactive content, social media engagement, or innovative subscription models, magazines are redefining what it means to consume news and culture.

As we turn the page on the past and embrace the future, one thing is certain: the world of magazine news is more vibrant and diverse than ever before, and it will continue to evolve in exciting ways. The question is no longer whether print will survive—it's how magazines will continue to innovate and captivate readers in an ever-changing digital world.

[transmutationisms]

hi!! big fan of your blog. you really changed my succession viewing experience and i can't wait to rewatch after reading the recs you've put up!

that being said, i read megan garber's piece in the atlantic about the animal imagery/darwinian implications in the show and really loved it (as a biologist with an interest in sociology lol). do you have any specific reading material relating to the topics in that piece? i'd just love to read more but not super sure what i'm even asking/looking for, so feel free to ignore!

hi! so, there's quite a large body of literature in history of biology that deals with the politics of evolutionary theory, including darwinism. you can read these in any order, though i would recommend starting with bob young's 'malthus and the evolutionists: the common context of biological and social theory' if you haven't already encountered it. this was a signal essay in historically grounding the argument that darwinian evolutionary theory read victorian industrial capitalism and malthusian population anxiety into the natural world, which was why it appealed to victorian men of science in a way that previous theories of evolution (sometimes referred to as species transformation or transmutationism, or transformisme / transformismo in france / italy) hadn't. bob was a marxist historian at a time when history of biology had been largely written by working scientists and naive positivists, and his methodological influence continues to be felt in the field today. anyway, these are only starting points and are centred on france and britain, and also i excluded p*ter b*wler because i hate his ass:

the politics of evolution: morphology, medicine, and reform in radical london, by adrian desmond

utopia's garden: french natural history from old regime to revolution, by emma spary

the age of lamarck: evolutionary theories in france, 1790–1830, by pietro corsi

l'introduction du darwinisme en france au xixe siècle, by yvette conry (<- i can't remember whether this was translated into english, sorry)

faces of degeneration: a european disorder, 1848–1918, by daniel pick

darwin: the life of a tormented evolutionist, by adrian desmond and james moore

the cuvier-geoffroy debate: french biology in the decades before darwin, by toby appel

evolution before darwin: theories of the transmutation of species in edinburgh, 1804–1834, by bill jenkins

the spirit of system: lamarck and evolutionary biology, by richard burkhardt

the meaning of evolution: the morphological construction and ideological reconstruction of darwin's theory, by robert j richards

the great nation in decline: sex, modernity, and health crises in revolutionary france, c. 1750–1850, by sean quinlan

lamarck, the mythical precursor: a study of the relations between science and ideology, by madeleine barthélemy-madaule

victorian sensation: the extraordinary publication, reception, and secret authorship of vestiges of the natural history of creation, by james secord

[whencyclopedia]

Banastre Tarleton

Banastre Tarleton (1754-1833) was a British military officer and politician, most famous for his role in the southern campaigns of the American Revolutionary War (1775-1783). In command of an elite unit of Loyalists called the British Legion, Tarleton gained a reputation for aggression and cruelty, with Patriots even coining the phrase 'Tarleton's Quarter' to refer to his mercilessness.

Tarleton joined the British Army in April 1775 at age 20 after blowing through his inheritance. Sent overseas to fight the American rebels, he soon became one of the most infamous British officers of the conflict. Called 'Bloody Ban' after his men massacred surrendering American soldiers at the Battle of Waxhaws, Tarleton led his British Legion on raids throughout the American South, their plumed leather helmets and green jackets striking fear into the hearts of many Patriots. Defeated by Daniel Morgan at the Battle of Cowpens (17 January 1781), Tarleton nevertheless managed to return to England after the war with his reputation intact. He began a long political career in Parliament, in which he notably defended the slave trade, before his death on 15 January 1833 at the age of 78. He is best remembered today for his ruthlessness during the war, although many tales of his cruelty have been exaggerated.

Early Life

Banastre Tarleton was born in Liverpool, England, on 21 August 1754, the third of seven children born to John Tarleton and his wife Jane Parker. John Tarleton was a successful businessman involved in the Caribbean sugar trade and owned plantations in Jamaica, Curaçao, and several other islands in the West Indies. By the 1760s, the elder Tarleton owned three ships that were primarily used to deliver enslaved Africans to Jamaica; indeed, much of the Tarleton family's wealth was derived from the slave trade. In 1764, John Tarleton (or 'Great T' as he was called by his constituents) was elected mayor of Liverpool and served a single one-year term. In 1768, the elder Tarleton tried to stand for election to Parliament, but a mob of whalers prevented him from running.

Banastre (or Ban, as he preferred to be called) attended school in Liverpool. Intelligent, handsome, and charming, he was not a diligent student, preferring to spend his time playing cricket; despite his small physique, he was surprisingly strong and enjoyed many other athletic activities like boxing, horseback riding, and tennis. In the autumn of 1771, Ban and his older brother Thomas were sent to Oxford to study at University College. Tarleton remained there until 6 September 1773, when his father unexpectedly died, leaving him an inheritance of £5,000. With this small fortune, Tarleton headed to London to begin studying law at the Middle Temple. His studiousness had not much improved, however, as Tarleton often neglected his studies in favor of attending the theatre or drinking and gambling at the fashionable Cocoa Tree club. It was not long before he had nearly exhausted his inheritance, forcing him to drop out of law school.

During this period of adolescent partying, the wayward Tarleton befriended several British army officers, who likely helped put his thoughts on a military path. On 20 April 1775, the 20-year-old Tarleton purchased a cornet's commission in the King's Dragoon Guards, one of the most prestigious regiments in the entire army. It was an interesting time to enter military service, as only the day before, the Battles of Lexington and Concord had been fought on the other side of the Atlantic in the British colony of Massachusetts, sparking the American Revolution. After several months of intensive training, Cornet Tarleton was finally sent to North America in February 1776, setting sail from Cork, Ireland, under the command of Lord Charles Cornwallis. Little did Tarleton know that by the time his service in the New World was over, he would be regarded as one of the most infamous men in America.

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