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Podcast Prototypes

on August 06, 2019

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Colonial American Slavery

The following is a summary of the first two chapters of Peter Kolchin's American Slavery: 1619-1877. The economies of the British colonies that would eventually become the United States were not originally significantly dependent upon the slavery of uprooted Africans. "The initial demand for labor that eventually led to slavery was...color blind." Many Native Americans were made slaves by the English colonists. However, their widespread enslavement was rendered impossible by epidemics which wiped out large numbers of them; many others were killed in battle with European settlers. (8, 14) More important was the large number of indentured servants that emigrated from Europe. Indenturing, essentially synonymous with apprenticing in the Old World, evolved to encompass a variety of arrangements in the New World. Some servants were simply kidnapped, and others were apparently sentenced to indentured servitude for criminal behavior. But the majority came voluntarily. The...

Mussolini's Italy: First Two Chapters

For simplicity, throughout I will primarily use the general appellation "fascist" or "fascism" as opposed to the capitalized "Fascist" or "Fascism" which refer specifically to the Italian fascist movement as embodied in the Fascist Party. Capitalized, the term excludes other fascisms, specifically Nazism. I'm currently reading RJB Bosworth's Mussolini's Italy: Life Under the Fascist Dictatorship, 1915-1945 . Bosworth is an Australian scholar who previously authored a biography of Mussolini. Mussolini's Italy was published in 2005. Bosworth reminds us that Italy provided the world with the first fascist state, and that the word "totalitarianism" was first used to pejoratively describe Italy under Mussolini--though Bosworth curiously appears to omit reference to the etymology of the world "fascism," first used by Mussolini himself, according to Robert Paxton, to describe the movement whose leadership he was asce...

The Significance of Writing in Four Hundred Words

The following was composed in January of 2014, inspired by an advertisement by the Salem State Log , Salem State University's campus newspaper, for articles by students discussing their experiences with writing. In more circumstances than most people, I prefer the written to the spoken word. It allows communication of ideas of greater complexity with greater precision in a form of greater duration. It is an invention that has expanded and enhanced the reliability of our collective memory, thereby facilitating both great evil as well good, but also a uniquely human exploration of the universe. What is writing? Writing is a means of conveying information. What distinguishes it from the spoken word? It is seen, not heard. Most languages today are associated with no script—they are spoken, never written. And while the means of recording spoken language has existed since the nineteenth century, even today the vast majority of spoken language dissipates instantaneously upon i...

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