Rock Oil, Civil War, and Industrial Slavery Interrupted

2019 ◽  
pp. 214-255
Author(s):  
Jeremy Zallen

This chapter examines how the contingently timed and combined onslaught of Pennsylvania petroleum and the Civil War radically reoriented the possibilities and geographies of light in North America. On the eve of war, free-labor western Pennsylvania and industrial-slavery western Virginia were both poised to capture and launch fossil fuel revolutions in power and light. This chapter uses business, court, and military records along with newspapers and trade journals to explore how one of these revolutions—that based on free-labor and ownership of a mineral liquid “distilled by nature free of charge”—came to triumph over the other—that based on industrial slavery and capital-intensive coal oil—and how that triumph was understood then and subsequently as an inevitable stage of “progress.” As military clashes interrupted and destroyed turpentine camps, whaleships, and southern coal mining, the reservoirs of American light shifted their center of gravity markedly northward and westward. A period of widely increased access to illuminants, it was also a time of deepening monopoly control over the means of light. This chapter explores the centrality of political economy and organized violence to any true understanding of the histories of labor, energy, and technology.

Men Is Cheap ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 11-43
Author(s):  
Brian P. Luskey

During the economic crisis of the 1850s and early 1860s that made northerners’ individual and household independence seem more precarious, men like Thomas Webster gave voice to their ideology and tried to protect their interest. In doing so, they embraced both caution and speculation not only to end slaveholders’ grip on the nation’s political economy but also to benefit from slave emancipation. Their cautious hedges proved risky, and led to profound soul-searching in political and cultural debates among northern devotees of free labor. By 1860, the financial uncertainty borne of the Panic of 1857 and the secession crisis forced Webster to look for patronage from Republican allies to access a new capital stream. It was through the work of middlemen like Webster—as much as through the efforts of abolitionists, Republican politicians, Union soldiers, and enslaved people—that slavery ended and free labor’s promise for workers was unmade during the Civil War Era. Webster represented the speculative—many said the fraudulent—impulses and activities in an economy founded on the fact that having capital meant having power. That capital would make these northerners more independent in a competitive market, and their speculations would shape the contours of war and emancipation.


2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kjell Hausken ◽  
Mthuli Ncube

We consider revolutions and civil war involving an incumbent, a challenger, and the population. Revolutions are classified into eight outcomes. In four outcomes incumbent repression occurs (viewed as providing sub-threshold benefits such as public goods to the population). Accommodation occurs in the other four outcomes (benefits provision above a threshold). The incumbent and challenger fight each other. The incumbent may win and retain power or else lose, thereby causing standoff or coalition. In a standoff, which is costly, no one backs down and uncertainty exists about who is in power. In a coalition, which is less costly, the incumbent and challenger cooperate, compromise, and negotiate their differences. If the population successfully revolts against the incumbent, the challenger replaces the incumbent. Eighty-seven revolutions during 1961–2011, including the recent Arab spring revolutions, are classified into the eight outcomes. When repressive, the incumbent loses 46 revolutions, remains in power through 21 revolutions, and builds a coalition after 12 revolutions. When accommodative, the incumbent loses seven revolutions and builds a coalition after one revolution. The 87 revolutions are classified across geographic regions and by time-period.


2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 265-291
Author(s):  
Manuel A. Vasquez ◽  
Anna L. Peterson

In this article, we explore the debates surrounding the proposed canonization of Archbishop Oscar Romero, an outspoken defender of human rights and the poor during the civil war in El Salvador, who was assassinated in March 1980 by paramilitary death squads while saying Mass. More specifically, we examine the tension between, on the one hand, local and popular understandings of Romero’s life and legacy and, on the other hand, transnational and institutional interpretations. We argue that the reluctance of the Vatican to advance Romero’s canonization process has to do with the need to domesticate and “privatize” his image. This depoliticization of Romero’s work and teachings is a part of a larger agenda of neo-Romanization, an attempt by the Holy See to redeploy a post-colonial and transnational Catholic regime in the face of the crisis of modernity and the advent of postmodern relativism. This redeployment is based on the control of local religious expressions, particularly those that advocate for a more participatory church, which have proliferated with contemporary globalization


1986 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 227-243 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew L. Christenson

Although the interest in shell middens in North America is often traced to reports of the discoveries in Danish kjoekkenmoeddings in the mid-nineteenth century, extensive shell midden studies were already occurring on the East Coast by that time. This article reviews selected examples of this early work done by geologists and naturalists, which served as a foundation for shell midden studies by archaeologists after the Civil War.


Author(s):  
Christine Cheng

During the civil war, Liberia’s forestry sector rose to prominence as Charles Taylor traded timber for arms. When the war ended, the UN’s timber sanctions remained in effect, reinforced by the Forestry Development Authority’s (FDA) domestic ban on logging. As Liberians waited for UN timber sanctions to be lifted, a burgeoning domestic timber market developed. This demand was met by artisanal loggers, more commonly referred to as pit sawyers. Out of this illicit economy emerged the Nezoun Group to provide local dispute resolution between the FDA’s tax collectors and ex-combatant pit sawyers. The Nezoun Group posed a dilemma for the government. On the one hand, the regulatory efforts of the Nezoun Group helped the FDA to tax an activity that it had banned. On the other hand, the state’s inability to contain the operations of the Nezoun Group—in open contravention of Liberian laws—highlighted the government’s capacity problems.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giuliano Cerasa ◽  
Gabriella Lo Verde

AbstractOzognathus cornutus (LeConte, 1859) (Coleoptera: Ptinidae: Ernobiinae), species native to North America, is a saproxylophagous species and is known to feed on decaying tissues within conspicuous galls and on vegetal decaying organic material such as dried fruits or small wood shavings and insect excrements in galleries made by other woodboring species. A few years after the first record in 2011, its naturalization in Italy is here reported. The insect was found as successor in galls of Psectrosema tamaricis (Diptera Cecidomyiidae), Plagiotrochus gallaeramulorum, Andricus multiplicatus and Synophrus politus (Hymenoptera Cynipidae). The galls seem to have played an important ecological role in speeding up the naturalization process. The lowest proportion of galls used by O. cornutus was recorded for P. tamaricis (23%), the only host belonging to Cecidomyiidae, while the percentages recorded for the other host species, all Cynipidae forming galls on oaks, were higher: 43.6%, 61.1% and 76.9% in A multiplicatus, S. politus and P. gallaeramulorum, respectively. Although O. cornutus is able to exploit other substrates like dried fruits and vegetables, for which it could represent a potential pest, it prefers to live as a successor in woody and conspicuous galls, which thus can represent a sort of natural barrier limiting the possible damages to other substrates.


1992 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 305-305
Author(s):  
Mahito Watabe

The late Miocene Chinese hipparions are morphologically diversified showing similarity to both western Old World's and North American forms. Two Chinese taxa that are phylogenetically related to western Old World's forms are Hipparion fossatum (= H. forstende) from Baode (Shanxi) and H. hippidiodus from Qingyang (Gansu) and Baode. The former is related to H. mediterraneum and the latter to H. urmiense - platygenys from the Turolian localities in the western Old World. H. fossatum and H. hippidiodus are associated with the “dorcadoides” (open-land) and “mixed” faunas in northern China. Hipparion fossatum that is characterized by POF located close to the orbit co-occurs with large and morphologically specialized form, H. dermatorhinum in Baode (Loc.30). H. hippidiodus with reduced POF is discovered with smaller H. coelophyes in Loc. 43, 44 (Baode) and Loc. 115 (Gansu).The hipparions associated with the “gaudryi” (forest) fauna are characterized by well defined and small POF located far from the orbit. Those forms are: H. platyodus from Loc. 70; H. ptychodus from Loc. 73; H. tylodus from Hsi-Liang in Yushe - Wuxiang basins; and H. sefvei from Loc. 12 at Xin-an in Henan province. H. coelophyes from Baode (Loc.43 & 44) and Qingyang (Loc. 115) also show similar facial morphology to the these forms, although it has small size and shallow POF. Those forms are similar in facial and dental morphology to Hipparion sensu stricto and some species of Cormohipparion in North America.The assemblages of Chinese hipparions are composed of two groups whose members are phylogenetically similar to the forms from both western part of Eurasia and North America. The “gaudryi” fauna is considered younger than the other two on the basis of faunal analyses. The similarity in hipparionine taxonomy between northern China and North America in the latest Miocene is an evidences for possible faunal interchange(s) occurred during that period, as suggested by taxonomic analyses on carnivores and proboscideans in eastern half of Eurasia and North America.


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