John Baker in BlackPast.Org:
When I was in the seventh grade, I spotted a photograph of four former slaves in my social studies textbook. Although the photograph was entitled Black Tennesseans, I noticed a strong family resemblance between them and my family members. When my grandmother told me that two of them were actually her grandparents, I began the lifelong research project that became The Washingtons of Wessyngton Plantation: Stories of My Family’s Journey to Freedom.
I tell the story of my ancestors Emanuel and Henny Washington, who were enslaved on Wessyngton Plantation owned by the Washington family. This is also the story of the hundreds of other African Americans connected with the plantation for more than two hundred years. It is a story of family, faith, and community. Founded in 1796 by Joseph Washington, a distant cousin of America’s first president, Wessyngton Plantation covered 15,000 acres in Robertson County and held an enslaved population of 274 African Americans. They comprised the largest enslaved population on a single plantation in the state of Tennessee and they worked on the largest tobacco plantation in the United States and the second largest in the world.
During the Civil War many African American men from the plantation enlisted in the Union Army, others ran away and worked on the military fortification, Fort Negley, in Nashville. After the emancipation in 1865 many of the freedpeople returned to Wessyngton as sharecroppers. Others purchased their own farms including several who bought land on which they had previously been enslaved. Some of this land remains in their descendants’ possession.
Only two slaves were ever sold from Wessyngton Plantation so the African Americans there formed family groups that remained intact for generations. Many of their descendants still remain in the area close to the plantation, others now numbering in the tens of thousands live throughout the United States. Some of the African Americans on Wessyngton also retained true African names, which was very rare for that period. This has made it possible to trace their African ethnic group heritage, which has been confirmed by DNA testing.
More here. (Note: Throughout February, we will publish at least one post dedicated to Black History Month)
Most female flies take a low-rent approach to parenthood, depositing scores of seed-sized eggs in the trash or on pet scat to hatch, leaving the larvae to fend for themselves. Not so the female tsetse fly. She gestates her young internally, one at a time, and gives birth to them live. When each extravagantly pampered offspring pulls free of her uterus after nine days, fly mother and child are pretty much the same size. “It’s the equivalent of giving birth to an 18-year-old,” said Geoffrey Attardo, an entomologist who studies tsetse flies at the University of California, Davis. The newborn tsetse fly looks like a hand grenade and moves like a Slinky, and if you squeeze it too hard the source of its plumpness becomes clear — or rather a telltale white. The larva, it seems, is just a big bag of milk. “Rupture the gut,” Dr. Attardo said, “and the milk comes spilling out.”
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The dystopia George Orwell conjured up in “1984” wasn’t a prediction. It was, instead, a reflection. Newspeak, the Ministry of Truth, the Inner Party, the Outer Party — that novel sampled and remixed a reality that Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism had already made apparent. Scary stuff, certainly, but maybe the more frightening dystopia is the one no one warned you about, the one you wake up one morning to realize you’re living inside.
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British scholar David Harvey is one of the most renowned Marxist scholars in the world today. His course on Karl Marx’s Capital is highly popular and has even been turned into a series on YouTube. Harvey is known for his support of student activism, community and labour movements.
With his finely tuned editing ear, Benjamin Dreyer often encounters things so personally horrifying that they register as a kind of torture, the way you might feel if you were an epicure and saw someone standing over the sink, slurping mayonnaise directly from the jar.
Davos 2019 was a downbeat affair. That at least is how regulars