How many times have you failed in your endeavors? When you were learning how to ride a bike, roller skate, play the piano, learn a foreign language, etc., didnÂ’t you fail many times?

Many modern conveniences are the result of EdisonÂ’s ingenuity. Edison did amazing things simply by persevering.

1. Edison was persistent

After fifty years of efforts to create a long-lasting incandescent light bulb, Edison achieved success with the incandescent light bulb. Edison needed a material that would be compatible to form a long-lasting filament. He initially tried platinum, which only worked for about one to two hours. He tried carbon, which had the highest melting point. When carbon didnÂ’t seem to work, Edison tried boron, chromium, molybdenum, tungsten, nickel, platinum (again). Finally, Edison got carbon to work as a filament material for his light bulb, which lit for over 40 hours.

What are some of the things that you are doing in your life and careers? Do you like what you are doing for a living? Are there other things that you would like to be doing as a career? You may ask, “what if I try something and it doesn’t work?” Try something else. And if you’re not successful, try again! Reference the example with a baby learning how to walk. How do most people walk? They kept on trying, no matter how long it took, to walk.

2. Edison learned how to meet the unmet need

The classic marketing philosophy says to “fill the unmet need.” Edison invented practical items that a majority of the population could use, such as the light bulb, the phonograph, batteries, etc.

Edison not only could invent things, he could invent practical things. Every one of us has practical skills that we can offer the world. The world needs your talents much like the world needed EdisonÂ’s talents. What are some ideas that you have that would meet the unmet need? What are you seeing around you that could be improved? Edison did the same pondering and look at how much he accomplished.

3. Edison knew he could invent something when he was determined

Edison’s quest to invent the incandescent light bulb took him about four years. About his electric light experiments, he said “I was never myself discouraged or inclined to be hopeless of success.” Edison knew that he could find a way to make the light bulb work and to be a practical item for the general public to use.

For those of you involved in obtaining goals, are you determined enough that you are going to succeed? Do you have that attitude of accomplishing something no matter what?

Edison saw thousands of better ways of doing things. He had to literally make many things happen in order to achieve success. Edison did not think that any of his failures were actually “failures.” Edison said “If I find 10,000 ways something won’t work, I haven’t failed. I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is just one more step forward….” Do you turn your “mistakes” into learning experiences? Adopt the same attitude as Edison did. Learn from mistakes. Be persistent.

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The slaves were transported across the ocean in especially fitted ships. They were kept lying on narrow ledges, chained, but were brought above deck in good weather. Women and children were not shackled. Even these harsh conditions did not prevent the would-be slaves from frequently attempting to rebel, though, usually, unsuccessfully.

Overcrowding, minimal and monotonous diet (two meals per day and a pint of water), poor hygiene, epidemics, and lack of physical activity decimated, on each and every 1-2 months long trip, a whopping one seventh to one fourth of the “cargo” and one sixth to one half of the crew. Another 10% of the slaves died during the process of “seasoning” – getting used to local conditions in their destinations.

Initially, all types of unfree workers, regardless of color, were treated the same way: bought, sold, and worked, sometimes to death. Gradually, starting in the 18th century, light-skinned slaves (”house negroes”) and whites were tackled more leniently. Surprisingly, slave rebellions were rather rare – perhaps because cruel slave-owners were socially ostracized and miscegenation (white-black sexual liaisons) was frowned upon.

Most slave-owners regarded themselves as custodians of their slaves. They properly fed the working adults (though children usually went malnourished), allowed them to grow vegetables in their own garden plots, provided them with clothing (four suits) and housing (one wooden cabin per family). In wealthier and larger plantations, the slaves were cared for by qualified physicians. The master felt it his obligation and right to constantly intervene, interfere, and meddle in the lives of his inferiors.

Slave life was richer than portrayed in literature and cinema. Slaves belonged to churches and were ordained as ministers and preachers. A few learned to read and write. Music was a favorite pastime. Understandably, so was drinking. Slaves were allowed to moonlight or work on their own free time.

Actually, only a minority of the white population in the south were slave-owners (347,525 out of 6,000,000 in 1850). Only 1,800 people owned more than 100 slaves. There were 250,000 freed slaves in the south by 1860. The average cotton plantation had only 35 slaves, about 50-60% of them engaged in the production of the immensely profitable crop and its processing.

Still, slaves constituted more than half the population in some southern states (South Carolina, Mississippi) and two fifths of the total southern populace (compared to an average of 5% in the north and 10% in New-York). Of the first 12 Presidents of the USA, 8 were slave-owners. Some slave-owners were themselves black and former slaves.

The Law, even in the Deep South, recognized slaves as both chattel and human beings. Slaves were held responsible for criminal acts they had committed, for instance, and enjoyed many human rights (e.g., the right not to be killed, tortured, or beaten brutally, to be cared for in old age or sickness, to receive religious instruction, to bring suit and give evidence in some cases). Case law and non-binding custom endowed them with additional privileges: the right to marry, own private property (peculium), have free time, enter contracts, and (if female or child) be consigned to lighter labor.

Still, a minority of slave-owners ignored these legal protections and social censure and indulged their sadistic urges and sexual appetites. In some plantations, nutrition was so lopsided or deficient that slaves resorted to eating clay to supplement their diet. In others mutilation, branding, chaining, torture, murder, and rape – all criminal acts prohibited by Law – were common.

But while individual slaves were, at least theoretically, protected by law and social custom – not so the negro family. The owner had the right to sell his slaves separately, regardless of their familial ties. Some states, like Louisiana in 1829, passed legislation prohibiting the sale of children under the age of ten. Others (Alabama and Georgia) forbade the separation of inherited slave families. But these were the exceptions to the widespread practice.

Though not recognized or protected by Law, many slaves accumulated property. A few hundred slaves even purchased their freedom from their white masters. Slave-owners in the USA usually retained ownership of sick, disabled, or infirm slaves and took care of them. Suicide among slaves in the USA was a rarity. Many slaves (especially in the coastal areas of Georgia and South Carolina) were free to do as they chose once they had completed their daily assignments (the “task system”).

On the eve of the American Revolution, c. 400,000 slaves amounted to one fifth of the population of the rebellious colonies. Slavery in the USA was abolished in stages and decades after it was eliminated in Britain. Rhode Island banned it as early as 1774. Pennsylvania, New-York, and New Jersey followed suit. In 1787, the Continental Congress prohibited the practice in the Midwest. The slave trade – or, more precisely, the importation of slaves into the USA – was banned altogether in 1808. Even so, between 1808 and 1865, traders smuggled 270,000 slaves into the USA.

But the major engine of growth of the slave population was reproduction. Twenty thousand slaves were born every year during the 1790s – and 70,000 annually in the 1840s. As a result, the ratio between the sexes was equal and the slave population skyrocketed from 1.2 million in 1810 to 4 million in 1860. Some slave-owners even established “breeding farms” and sold the off-spring in the markets of “deficit” states.

Gradually, all the states north of the Ohio River and the Mason-Dixon line became slave-free. Northerners resented the presence of fugitive slaves (about 1000 per year) who crossed the Ohio River in what was known as the Underground Railroad, but they often clashed with federal authorities when the latter tried to extend their jurisdiction to the escapees under the Fugitive Slave Laws.

Most abolitionists – as well as President Abraham Lincoln (who was never one) – wanted to repatriate the blacks (return them to Africa) and, in any case, expel all free blacks from northern and, later, southern territories. The African nation-state of Liberia was established specifically to accommodate former North American slaves.

It was widely acknowledged that slave-owners should be compensated for the loss of their property. Not a single abolitionist supported or even discussed reparations (compensating the slaves for their free labor, denial of freedom, brutal treatment, and hardships). It was accepted wisdom that blacks – both slaves and free – should never be allowed to carry arms.

Slaves in the South (the Confederacy) were finally emancipated in 1863, during the Civil War. But, even then, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation did not apply to some states within the Union. These other slaves remained in slavery until December 1865, when the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution was adopted.

Article Source: http://www.articledashboard.com

Sam Vaknin ( samvak.tripod.com ) is the author of Malignant Self Love – Narcissism Revisited and After the Rain – How the West Lost the East. He served as a columnist for Global Politician, Central Europe Review, PopMatters, Bellaonline, and eBookWeb, a United Press International (UPI) Senior Business Correspondent, and the editor of mental health and Central East Europe categories in The Open Directory and Suite101.

Until recently, he served as the Economic Advisor to the Government of Macedonia.

Visit Sam’s Web site at samvak.tripod.com

About 20-25% of the populace in the colonies – c. 600,000 – were blacks. About one third of the white denizens were non-British. Local patriotism ran high. All adult, white, property-owning, men (about two thirds of the male numbers) were eligible to vote in elections to the lower house of the legislative assembly of the colony they resided in. Each colony also had its governor.

Some colonies (e.g., Rhode Island and Connecticut) were, in effect, incorporated under royal charter as semi-commercial ventures. Others belonged to the descendants of their founders (proprietary colonies such as Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Delaware). Georgia, North and South Carolina, Virginia, New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire were royal provinces, under direct British rule.

Some of the colonists – for instance, the New Englanders – were among the wealthiest and best educated people in the world, better off than the British themselves. But, per capita, they paid only 3% of the taxes levied on a typical Briton. The colonies supplied the West Indies with most of their foodstuffs and consumed British finished products – but they were not economically crucial to the British Empire.

In the years leading to the War of Independence (1765-1776), the British actually repealed all the taxes on products imported into the colonies – with the single exception of tea (and even this tax was drastically reduced). The colonists’ slogan “no taxation without representation” was, therefore, more about local representation than about foreign taxation. And even this bit ringed hollow. The Encyclopedia Britannica: “The assemblies had the right to tax; to appropriate money for public works and public officials, and to regulate internal trade, religion, and social behavior”. The role of British government was confined to foreign affairs and trade.

But both parties to the conflict breached this modus vivendi. During the Seven Years (French and Indian) War (1754-1763), the colonies refused to relinquish control over their militias to the British command and smuggled French goods into British North America (France being Britain’s enemy). The British, on the other hand, began interfering in the colonies’ internal affairs, notably (but not only) by imposing taxes and customs duties in order to ameliorate Britain’s growing national debt and by rendering tax officials financially independent of the local colonial assemblies.

Add to this a severe recession in the colonies brought on by unbridled spending financed with unsustainable personal indebtedness and, not surprisingly, acts of resistance to British taxation – such as the Boston Tea Party – were organized mainly by smugglers, artisans, and shopkeepers. Secret groupings, such as the Sons of Liberty resorted to violence and intimidation to achieve their (mostly economic but disguised as “patriotic”) goals. Even women got involved in a “buy American” campaign of boycotting British goods.

Many British merchants, bankers, politicians, intellectuals, and journalists supported the colonies against the crown – each group for its own reasons. The merchants and bankers, for instance, were terrified of a mooted unilateral debt moratorium to be declared by the colonies if and when militarily attacked. Others found it distasteful to kill and maim white British subjects (as the insurgents were). Yet others resisted imperialism, the monarchy, taxes, or all three. Even within the British Army there was strong dissent and the campaign against the rebellious colonies was carried out half-heartedly and lackadaisically. On the other hand, British die-hards, such as Samuel Johnson, demanded blood (”I am willing to love all Mankind, except an American”).

The denizens of the colonies tried, till the last moment, to avert a constitutional (and, consequently, military) crisis. They suggested a model of two semi-autonomous nations (the United Kingdom and the colonies), united by the figurehead of the King. But it was too little and way too late. Violent clashes between the citizenry and British units started as early as October 1765 with the First Nonimportation Movement, directed against the Stamp Act. They continued with the Boston Massacre (five dead) in 1770; the attack on the British customs ship, the Gaspée, in Rhode Island, in 1772; and the Boston Tea Party in 1773.

In April 1775, General Gage, governor and military commander of Massachusetts, suffered a humiliating defeat in a skirmish in Concord and Lexington. The Patriots were alerted to his movements by Paul Revere who rode all night to inform them that the “regulars (not the British, as the legend has it) are coming.” He was one of many such scouts.

The Loyalists fielded 50-55,000 armed men and the Patriots countered by organizing “militias” – irregular units of ill-trained and undisciplined volunteers. The Continental Army was established only in June 1775, under the command of George Washington, a veteran of the French and Indian War. At their peak, the rebels mastered less than 100,000 men in arms – only 25-30,000 of which were on active duty at any given time.

The Continental Army was, in the words of General Philip Schuyler of New York “weak in numbers, dispirited, naked, destitute of provisions, without camp equipage, with little ammunition, and not a single piece of cannon.” Late pay caused frequent mutinies and desertions. In 1783, Washington had to personally intervene to prevent a military coup. Only repeated promises of cash bonuses and land grants kept this mob of youngsters, foreigners, and indentured servants intermittently cohesive.

Still, they outnumbered the British and the “Hessians” – the 30,000 German mercenaries who participated in the 8 years of fighting. In all of North America, the British had 60,000 soldiers as late as 1779. They had to face a growing presence of hostile French, Spanish, and Dutch armies, supplies, and navies. The Native-Americans (Indians) supported mostly the British, especially west of the Appalachians. This provoked numerous massacres by the Patriots.

The War spread to other parts of the world: the Gulf Coast, the Caribbean, India, the Netherlands, the Mediterranean. The US Navy even invaded the British port of Whitehaven in 1778.

The conflict affected the civilian population as well with both sides committing war crimes and atrocities aplenty. With many men gone, women took over traditionally male roles and vocations, such as farming. Hyperinflation – brought on by $500 million in newly minted and printed money – led to mob scenes as storekeepers were attacked and warehouses looted.

The blacks largely sided with the British – but many joined the Patriots and, thus, won their freedom after the war. Virginia planters alone manumitted 10,000 slaves. By 1800, slavery was abolished in all the states north of Delaware.

All told, less than 7000 Patriots died in battle (and 8500 wounded). About 1200 Germans perished, too. No one knows how many British troops, Indians, and other combatants paid with their lives in this protracted conflict. About 100,000 Loyalists emigrated to Canada and thousands others (mainly of African ancestry) went to Sierra Leone and the Bahamas. They were all fully compensated for the property they left behind in what came to be known as the United States of America (USA).

Article Source: http://www.articledashboard.com

Sam Vaknin ( samvak.tripod.com ) is the author of Malignant Self Love – Narcissism Revisited and After the Rain – How the West Lost the East. He served as a columnist for Global Politician, Central Europe Review, PopMatters, Bellaonline, and eBookWeb, a United Press International (UPI) Senior Business Correspondent, and the editor of mental health and Central East Europe categories in The Open Directory and Suite101.

Until recently, he served as the Economic Advisor to the Government of Macedonia.

Visit Sam’s Web site at samvak.tripod.com

There’s a story about Robespierre that has the preeminent rabble-rouser of the French Revolution leaping up from his chair as soon as he saw a mob assembling outside.

“I must see which way the crowd is headed”, he is reputed to have said: “For I am their leader.”
http://www.salon.com/tech/books/1999/11/04/new_optimism/

People who exercise violence in the pursuit of what they hold to be just causes are alternately known as “terrorists” or “freedom fighters”.

They all share a few common characteristics:

A hard core of idealists adopt a cause (in most cases, the freedom of a group of people). They base their claims on history – real or hastily concocted, on a common heritage, on a language shared by the members of the group and, most important, on hate and contempt directed at an “enemy”. The latter is, almost invariably, the physical or cultural occupier of space the idealists claim as their own.
The loyalties and alliances of these people shift effortlessly as ever escalating means justify an ever shrinking cause. The initial burst of grandiosity inherent in every such undertaking gives way to cynical and bitter pragmatism as both enemy and people tire of the conflict.
An inevitable result of the realpolitik of terrorism is the collaboration with the less savoury elements of society. Relegated to the fringes by the inexorable march of common sense, the freedom fighters naturally gravitate towards like minded non-conformists and outcasts. The organization is criminalized. Drug dealing, bank robbing and other manner of organized and contumacious criminality become integral extensions of the struggle. A criminal corporatism emerges, structured but volatile and given to internecine donnybrooks.
Very often an un-holy co-dependence develops between the organization and its prey. It is the interest of the freedom fighters to have a contemptible and tyrannical regime as their opponent. If not prone to suppression and convulsive massacres by nature – acts of terror will deliberately provoke even the most benign rule to abhorrent ebullition.
The terrorist organization will tend to emulate the very characteristics of its enemy it fulminates against the most. Thus, all such groups are rebarbatively authoritarian, execrably violent, devoid of human empathy or emotions, suppressive, ostentatious, trenchant and often murderous.
It is often the freedom fighters who compromise their freedom and the freedom of their people in the most egregious manner. This is usually done either by collaborating with the derided enemy against another, competing set of freedom fighters – or by inviting a foreign power to arbiter. Thus, they often catalyse the replacement of one regime of oppressive horror with another, more terrible and entrenched.
Most freedom fighters are assimilated and digested by the very establishment they fought against or as the founders of new, privileged nomenklaturas. It is then that their true nature is exposed, mired in gulosity and superciliousness as they become. Inveterate violators of basic human rights, they often transform into the very demons they helped to exorcise.
Most freedom fighters are disgruntled members of the middle classes or the intelligentsia. They bring to their affairs the merciless ruthlessness of sheltered lives. Mistaking compassion for weakness, they show none as they unscrupulously pursue their self-aggrandizement, the ego trip of sending others to their death. They are the stuff martyrs are made of. Borne on the crests of circumstantial waves, they lever their unbalanced personalities and project them to great effect. They are the footnotes of history that assume the role of text. And they rarely enjoy the unmitigated support of the very people they proffer to liberate. Even the most harangued and subjugated people find it hard to follow or accept the vicissitudinal behaviour of their self-appointed liberators, their shifting friendships and enmities and their pasilaly of violence.

Article Source: http://www.articledashboard.com

Sam Vaknin ( samvak.tripod.com ) is the author of Malignant Self Love – Narcissism Revisited and After the Rain – How the West Lost the East. He served as a columnist for Global Politician, Central Europe Review, PopMatters, Bellaonline, and eBookWeb, a United Press International (UPI) Senior Business Correspondent, and the editor of mental health and Central East Europe categories in The Open Directory and Suite101.

Until recently, he served as the Economic Advisor to the Government of Macedonia.

Visit Sam’s Web site at samvak.tripod.com

Yet, while alive, Bolivar was a much hated dictator and – at the beginning of his career – a military failure.

His aide and friend, Gen. Daniel O’Leary, an Irish soldier described him so:

“His chest was narrow, his figure slender, his legs particularly thin. His skin was swarthy and rather coarse. His hands and feet were small .a woman might have envied them. His expression, when he was in good humor, was pleasant, but it became terrible when he was aroused. The change was unbelievable.”

Bolivar explained his motives:

“I confess this (the coronation of Napoleon in 1804) made me think of my unhappy country and the glory which he would win who should liberate it”

And, later, after a victory against the Spaniards in 1819:

“The triumphal arches, the flowers, the hymns, the acclamations, the wreaths offered and placed upon my head by the hands of lovely maidens, the fiestas, the thousand demonstrations of joy are the least of the gifts that I have received,” he wrote. “The greatest and dearest to my heart are the tears, mingled with the rapture of happiness, in which I have been bathed and the embraces with which the multitude have all but crushed me.”

Venezuela became independent in 1811 and Bolivar, being a minor – though self-aggrandizing – political figure, had little to do with it. After his first major military defeat, in defending the coastal town of Puerto Cabello against royalist insurgents out to oust the newly independent Venezuela, he advocated the creation of a professional army (in the Cartagena Manifesto). Far from being a revolutionary he, justly, opposed the reliance on guerrilleros and militiamen.

He then reconquered Caracas, Venezuela’s capital, at the head of a small army and declared himself a dictator. He made Congress award him the title of El Libertador (the Liberator). The seeds of his personality cult were sown. When he lost Caracas to the royalists in yet another botched campaign, he retreated and captured Bogotá, the capital city of Colombia in December 1814.

After a series of uninterrupted military defeats, Bolivar exiled himself to Jamaica. In a sudden conversion, he published the Jamaica Letter (1815) in which he supported a model of government akin to the British parliamentary system – yet, only following a phase of “guided leadership” (identical to Hitler’s “Fuhrerprinzip”).

But the self-anointed leader did not hesitate to desert his soldiers and leave them stranded after yet another of his military exploits – an attempt to capture Caracas – unravelled in 1816. He simply defected to Haiti, letting his loyal troops fend for themselves as best they could.

There followed a string of successful – even brilliant – battles and coalitions with local warlords and politicians which culminated in the liberation of Peru. In 1824, Bolivar was declared dictator – or, to be precise, “Emperor” – of Peru and commander in chief of its army. Bolivar liked power and its trappings. In the constitution he composed in 1826, he suggested that the president of Bolivia – the name given to the entire region, except Peru – should be appointed for life and should have the right to choose his successor.

This president – presumably, Bolivar – was described unabashedly by Bolivar himself as:

“The sun which, fixed in its orbit, imparts life to the universe. .Upon him rests our entire order, notwithstanding his lack of powers .a life term president, with the power to choose his successor, is the most sublime inspiration amongst republican regimes.”

In a letter to Santander, the Liberator expounded:

“I am convinced, to the very marrow of my bones, that our America can only be ruled through a well-managed, shrewd despotism.”

The National Geographic describes how:

“William Tudor, the American consul at Lima, wrote in 1826 of the ‘deep hypocrisy’ of Bolívar, who allowed himself to be deceived by the ‘crawling, despicable flattery of those about him.’ Later, John Quincy Adams would define Bolívar’s military career as ‘despotic and sanguinary’ and state baldly that ‘he cannot disguise his hankering after a crown.’ In Bogotá the U. S. minister and future president, Gen. William Henry Harrison, accused Bolívar of planning to turn Gran Colombia into a monarchy: ‘Under the mask of patriotism and attachment to liberty, he has really been preparing the means of investing himself with arbitrary power.’ “

When, in 1828, a constitutional convention in Colombia rejected amendments to the constitution that he proposed, Bolivar assumed dictatorial powers in a coup d’etat.

Now, Bolivar was the oppressor. He has murdered, or exiled his political rivals throughout his career. He confiscated church funds and imposed onerous taxes on the populace. Consequently, the “Liberator” faced numerous uprisings and narrowly escaped an assassination attempt. By the time he died he was so despised that the government of Venezuela refused to allow his body onto its soil. It took 12 years of constant petitioning by the family to let his remains be interred in the country that he helped found.

Article Source: http://www.articledashboard.com

Sam Vaknin ( samvak.tripod.com ) is the author of Malignant Self Love – Narcissism Revisited and After the Rain – How the West Lost the East. He served as a columnist for Global Politician, Central Europe Review, PopMatters, Bellaonline, and eBookWeb, a United Press International (UPI) Senior Business Correspondent, and the editor of mental health and Central East Europe categories in The Open Directory and Suite101.

Until recently, he served as the Economic Advisor to the Government of Macedonia.

Visit Sam’s Web site at samvak.tripod.com

Her mother was ambassador to India in the 1960s. She is cherished by all her countrymen.

Moreover, Aung San Suu Kyi is the daughter of an illustrious figure in Burmese history, a national hero – Aung San, who was murdered in 1947.

Aung San may be a hero to the Burmese but he has collaborated with the Japanese war-crime tainted military machine throughout the second world war – though he conveniently switch allegiances to the winning side five months before the Japanese capitulated.

Aung San raised a Burmese contingent – the “Burma Independence Army” – to assist the Japanese in their invasion of Burma in 1942. He was rewarded with the post of minister of defense in Ba Maw’s puppet government (1943-5).

In March 1945, in what amounted to a coup, he opportunistically defected, together with the Burma National Army, to the Allies, and worked closely with the British, whom he hitherto claimed to have been fighting for independence.

When the war was over, he established a private militia, under his commend – the People’s Volunteer Organization. He proceeded to negotiate Burma’s independence from Britain and its first elections. He was murdered – with his brother and four others – probably by a political opponent, U Saw, in 1947.

Article Source: http://www.articledashboard.com

Sam Vaknin ( samvak.tripod.com ) is the author of Malignant Self Love – Narcissism Revisited and After the Rain – How the West Lost the East. He served as a columnist for Global Politician, Central Europe Review, PopMatters, Bellaonline, and eBookWeb, a United Press International (UPI) Senior Business Correspondent, and the editor of mental health and Central East Europe categories in The Open Directory and Suite101.

Until recently, he served as the Economic Advisor to the Government of Macedonia.

Visit Sam’s Web site at samvak.tripod.com

The Republicans did not intend to abolish slavery – just to “contain” it, i.e., limit it to the 15 states where it had already existed. Most of the Democrats accepted this solution.

This led to a schism in the Democratic party. The “fire eaters” left it and established their own pro-secession political organization. Growing constituencies in the south – such as urban immigrants and mountain farmers – opposed slavery as a form of unfair competition. Less than one quarter of southern families owned slaves in 1861. Slave-based, mainly cotton raising, enterprises, were so profitable that slave prices almost doubled in the 1850s. This rendered slaves – as well as land – out of the reach of everyone but the wealthiest citizens.

Cotton represented three fifths of all United States exports in 1860. Southerners, dependent on industrial imports as they were, supported free trade. Northerners were vehement trade protectionists. The federal government derived most of its income from custom duties. Income tax and corporate profit tax were yet to be invented.

The states seceded one by one, following secession conventions and state-wide votes. The Confederacy (Confederate States of America) was born only later. Not all the constituents of the Confederacy seceded at once. Seven – the “core” – seceded between December 20, 1860 and February 1, 1861. They were: South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas.

Another four – Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas – joined them only after the attack on Fort Sumter in April 1861. Two – Kentucky and Missouri – seceded but were controlled by the Union’s army throughout the war. Maryland and Delaware were slave states but did not secede.

President James Buchanan who preceded Abraham Lincoln, made clear that the federal government would not use force to prevent secession. Secession was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court only in 1869 (in Texas vs. White) – four years after the Civil War ended. New England almost seceded in 1812, during the Anglo-American conflict, in order to protect its trade with Britain.

The constitution of the Confederacy prohibited African slave trade (buying slaves from Africa), though it allowed interstate trade in slaves. The first Confederate capital was in Montgomery, Alabama – not in Richmond, Virginia. The term of office of the Confederate president – Jefferson Davis was the first elected – was six years, not four as was the case in the Union.

Fort Sumter was not the first attack of the Confederacy on the Union. It was preceded by attacks on 11 forts and military installations on Confederate territory.

Lincoln won only 40 percent of the popular vote in 1860. Hence the South’s fierce resistance to his abolitionist agenda. In 1864, the Republicans became so unpopular, they had to change their name to the Union Party. Lincoln’s vice-president, Johnson, actually was a Democrat and hailed from Tennessee, a seceding state.

He was the only senator from a seceded state to remain in the Senate.

Reconstruction started long before the war ended, in Union-occupied Louisiana, Arkansas, and Tennessee. Slave tax was an important source of state revenue in the South (up to 60 percent in South Carolina). Emancipation led to near bankruptcy.

The Union states of Connecticut, Minnesota, and Wisconsin refused to pass constitutional amendments to confer suffrage on black males. The Union army consigned black labor gangs to work on the plantations of loyal Southerners and forcibly separated the black workers from their families.

Contrary to myth, nearly two thirds of black families were headed by both parents. Slave marriages were legally meaningless in the antebellum South, though. But nearly 90 percent of slave households remained intact till death or forced separation. The average age of childbirth for women was 20.

Segregation was initiated by blacks. The freedmen lobbied hard and long for separate black churches and educational facilities. Nor was lynching confined to blacks. For instance, a white mob lynched, in September 1862, forty four Union supporters in Gainesville, Texas. Similar events took place in Shelton Laurel, North Carolina. The Ku Klux Klan was the paramilitary arm of the Democratic party in the South, though never officially endorsed by it. It was used to “discipline” the workforce in the plantations – but also targeted Republicans.

The Democrats changed their name after the war to the Conservative Party. By 1877 they have regained power in all formerly Confederate states.

Article Source: http://www.articledashboard.com

Sam Vaknin ( samvak.tripod.com ) is the author of Malignant Self Love – Narcissism Revisited and After the Rain – How the West Lost the East. He served as a columnist for Global Politician, Central Europe Review, PopMatters, Bellaonline, and eBookWeb, a United Press International (UPI) Senior Business Correspondent, and the editor of mental health and Central East Europe categories in The Open Directory and Suite101.

Until recently, he served as the Economic Advisor to the Government of Macedonia.

Visit Sam’s Web site at samvak.tripod.com

Until the middle of the twentieth century, treatment for most inpatients in large state hospitals, like that in Athens, was limited to providing a safe and humane environment. Effective drugs for mental illnesses did not become available until the late 1950s and early 1960s.

In 1936 Egas Moniz, M.D., a Portugese physician who eventually won a Nobel Prize for his work, reported the results of his earliest frontal lobotomies in a French medical journal. Dr. Walter Freeman, a neurologist at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., who had met Dr. Moniz a year earlier, was impressed with the report. Within the same year Dr. Freeman teamed with a neurosurgeon to perform the operation, and over the next decade the partners operated on many more cases. However, Freeman became frustrated with the operationÂ’s limitations. In 1946 he developed an alternative procedure that could be done more quickly, outside an operating room, and without anesthetic drugs.

He used electroconvulsive therapy to produce drugless anesthesia. After the patientÂ’s convulsive movements subsided, Dr. Freeman operated.

Lifting an upper eyelid, he inserted a long, metal pick between the eyeball and the eyelid until it reached the bony roof of the eye-socket. He pounded the pick through the bone into the braincase where it entered a frontal lobe of the brain. He repeated the insertion procedure on the opposite side. Then, using the outer ends of the picks as handles, he made sweeping movements which severed and destroyed the frontal lobes. He finished before the patient awoke from the after-effects of the induced seizure.

Dr. Freeman performed this procedure in state hospitals nationwide that were understaffed, overflowing with patients, and very receptive to any new treatment that held promise. Every state hospital of that era could give electroconvulsive treatment, and the hospital did not have to provide an operating room. A minor procedure room sufficed.

Freeman met with families of patients, explained the risks and benefits of the procedure, and answered questions. Some families consented and others didnÂ’t. Assisted by the local medical staff, and with a succession of patients filing into and out of the procedure room, Freeman typically operated on his entire case-load in just one day. Charging $25 per patient for his services, he departed within a few days for his next destination.

Freeman visited the Athens State Hospital more times than any of the other state hospitals in Ohio. On his first visit in 1953 he was treated as a minor celebrity. The Athens Messenger of November 16 reported his arrival with the headline “Lobotomies to be performed: surgery may relieve mental illness of many patients at state hospital.” A follow-up article on November 20–entitled “Dr. Freeman, pioneer in trans-orbital technique, demonstrates method: lobotomies are performed on 31 Athens State Hospital patients”–
showed pictures of Freeman with the local staff, including Superintendent Charles Creed, Assistant Superintendent Hubert Fockler and Drs. Beatrice Postle Fockler, Wayne Dutton and Genevieve Garrett Dutton.

The surgeries were performed in the Receiving Hospital, a separate building constructed in 1950 which is now the eastern-most portion of the main building.

Wolfhard Baumgaertel, M.D., longtime general practitioner in Albany, Ohio, was present for FreemanÂ’s third visit to Athens in October 1954. Dr. Baumgaertel watched the procedure on the dayÂ’s first patient, and then
provided after-care for this patient and all the others who followed.

Despite his familiarity with surgery, Dr. Baumgaertel recalled being surprised by the procedure, saying, “I do not remember which made me more aghast while watching this–the hammering of the picks into the brain or the simultaneous movement of the picksÂ’ handles in the doctorÂ’s hands.”

Describing his after-care of Freeman’s patients, Dr. Baumgaertel said, “At regular intervals the patients arrived in the recovery room, my domain during this, to me, unknown and incomprehensible event. My main equipment consisted of several suction machines and oxygen, the latter being somewhat unnecessary. Vital signs were monitored until the patient woke up. We had no major complications. Some nasal drainage of cerebral liquor was not considered a problem.

“I do not remember any immediate or late post-operative deaths in the patients I attended to. Most returned to their floors in the asylum within one to two weeks. Of course, none of them were able to recall the event, but there were also no questions. I remember having been surprised to the point of being shaken when I discovered a total absence of wonder on the part of the patients as to what happened to them.”

Geneva Riley, R.N., who was director of nursing at the Athens State Hospital 1975-1993, witnessed the same procedure at another facility. She likened the noise made by the picks to the sound of cloth tearing.

In the mid-1990s the author encountered one of Dr. FreemanÂ’s former patients at Doctors Hospital of Nelsonville in Nelsonville, Ohio. His computed tomographic (CT) scan showed large areas of damage to the frontal lobes. The radiologist, unaware of the patientÂ’s prior history, interpreted the abnormalities as due to strokes.

But the patient and his wife had a different story to tell. Emotionally traumatized by combat in World War II, the man was an inpatient at Athens State Hospital in the 1950s when Dr. Freeman came to town. The patient was functioning at a low level, dropping to the ground at any sudden noise and smoking cigarettes beneath a blanket. His wife agreed to the procedure which was complicated by hemorrhage. Even so, he improved and was discharged from the hospital after three months. For many years he operated heavy equipment without difficulty except for an occasional seizure.

Asked if she had regrets, the patient’s wife said, “No. I still think I made the right decision.”

To see pictures related to this article visit: http://www.cordingleyneurology.com/lobotomiespictures.html

(C) 2005 by Gary Cordingley

Article Source: http://www.articledashboard.com

Gary Cordingley, MD, PhD, is a clinical neurologist, teacher and researcher who works in Athens, Ohio. For more health-related articles see his websites at: www.cordingleyneurology.com and www.neurologyarticles.com

Gorky’s real name was Alexei Maximovich Peshkov. He chose the pseudonym “Gorky” – “bitter” in Russian – to describe his early experiences from the age of eight as a menial worker. In his late teens he attempted suicide. The bullet pierced his lung, rendering him susceptible to Tuberculosis for the rest of his life.

Between 1899 and 1906 Gorky lived in St. Petersburg and participated in the activities of the Social Democratic Party. When it split in 1903, he, indeed, supported the Bolsheviks financially – though he never joined them formally. He was a strong critic of Lenin. Partly to avoid his wrath, he exiled himself to Capri, Italy in 1906.

Moreover, though he upheld the Bolsheviks’ anti-war stance, he opposed the 1917 October Revolution (the Bolshevik coup against the post-Tsarist Social Democratic government). So damaging was his criticism of Lenin’s dictatorial ways and the illegitimacy of the Bolshevik regime that his work was censored from July 1918 onwards.

Gorky left Russia in 1921 and lived in Sorrento, Italy until 1928 when he was lured back by a lavish celebration of his 60th birthday. The year after, he relocated permanently to Russia. In 1938, certain senior Soviet figures – like Nikolai Bukharin and Genrikh Yagoda – were accused of murdering him in 1936, while under medical treatment.

Article Source: http://www.articledashboard.com

Sam Vaknin ( samvak.tripod.com ) is the author of Malignant Self Love – Narcissism Revisited and After the Rain – How the West Lost the East. He served as a columnist for Global Politician, Central Europe Review, PopMatters, Bellaonline, and eBookWeb, a United Press International (UPI) Senior Business Correspondent, and the editor of mental health and Central East Europe categories in The Open Directory and Suite101.

Until recently, he served as the Economic Advisor to the Government of Macedonia.

Visit Sam’s Web site at samvak.tripod.com

Europeans are also accused of importing pathogens, disease causing agents, such as smallpox and measles, malaria and yellow fever. Indigenous people had no immunological resistance to these illnesses as they were never exposed to them.

But recent findings by a team of anthropologists, economists and paleopathologists who have completed a massive study of the health of people living in the Western Hemisphere in the last 7,000 years – suggest that Native American’s health was severely run down long before the Europeans delivered the coup de grace.

The researchers analyzed more than 12,500 skeletons – half of them pre-Columbian – from 65 sites in North and South America for evidence of infections, malnutrition and other health problems.

The study – “The Backbone of History: Health and Nutrition in the Western Hemisphere”, edited by Dr. Richard H. Steckel and Dr. Jerome C. Rose – discovered that the haleness of Native-Americans declined markedly in the 1000 years before Columbus “discovered” them.

The vast majority of the skeletons showed telltale signs of advanced degenerative joint disease, deteriorating dental health, stature, anemia, arrested tissue development, infections and trauma from injuries. These were attributed by the participants to limited diets and urban congestion. People became shorter and died earlier – on average at age 35 – as the centuries passed.

“Pre-Columbian populations were among the healthiest and the least healthy in our sample,” Dr. Steckel and Dr. Rose said. “While pre-Columbian natives may have lived in a disease environment substantially different from that in other parts of the globe, the original inhabitants also brought with them, or evolved with, enough pathogens to create chronic conditions of ill health under conditions of systematic agriculture and urban living.”

Moreover, there are signs that diseases hitherto thought to have been introduced by the white explorers were actually indigenous.1,000-year-old Peruvian mummies, for instance, were found to have been infected with tuberculosis in their lungs.

Article Source: http://www.articledashboard.com

Sam Vaknin ( samvak.tripod.com ) is the author of Malignant Self Love – Narcissism Revisited and After the Rain – How the West Lost the East. He served as a columnist for Global Politician, Central Europe Review, PopMatters, Bellaonline, and eBookWeb, a United Press International (UPI) Senior Business Correspondent, and the editor of mental health and Central East Europe categories in The Open Directory and Suite101.

Until recently, he served as the Economic Advisor to the Government of Macedonia.

Visit Sam’s Web site at samvak.tripod.com