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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

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

Children of the Sun

The following is an attempt to organize some of my thoughts on Alfred Crosby’s Children of the Sun . It essentially summarizes the first six chapters. Alfred Crosby’s Children of the Sun: A History of Humanity’s Unappeasable Appetite for Energy is a history of humanity’s use of energy. It begins with the transformation of matter into energy through nuclear fusion in the core of the Sun and ends with the current energy crisis and humanity’s efforts to replicate the Sun’s activities by “domesticating” hydrogen fusion—figuring out how to build a power plant whose energy is produced by smashing hydrogen atoms together. The First Prime Mover: Muscle The book’s title is derived from a statement by the Russian geochemist Vladimir Vernadsky. (2) Vernaksy was referring to the fact that of the two sources of energy on Earth—radioactive decay of heavy elements in the center of the Earth and nuclear fusion at the center of the Sun—we depend almost entirely on the latter. Aside from a

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