Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology

Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology

Popular Religion and Ritual in Prehistoric and Ancient Greece and the Eastern Mediterranean

.), Popular Religion and Ritual in Prehistoric and Ancient Greece and the Eastern Mediterranean

Greek and Roman Myth and the Bible

Greek and Roman Myth and the Bible

Reconstruction, Racist Democratic Party, Eric Foner

Reconstruction

                                                By Eric Foner

 

Page 26:

“The rise of political antislavery in the 1840s and 1850s was accompanied by the emergence of white supremacy as a central tenant of the Northern Democratic party..

Page 29:

“Sanctified by the North’s triumph, the free labor ideology would emerge from the war further strengthened as a definition of the good society, an underpinning of Republican Party policy,...”

Page 30:,

“Generally, however, the Democratic Party, the preeminent Conservative institution of the era reaped the political harvest of opposition to the changes wrought by the war. Tainted with disloyalty in Republican eyes, unable to develop a coherent alternatives to the policies of the Lincoln administration (it remained throughout the period, as one historian puts it, a “Party of negations”)....

Page 31:

“The potent cry of white supremacy provided the final ideological glue in the Democratic coalition”

Page 32:

“The Emancipation Proclamation provoked lurid Democratic descriptions of an impending black inundation of the Midwest. In Indiana, one group of Democratic women paraded before an election with banners emblazoned: “Fathers save us from nigger husbands”. As Georges Clemenceau, reporting, on Reconstruction for a French newspaper, observed after war “Any Democrat who did not manage to hint that the Negro is a degenerate gorilla would be considered lacking in enthusiasm “

“Beginning with an attack on a , factories and docks (some, the scene of recent strikes), the opulent homes as the Colored conscription office, the riot quickly developed into a wholesale assault upon all the symbols of the new order being created by the Republican party and the Civil War. Its targets included government officials, factories and docks (Some, the scene of recent strikes), opulent homes of the city’s Republicans elite, and such symbols of reform spirit as the Colored Orphans Asylum, which was burned to the ground. Above all, the riot degenerated into a virtual racial pogrom, with unaccounted numbers of blacks murdered on the streets or driven to take refuge in Central Park or across the river in New Jersey. Mattie Griffith, a white abolitionist, watched from her window as the immigrant working class – or, in her way of putting it, “ the strange wretched, abandoned creatures that flocked out from their dens and lair’s – took tot eh streets to comity acts of unimaginable cruelty upon the city’s black population: “A child of 3 years of age was thrown from a 4^th story window and instantly killed. A woman one hour after her confinement was set upon and beaten with her tender babe in her arms…Children were torn from their mothers’ embrace and their brains blown out in the very face of the afflicted month. Men were burnt by slow fires”

Page 215:

“The “undisputed history” of these years, black Congressman Josiah Walls later observed, explained why Southern blacks refused to cast Democratic ballots and stood as a warning “as to what they will do if they should again obtain control of this Government.” Most of all, Presidential Reconstruction reinforced blacks’ identification with federal authority. Only outside intervention could assure freedmen s modicum of justice”

Page 217:

“Throughout the north, support for the President [Johnson] and opposition to enfranchising blacks became the Democrat’s rallying cries…..and party speakers described Republicans as “nigger adorers” ….”

Page 218:

“The Blair family had long been obsessed with the specter of racial “amalgamation,” and as with Johnson, prejudice led them down the path of illogic in which blacks and advocates of black suffrage were somehow equated with slavery and Slave Power”

Page 231:

“Equality in civil rights – equal treatment by the courts and civil and criminal laws – most Republicans now deemed nearly as essential, for an individual’s natural right could not be secured without it”

 

Page 291:

“And the Republican party – the party of emancipation and black voting rights – become an institution as central to the black community as the church and school”

Page 313:

“In Ohio, where a measure enfranchising blacks was on the fall ballot, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Allan G. Thurman pledged to save the state from “the thralldom of nigerrism” on the West coast , Democrats added anti -Chinese appeals, arguing that Republican doctrine of “universal equality for all races in all things “ would lead to an Asiatic influx and control of the state by an alliance of the “Mongolian and Indian and African”

Page 340:

From Frank Blair, Democrat VP candidate:

“In blatantly racist language, he excoriated Republicans for placing the South under the rule of “a semi-barbarous race of blacks who are worshippers of fetishes and polygamists” and longer to: subject the white women to their unbridled lust”….Reading Darwin’s The Origin of Species had reinforced Franks’ long-standing fear of racial intermixing, which, he now asserted, would reverse evolution, produce a less-advanced species incapable of reproducing itself, and destroy “the accumulated improvement of the centuries” These were the convictions of the Democratic candidate for the Vice Presidency of the United States.”

Page 342:

“Founded in 1866 as a Tennessee social club, the Ku Klux Klan now spread in nearly every southern state, launching a “reign of terror” against Republicans leaders black and white” …..

Blacks had no doubt who was behind the violence. “We don’t call them democrats,” a local leader commented of the assailants, “we call them southern murderers”

Page 422:

“Tennessee Democrats repealed the Republican law penalizing railroads for discriminating against blacks and drafted a new constitution requiring racial separation in the public schools”

…in 1873 made payment of a poll tax a requirement for voting, effectively disentrancing the bulk of the black population and ensuring over twenty years of uninterrupted Democratic ascendency in the state.

Page 425:

“In effect, the Klan was a military force serving the interests of the Democratic party, the planter class and all those who desired the restoration of white supremacy”

Page 426:

“Jack Dupree, the victim of a particularly brutal murder in Monroe county, Mississippi—assailants cut his throat and disemboweled him, all within sight of his wife, who had just given birth to twins- was “president of a republican club” and know as a man who would speak his mind”

 

Page 427:

“In October 1870, a group of armed whites broke up a Republican campaign rally at Eutaw, the county seat of Greene county, Alabama, killing four blacks and wounding fifty-four. In the same month, on the day after Republicans carried Laurens county, in South Carolina’s Piedmont cotton belt, a racial altercation at Laurensville degenerated into a “negro chase” which bands of whites scoured the countryside, driving 150 freedmen from their homes and committing 13 murders”

Page 431:

Possibly the most massive Klan action anywhere in the South was the January 1871 assault on the Union county jail by 500 masked men, which resulted in the lynching of eight black prisoners. Hundreds of Republicans were whipped and saw their farm property destroyed in Spartanburg, a largely white county with a Democratic majority”

Page 560:

“…. Democrats assaulted a republican barbecue in Clinton, only 15 miles from the state capital. A few individuals on each side were killed, and armed whites went onto to scour the countryside, shooting down blacks “just the same as birds: They claimed perhaps thirty victims, among them schoolteachers, church leaders, and local Republican organizers.”

The Routledge Handbook of Early Christian Art

The Routledge Handbook of Early Christian Art

The Greek and Roman Trophy: From Battlefield Marker to Icon of Power

The Greek and Roman Trophy: From Battlefield Marker to Icon of Power

Thucydides. How to Think about War: An Ancient Guide to Foreign Policy

Thucydides. How to Think about War: An Ancient Guide to Foreign Policy

Harvard Business Review, Decency is Just as Important as Intelligence, Bill Boulding

for-leaders-decency-is-just-as-important-as-intelligence

Empire and Political Cultures in the Roman World

Key Themes in Ancient History

British Walls: Antonine Wall, 142 AD, Hadrian's Wall, 122 AD

Queer Classics Survey of LGBTQ+ Classicists Reveals Community and Continuity

queer-classics

A Companion to Sparta (2 vols). Blackwell Companions to the Ancient World: Ancient History

A Companion to Sparta (2 vols). Blackwell Companions to the Ancient World: Ancient History

10 LinkedIn Profile Summaries That We Love (And How to Boost Your Own)

linkedin-best-practices

The Cambridge Companion to Hippocrates

The Cambridge Companion to Hippocrates

Richard Lim, Public Disputation, Power, and Social Order in Late Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995)

Richard Lim, Public Disputation, Power, and Social Order in Late Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995)

Lucius Verus and the Roman Defence of the East

Lucius Verus and the Roman Defence of the East

Hellenistic Philosophy

http://www.bmcreview.org/2019/07/20190719.html

Hellenistic Philosophy

The World-Class Photography of Ebony and Jet Is Priceless History. It’s Still Up for Sale.

It’s impossible to overstate the significance of the Johnson Publishing Company, founded in Chicago in 1942. John and Eunice Johnson began with Negro Digest, a Readers Digest for an African American audience, which quickly reached thousands of households. Ebony, the company’s flagship monthly, launched in 1945, followed by the weekly Jet in ’51. Soon Johnson Publishing emerged as a beacon of African American enterprise, in no small part because Johnson himself poached some of the top journalistic, editorial, and design talent from around the country. One catch was the Atlanta Daily World’s Lerone Bennett Jr., who eventually became Ebony’s influential executive editor and a historian whose work resonated deeply with Americans who didn’t see themselves in the history taught in schools. Celebrities—the likes of Dorothy Dandridge, Ray Charles, and Aretha Franklin—were featured in the magazines as their careers were taking off: they were superstars in African American living rooms but nearly unknown to the readership of photo magazines targeting a mainstream readership, like LIFE.

I’ve had anxiety about this for four years,” says Brenna W. Greer, an associate professor of history at Wellesley College who writes about race, business, and visual culture. Greer’s new book, Represented: The Black Imagemakers Who Reimagined African American Citizenship, makes the case that a key part of African Americans’ struggle for full citizenship after World War II centered on creating and managing commercial images of themselves. That made what the Johnson Publishing Company was doing crucial, she says.

But perhaps the most alarming question around licensing revolves around the possibility of charging a usage fee for sensitive items in the collection. Historians who have knowledge of what Ebony and Jet published will point, immediately, to David Jackson’s photographs of Emmett Till lying in repose at his funeral, which first ran in the September 15, 1955, issue of Jet. Till was a 14-year-old boy from Chicago who was tortured and murdered while visiting relatives in Mississippi, for allegedly whistling at a white woman.

Cf. https://books.google.com/books?id=57EDAAAAMBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=september+15+1955+jet&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjZquzw8pjjAhUYCs0KHVkxDkcQ6AEIKDAA#v=onepage&q=september%2015%201955%20jet&f=false

The publication of Jackson’s photographs of Till’s carefully dressed but badly decomposed body echoed like a thunderclap among African Americans, particularly young people who became activists in the 1960s—the “Emmett Till generation,” they would call themselves.

Cf.  https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/summer-2019/the-world-class-photography-of-emebony/em-and-emjet/em-is-priceless-history-its-still-up-for-sale

Zenobia: Shooting Star of Palmyra. Women in Antiquity

Zenobia: Shooting Star of Palmyra. Women in Antiquity

Africa: China Colony