"Two years ago, Richmond, Va., installed 17 markers delineating a slave trail, running past the sites of slave markets and a slave jail."

"A national slavery museum is being planned, said Delores McQuinn, a state legislator, who has led the slave trail project. Charleston, S.C., has moved away from its traditionally genteel approach to antebellum history to one that acknowledges the central role of slavery in the city’s development. An International African-American Museum is planned there as well and is seen as good business."

"Tourism audiences are changing," said Mary Battle, a public historian with the Avery Research Center for African-American History and Culture at the College of Charleston.

Imagine consistent outrage over the use of slavery as a metaphor (disaggregating it from any lust to get Sarah Palin).

"It’s deplorable for people to work wages, slave wages, in the 21st century evolutionary country." That's a quote highlighted in this local CBS report, which is currently highlighted at the top of Drudge with the simple teaser "Slave wages."

Now, we were just talking about all the trouble Martin Bashir encountered after he went super-dramatic about how despicable it was for Sarah Palin to have used slavery as a metaphor, and I said:

Bashir — if he was ever worth having his own show — should be able to say very clearly that he intended to express the depth of the horror of slavery and therefore why it should never be used as a metaphor. Now, of course, he'd be open to the criticism that he only chose to go where he did because his target was Sarah Palin, but he could confess to that, say that was wrong, and dedicate himself to permanent across-the-board opposition to slavery as a metaphor.

So... imagine going Bashir over the use of the term "slave wages." Remember, all Sarah Palin did was use slavery as a metaphor, and she was grilled by Jake Tapper on CNN — here's the transcript — in what to me looks like an effort to make her say something off (as if Tapper wanted to be the new Katie Couric, ruining Sarah Palin all over again).

TAPPER: So, you obviously feel very passionate about the national debt. The other day, you gave a speech in which you compared it to slavery.

PALIN: To slavery. Yes. And that's not a racist thing to do, by the way, which I know somebody is going to claim it is.

TAPPER: Don't you ever fear that by using hyperbole like that -- obviously, you don't literally mean it's like slavery, which cost millions of people their lives and there was rape and torture. You're using it as a metaphor. But don't you ever worry that by using that kind of language, you -- you risk obscuring the point you're trying to make?

PALIN: There is another definition of slavery and that is being beholden to some kind of master that is not of your choosing. And, yes, the national debt will be like slavery when the note comes due.

More at the link. You see what Tapper is doing, playing the old game of Screwing with Sarah. And Bashir just came tripping after Tapper. He can get in there too. They want to tap her and bash her. Rape metaphor intended, because I'm trying to highlight the political use of metaphor and responsive arguments that this metaphor is not allowed. Bashir said:

Given her well-established reputation as a world class idiot, it’s hardly surprising that [Palin] should choose to mention slavery in a way that is abominable to anyone who knows anything about its barbaric history. So here’s an example. One of the most comprehensive first-person accounts of slavery comes from the personal diary of a man called Thomas Thistlewood, who kept copious notes for 39 years. Thistlewood was the son of a tenant farmer, who arrived on the island of Jamaica in April 1750, and assumed the position of overseer at a major plantation.

What is most shocking about Thistlewood’s diary is not simply the fact that he assumes the right to own and possess other human beings, but is the sheer cruelty and brutality of his regime. In 1756, he records that a slave named Darby ‘catched eating kanes; had him well flogged and pickled, then made Hector, another slave, s-h-i-t in his mouth.’ This became known as ‘Darby’s Dose,’ a punishment invented by Thistlewood that spoke only of inhumanity.

And he mentions a similar incident in 1756, his time in relation to a man he refers to as Punch. ‘Flogged Punch well, and then washed and rubbed salt pickle, lime juice and bird pepper. Made Negro Joe piss in his eyes and mouth.' I could go on, but you get the point....

When Mrs. Palin invokes slavery, she doesn’t just prove her rank ignorance. She confirms if anyone truly qualified for a dose of discipline from Thomas Thistlewood, she would be the outstanding candidate.

I'm asking you to imagine consistency about the use of metaphor, disaggregating it from the lust to get Sarah Palin or somebody else you think is asking for it. Imagine doing the Bashir routine when anyone talks about "slave wages" or being a "wage slave." That's what Bashir would have needed to do to prove his good faith in his outrage over the cheap deployment of the idea of slavery. It's not something you can realistically imagine, and that's why we know it was Bashir, even more than Sarah Palin, who carelessly appropriated the suffering of others to make a political point.

Bonus: Imagine what Bashir — in a quest for consistency — would have to say to Bryan Ferry:



By the way, Bashir's Thistlewood story was about torture, and torture can occur in many contexts other than slavery. True consistency would require him to rage against the use of torture as a metaphor. He ought to lose his cool whenever he sees, say, a headline like "Homework torture for some gifted students."

Be consistent and principled about metaphor or eat shit and die.

Bashir resigns.

He'd apologized, but "upon further reflection," he resigns from MSNBC.

ADDED: I think this is all such nonsense (including the ousting of Alec Baldwin). They can't trust people to understand explanations. Bashir — if he was ever worth having his own show — should be able to say very clearly that he intended to express the depth of the horror of slavery and therefore why it should never be used as a metaphor. Now, of course, he'd be open to the criticism that he only chose to go where he did because his target was Sarah Palin, but he could confess to that, say that was wrong, and dedicate himself to permanent across-the-board opposition to slavery as a metaphor.

"Apple has acquired a company with access to 'the hose'..."

"... the nickname for Twitter’s stream of 500 million tweets per day."

$200 million for Topsy, which I've got to assume is named after the character in "Uncle Tom's Cabin":

A ragamuffin young slave girl. When asked if she knows who made her, she professes ignorance of both God and a mother, saying "I s'pect I growed. Don't think nobody never made me."... The phrase "growed like Topsy" (later "grew like Topsy") passed into the English language, originally with the specific meaning of unplanned growth, later sometimes just meaning enormous growth.

Is it in poor taste to name a company after a slave girl?

Or do you think the company was named after Topsy the elephant, famous for dying of electrocution, captured on film by Thomas Edison in the year 1903?

Initially, Topsy was supposed to be hanged, but other ways were considered when the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals protested. Edison then suggested electrocution with alternating current, which had been used for the execution of humans since 1890.

Topsy was fed carrots laced with 460 grams of potassium cyanide before the deadly current from a 6,600-volt AC source was sent coursing through her body, partly as a demonstration of how "unsafe" his competitor's (George Westinghouse) alternating current design was.

Is it in poor taste to name a company after an electrocuted elephant?



The hose.

Council of Croatian Community in France files suit against Bob Dylan in a Paris court, accuses him of racism.

"He was without any doubt inciting hatred against Croatians," according to the Council of Croatian Community in France. What did Bob do? In an interview with Rolling Stone, he said (as quoted at the link): "Black people can sense Klan blood, Jews can sense Nazi blood and Serbs can sense Croat blood."

What does that mean "sensing blood"? Talking in terms of blood does have a racist feeling to it. He's a poet though, so there's that tendency to use vivid metaphor. Blood is one of the great metaphors — used in 49 Dylan songs — but it's complicated, a refers to many different things. The word "sense" is vague, unlike say "smell" or "taste," and tied to "blood," it can cause too much confusion, and I don't recommend judicial relief.

Here's the Rolling Stone interview (which came out last year). Check the context and the actual verbatim quote:

Do you see any parallels between the 1860s and present-day America?

Mmm, I don't know how to put it. It's like . . . the United States burned and destroyed itself for the sake of slavery. The USA wouldn't give it up. It had to be grinded out. The whole system had to be ripped out with force. A lot of killing. What, like, 500,000 people? A lot of destruction to end slavery. And that's what it really was all about.

This country is just too fucked up about color. It's a distraction. People at each other's throats just because they are of a different color. It's the height of insanity, and it will hold any nation back – or any neighborhood back. Or any anything back. Blacks know that some whites didn't want to give up slavery – that if they had their way, they would still be under the yoke, and they can't pretend they don't know that. If you got a slave master or Klan in your blood, blacks can sense that. That stuff lingers to this day. Just like Jews can sense Nazi blood and the Serbs can sense Croatian blood.

It's doubtful that America's ever going to get rid of that stigmatization. It's a country founded on the backs of slaves. You know what I mean? Because it goes way back. It's the root cause. If slavery had been given up in a more peaceful way, America would be far ahead today. Whoever invented the idea "lost cause . . . ." There's nothing heroic about any lost cause. No such thing, though there are people who still believe it.

The statement "He was without any doubt inciting hatred against Croatians" incites... negative opinions against... the person who makes that statement... in that I'm left thinking he's not too good at reading. But reading's an emotional thing. I'm continually amazed at what happens to words when they're swirled around with the readers' emotions.

50 years ago today, C.S. Lewis and Aldous Huxley died.

One might imagine them encountering John F. Kennedy in the antechamber of the afterlife.

I've been planning for a while to write this as the first post today, but I'm pleased to see that there are many news stories this morning honoring the 3 men who shared a death date. You may have noticed who entered the world on the same day as you. (Perhaps I had a conversation with Rush Limbaugh in the antechamber to life.) But will you know who passes through the departure gate alongside you?

ADDED: In The Guardian: , the author Laura Miller writes:

Apart from the Narnia books, the work of Lewis's I most cherish, "An Experiment in Criticism," makes the almost postmodern – and at the very least radically humble – proposition that we might best judge the literary merit of a book not by how it is written, but by how it is read. If "we found even one reader to whom the cheap little book with its double columns and the lurid daub on its cover had been a lifelong delight, who had read and reread it, who would notice, and object, if a single word were changed, then, however little we could see in it ourselves and however it was despised by our friends and colleagues, we should not dare to put it beyond the pale." That is a faith I am happy to share.

And Nicholas Murray writes:

The FBI kept a fat file on [Aldous Huxley] but failed utterly to find anything damning (as his biographer I was sorely disappointed when it slid out of the jiffy bag). He was nevertheless refused US citizenship...

He has survived his detractors and remains an eloquent critical voice, warning against our tendency to "love our slavery" – Brave New World's dystopian idea of manipulation and conformity and our tendency to submit to soft power, so clearly vindicated by the extraordinary complacency with which the public seems to have greeted the Snowden revelations of illegitimate surveillance. A free democrat to the core of his being, at war through words with "the great impersonal forces now menacing freedom," he shows that heroism can exist away from the noisy battlefield.

AND: "Yes, 'Everybody’s happy nowadays.' We begin giving the children that at five. But wouldn’t you like to be free to be happy in some other way, Lenina? In your own way, for example; not in everybody else's way." Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World (Kindle Locations 1167-1169).

ALSO: Kindle Locations 2729-2737:

“But do you like being slaves?” the Savage was saying as they entered the Hospital. His face was flushed, his eyes bright with ardour and indignation. “Do you like being babies? Yes, babies. Mewling and puking,” he added, exasperated by their bestial stupidity into throwing insults at those he had come to save. The insults bounced off their carapace of thick stupidity; they stared at him with a blank expression of dull and sullen resentment in their eyes. “Yes, puking!” he fairly shouted. Grief and remorse, compassion and duty—all were forgotten now and, as it were, absorbed into an intense overpowering hatred of these less than human monsters. “Don’t you want to be free and men? Don’t you even understand what manhood and freedom are?” Rage was making him fluent; the words came easily, in a rush. “Don’t you?” he repeated, but got no answer to his question. “Very well then,” he went on grimly. “I’ll teach you; I’ll make you be free whether you want to or not.” And pushing open a window that looked on to the inner court of the Hospital, he began to throw the little pill-boxes of soma tablets in hand-fills out into the area.

How is your carapace of thick stupidity today? Mine is chafing. I'm struggling not to concoct a joke out "little pill-boxes of soma tablets," Jackie's iconic pink hat, and my favorite Bob Dylan song. I need some rage to make me fluent.

"Kuwaiti preacher Mubarak al-Bathali ruled recently that marriage depicted on television is considered valid and real."

"His ruling was based on a Muslim hadith, a saying by the Prophet Muhammad."

In this hadith, Muhammad defined three issues as pivotal and serious even if used jokingly: Marriage, divorce, and freeing a slave. "This hadith shows intent has no central part in these three matters," said the preacher, who also ruled that a woman who is married cannot depict a character getting married on television.

"The worst forms of racial discrimination in this Nation have always been accompanied by straight-faced representations that discrimination helped minorities."

Justice Thomas, in today's opinion in Fisher v. University of Texas, likening affirmative action to slavery and segregation. ("Slaveholders argued that slavery was a 'positive good' that civilized blacks and elevated them in every dimension of life.... A century later, segregationists similarly asserted that segregation was not only benign, but good for black students.... Following in these inauspicious footsteps, the University would have us believe that its discrimination is likewise benign. I think the lesson of history is clear enough: Racial discrimination is never benign....")

"Revealed: Bush ancestor was heavily invested in kidnapping Africans into slavery."

I assume this report is true and that the tainted blood of the Bush clan is interesting, but why is it being revealed now?

Because Obama's in trouble, and it's the next thing that could be pulled out of the country's miscellaneous bag o' distractions?

Because Jeb's in that lineage too, and he's in the running for next President, and he said something embarrassing recently, so it was a good time to kick him?

Because the George Zimmerman trial is getting underway, and that hasn't worked out as well as some in the race-baiting industry had hoped, and maybe some unrelated racial disturbance would resonate?

Because Paula Deen said something really stupid about slavery, so the editors at Slate looked around in their storehouse of as-yet-unpublished articles and found one that had slavery?

"I am a child of former slaves who had a system imposed on them. I had an economic system imposed on me."

Said Lauryn Hill, in court. 

She also said: "Over-commercialisation and its resulting restrictions and limitations can be very damaging and distorting to the inherent nature of the individual."

She's now in jail (for failing to pay $500,000 in taxes).

ADDED: Ideas that would work perfectly well in song lyrics can sound so wrong in court. The artist describes feelings, impressionistically. It's in no way an excuse or justification. But sometimes artists/politicos use court as a forum for expression without any expectation that it will advance their legal cause. One can intelligently and consciously eschew persuasion and victory.

"Julien Fédon, a mixed race owner of the Belvedere estate in the St. John Parish, launched a rebellion against British rule on the night of 2nd March 1795..."

"... with coordinated attacks on the towns of Grenville, La Baye and Gouyave. Fédon was clearly influenced by the ideas emerging from the French Revolution..."

... especially the Convention's abolition of slavery in 1794: he stated that he intended to make Grenada a "Black Republic just like Haiti." Fédon and his troops controlled all of Grenada except the parish of St George's, the seat of government, between March 1795 and June 1796. During those insurgent months 14,000 of Grenada's 28,000 slaves joined the revolutionary forces in order to write their own emancipation and transform themselves into "citizens"; some 7,000 of these self-liberated slaves would perish in the name of freedom. Fédon's forces were defeated by the British in late 1796, but Fédon himself was never caught and his fate is unknown.

Grenada is the next "History of" country, as we resume our alphabetical progression the the "History of" Wikipedia pages for the 206 countries of the world.



IN THE COMMENTS: bagoh20 said: "Is that outfit ever appropriate in Grenada near the equator?" And Anniella said: "That's an amazing painting, but there's a very good reason he's so bundled up," linking here.

In 1819, Charles Willson Peale headed down to Washington to paint portraits of President James Monroe, Henry Clay, and other dignitaries for exhibition in the famed Peale museum located in Independence Hall. But there was another sitter the painter wanted to snare on his trip.

"I heard of a Negro who is living in Georgetown said to be 140 years of age," Peale wrote in his diary. "He is comfortable in his Situation having Bank stock and lives in his own house."

The man was Yarrow Mamout, a free African, a Muslim who indeed held bank stock, purchased with great effort to secure a comfortable old age - after a life of abduction and bondage...

So... it's not Julien Fédon. I had my doubts, and I won't take advantage of the lame excuse — though I thought of it when I decided to use that picture — that I never actually say that's Julien Fédon. I'm glad to hear of Yarrow Mamout and I love the painting.

"Yarrow owns a house & lotts and is known by most of the Inhabitants of Georgetown & particularly by the Boys who are often teazing him which he takes in good humour," Peale confided in his diary. "The acquaintance of him often banter him about eating Bacon and drinking Whiskey - but Yarrow says it is no good to eat Hog - & drink whiskey is very bad."

"Portuguese traders who arrived in the 15th century named the country after the Portuguese word gabão, a coat with sleeve and hood..."

"... resembling the shape of the Komo River estuary. The coast subsequently became a center of the slave trade with Dutch, English, and French traders arriving in the 16th century."

France assumed the status of protector by signing treaties with Gabonese coastal chiefs in 1839 and 1841. In 1849, the French captured a slave ship and released the passengers at the mouth of the Komo; The slaves named their settlement Libreville, French for "free town." In 1910 Gabon became one of the four territories of French Equatorial Africa, a federation that survived until 1959.

Gabon is today's "History of" country. 



Union... travail... justice...

"The Portuguese explorer, Fernão do Pó, seeking a route to India, is credited with having discovered the island of Bioko in 1471."

"He called it Formosa ('beautiful [isle]', a name later applied to Taiwan), but it quickly took on the name of its European discoverer, albeit spelt 'Fernando Po.' The islands of Fernando Po and Annobón were colonized by the Portuguese in 1474.... From 1827 to 1843, Britain established a base on the island to combat the slave trade."

In Equatorial Guinea, today's "History of" country.

"Christopher Columbus reached the island of Hispaniola on his first voyage, in December 1492."

"On Columbus second voyage in 1493 the colony and Santo Domingo became the new capital, and remains the oldest continuously inhabited European city in the Americas."

Hundreds of thousands Tainos living on the island were enslaved to work in gold mines. As a consequence of oppression, forced labor, hunger, disease, and mass killings, by 1535, only 60,000 were still alive. In 1501, the Spanish monarchs, Ferdinand I and Isabella, first granted permission to the colonists of the Caribbean to import African slaves, which began arriving to the island in 1503. These African importees have had the most dominant racial influence, and their rich and ancient culture has had an influence second only to that of Europe on the political and cultural character of the modern Dominican Republic.

The Dominican Republic is today's "History of" country. (In the "History of" project, we're going through the 206 countries of the world in alphabetical order and reading their "History of" page in Wikipedia.)

If your teenaged son had nightmares after reading "Beloved" in Advanced Placement English class...

... can you imagine responding by seeking to get the book removed from the classroom, engaging in public activism that included talking about the boy's dreams? Quite aside from the censorship angle, is this any way to treat your son?

IN THE COMMENTS: I said:

The book is a pain to read if you're not into [it]. I would never force anyone to read that book. The writing style is enough to give nightmares.

Robert Cook said:

Oh, rather like THE GREAT GATSBY, eh?

Let me answer that here on the front page, because this is important. Yes. It is like "The Great Gatsby." Neither book should be forced on anyone. It's destructive of the capacity to appreciate exactly what is most notable, the strange locutions. If you are not in the mood to get inside those sentences and luxuriate and ideate, it's a damned pain. If you've been assigned the book and so you feel like powering through it, everything that's good about it will feel like a speed bump. People hate speed bumps. These English teachers who imagine they are serving up delight are making it hateful.

I've said this already, but I don't keep repeating it as I've blogged about isolated sentences from "The Great Gatsby" in my "Gatsby" project. So let me point out one place where I made the point clearly:

My initial motivation was love. I thought of all the high school students — I remember being one — who were assigned this book and made to read the whole thing. That being the task, the really interesting sentences are speed bumps. They're completely annoying. You can't take the time to figure them out. What should be loved is hated. Later in life, I reread the book and enjoyed it, because of the worthiness of individual sentences.

The writing style of "Beloved" is, in my opinion, much, much worse than "The Great Gatsby." Chances are, a high school student will resist the project of reading this material, especially since the teacher might not emphasize the artistry of the style. It may be administered medicinally, by a teacher who wants her presumably bland and cosseted students to vicariously inhabit the condition of slavery. This is a terrible idea. Recommend "Beloved" for optional, outside reading and give the students the 19th century narratives written by Americans who were themselves enslaved. That's real and that's free of the pretensions of poetry.

"Lincoln" smears Connecticut.

"I could not believe my own eyes and ears," said Connecticut Congressman Joe Courtney. "Placing the State of Connecticut on the wrong side of the historic and divisive fight over slavery is a distortion of easily verifiable facts."

"It is historical fiction -- a noble genre going back to Shakespeare and well before -- not history," [said Columbia University historian Eric Foner].

And yet we're pressured to go see that movie because of the way it explains history. 

By coincidence, Shakespeare is getting some negative press this week, after bones found under a parking lot in England were determined to have belonged to Richard III, the last of the Plantagenet dynasty, supplanted by the Tudors, whom Shakespeare had reason to flatter as he portrayed Richard III as a villain.

No “bunch-backed toad,” no “slave of nature and the son of hell,” no “bottled spider,” the exhumed Richard is enjoying a remake as a physically challenged fellow with spinal curvature who might have starred in last year’s London Paralympics if given the chance.

Alas he got clobbered several times with a halberd (presumably wielded by a halberdier ignoring late 15th century safety regulations), and may have suffered the ignominy of being sodomized with an unlicensed dagger while being carried naked on horseback to Leicester. ....

“I’ve spoken to scoliosis experts and they say acute scoliosis like that was painful,” Philippa Langley, a Richard III enthusiast, told The Guardian. “So we know that he was working through the pain barrier every day just to do his job.... He had an incredibly powerful, strong work ethic. This man never stopped. He was on a horse every day, fighting skirmishes, doing everything they had to do.”

Imagine a movie about Lincoln that does not cater to the tastes of the present-day dynasty. There's plenty of old material to rake over. He wasn't called "bunch-backed toad" or a "bottled spider," but he was called "The obscene ape of Illinois." And:

The illustrious Honest Old Abe has continued during the last week to make a fool of himself and to mortify and shame the intelligent people of this great nation. His speeches have demonstrated the fact that although originally a Herculean rail splitter and more lately a whimsical story teller and side splitter, he is no more capable of becoming a statesman, nay, even a moderate one, than the braying ass can become a noble lion. People now marvel how it came to pass that Mr. Lincoln should have been selected as the representative man of any party. His weak, wishy-washy, namby-pamby efforts, imbecile in matter, disgusting in manner, have made us the laughing stock of the whole world. The European powers will despise us because we have no better material out of which to make a President. The truth is, Lincoln is only a moderate lawyer and in the larger cities of the Union could pass for no more than a facetious pettifogger. Take him from his vocation and he loses even these small characteristics and indulges in simple twaddle which would disgrace a well bred school boy.

"The Kingdom of Dahomey became a major power in the Atlantic slave trade..."

"... with slaves supplied through raids of surrounding areas.  Oyo would sometimes put pressure on Dahomey to decrease their slave trade, largely to protect Oyo's own trade, which would slow the trade for a while before it increased again...."

The place that was the Kingdom of Dahomey is now called the Republic of Benin, and it is today's "History of" country. The French took over circa 1870, and the finally let go in 1960:

Between 1960 and 1972, a succession of military coups brought about many changes of government. The last of these brought to power Major Mathieu Kérékou as the head of a regime professing strict Marxist-Leninist principles. By 1975 the Republic of Dahomey changed its name to the People's Republic of Benin. The People's Revolutionary Party of Benin (PRPB) remained in complete power until the beginning of the 1990s. Kérékou, encouraged by France and other democratic powers, convened a national conference that introduced a new democratic constitution and held presidential and legislative elections....

"Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry."

Think hard. It doesn't really matter — does it? — that this is today's sentence from "The Great Gatsby," another dutiful posting in our Gatsby project, wherein we look at one sentence, out of context, each day. I know the context of that sentence. I know what happened in the story. You can look it up.

It's so tempting to break out of the form of the project and tell you, to go back into the paragraph, even as I want to tempt you out of the book altogether to look at this proposition that Americans are willing — occasionally! — to be serfs but won't accept the notion that they are peasants. What's the difference?!

But I've got to tell you. There was a rich man — not Gatsby — who tried to get the people in the houses around his house to accept having their roofs thatched with straw. He offered to pay their taxes for 5 years if they'd accept this imposition which would have allowed him to have a nice view of a faux-peasant village. They refused, and the rich man, we're told, "went into an immediate decline." And "His children sold his house with the black wreath still on the door." That's how Gatsby got his house. So that's the peasant idea that offends Americans.

But serfs. We are willing to be serfs.

"By 1666 at least 12,000 white smallholders had been bought out, died," or left Barbados.

"Many of the remaining whites were increasingly poor. By 1680 there were seventeen slaves for every indentured servant. By 1700, there were 15,000 free whites and 50,000 enslaved blacks."

... The British abolished the slave trade in 1807, but not the institution itself. In 1816, slaves rose up in the largest major slave rebellion in the island's history. Twenty thousand slaves from over seventy plantations rebelled. They drove whites off the plantations, but widespread killings did not take place. This was later termed "Bussa's Rebellion" after the slave ranger, Bussa, who with his assistants hated slavery, found the treatment of slaves on Barbados to be "intolerable," and believed the political climate in the UK made the time ripe to peacefully negotiate with planters for freedom... Bussa's Rebellion failed. One hundred and twenty slaves died in combat or were immediately executed; another 144 were brought to trial and executed; remaining rebels were shipped off the island...

Slavery was abolished in 1834 in Barbados, today's "History of" country.

ADDED: Here— at the U.K. National Archives website — is a school lesson on Bussa's rebellion, with nice scannings of original documents for students to read. And here's a drawing taken from the rebels that "appears to stress the rebels' loyalty to Britain and to the Crown while conveying their earnest desire for liberty."

Archaic People, Saladoid people, Arawaks, Caribs...

I'm trying to read the "History of" page for Antigua and Barbuda, which is a single country. It's today's country as we run through the list of 206 countries in the world. But this Wikipedia page is kind of a mess. There are names of various people who arrived in succeeding waves, mostly, it seems, paddling from Venezuela. I'm not quite picturing how one group "replaced" or "succeeded" another. But the earliest people were there by around 2900 BC. These were the "archaic people."

The Catholic Encyclopedia does make it clear that the European invaders had some difficulty identifying and differentiating between the various native peoples they encountered.

So maybe it's not just a Wikipedia problem. But you'd think by now they'd have sorted out who replaced whom, when, and how. Maybe not. Maybe my expectations for archaeology are excessive. And then there's the question: how/why did they leave?

No researcher has conclusively proven any of these causes as the real reason for the destruction of West Indian natives.

Christopher Columbus arrived in 1493, but the Caribs defended themselves. It was England that colonized the islands 1632.

Settlers raised tobacco, indigo, ginger, and sugarcane as cash crops.... [T]he sugar industry became so profitable that many farmers replaced other crops with sugar, making it the economic backbone of the islands. 

The English brought in African slaves to work in the sugar plantations.

During the 18th century, Antigua was used as the headquarters of the British Royal Navy Caribbean fleet....

... Antiguan slaves were emancipated in 1834, but remained economically dependent upon the plantation owners....

The islands achieved independence from the United Kingdom in 1981, becoming the nation of Antigua and Barbuda. It remains part of the Commonwealth of Nations, and remains a constitutional monarchy, with Queen Elizabeth II as Queen of Antigua and Barbuda.