Sublime

Black miner, maintained that “none of us who toil for our daily bread are free. At one time…we were chattel slaves; today we are, one and all, white and black, wage slaves.”

The first America

Regardless of how landlords came to own property—sweat, intelligence, or ingenuity for some; inheritance, luck, or fraud for others—rising rents mean more money for landlords and less for tenants. Their fates are bound and their interests opposed. If the profits of urban landlords were modest, that would be one thing. But often they are not. The an

Do you think the enslavement of 150,000,000 children is so much less than the race-based slavery of not-so-long-ago? Is the ongoing genocide of indigenous peoples so much less than the Final Solution, so much less than Manifest Destiny?

Chicken production remains a dirty business. Five companies—Tyson Foods, based in Arkansas; Pilgrim’s Pride, a multinational company that began as a feed store in Pittsburg, Texas; Perdue of Salisbury, Maryland; Sanderson Farms, the only Fortune 1000 company in Mississippi; and Koch Foods of Illinois—all with processing factories in Mississippi, to

I am forced, against all my hopes and inclinations, to regard the history of my people here as the progress of the doom of what I value most in the world: the life and health of the earth, the peacefulness of human communities and households.

original residents of Tasmania, were cast as “living fossils.” Lord Salisbury, the UK prime minister, explained in an 1898 address that “you may roughly divide the nations of the world as the living and the dying.” Indigenous peoples were, in this telling, the pre-dead, with extermination merely serving to accelerate the inevitable timeline.

He believed only two million still survived. By 1880, owing to warfare and deculturation as well as illness, Native numbers had dropped to 250,000, a decline of 98 percent.

The worst of it was on the other side of the globe, on the tiny Caribbean island of Navassa, near Haiti. Rather ominously, it was called Devil’s Island. Although Navassa didn’t have much actual guano, its coral reef was packed with deposits of tricalcium phosphate, the fossilized legacy of centuries’ worth of marine life—also a rich nutrient for ex