Children as young as 13, almost all black, are sentenced to life imprisonment for nonhomi-cide off enses.
RNI- I know that the incarceration rates for Black people is much, much higher than those for white people, but I wasn't aware that children as young as 13 were being imprisoned, much less that they were being given life sentences.
Enslaved workers felled trees by ax, burned the underbrush and lev-eled the earth for planting. ‘‘Whole forests were literally dragged out by the roots,’’ John Parker, an enslaved worker, remembered. A lush, twist-ed mass of vegetation was replaced by a single crop. An origin of Amer-ican money exerting its will on the earth, spoiling the environment for profi t, is found in the cotton plantation.
EPT & RNI - I knew previously that slaves were widely used to pick cotton fields, but I didn't know how much work they actually did to even just create those fields which they later had to pick.
In trade magazines, owners swapped advice about the minutiae of planting, including slave diets and clothing as well as the kind of tone a master should use.
RNI - I was previously unaware that there were even magazines dedicated to collaborating about how to better use slaves. Though, on second thought, today we also have chat groups and communications about how to do a task better, sometimes including supervising people working under you, so it makes sense that this was happening. However, the fact that despite the limited communication of the time, a topic that was found important enough to discuss in a magazine was how to manage slaves, is appalling.
ears after abolishing the African slave trade in 1807, Britain, and much of Europe along with it, was bankrolling slavery in the United States.
RNI - It's intriguing to me that much of Europe; while on the surface abolished slavery, in reality supported it and made money off of it in the United States. The fact that they did this isn't well known, as I certainly hadn't heard of it before despite receiving an excellent education.