Sublime

get out of my door,” Bessie Smith lamented in “Backwater Blues.” In response to the “great flood,” Congress in effect nationalized flood control along the Mississippi and entrusted the work to the Army Corps of Engineers. Joseph Ransdell, Louisiana’s senior U.S. senator at the time, called the Flood Control Act of 1928 the most important piece of w

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All told they spent nearly two years in Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru. From Bogotá they went over the Andes on foot, picking the more difficult of two possible routes. They were in the Andes, crossing and recrossing, from September 1801 until October 1802, and they must have made a picturesque caravan, with their guides and mules and scientific instr

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In the Americas, the human cost of Europe’s maritime imperialism was largely borne by the indigenous Amerindians and imported slaves. Overland expansion in the Old World faced tougher resistance and a harsher environment. So here the price of the Occidental breakout was a domestic regime of deepening social and political oppression, whose effects w

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Moreover, Civic Biology was a monstrously racist text, which ranked humanity in five categories of evolutionary development (with blacks at the bottom and whites at the top), advocated eugenic cleansing of the race, denounced intermarriage and the perpetuation of ‘degenerate’ stock and suggested ‘humane’ steps for the elimination of social ‘parasit

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Convinced by Progressives, the spiritual heirs of the People’s Party, that the first bill was not sufficient, Roosevelt sent up another. “I ask the Congress for specific legislation relating to the mortgage and other forms of indebtedness of the farmers of the nation,” he said. The proposed legislation was revolutionary in concept; it would use fed

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