#european settlers

[alwaysbewoke]

Jean-Baptiste Pointe DuSable was born in Saint-Domingue, Haiti (French colony) during the Haitian Revolution. At some point he settled in the part of North America that is now known as the city of Chicago and was described in historical documents as "a handsome negro" He married a Native American woman, Kitiwaha, and they had two children. In 1779, during the American Revolutionary War, he was arrested by the British on suspicion of being an American Patriot sympathizer. In the early 1780s he worked for the British lieutenant-governor of Michilimackinac on an estate at what is now the city of St. Clair, Michigan north of Detroit. In the late 1700's, Jean-Baptiste was the first person to establish an extensive and prosperous trading settlement in what would become the city of Chicago. Historic documents confirm that his property was right at the mouth of the Chicago River. Many people, however, believe that John Kinzie (a white trader) and his family were the first to settle in the area that is now known as Chicago, and it is true that the Kinzie family were Chicago's first "permanent" European settlers. But the truth is that the Kinzie family purchased their property from a French trader who had purchased it from Jean-Baptiste. He died in August 1818, and because he was a Black man, many people tried to white wash the story of Chicago's founding. But in 1912, after the Great Migration, a plaque commemorating Jean-Baptiste appeared in downtown Chicago on the site of his former home. Later in 1913, a white historian named Dr. Milo Milton Quaife also recognized Jean-Baptiste as the founder of Chicago. And as the years went by, more and more Black notables such as Carter G. Woodson and Langston Hughes began to include Jean-Baptiste in their writings as "the brownskin pioneer who founded the Windy City." In 2009, a bronze bust of Jean-Baptiste was designed and placed in Pioneer Square in Chicago along the Magnificent Mile. There is also a popular museum in Chicago named after him called the DuSable Museum of African American History.

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[news4dzhozhar]

[historyfiles]

Modern Antigua and Barbuda: Antigua gained European settlers in 1632 when English colonisers arrived from St Kitts, with the depopulated island becoming an English colony in 1667.

[prairie-tales]

Notes from National Geographic 'Atlas of Indian Nations', p. :

Notable cases of multi-tribal resistance:

The Ottawa chief Pontiac brought more than a dozen tribes together in 1763 and together they burnt down nine of eleven British forts.

Tecumseh was a Shawnee Chief who also brought tribes together to fight the European settlers, but he lost his life in battle.

In the Plains, the Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapho often worked together against American invasion.

The Apache fought alone.

Resistance rarely did anything than buy a little time before the inevitable engulfment of European expansion.

[dgtcreative2024]

The Ones Who Claimed Africa's Whole Gold Inventory

At any point might you at some point comprehend that Elon, musk, Jeff, Bezos or Bernard Arnold are only walking around the domain of the rich? In no way, shape or form these refined men have shot themselves to an unbelievable status, standing side by side with the titans of abundance all through the chronicles of history. Presently, how about we set out on a fascinating excursion to investigate and reveal the tales of the genuine heavyweights. Who've made a permanent imprint on the abundance scene across hundreds of years, John d Rockefeller. While diving into the records of history's most affluent people, we unavoidably experience faces that become the stuff of dreams for scheme, scholars around the world, john d Rockefeller is exactly one such figure.

[xtruss]

Hikers are seen in the distance at the Mesquite Sand Dunes in Death Valley National Park, California. This rugged desert landscape holds the world's record for the hottest air temperature—134°F in 1913. Tourists still flock here to experience the blistering heat. Photograph By Raul Touzon, National Geographic Image Collection

How Did Death Valley 🏜️ Gets Its Name? Not From The Heat

In December 1849, a group of settlers seeking their fortunes stumbled upon this inhospitable valley. The few who made it out alive assigned the haunting moniker.

— By Erin Blakemore | July 25, 2023

As a heat wave continues to blanket the Northern Hemisphere, tourists are making pilgrimages to the hottest place on Earth—Death Valley, California—in hope of experiencing a new world-record high temperature. The valley already holds the record for hottest air temperature ever recorded, a whopping 134°F in 1913.

But if they think the valley was named after its scorching summer temps, they’re wrong—it actually got its name from a winter disaster. Here’s how Death Valley got its name, and why it continues to lure visitors with its extreme weather and barren landscape.

Photographing Death Valley’s starry skies shines a light on pollution. A national park artist-in-residence captures the fragility and beauty of the desert at night. August 20, 2020! As an artist-in-residence at Death Valley National Park, photographer Harun Mehmedinović captured images of its night skies and increasing light pollution. In this snowy shot, he caught both stars and, on the right, the glow of the city of Las Vegas. Photograph By Harun Mehmedinović

Inside A Desolate Desert

Located in southeastern California near the Nevada border, Death Valley is nestled in the northern Mojave Desert between four mountain ranges: the Panamint Range to the west, the Amargosa Range to the east, the Grapevine Mountains to the north, and the Owlshead Mountains to the south.

The area’s original inhabitants, the Timbisha Shoshone, lived in harmony with the valley for millennia. But when European settlers encountered it during their westward migration, they were flummoxed by the landscape. Though surrounded by mountain ranges, the valley is situated at the lowest elevation in the United States. The alkaline desert floor is bone dry and lacks vegetation, while the surrounding mountains trap the heat reflected by the sparse desert floor—making it blindingly hot in the summer and inhospitable even in winter.

Even before gold was discovered there in 1849, California attracted white settlers searching for a new life filled with natural riches. Many of these emigrants were completely unprepared for the arduous trip across both mountain and desert—and some fell victim to people who falsely claimed they knew the safest, fastest routes.

In one particularly famous case in 1846, a group of pioneers known as the Donner Party became snowbound after following the shortcut that a booster named Lansford Hastings had advertised. Stuck in the Sierra Nevadas, some of these pioneers eventually resorted to cannibalism and lost nearly half of their group to starvation and exposure.

Photographing Death Valley’s starry skies shines a light on pollution. A national park artist-in-residence captures the fragility and beauty of the desert at night. August 20, 2020! The Milky Way looks brighter above Death Valley’s Panamint Springs thanks to the dim lighting at this gas station. Mehmedinović says the image shows the benefit of cutting out excessive light around national parks. Photograph By Harun Mehmedinović

On The Trail To Death Valley

Despite the Donner Party disaster—and the fact that they lacked familiarity with the terrain—boosters and wagon train leaders still attempted to find shortcuts on their journeys to California, especially after gold was discovered there.

In October 1849, members of trail leader Jefferson Hunt’s Mojave San Joaquin Company wagon train grew impatient with Hunt’s pace and his preferred route, known as the Old Spanish Trail. Some worried they’d be stuck in the mountains during the winter like the Donner Party if they didn’t move more quickly. They briefly convinced Hunt to try an alternative route, but Hunt returned from a reconnaissance mission nearly dead of thirst and told them he’d keep to the Old Spanish Trail.

A subset of the party still thought they could find a path west across the Mojave Desert, however—and when they met up with another, smaller party on the trail, they were shown a hand-drawn map of a cutoff that was endorsed, they were told, by some of the region’s most experienced trappers and mountaineers. After Hunt refused to take the shortcut, which would shave 500 miles and potentially months off the journey, much of the party broke off to try out the supposedly superior route.

At first, it seemed like they’d made the right choice: travel was easy, and they made good time. But soon they encountered more and more inhospitable terrain, and increasing disputes about how to proceed. One group headed toward a nearby mountain in hopes of finding water. The other, a group of younger, unmarried men who called themselves “Jayhawkers,” broke off into their own party and attempted to press due west to find the mountaineers’ advertised trail—a route that, it turns out, didn’t really exist.

As both groups journeyed, water became harder to find, and many turned back in search of Hunt rather than face the coming winter in the deadly Sierras. “Grass there is scarce, wood there is none,” wrote Jayhawker Sheldon Young of the landscape. “It is a dubious looking country.”

Photographing Death Valley’s starry skies shines a light on pollution. A national park artist-in-residence captures the fragility and beauty of the desert at night. August 20, 2020! Light pollution from cities can encroach on rural areas. Here, in Mehmedinović’s photograph of Death Valley’s Racetrack Playa, the glow on the right comes from Las Vegas, more than 200 miles away. Photograph By Harun Mehmedinović

Disaster Strikes

Weak and exhausted, in December 1849 both groups eventually entered a massive valley filled with salt flats and surrounded by mountains on all sides. Water was scarce in the desert valley; they were only able to locate highly alkaline water sources.

The Jayhawkers slaughtered many of their own oxen to eat and walked across the valley, eventually finding a Native American who guided them to safety. The other party tried going the other direction. As they pressed onward, this time another group of men decided to strike out on their own, and would ultimately die of exposure along their preferred trail.

On the verge of dehydration, the remaining members of the original party were briefly saved by a snowstorm. But over time, oxen dropped dead from thirst and exhaustion, and several men died. Finally, all but a few of the men broke off find their way over the mountains. The others waited patiently at the bottom of the valley.

Finally, after more than a month, the remaining party members—mostly women and young children—were rescued by two young men they’d sent off to get supplies. As they made their final crossing of the Panamint Mountains, one of the party members is said to have turned toward the valley and said “Goodbye, Death Valley.” Overall, it took the shortcut seekers more than four months to find their way to the part of California they sought.

Photographing Death Valley’s starry skies shines a light on pollution. A national park artist-in-residence captures the fragility and beauty of the desert at night. August 20, 2020! "These images are meant to evoke a sense of wonder and curiosity,” says Mehmedinović. “I see images as a gateway to a discussion on the importance of the night sky and our impact on the environment.” Photograph By Harun Mehmedinović

The Highest Temperature Recorded on Earth?

The name stuck—and today, the valley is still known as one of the most barren and dangerous places in the United States. In 1913, the ambient air temperature reportedly rose to 134 degrees, still the world-record high air temperature.

Modern-day meteorologists dispute this reading, pointing out that the temperature was not in line with that of other nearby places and that even freak “hot spots” in the valley cannot account for those variations.

“It is possible to demonstrate that a temperature of 134°F in Death Valley on July 10, 1913, was essentially not possible from a meteorological perspective,” wrote meteorologist Christopher C. Burt in a 2016 analysis. However, the World Meteorological Organization, which validates world-record temperatures, still considers the reading a world record.

The group “is always willing to investigate any past extreme record when new credible evidence is presented,” the WMO wrote in a 2020 release, but to date the analysis has never been officially invalidated.

In the meantime, as a potential new extreme approaches, the organization says it’s ready to examine and validate any new records. Death Valley may not have gotten its name from a scorching summer’s day. But 174 years after it was named, the barren, salty valley is still as inhospitable as it was in 1849.

[korla-the-kenku]

I've heard about this before. Most earthworms in the upper half of North American went extinct. From what I remember, when European settlers came over, they would weigh their ships down with soil so that the ships would have an equal weight for the return ship bringing home imports.

North American forests actually didn't rely on earthworms to break down leaf litter. Native invertebrates did it at a slower rate. This was how local fauna had evolved.

Earthworms accelerate decomposition, which was problematic for these ecosystems that evolved with slow decay processes. This affected the soil, such as changes in pH, in texture and density, and nutrient enrichment.

These changes made the soil inhospitable for a lot of local plants and let invasive species get an edge in. This also affected the invertebrate species that had been doing the job before.

The soil change also affected other things. The old slowly decaying leaf liter traped and stored carbon. But invasive worms that devoured that leaf litter were releasing more carbon into the atmosphere, and preventing additional carbon storage by depleting the leaf layer. This is a worsening problem.

All of this damages older forests, though it seems to affect new forests much less. Either way it has changed our ecosystem from what it had been.

[leroibobo]

the depopulation of the palestinian village of kawkab al-hawa (“the star of the jordan river”) is far from the only case in which a palestinian village was violently, entirely depopulated during the 1948 nakba. it's also not the only case in which neighboring kibbutz residents advocated for and even themselves participated in the destruction of houses, nor is it the only case in which elements of the village were only kept so they could serve a neighboring tourist attraction. however, it is a conspicuous case of all of the above, combined.

kawkab al-hawa happens to sit by belvoir castle, one of the best-preserved crusader castles in palestine. the village itself had been testified to in some shape or form from antiquity - the crusaders had referred to the village with the frankish name "belvoir", hence the name of the castle. after saladin retook it, the village as we know it today expanded into and around the castle's confines. by 1945, the castle had been in ruins for centuries, while the rural village housed 300, mostly farmers.

in the words of meron benvenisti: "In the Israeli context, it is preferable to immortalize those who exterminated the Jewish communities of Europe (in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries) and murdered the Jews of Jerusalem in 1099 than to preserve relics of the local Arab civilization with which today's Israelis coexist...Arab buildings spoil the myth of an occupied land under foreign rule, awaiting liberation at the hands of the Jews returning to their homeland."

[firefistjaigio]

how the casually racist friendgroup reacts when someone says eugenicist rhetoric

[cavalierzee]

"Bring Them Home"

Europe Wants Their Immigrants Back!

[mesetacadre]

not a marxist (yet) so can i ask if it's generally agreed upon that capitalism is the primary contradiction why theres a subset of ppl saying it's actually settler colonialism or it's actually this other thing?

You're getting a little bit confused over these terms. The primary contradiction of capitalism is class, because the antagonism between the exploiter class (the capitalist class, the group of people who own the means of production) and the exploited class (the working class, the group of people who sell their labor power in exchange for a portion of the value they create, a salary) creates a struggle between them that will, eventually, cause the collapse of capitalism, and if the working class is prepared, replaced with socialism. If you see people saying that capitalism creates its own demise, this is what they mean.

There are other contradictions within capitalism, more or less inherent, more or less specific. For example, the conflict between different sectors of the capitalist class that manifest through means like parlamentarism or interimperialist wars can create a deepened crisis that could lead to an overthrow by the working class, or it could not.

Settler colonialism, on the other hand, is a particularly oppressive form that imperialist capitalism (the current a highest stage of capitalism, as described by Lenin) can take in the imperial periphery, such as in Palestine or the Sahrawi Republic (Western Sahara). Within these states or territories that suffer settler colonialism, the primary contradiction does become the settler-indigenous* relation. It becomes the more pressing matter, the main and precedent form of oppression, and the specific contradictions it spawns will contribute to its collapse. Such has been the case in most of the world already, take South Africa, Zimbabwe and Algeria as examples. It is also important to note that a vanguard party, like the PFLP, could successfully take advantage of the collapse of Israeli colonialism and inmediately organize a socialist revolution, given it possesses enough strength and organizes a sufficient portion of the Palestinian working class, but it isn't a given. Not understanding this is the mistake more immediatist forms of communism make, such as some trotskyists saying "the palestinian working class should rise up against the palestinian bourgeoisie".

Settler colonialism is distinct from "normal" manifestations of imperialism in this fact, in the precedence the class struggle takes. Other places, such as in Burkina Faso, Cuba, or Vietnam, are places in the imperial core in which their socialist revolutions did not have to ally with non-communist elements to kick out the imperialist capitalist class and then maybe do their own revolution, because the absence of the more "aggressive" settler colonialism allowed them to get rid of imperialist subjugation and capitalism in one fell swoop. In most places in Africa, however, the more explicit forms of European colonialism (and not settler-colonialism) did eventually fall to popular uprisings or under their own weight, but were replaced by their own national bourgeoisie who still sold off their country to imperialists anyway.

Capitalism or settler colonialism are not contradictions by themselves, the contradictions are the mechanisms and elements that these systems create which have the potential to make them extremely weak or outright collapse.

[thebellekeys]

I cannot think of a single valid reason why Israel should even be allowed to participate in Eurovision in any year much less this year...

[rotzaprachim]

sometimes I really get depressed about the fact that the friend I thought was normal and well meaning and even had a chat with about this still kept making “get to know I/p” kinda of flyers about how Hamas is brave freedom fighters who did nothing wrong and Israeli civilians weren’t hurt and how everything bad in our local rural area is *connected* to the non military civilian partnerships with Israeli clean energy research … I don’t know how much reach this girl has but she WAS THE ONE in charge of the local I/p “education” and “fact finding” and she still wanted me to come “share my side” to prove she wasn’t antisemitic even after I asked her yo change the wording on the flyers. It’s so minor but depressing as hell and I don’t want to think about who she’s influencing

[prairie-tales]

[maslimanny]

Love Cardinals 😍😍

[thoughtportal]

Ernie Chambers