First session: November 21, 2015. Last date to add: Sometime in the future.
Reading: Self-assigned. Recommendations made and welcomed.
Posting history, in reverse order
https://www.freerepublic.com/tag/by:homerjsimpson/index?tab=articles
To add this class to or drop it from your schedule notify Admissions and Records (Attn: Homer_J_Simpson) by reply or freepmail.
Link to previous New York Times thread
https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/3910242/posts
Check out The Zong Massacre. The Song was a British slave ship that had been captured by the Dutch. It was carrying 400 slaves, double its capacity, to Jamaica and was running out of drinking water:
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the notorious events off Jamaica in 1781 and their background. The British slave ship Zong, having sailed across the Atlantic towards Jamaica, threw 132 enslaved Africans from its human cargo into the sea to drown. Even for a slave ship, the Zong was overcrowded; those murdered were worth more to the ship dead than alive. The crew said there was not enough drinking water to go round and they had no choice, which meant they could claim for the deaths on insurance. The main reason we know of this atrocity now is that the owners took their claim to court in London, and the insurers were at first told to pay up as if the dead slaves were any other lost goods, not people. Abolitionists in Britain were scandalised: if courts treated mass murder in the slave trade as just another business transaction and not a moral wrong, the souls of the nation would be damned. But nobody was ever prosecuted.
Good evening Professor.
It is true that we should have invented the cotton gin much earlier, or we should have picked our own cotton. I have before and you better wear gloves.
Anyway, if it hadn’t been for the African tribes and the Arabs, there probably wouldn’t be a slave trade.
But that is history.
If all that didn’t happen, I probably wouldn’t have married my wife. Who happens to be African American.
Go figure.
5.56mm