Tag Archives: history

A Forgotten Piece Of African-American History In The Former Town Of Dearfield On The Great Plains : The Salt : NPR

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Movies could be made about this.

Abandoned towns from the early 20th century are far from unique on this stretch of the Great Plains. Withered storefronts and collapsed homes are common. Boom and bust economics and harsh weather made it tough for turn of the century settlers to succeed long-term.

Few ghost towns, however, have all the elements that make Dearfield’s story so compelling: larger than life characters, struggles to live off the land, tales of racial integration at the height of the Jim Crow era.

via A Forgotten Piece Of African-American History In The Former Town Of Dearfield On The Great Plains : The Salt : NPR

The Fusion Party in North Carolina

Politics, Uncategorized, , ,

I’m reading on how the Fusion Party in North Carolina brought together liberal Black Republicans and progressive, pro-labor White Populists against the planter elite-dominated Democrats for a short, amazing period before Democrats used “white supremacy” and violence to split the working class vote.

I think that this coalition approach might work in this era: progressive Berniecrats and liberal Democrats who respect each other’s autonomy without taking over each other.

The Democrats won’t fit all progressives, and many progressives who are focused on class issues will see the Democrats as a constraint. Both should be respected as separate parties, and we should negotiate a coalition between the two on good faith.

But this can’t be negotiated under the Democratic tent. The Democrats will have to come to the table, and not assume that they are the only legitimate party in this country.

Maybe we need the Fusion Party to come back to the South, and be the bridge to unite these groups in ways that the Dems in the South will be prevented from doing for the next several decades.

 

#WilliamLorenKatz is woke. Like, Tim Wise-woke. I read his book “Black Indians: A Hidden Heritage” at the library. He’s been writing books on POC American history in the Old West for over 30 years. It’s through him that I found out about Chief John Horse and the Black Seminoles who fought against the U.S. Army in the Seminole Wars, the bloodiest of the Indian Wars.

 

African history hypothesis: When better ships made it easier for European states like Portugal, Spain and the Netherlands to navigate their way to the Moluccas in the 1400s-1500s, it was the end of an era when caravan trade routes allowed for kingdoms in both the Sahel and Eurasia to attain prominence in trade while being in the desert or mountains.

Africa, by way of geographically being “in the way” between Europe and Asia, went from being a thoroughfare of trade to being a stumbling block to skip over. The Trans-Saharan and Silk Road routes were both made redundant.

If southern Africa were broken up into archipelagos of islands (a la Indonesia or the West Indies), would those African islands have thrived more from trade in the longer run?