In 1937, a trucker got frustrated waiting for his cargo to be unloaded. He later sold his company for $1.1 billion.

Here’s the story of how Malcom McLean made a billion dollars and which startup could be following in his footsteps. (Inspired by our episode with @laurabehrenswu)

In the early 1950s, the shipping industry was a dying business.

New York’s docks were handling half as much domestic cargo in the early 1950s as they had been in the depressed 1930s.

In thirty years, no one had invested significant money in coastal shipping.

Why?

As McLean found out, loading ships was difficult and slow.

A truck or train would deliver items to the port. Each item was unloaded separately, recorded, and carried to storage.

When a ship was ready, each item was taken from storage, counted again, and hauled on-board.

The cost of this labor was significant. As one expert at the time explained:

“A four-thousand-mile voyage for a shipment might consume 50 percent of its costs in covering just the two ten-mile movements through two ports.”

Yet, despite the industry’s issues, it felt little pressure to change.

Foreigners were barred from operating domestically. Cartels ran international routes. And gov. subsidies eased the pain of labor costs.

Reshaping the industry needed an outsider.

Enter Malcolm McLean.

A Thanksgiving story to warm your pluralistic hearts:

It was the early 1990s, the days before Washington DC had meters in taxis. A famine was raging in Somalia. And I was working in my first job out of college: a brief stint working for an organization that focused on the Middle East peace process.

I was heading to my parents’ house. I was standing in front of a mailbox near my office. I was holding a stack of papers with Hebrew writing on them. I hailed a cab.

I was aware that on the mailbox behind me was a large sign from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals with an image of a turkey and the words: “Thanksgiving is Murder on Turkeys.”

It was the period right around Thanksgiving.

A cab pulled up, and I got in the front seat—because in the days before metered cabs in DC, drivers were allowed to pick up more than one fare, and someone else was already occupying the back seat.

In 1637, the Dutch Republic erupted into a speculative fever over an unlikely item...the tulip.

Tulip Mania has become a legend synonymous with market euphoria and bubbles. But is this tale all it's cracked up to be?

Who's up for a story?

👇👇👇

1/ The tulip is a spring-blooming flower native to the valleys of the Tien Shan Mountains in Central Asia.

It is believed to have been introduced to Europe in 1554, when an ambassador of the Holy Roman Emperor sent tulip bulbs and seeds to Vienna from the Ottoman Empire.

2/ Tulips gained in popularity as people were attracted to their rich color and ability to grow in sub-optimal conditions.

They soon became a coveted status symbol for the wealthy.

The Semper Augustus, with its colorful, flame-like streaks, was the most desired of them all.

3/ By the early 1600s, the Dutch Republic was entering a golden age.

Many financial innovations popped up during this time - the first stock exchange, for example.

But it was another financial innovation that would propel tulips into historical lore: the futures contract.

4/ As tulips grow slowly and may take several years to bloom, paper contracts were written that entitled the buyer to the future tulips.

These contracts were freely-traded.

So in addition to the physical market for tulip bulbs, a thriving paper market was established.

This week, 33 years ago, Thomas Sankara, the revolutionary leader of Burkina Faso, was assassinated in a French-backed coup. He aspired to an egalitarian, feminist society, and an economy built on self-sufficiency, ecological regeneration, and independence from Western powers.

As debt crises mount across Africa, his ideas are more vital now than ever. I wrote about Sankara's legacy in these two pages from The Divide:

Today, Sankara's legacy is inspiring a new generation of revolutionary thinkers and activists across the continent and beyond. As Sankara himself put it, with uncanny prescience, “You can assassinate revolutionaries, but you cannot kill ideas”.

Sankara knew his assassination was coming. Speaking to African leaders at the OAU, he said "I would like this conference to clearly declare that we will not repay the debt; we must do it together, to avoid being assassinated individually..."

"...If Burkina Faso is the only one to refuse, I will not be here at the next conference."

This is Camille du Gast (1868-1942). She was a balloonist, parachutist, fencer, tobogganist, skier, horse trainer, concert pianist & singer. She was the second woman to compete in an international motor race & was embroiled in the scandal of La Femme au Masque.

Thread!

Excerpts from The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. to help shed light on the way to go as regard the #EndSARS #ReformPoliceNG protest going on across the country.

A thread.

Before the Boycott started, Martin Luther King Jr. thought about the morality of the method of protesting - the Boycott.

In spite of the fact that the Black community had a legitimate demand, they still thought about the morality of their method.

Would anyone suffer unjustly?

On the first day of the protest, Martin Luther King Jr. noticed that at the peak of the morning traffic, no more than eight Negro passengers rode the bus.

Almost everyone in the Black community cooperated.

Now, what happened next?

Leaders in the community discussed the need for some organisation to guide and direct the protest because everything happened spontaneously.

They decided to elect officers and Martin Luther King Jr. was made the President of the Association.

They formed an ad hoc organisation called the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA).

Ronald Reagan called Medicare & Medicaid dangerous socialism in 1961... he was a right winger of the Barry Goldwater variety, not the warm and fuzzy presidential muppet he has become in his canonization by the 1980s Alex P. Keatons in the commentariat.

Reagan launched his 1980 presidential campaign at the Neshoba County Fair in Philadelphia, Mississippi, just 16 years after Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney were lynched there, 17 years after Medgar Evers' slaying and 12 years after Dr. King's assassination.

He did it send a message to white voters, not different from the message Donald Trump sent. He was letting white people who were resentful of civil rights advances know whose side he was on, further codifying the GOP as America's white interests party.

Reagan gutted what was left of the Great Society to shovel tax cuts into the pockets of the super rich. (My mother's federal job was deleted by his first presidential budget, though my absentee father was a big Reagan fan. Needless to say they divorced).

Reagan tried to ignore the AIDS pandemic which killed more people than Trump's COVID pandemic has. He just didn't give it the time of day, even though at the time, it was something seemingly everyone thought about, talked about and was terrified of.

This Day in Labor History: January 5, 1914. Henry Ford announced his famous $5 a day wage to his workers. But let's be clear; Ford was a horrible human who treated his workers awful. He's no model and we need to talk about this!

Turnover was a massive problem for employers through the early 20th century. The horrors of industrialization combined with callousness of employers to lead to workers constantly seeking a job that was just a little bit less terrible than the last.

The growth of assembly line work made this worse because it was so boring. Treating a worker like a machine, as Henry Ford did, deskilled and depressed workers who had once partially defined themselves through their physical labor.

This labor was just as physical and exhausting, but required no thinking and provided no satisfaction. Thus the Ford Motor Company had the same turnover problems as other industries. In 1913, the turnover rate for the company was 370 percent.

Ford decided he needed to do something about this turnover. So he began to think about what would become known as welfare capitalism.

The Forgotten Story of Human Zoos – Crimes of the Colonial Era

Thread!!!!

Humans have been taken from their native lands and taken to be exhibited in human zoos for more than a century. Alongside animals, they were displayed before fellow humans. This little known and profoundly troubling aspect of colonial history played a crucial part.

Between 1810 and 1940, in Europe, America and Japan, almost 35 thousand people were exhibited in world fairs, colonial exhibits, zoos, freak shows, circuses and relocated ethnic villages.

These activities were attended by some 1,5 billion visitors. This documentary traces how racism in these so-called ‘human zoos’ was constructed and disseminated using previously unpublished archive material.

Children, women and men were exhibited as exotic animals, and ordered in a “race” hierarchy. In a way that served to justify colonialism, they were cast as “other” and described as “savage.”

Most environmental thinking is ripping off or erasing Indigenous and/or non-western peoples and cosmologies in one way or another and it’s tiring to watch this be so normalized in western scholarship. If you don’t have Indigenous people on your environmental panel, it is violence

Indigenous peoples represent 5% of earth’s human population but protect 80% of earth’s biodiversity (UN). Indigenous environmental defenders are frequently murdered for work protecting lands/waters/atmospheres. Indigenous cosmologies/onto-epistemologies are vital, radical.

Indigenous peoples exist in every human inhabited continent. Indigenous peoples represent what Mbuto Milando called ‘the 4th world’ (of non-dominant cosmologies) which Secwepemc thinker George Manuel theorized about. This UN definition is helpful (& inclusive, not exclusive):

The focus on dominance is helpful in identifying local+international power structures — Indigenous groups represent non-dominant cosmologies, onto-epistemologies that relate to lands/waters/atmospheres. But remember that Indigenous peoples dispossessed carry cosmologies with them

So also remember that work that @MaiaLButler does with Edwidge Danticat’s concept of ‘floating homelands’ is important node of thinking about Indigenous cosmologies, the 4th world. Non-dominant knowledge about being in/relating to the earth includes those dispossessed from
home.

Some achievements of Abū Bakr Muhammad ibn Zakariyyā al-Rāzī in the field of medicine.

Al-Razi was one of the world's first great medical experts. He is considered the father of psychology and psychotherapy

Short thread.

SKULL TOWER

The Skull Tower is a stone monument, embedded with human skulls that was constructed by soldiers of the Ottoman Empire after the Battle of Cegar in 1809.
(1)

The Battle of Cegar, (also called the Battle of Kamenica) was a conflict during the First Serbian Uprising in the Sanjak of Smederevo (an Ottoman administrative division) between the Serbian Revolutionaries and Ottoman forces on Cegar hill near the city of Nis in Serbia.
(2)

Before the battle, the Serbian Revolutionaries had constructed six large defensive positions to force the Ottoman’s defending from the Nis fortress to capitulate, but the Ottoman’s used the negotiations to delay the conflict in time for 20,000 reinforcements from Rumelia.
(3)

The battle lasted a whole day, with fierce hand-to-hand fighting resulting in thousands of losses on both sides and concluding in the Serbian Revolutionaries being forced to retreat in defeat to the town of Deligrad.
(4)

As a warning to further revolutionaries in the region, the Ottomans collected the heads from the Serbian dead and peeled off the skin.

The heads were stuffed with straw and sent to the Ottoman sultan, Mahmud II at the Imperial Palace in Istanbul to celebrate the victory.
(5)

The Invention of Whiteness: the Spanish Laboratory
a thread

To mourn the first day of the Invasion, I'm sharing thoughts from a future book.
Much has been written on British colonization of Ireland as a laboratory for creating whiteness in the anglo world. Much less has been...

...written on the equally important Spanish experience, owing in part to anglocentric historiography and to a simplistic anti-imperialism only capable of focusing on the evils of Anglo-US dominance, and denying the centrality of whiteness to Iberian and Latin American societies.

In fact, Spain itself was invented as an integral part of this process of colonization and the creation of whiteness.
It's the year 1000. The concepts of Spain or a white race do not yet exist. Most of the Iberian peninsula is inhabited by a diverse Muslim society. The western...

fringes of Christendom are organizing a major holy war to conquer this territory and exterminate the Muslims (note that many Christians and Jews live peacefully in the Muslim territory).
Spanish mythology will later refer to this as a "Reconquest" but the political & cultural...

groups that organize it did not exist when Muslim armies first took over Iberia around 720. Christian wars of conquest will last more than 500 years and will include frequent massacres of civilians. The bloody process will shape Castillian practices of warfare and create an...

In honor of Indigenous Peoples’ Day I wanted to provide a thread of acclaimed shows and films that feature Indigenous peoples! The film industry has such a violent legacy with native peoples, things need to be better. These are some of my favorite shows/films growing up.

1. Molly of Denali
This is the first nationally distributed children’s series to feature a Native American lead! It’s one of my favorite shows and features Molly, an Alaska Native girl. This is a show made and produced by native folks and is voiced by Alaska Natives.

2. Whale Rider (2002)
This is a film that stars the youngest actress ever nominated for an oscar. It’s a Māori coming of age movie and has themes of tradition and overcoming rigid gender stereotypes. It’s beautiful and so powerful.

3. Boy (2010)
Taika Waititi, one of the first Indigenous filmmakers to win an Oscar, directed this film. It features a young Māori boy in New Zealand in the ‘80s. i love this film :,)

4. The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open (2019)
Directed by Elle Máijá Tailfeathers, this film addresses issues like domestic violence Native women face . It features two Indigenous women, Violet Nelson (Kwakwaka’wakw) and Elle.

"They all laughed at Christopher Columbus when he said the world was round"

Nah, they laughed because they already knew the world was round–and his math about earth's size was incorrect.

This is a #ColumbusDay thread about how so much of what we were taught about him was wrong:

An interview with @CondoleezzaRice appeared on the @HooverInst website yesterday. She had some things to say about historians. A thread, beginning with a direct quote 1/

#twitterstorians @AHAhistorians @SocHistTech

"Let's start by really bringing the best young historians of China and India. History is being practiced in the academy in a way that's not really very inspiring. History departments ask much narrower questions than in years past.... 2/

... When I was a young faculty member, I remember sitting at a first faculty meeting with Gabriel Allman, author of The Civic Culture, and Seymour Martin Lipset, who had written the Political Man. These were historians who explored big questions."
& now for some fact-checking 3/

Gabriel Almond (NOT Allman) was a political scientist, not a historian. He chaired the Stanford Political Science department from 1964 to 1969, and retired in 1976. Rice received her PhD in 1981 from the Univ. of Denver, and joined the Stanford faculty later that year. 4/

My historian’s mind sees a chronology snag, but I suppose it’s not impossible that emeritus profs attended faculty meetings back then. ?? Seymour Lipset was a sociologist AND a political scientist; again, not a historian. 5/

If you are observing #ColumbusDay instead of #IndigenousPeoplesDay2020 here is a list of what you are celebrating...

1. Christopher Columbus's army used Indigenous people as dog food. They were known to feed live babies to dogs in front of their horrified parents.

CW: SA

2.) His "voyage" initiated the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade when he captured 1600 Taino people and shipped them to Spain for gold. Most died on the journey.

3.) Columbus sex trafficked Indigenous girls for his own personal profit. He journaled, “There are plenty of dealers who go about looking for girls; those from nine to ten are now in demand.”

4.) Columbus's army required any Taino person 14 or older to bring them a thimble of gold dust every 3 months. If not, the army would chop off their hands and tie the victim's hands around their neck. Most victims bled to death. An estimated 10,000 Taino people died this way.

5. His army systematically raped Indigenous women. His close friend Michele de Cuneo wrote the following

“While I was in the boat I captured a very beautiful Carib woman... I conceived desire to take pleasure. I wanted to put my desire into execution but she did not want it...

There is an interesting correlation between what is going on in the USA today & what happened at the end of the Roman Empire.

What brought down the empire?

1/Invasions by Barbarian tribes (we had 911 & Al Qaeda/Taliban then Russians invaded our elections...)

2/Economic troubles and overreliance on slave labor (we’ve had a reliance on illegal immigrants working on farms, in construction & restaurants)

3/The rise of the Eastern vs West Empire (we have China)

4/Overexpansion and military overspending (The U.S. Spends More on Its Military Than 144 Countries Combined)

5/Government corruption and political instability (this one is all about the GOP & Trump)

6/Christianity & the loss of traditional values (Religion at its core was created to control the destructive tendencies of man but people have figured out it was all just a story & science is the true god-society is currently in the middle of this transition & it will be painful)

7/Weakening of the Roman legions (consider what the Trump administration has done to the USA’s standing in the world & the politicization of our courts and key Federal agencies)

#FoodForThought