the guy by the door …

Brothers consulting on their computing environment.

While not ready for Vista, we were ready for a new scanner/ copier/ printer.

Coco and Jo at Pine St somewhere in the South.

Jo was our mother. She took me to see “Gone with the Wind.” I don’t remember how many times.¹ My mother went into reveries about men with gleaming sabres on horseback². She remembers how handsome Billy Westmoreland looked in his uniform when he came to church³. I suspect “The Wind Done Gone⁴” is more my style.

¹Frankly Scarlettⁱ, I don’t give a damn.

²She was, however, partial to gray uniforms.

³I guess West Point Gray was close enought for herⁱⁱ. She could have held out for Annapolis Blue, but she married a Pennsylvania Dutch school teacher. Go figure.

⁴Make-believe, it would seem, in the Mind of the Law is real enough to merit the attention of the Eleventh Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals. Was this case really about the money or was it about who owns history?

^IJo was a redhead too, but I was more circumspect with her.

^IIShe thought Billy got a raw deal about that “Viet Nam businessⁱ.”

ⁱShe was aware of the cautionary departing address of President/General of the Army Dwight David Eisenhower, for whom she and Guy both voted, but it seems to have had little or no effect on either of them.

My mother Jo in the arms of Coco*, Pine St. somewhere in the South

My mother Jo, who as I mentioned, took me to see Gone with the Wind countless times. blamed slavery on the Northern businessmen. It may seem like a facile excuse, but apparently there is enough blame to go around.

Kathryn Boodry of Harvard presented her thesis proposal. Seth Rockman (Brown University) and Caitlin Rosenthal (Harvard University) were commentators.

Sven Beckert, Caitin Rosenthal, Kathryn Boodry, Seth Rockman, Louis Hyman. Beckert and Hyman are the unindicted co-conspirators cofacilitators of the seminar.

There were, in the antebellum period¹, two distinct sets of labor relations in the South and North – slavery and ‘free labor’ repsectively². According to Kathryn, the conventional wisdom is to view these as two separate economic systems. However, due to capital flows – trading and lending – the two are inextricably linked to the point that Kathryn proposes that they should be viewed as two parts of a single system. In fact, she finds including the end use of cotton in England to be essential to the analysis – not the American economy, the Atlantic economy. They’re kind of big on that kind of stuff at the Warren Center. A seminar participant from the Caribbean pointed out that due to trade in sugar cane and rum Atlantic economy should include the  Caribbean. Jack Womack was not there to represent South America, which does, if I remember correctly, border the Atlantic.

…more to come…

The workshop website.

*Coco was a servant at the time ~1917-18. My mother argues that the slaves must have been happy because they stayed on with the families as servants. My argument, underscored by an African scholar I know, ‘what choice did they have?’

¹I have to admit that in the preGoogle period, I never got it together to look up antebellum.

²Lauren Coyle, who was an editor of Unbound last year, objected that ‘free labor’ is a misnomer. “Where can you find working class people whose work is not coerced?” Professor Seth rejoined that there were differences in the details of compensation and the levels of violence used in the two cases.