(Originally posted elsewhere on 4 February 2024.) At H-Net, was reading Kristin Lee's review of Cecile Vidal's new Caribbean New Orleans: Empire, Race, and the Making of a Slave Society (UNC Press, 2019). Fun takeaways: Though US-administered Louisiana from circa 1805-ish to 1865
(Originally posted elsewhere on 11 February 2024.) Just thinking about avocado, plantations, and advertisements. Since I'm at my retail job and annoyed by the fucking Super Bowl. -- Excerpt: Avocado orchards had carpeted the gently undulating hills around the [...] lake of Pátzcuaro with stodgy green bushes. Here, before the
16 July: Trinity atomic bomb test (1945), US foreshadows upcoming mass death at Hiroshima/Nagasaki and heralds age of fear and global imperial hegemony 17 July: the end of Tsar Nicholas/Romanov family (1918); RMS Carpathia (rescued Titanic six years earlier) sunk by German u-boat (1918, same day as
(Originally posted elsewhere on 19 December 2019.) Thank you for the response (for those following again, it was in response to discussion of wastelanding, Spanish/Mexican/US conquest, the notion that the deserts of North America are vibrant, and reptile endemism). Yep, sure. Regarding the high biodiversity and endemic distribution
(Originally posted elsewhere in February 2022.) Reading on early maritime law. Just wanted to put Sonja Schillings and Lauren Benton in conversation. Benton, of course, is author of Rage for Order: The British Empire and the Origins of International Law, 1800-1850 (2016) and A Search for Sovereignty: Law and
(Originally posted elsewhere on 24 April 2024.) Just organizing more notes. Some recent-ish books/texts on heyday of German Empire: German Colonialism in Africa and its Legacies: Architecture, Art, Urbanism, and Visual Culture (Edited by Itohan Osayimwese, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2023) An Imperial Homeland: Forging German Identity in Southwest Africa
(Originally posted elsewhere on 23 May 2022.) At the oasis of Cuatro Cienegas, in the Chihuahuan Desert of Coahuila south of the Big Bend of the Rio Grande, more than 90% of the oasis pools and wetlands have already dried and disappeared due to water extraction for private land development,
(Scott review originally posted about elsewhere on 19 March 2024. Langfur review originally posted about elsewhere on 21 April 2024.) Two scholars, as reviewed by two other scholars. Put side-by-side by me (decidedly not a scholar, sorry; I'm a night-shift retail employee!). Here, Natasha Lightfoot
So there’s a lot going on in this single chapter of Sippial’s. There’s something I left unrepresented in this excerpt, because I want more time to mull it over. I’ll include those thoughts as preface. So the relatively “radical” newspaper here--purportedly edited/compiled by activist
Archivist I follow had shared the above-appended image of the fire at Carney, Kansas. And I was lost in thought considering the spatial and temporal context of that fire. The image/print comes from: Frederick Arthur Amrbose Talbot, The oil conquest of the world (Lippincott, 1914), page 201. A
(Originally posted elsewhere on 25 June 2020.) Amidst pandemic/quarantine closures, intensified Canadian pushes for construction of Keystone XL in Lakota territory of the Northern Plains, and similarly intense Canadian state (especially Albertan) advocacy for expanding the pipeline corridors traversing Sault Ste. Marie and the lower peninsula of Michigan, we
(Originally posted elsewhere on 17 February 2020. Wild, nigh-unbelievable sequence of ironies and serendipitous encounters in the eighteenth-century political ecology of ginseng. All kinds of fun stuff: smuggling; piracy; biogeography; relevancy of local climate; eccentric natural historians "guessing" at presence of ginseng on the other side