It might be hard to tell exactly what Bulstrode's specific political motivation is if we only read her paper in History and Technology. But it becomes clearer if you read her more explicitly activist, non-academic work where she cites her academic paper. Her goal is to further the globalist reparations movement.
Also, she is not careful at all here to avoid explicit accusations of theft.
"This year marks the 240th anniversary of arguably one of the biggest thefts in the history of intellectual property. The so-called “Cort process”, patented by the financier Henry Cort between 1783 and 1784, has been called one of the most important innovations of the British industrial revolution. Yet recently published findings show the process was first developed by 76 black metallurgists, many of them enslaved, in an 18th-century foundry in Jamaica."
This really sounds like a case of selective demands for rigor meets the academy. For socially desirable narratives, nothing short of a bulletproof N=10,000 double blind randomized RCT will do (preferably enough of them to generate an entire Cochrane review.) For narratives you do like, apparently nothing more than a plausibility argument is necessary to advance a claim as the actual truth.
History and culture are a battleground and matter quite a bit to getting folks to make different decisions and enact better policies.
West Virginia and Massachusetts are different states in the same country with different trajectories, and while things like “invest in education” and “focus on good governance” are the right answer all of the political barriers involved in changing how that population sees itself and makes decisions has everything to do with culture and history
Not saying that this Jamaican story matters, but the idea that places even in similar regions with different histories and cultures are “the same” is misguided to me and incorrect.
Last example, Bangladesh and Pakistan and India are similar places with different histories and cultures Erasing that and making it all about policy choices is just choosing to simplify things that are hard, and making where places are today a “just so” story that fails to engage with how people actually behave and make decisions
Politics, history and culture have their own slow boring of hard boards that writers like Matt can also understand and grapple with.
It always amuses me what kind of nationalist delusions are acceptable in progressive circles and what aren't. A lot of people who would sneer at Albanians claiming George Washington was Albanian will believe in this fairytale about Jamaica.
The current progressive thing is to recast all things good as being invented or thought up by Black people, or occasionally “Indigenous Knowledge”. It’s all Orwellian historical rewrite to create some sort of grand narrative for a continent that, south of Egypt, was easily conquered and primitive. There’s little contribution to world society; that’s ok, or it should be. Not inventing the wheel or not discovering electricity or heliocentrism isn’t a value judgement. Different people and places developed differently. But the need to elevate Blacks to some superior position at all times on all things requires rewriting history because the history is what it is. The Chinese figured out gun powder, not Africans. Sorry, Wakanda isn’t real.
Wokes redefine words and rewrite history because reality doesn’t line up with their obsessions. Living in the now would be a lot more productive because who gives a shit who figured out casting iron.
Since the readers here are primarily left oriented, they seem to not see the obvious. The Jamaican metallurgists story is Jussie Smollett packaged differently. Isn't it obvious that she had a political perspective that anything ever invented by white dudes was probably stolen from people of color? Stating this without any evidence was just a shallow attempt to ingratiate herself to other left oriented people who would think that even questioning whether it was true would be racist. Of course it is not racist to question whether it is true, but academia has gotten off the rails with identity politics that you just can't question such a thing. I am hopeful that we will make a swing to normalcy, but I fear that Matt makes a point that this brouhaha is not important because Cort was not important. But this is a story because it shows academia creating racism where it didn't exist. It doesn't matter that Cort wasn't important.
I have always been of the opinion that there is enough racism in the world that you shouldn't have to make it up. I think it has driven a lot of center minded people to the right when they see people fabricating stories of racism.
Using “enslaved people” on the first reference and “slaves” on subsequent references, could be an earnest attempt to humanize slaves. However, to forbid the use of the monosyllable stifles discourse and provokes needless friction.
Should we say "working people" instead of "workers"? "People of wealth?"
Semi serious question because it seems to be that you have inadvertantly created a universal law that applies to any descriptor of person, and thus doesn't differentiate at all. It asks the question "what is an exotic category? Aren't all people ordinary?".
Slavery is a very unusual and maybe unique category - especially racialized, chattel slavery, which is justified by denying the full humanity of the people in bondage. Not capable of self-govt, self-management - some even say they were done a favor by being brought here. Also, “slaves” are objects of pity and without agency. Reducing a person to that status is painful and potentially denigrating in a way that isn’t like other labels.
Sure, there can be negative connotations for other labels, and all labels are at least a little flattening. But there are at least some positive connotations for “worker” or “working class”, and I’d say “rich” is very often used as a positive - something the speaker envies or wishes to be.
A lot of that does not apply to slavery as practiced in other cultures, including indigenous American cultures. And it strikes me that you and I *would* pity a slave, and that slavery is of course a condition which removes agency. How does saying 'enslaved person' change any of that, especially since, in the context you highlight, it happened generations ago?
Should we say 'impoverished person'? Being poor doesn't seem to have any positive connotations, it is a state of reduced agency, people often pity the poor.
Well, we often do say “working people,” rather than workers, and we do it because it’s more humanizing! You probably don’t object to the term “wealthy people” which is the same construction as “enslaved people.”
But I would never say "the working people at the site need to get their PPE checked". I would use workers.
Wealthy people is not the same construction as enslaved people because one is a construction with a verb in the simple past tense (enslaved, 'it was done') and 'wealthy people' is a construction with an adjective in the present continuous tense. The comparison would be 'people of wealth' or 'enriched people', neither of which, in sure you will admit, anyone will ever use unironically today.
I think you’re splitting hairs on the grammatical differences between “wealthy people” and “enslaved people.” Nor would I say that the terms “workers” or “slaves” should never be used. It depends on context.
All I am saying is that for me, “enslaved people” has a noticeably different connotation than “slaves.” I noted above that it doesn’t appear that everyone notices it. If you don’t feel they are meaningfully different, then use the one you prefer.
I don't think it's a big deal, and its common justification is on the lines you suggest. But I think it's bad as a historical term. First, it is not the historical term used at the time. We don't have to always stick to the documented terminology but if we deviate from it better be for improved heuristics. Here however the opposite seems to be the case. The new term obscures more than it reveals. E.g. it blurs the distinction between the genuine action of someone literally being enslaved (status shift of free->slave) and someone who is in the social and legal status of a slave (e.g. possibly from birth). It essentially argues that slavery is a condition that is based on constant repression, which is correct in some basic sense, but over simplifies to the extent that it suggest that the slave is "enslaved" by its enslaver (aka owner, master) rather than by a whole social system, as is often the case.
So we have a similar problem to if you start calling all the poor "impoverished" but it's actually worse since at least poor isn't an official legal status in our society.
I can only say for myself that I felt a subtle and powerful shift in perception when I considered the two terms. It doesn’t seem like that happens for everyone, and I’m familiar with the euphemistic treadmill.
Like when I hear “concubines,” my connotation is this separate category of exotic, sexy Arabians, somehow fundamentally different from woman like myself. I’m not sure I would ever have made the cut into a harem, and I don’t know that I’d call them “people born female experiencing sexual servitude,” but for me, it does create a layer of removal.
I wouldn't pay extra for it, but I am fully of the view that the term "enslaved people" is euphemistic and typically contributes nothing to actually better understanding the subject matter being discussed.
Reading “enslaved people” is annoying. What is utterly unacceptable is people shutting down because I use the more eloquent and venerable monosyllable: “slaves.”
I'm late to today's Discourse, and so much Discourse has already been discoursed that I don't know where to jump in. SO, I'll just share a few thoughts from the perspective of someone working in higher ed. For the the record, I am not an academician; I am, in the parlance of some institutions of higher learning, a "faculty-equivalent academic professional."
1) Higher ed is a business; if you want to "fix" it (to the extent it CAN be fixed), get rid of the creature comforts and emphasis on athletics -- the students who want to learn will still pay to attend, and the students who have been told by their high school guidance counselors that college is simply "what's next" won't find the experience fun enough to take out loans for. Yeah, some schools will lose money and close. SO sad.
2) If you're a baby academician, the sweet spot is to become JUST controversial enough that The Groups circle the wagons to protect you -- not because they agree with whatever claim you made in whatever paper, but because if you get taken out, they are now more exposed to criticism down the line. If you survive, there will always be a search committee out there that takes the perspective of "It's so terrible, what they tried to do to you, those horrible people."
3) I have a liberal arts background, and I constantly talk to students about the value of a liberal arts education in teaching a person "how to THINK" instead of "HOW to think." That said, I'm not going to s**t on STEM fields or business or education or HVAC repair or plumbing or anything else. Society needs all types to function. Higher ed has WAY too much navel-gazing and simultaneous preening. Even Einstein put his pants on the same way as the rest of us. The funny thing is he was probably more acutely aware of that than most of today's professoriate.
4) This one is just my gut feeling based on subjective experience, but the acute desire of most PhDs is NOT to win a Nobel, but to become an administrator. Not a department chair (because that is a stressful job that SUCKS) but a Dean, Provost, President. Being "right" in your publications doesn't matter as much then, because the people who hire deans, provosts, and presidents are very much NOT impartial academicians putting the advancement of knowledge first. Oh, they care about "advancement," just not the type you think.
"Even Einstein put his pants on the same way as the rest of us."
Big if true. :) Just last night I was watching Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and there is a dialog where someone says, "Einstein was probably one of them," them being aliens.
It feels like Matt is being deliberately disingenuous here. This seems like an obvious attempt to bolster the case for massive reparations, both in our own country, and to colonized countries in general.
Did you actually read this post? Matt doesn't say anything of the sort. In fact, he basically says the opposite: "You solve present problems in the present."
He also said people are lying here for no ideological/political purpose. I think the ideological/political purpose is obvious to everyone, including him.
I feel like an under-explored avenue in American historical mythmaking is blaming the slavery on our oldest enemy: the British*. Like, "this is a land and a people created for freedom, saddled by their forbearers with terrible legacies to overcome, but in the end the spirit of America proves out" etc. etc. It's not like there was an American Congress kicking around in 1619 authorizing things.
It's awkward that the British Isles did abolition before us, but to be fair their mainland economy was a lot less entangled in the work slaves actually did. And it's maybe less awkward that competing myths?
* With love, mates. Our oldest enemy but also today our closest friend; this truly is a land of contradictions innit?
Britain and Germany are really like family to America, and that's why we make fun of them and get into fist fights at holidays with them, but ultimately feel pretty good about them.
Canada is like a cousins long-time girlfriend. She's always around, but it's kinda awkward. Mexico is the cool neighbor who lets himself in and helps himself to a beer without having to ask.
As an educator, I can attest this type of thing is coin of the realm now in public schools.
It is in the culture as a whole too. There are videos made by Buzzfeed and other groups telling people that everything they have in life was invented by Black people.
There are of course debunking videos because these claims are often outright made up or absurd, but the debunking video gets a tiny fraction of the views the original videos get.
The idea why such flimsy and sometimes comically inept claims get traction is because generals are often fighting the last war as it were. The idea is that we have to lie and make stuff up to increase black self esteem to become better students.
The truth is we won that battle long ago. The National Institute for Health has good data that the highest demographic for self-esteem are African Americans and the lowest is Asian Americans. This is the inverse of their academic performance.
I really noticed this in an intro to sociology course I took last year - all of the course material addresses "culture" as though it's still 1950, and pretends like the students have been watching Leave it to Beaver. The exception being the occasional curated "modern and hip" thing about BLM or a celebrity with a novel gender identity. It seems like a lot of education assumes their target audience is like 30-60 years older than they actually are.
Is anyone else as bothered as I am by the incorrect setting of Cort's name between commas in the abstract? It would make me a little skeptical of the author and publication from the jump.
Late to the party. Reading the headline i was like “oh boy this will be depressing”. Surprisingly it mostly wasn’t. With one exception this is business as usual. Academics are supposed to find something *original* and *signficant* to say. They are allowed, and expected, to take the argument as far as the evidence can reasonably allow. The abstract - at least- doesn’t sugges that author did any different ! Moreover, in a professional journal aimed at peers I see no reason anyone reading the abstract would be misled to conclude what the journalists did!
But the journalists *also* did their job which is to sell papers (or in this day and age- generate clicks). They misunderstood the abstract, but only in the hyperbolic way media has *always* done.
The only bad thing I see in all this is the journal editors response. It’s a bit of mambo Jambo but the bottom line is that to historians like me it discredits their journal. Tit he general public- I fear- it discredits the profession. The latter is bad.
“Academics are supposed to find something original and significant to say...”
Yes, but certainly subject to the constraint of not making things up, as this article did. Otherwise, the public has no way of knowing what each result means, and at the very best has to wait for other specialists who can vet the claims. And then what happens if the specialists, too, are driven by the same imperative of finding something “interesting” to say, whether or not it’s supported?
This was an interesting piece. I particularly liked Matt's restraint and specificity: this kind of thing invites overbroad generalizations and hobby horses. Matt does a good job of asking questions that he has time to address within the space of this essay.
One trivial detail that jumped out at me was the mention of naval paymaster Adam Jellicoe. The only other time I've ever heard that last name was in reading about World War I. Admiral John Jellicoe was First Sea Lord then -- I recall a lot of infighting and controversies involving him and Winston Churchill. I didn't think it could be a coincidence. A little digging turns up (I think) that the latter Jellicoe was a great-grandson of the 18th-century one.
The name is so unique and particularly associated with naval service that I've always presumed the Star Trek character was a deliberate nod to the World War I admiral. (John Jellicoe was the commander of the British Fleet at the Battle of Jutland, which is probably the most famous naval battle of WWI and in the top 10 of most famous naval battles of all time.)
Dysphemistic posted this link to the NPR story and it's an interesting listen. The reporters repeatedly use the word "stole" to describe what happened, and Bulstrode agrees with it. So while the abstract may have been more oblique, the researcher is definitely not shying away from the media's portrayal of the findings. Just for what it's worth:
All the academic debates aside (which I recognize are the interesting debates), I’m puzzled by this passage: “ But there’s no railroad without a lot of rails, and that doesn’t happen without a lot of iron. And, apparently, iron at large scale isn’t possible if you need to rely on charcoal to turn pig iron into cast iron.”
If I’m following the logic right it implies that rails are cast iron. But I think that cast iron rails would be terrible. They would be extremely hard to cast in any great lengths and would then need to be finished to an appropriate surface quality. My understanding is that rails started at small scale with wood and went to wrought iron. Wrought iron could be made and shaped in the form required, but is too soft to be useful for great weights and over long time periods (wear being the issue). From wrought iron, the move was made to steel.
Was cast iron used for rails, or is there some other description of what’s going on?
You are correct. Yglesias has made a typo here and should have written "pig iron into wrought iron" or perhaps "bar iron", not cast iron. Pig iron is cast iron!
I should have just looked it up before posting. Puddling is the process of making wrought iron from pig (cast) iron. Pig iron is the unprocessed cast iron that comes from the original bloom where you smelt it out of ore. You are left with big ingots that can be used to remelt and recast as cast iron or further process into wrought iron or steel. At this point, steel was pretty difficult to make in quantity if I remember correctly (maybe I should just look it up again?). The issue is that wrought iron has essentially zero carbon, cast iron has a lot, and steel has a little bit. So you either need to burn off the right amount of carbon, or get rid of it all by some other process and add it back in.
If you look at old axes and such, you will see wrought iron bodies with relatively small steel bits welded in. This was because steel was expensive and wrought iron relatively less so.
Anyway, I don’t think it’s a typo as such. It’s likely more of a case of ignorance of the difference for people who aren’t interested in these specific details. I’m a (very) amateur blacksmith, so I’ve had reason to look into this stuff and learn a bit about the history and process. But to most people iron, steel, cast, alloy, and other things are pretty interchangeable.
Bringing it around to the rails, cast iron would be terrible for them. Hard to cast, requiring a lot of finish machining, and most importantly, brittle and not durable. Wrought iron rails would work much better and indeed did. However, they are soft and wear quickly. Their use provided much more weight carrying capacity than wood, but not enough for large scale industrial/commercial purposes. Steel rails resolve this issue and would wait for the next round of innovation.
My understanding is that pig iron is iron directly from a furnace, before it is either cast or rolled. That being said, I think the error remains, that rolled or wrought iron was used for rails, and not cast iron.
My understanding is that pig iron is a kind cast iron, as it’s cast into sand moulds, though of course not all cast iron is pig iron as it undergoes further steps to be usable.
It might be hard to tell exactly what Bulstrode's specific political motivation is if we only read her paper in History and Technology. But it becomes clearer if you read her more explicitly activist, non-academic work where she cites her academic paper. Her goal is to further the globalist reparations movement.
Also, she is not careful at all here to avoid explicit accusations of theft.
"This year marks the 240th anniversary of arguably one of the biggest thefts in the history of intellectual property. The so-called “Cort process”, patented by the financier Henry Cort between 1783 and 1784, has been called one of the most important innovations of the British industrial revolution. Yet recently published findings show the process was first developed by 76 black metallurgists, many of them enslaved, in an 18th-century foundry in Jamaica."
https://theconversation.com/slavery-stole-africans-ideas-as-well-as-their-bodies-reparations-should-reflect-this-212128
This really sounds like a case of selective demands for rigor meets the academy. For socially desirable narratives, nothing short of a bulletproof N=10,000 double blind randomized RCT will do (preferably enough of them to generate an entire Cochrane review.) For narratives you do like, apparently nothing more than a plausibility argument is necessary to advance a claim as the actual truth.
History and culture are a battleground and matter quite a bit to getting folks to make different decisions and enact better policies.
West Virginia and Massachusetts are different states in the same country with different trajectories, and while things like “invest in education” and “focus on good governance” are the right answer all of the political barriers involved in changing how that population sees itself and makes decisions has everything to do with culture and history
Not saying that this Jamaican story matters, but the idea that places even in similar regions with different histories and cultures are “the same” is misguided to me and incorrect.
Last example, Bangladesh and Pakistan and India are similar places with different histories and cultures Erasing that and making it all about policy choices is just choosing to simplify things that are hard, and making where places are today a “just so” story that fails to engage with how people actually behave and make decisions
Politics, history and culture have their own slow boring of hard boards that writers like Matt can also understand and grapple with.
It always amuses me what kind of nationalist delusions are acceptable in progressive circles and what aren't. A lot of people who would sneer at Albanians claiming George Washington was Albanian will believe in this fairytale about Jamaica.
The current progressive thing is to recast all things good as being invented or thought up by Black people, or occasionally “Indigenous Knowledge”. It’s all Orwellian historical rewrite to create some sort of grand narrative for a continent that, south of Egypt, was easily conquered and primitive. There’s little contribution to world society; that’s ok, or it should be. Not inventing the wheel or not discovering electricity or heliocentrism isn’t a value judgement. Different people and places developed differently. But the need to elevate Blacks to some superior position at all times on all things requires rewriting history because the history is what it is. The Chinese figured out gun powder, not Africans. Sorry, Wakanda isn’t real.
Wokes redefine words and rewrite history because reality doesn’t line up with their obsessions. Living in the now would be a lot more productive because who gives a shit who figured out casting iron.
Since the readers here are primarily left oriented, they seem to not see the obvious. The Jamaican metallurgists story is Jussie Smollett packaged differently. Isn't it obvious that she had a political perspective that anything ever invented by white dudes was probably stolen from people of color? Stating this without any evidence was just a shallow attempt to ingratiate herself to other left oriented people who would think that even questioning whether it was true would be racist. Of course it is not racist to question whether it is true, but academia has gotten off the rails with identity politics that you just can't question such a thing. I am hopeful that we will make a swing to normalcy, but I fear that Matt makes a point that this brouhaha is not important because Cort was not important. But this is a story because it shows academia creating racism where it didn't exist. It doesn't matter that Cort wasn't important.
I have always been of the opinion that there is enough racism in the world that you shouldn't have to make it up. I think it has driven a lot of center minded people to the right when they see people fabricating stories of racism.
I would pay extra for a version that said “slaves” rather than “enslaved people.” The extra syllables add nothing but hand wringing.
I genuinely feel it’s helpful. “Enslaved people” is a reminder that slaves were, well, ordinary people, like us, rather than an exotic category.
Using “enslaved people” on the first reference and “slaves” on subsequent references, could be an earnest attempt to humanize slaves. However, to forbid the use of the monosyllable stifles discourse and provokes needless friction.
Should we say "working people" instead of "workers"? "People of wealth?"
Semi serious question because it seems to be that you have inadvertantly created a universal law that applies to any descriptor of person, and thus doesn't differentiate at all. It asks the question "what is an exotic category? Aren't all people ordinary?".
Slavery is a very unusual and maybe unique category - especially racialized, chattel slavery, which is justified by denying the full humanity of the people in bondage. Not capable of self-govt, self-management - some even say they were done a favor by being brought here. Also, “slaves” are objects of pity and without agency. Reducing a person to that status is painful and potentially denigrating in a way that isn’t like other labels.
Sure, there can be negative connotations for other labels, and all labels are at least a little flattening. But there are at least some positive connotations for “worker” or “working class”, and I’d say “rich” is very often used as a positive - something the speaker envies or wishes to be.
A lot of that does not apply to slavery as practiced in other cultures, including indigenous American cultures. And it strikes me that you and I *would* pity a slave, and that slavery is of course a condition which removes agency. How does saying 'enslaved person' change any of that, especially since, in the context you highlight, it happened generations ago?
Should we say 'impoverished person'? Being poor doesn't seem to have any positive connotations, it is a state of reduced agency, people often pity the poor.
Well, we often do say “working people,” rather than workers, and we do it because it’s more humanizing! You probably don’t object to the term “wealthy people” which is the same construction as “enslaved people.”
But I would never say "the working people at the site need to get their PPE checked". I would use workers.
Wealthy people is not the same construction as enslaved people because one is a construction with a verb in the simple past tense (enslaved, 'it was done') and 'wealthy people' is a construction with an adjective in the present continuous tense. The comparison would be 'people of wealth' or 'enriched people', neither of which, in sure you will admit, anyone will ever use unironically today.
I think you’re splitting hairs on the grammatical differences between “wealthy people” and “enslaved people.” Nor would I say that the terms “workers” or “slaves” should never be used. It depends on context.
All I am saying is that for me, “enslaved people” has a noticeably different connotation than “slaves.” I noted above that it doesn’t appear that everyone notices it. If you don’t feel they are meaningfully different, then use the one you prefer.
Of course we're splitting hairs, the whole issue about using 'person based' language is an exercise in hair splitting!
I don't think it's a big deal, and its common justification is on the lines you suggest. But I think it's bad as a historical term. First, it is not the historical term used at the time. We don't have to always stick to the documented terminology but if we deviate from it better be for improved heuristics. Here however the opposite seems to be the case. The new term obscures more than it reveals. E.g. it blurs the distinction between the genuine action of someone literally being enslaved (status shift of free->slave) and someone who is in the social and legal status of a slave (e.g. possibly from birth). It essentially argues that slavery is a condition that is based on constant repression, which is correct in some basic sense, but over simplifies to the extent that it suggest that the slave is "enslaved" by its enslaver (aka owner, master) rather than by a whole social system, as is often the case.
So we have a similar problem to if you start calling all the poor "impoverished" but it's actually worse since at least poor isn't an official legal status in our society.
I can only say for myself that I felt a subtle and powerful shift in perception when I considered the two terms. It doesn’t seem like that happens for everyone, and I’m familiar with the euphemistic treadmill.
Like when I hear “concubines,” my connotation is this separate category of exotic, sexy Arabians, somehow fundamentally different from woman like myself. I’m not sure I would ever have made the cut into a harem, and I don’t know that I’d call them “people born female experiencing sexual servitude,” but for me, it does create a layer of removal.
I see the point and in my teaching I try to use "enslaved" and "slave" interchangeably for that reason.
I wouldn't pay extra for it, but I am fully of the view that the term "enslaved people" is euphemistic and typically contributes nothing to actually better understanding the subject matter being discussed.
Reading “enslaved people” is annoying. What is utterly unacceptable is people shutting down because I use the more eloquent and venerable monosyllable: “slaves.”
I'm late to today's Discourse, and so much Discourse has already been discoursed that I don't know where to jump in. SO, I'll just share a few thoughts from the perspective of someone working in higher ed. For the the record, I am not an academician; I am, in the parlance of some institutions of higher learning, a "faculty-equivalent academic professional."
1) Higher ed is a business; if you want to "fix" it (to the extent it CAN be fixed), get rid of the creature comforts and emphasis on athletics -- the students who want to learn will still pay to attend, and the students who have been told by their high school guidance counselors that college is simply "what's next" won't find the experience fun enough to take out loans for. Yeah, some schools will lose money and close. SO sad.
2) If you're a baby academician, the sweet spot is to become JUST controversial enough that The Groups circle the wagons to protect you -- not because they agree with whatever claim you made in whatever paper, but because if you get taken out, they are now more exposed to criticism down the line. If you survive, there will always be a search committee out there that takes the perspective of "It's so terrible, what they tried to do to you, those horrible people."
3) I have a liberal arts background, and I constantly talk to students about the value of a liberal arts education in teaching a person "how to THINK" instead of "HOW to think." That said, I'm not going to s**t on STEM fields or business or education or HVAC repair or plumbing or anything else. Society needs all types to function. Higher ed has WAY too much navel-gazing and simultaneous preening. Even Einstein put his pants on the same way as the rest of us. The funny thing is he was probably more acutely aware of that than most of today's professoriate.
4) This one is just my gut feeling based on subjective experience, but the acute desire of most PhDs is NOT to win a Nobel, but to become an administrator. Not a department chair (because that is a stressful job that SUCKS) but a Dean, Provost, President. Being "right" in your publications doesn't matter as much then, because the people who hire deans, provosts, and presidents are very much NOT impartial academicians putting the advancement of knowledge first. Oh, they care about "advancement," just not the type you think.
"Even Einstein put his pants on the same way as the rest of us."
Big if true. :) Just last night I was watching Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and there is a dialog where someone says, "Einstein was probably one of them," them being aliens.
It feels like Matt is being deliberately disingenuous here. This seems like an obvious attempt to bolster the case for massive reparations, both in our own country, and to colonized countries in general.
How so?
By saying that disaparate outcomes ultimately stem from theft, and that it is impossible to fix those outcomes without first rectifying the theft.
Did you actually read this post? Matt doesn't say anything of the sort. In fact, he basically says the opposite: "You solve present problems in the present."
He also said people are lying here for no ideological/political purpose. I think the ideological/political purpose is obvious to everyone, including him.
I feel like an under-explored avenue in American historical mythmaking is blaming the slavery on our oldest enemy: the British*. Like, "this is a land and a people created for freedom, saddled by their forbearers with terrible legacies to overcome, but in the end the spirit of America proves out" etc. etc. It's not like there was an American Congress kicking around in 1619 authorizing things.
It's awkward that the British Isles did abolition before us, but to be fair their mainland economy was a lot less entangled in the work slaves actually did. And it's maybe less awkward that competing myths?
* With love, mates. Our oldest enemy but also today our closest friend; this truly is a land of contradictions innit?
Britain and Germany are really like family to America, and that's why we make fun of them and get into fist fights at holidays with them, but ultimately feel pretty good about them.
Canada is like a cousins long-time girlfriend. She's always around, but it's kinda awkward. Mexico is the cool neighbor who lets himself in and helps himself to a beer without having to ask.
(Sigh)
This is an uncomfortable area.
As an educator, I can attest this type of thing is coin of the realm now in public schools.
It is in the culture as a whole too. There are videos made by Buzzfeed and other groups telling people that everything they have in life was invented by Black people.
There are of course debunking videos because these claims are often outright made up or absurd, but the debunking video gets a tiny fraction of the views the original videos get.
The idea why such flimsy and sometimes comically inept claims get traction is because generals are often fighting the last war as it were. The idea is that we have to lie and make stuff up to increase black self esteem to become better students.
The truth is we won that battle long ago. The National Institute for Health has good data that the highest demographic for self-esteem are African Americans and the lowest is Asian Americans. This is the inverse of their academic performance.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3263756/
The thing we could use in this country is a little humility by everyone. We could start by stopping blowing smoke up people's behinds.
I really noticed this in an intro to sociology course I took last year - all of the course material addresses "culture" as though it's still 1950, and pretends like the students have been watching Leave it to Beaver. The exception being the occasional curated "modern and hip" thing about BLM or a celebrity with a novel gender identity. It seems like a lot of education assumes their target audience is like 30-60 years older than they actually are.
Is anyone else as bothered as I am by the incorrect setting of Cort's name between commas in the abstract? It would make me a little skeptical of the author and publication from the jump.
Late to the party. Reading the headline i was like “oh boy this will be depressing”. Surprisingly it mostly wasn’t. With one exception this is business as usual. Academics are supposed to find something *original* and *signficant* to say. They are allowed, and expected, to take the argument as far as the evidence can reasonably allow. The abstract - at least- doesn’t sugges that author did any different ! Moreover, in a professional journal aimed at peers I see no reason anyone reading the abstract would be misled to conclude what the journalists did!
But the journalists *also* did their job which is to sell papers (or in this day and age- generate clicks). They misunderstood the abstract, but only in the hyperbolic way media has *always* done.
The only bad thing I see in all this is the journal editors response. It’s a bit of mambo Jambo but the bottom line is that to historians like me it discredits their journal. Tit he general public- I fear- it discredits the profession. The latter is bad.
P.S.
Or in short, this: https://phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1174
“Academics are supposed to find something original and significant to say...”
Yes, but certainly subject to the constraint of not making things up, as this article did. Otherwise, the public has no way of knowing what each result means, and at the very best has to wait for other specialists who can vet the claims. And then what happens if the specialists, too, are driven by the same imperative of finding something “interesting” to say, whether or not it’s supported?
This was an interesting piece. I particularly liked Matt's restraint and specificity: this kind of thing invites overbroad generalizations and hobby horses. Matt does a good job of asking questions that he has time to address within the space of this essay.
One trivial detail that jumped out at me was the mention of naval paymaster Adam Jellicoe. The only other time I've ever heard that last name was in reading about World War I. Admiral John Jellicoe was First Sea Lord then -- I recall a lot of infighting and controversies involving him and Winston Churchill. I didn't think it could be a coincidence. A little digging turns up (I think) that the latter Jellicoe was a great-grandson of the 18th-century one.
The name also rang a bell for me, but as a Captain in the Federation in Star Trek (and with the e dropped in the intervening 350-400 years):
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Edward_Jellico
Wonder if Star Trek captain is a reference. Anybody know how the Sea Lord felt about four shift rotation?
The name is so unique and particularly associated with naval service that I've always presumed the Star Trek character was a deliberate nod to the World War I admiral. (John Jellicoe was the commander of the British Fleet at the Battle of Jutland, which is probably the most famous naval battle of WWI and in the top 10 of most famous naval battles of all time.)
I immediately noted the name as well.
Dysphemistic posted this link to the NPR story and it's an interesting listen. The reporters repeatedly use the word "stole" to describe what happened, and Bulstrode agrees with it. So while the abstract may have been more oblique, the researcher is definitely not shying away from the media's portrayal of the findings. Just for what it's worth:
https://www.npr.org/2023/08/03/1191989712/henry-cort-stole-his-iron-innovation-from-black-metallurgists-in-jamaica
I agree with Matt that it's a bit sad because it overshadows what is an actually interesting story about the history of metallurgy in Jamaica.
Yep. And she does the same thing here, claiming it is "arguably one of the biggest thefts in the history of intellectual property" before citing her own paper. https://theconversation.com/slavery-stole-africans-ideas-as-well-as-their-bodies-reparations-should-reflect-this-212128
All the academic debates aside (which I recognize are the interesting debates), I’m puzzled by this passage: “ But there’s no railroad without a lot of rails, and that doesn’t happen without a lot of iron. And, apparently, iron at large scale isn’t possible if you need to rely on charcoal to turn pig iron into cast iron.”
If I’m following the logic right it implies that rails are cast iron. But I think that cast iron rails would be terrible. They would be extremely hard to cast in any great lengths and would then need to be finished to an appropriate surface quality. My understanding is that rails started at small scale with wood and went to wrought iron. Wrought iron could be made and shaped in the form required, but is too soft to be useful for great weights and over long time periods (wear being the issue). From wrought iron, the move was made to steel.
Was cast iron used for rails, or is there some other description of what’s going on?
You are correct. Yglesias has made a typo here and should have written "pig iron into wrought iron" or perhaps "bar iron", not cast iron. Pig iron is cast iron!
I should have just looked it up before posting. Puddling is the process of making wrought iron from pig (cast) iron. Pig iron is the unprocessed cast iron that comes from the original bloom where you smelt it out of ore. You are left with big ingots that can be used to remelt and recast as cast iron or further process into wrought iron or steel. At this point, steel was pretty difficult to make in quantity if I remember correctly (maybe I should just look it up again?). The issue is that wrought iron has essentially zero carbon, cast iron has a lot, and steel has a little bit. So you either need to burn off the right amount of carbon, or get rid of it all by some other process and add it back in.
If you look at old axes and such, you will see wrought iron bodies with relatively small steel bits welded in. This was because steel was expensive and wrought iron relatively less so.
Anyway, I don’t think it’s a typo as such. It’s likely more of a case of ignorance of the difference for people who aren’t interested in these specific details. I’m a (very) amateur blacksmith, so I’ve had reason to look into this stuff and learn a bit about the history and process. But to most people iron, steel, cast, alloy, and other things are pretty interchangeable.
Bringing it around to the rails, cast iron would be terrible for them. Hard to cast, requiring a lot of finish machining, and most importantly, brittle and not durable. Wrought iron rails would work much better and indeed did. However, they are soft and wear quickly. Their use provided much more weight carrying capacity than wood, but not enough for large scale industrial/commercial purposes. Steel rails resolve this issue and would wait for the next round of innovation.
My understanding is that pig iron is iron directly from a furnace, before it is either cast or rolled. That being said, I think the error remains, that rolled or wrought iron was used for rails, and not cast iron.
My understanding is that pig iron is a kind cast iron, as it’s cast into sand moulds, though of course not all cast iron is pig iron as it undergoes further steps to be usable.