This week we are introducing a new Atlas Intellectuals course on Slavery. Let’s see this DML on Frederick Douglass: “Socialism Is Slavery Of All To All” After escaping from slavery in Maryland, Douglass became a national leader of the abolitionist movement in Massachusetts and New York, gaining prestige for his oratory and critical writing against […]
DML: Frederick Douglass [Atlas Intellectuals] Read More »
We’re now posting serially at thinkspot the notes and transcripts of my Open College podcasts. Here’s the nineteenth: Professor Henry Louis Gates, Chair of African and African-American Studies at Harvard University wrote: “without complex business partnerships between African elites and European traders and commercial agents, the slave trade to the New World would have been
The Stain of Slavery [Open College notes] Read More »
In preparation for my Saturday livestream lecture at thinkspot (Slavery: Who Deserves *Credit* for Ending It), here’s a sobering-but-fascinating three-minute animated video of where the slaves went. URL: http://www.slate.com/articles/life/the_history_of_american_slavery/2015/06/animated_interactive_of_the_history_of_the_atlantic_slave_trade.html Information about Saturday: The horrors of slavery get much deserved attention, and slavery’s legacy remains as an important lesson — as well as a contentious feeder
Where the Slaves Went — transatlantic animation Read More »
“I devoutly believe,” the philosopher William James said, “in the gradual advent of some sort of socialistic equilibrium.” What does that require of us as citizens? That we feel “conscious of our work as an obligatory service to the state. We should be owned, as soldiers are by the army …” [emphasis in the original].
Wm. James on socialism and slavery Read More »
A new episode of my podcast series, produced by Possibly Correct out of Toronto. Audio: iTunes Stitcher YouTube Topics and times: The decline of slavery as a moral achievement // History: Slavery practiced everywhere before modernity // The internal African slave society and trades // The Atlantic trade and where the slaves went // Early
The Stain of Slavery [Open College] Read More »
The Tale of the Slave By Robert Nozick Robert Nozick was Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University. Consider the following sequence of cases, which we shall call the Tale of the Slave, and imagine it is about you. 1. There is a slave completely at the mercy of his brutal master’s whims. He often is
Nozick’s Tale of the Slave [excerpt] Read More »
Frederick Douglass’s connection to the British Enlightenment. Via David Henderson and David Beito, here is an excerpt from a letter Douglass wrote on November 17, 1864: “The old doctrine that the slavery of the black, is essential to the freedom of the white race, can maintain itself only in the presence of slavery, where interest
Frederick Douglass and Adam Smith Read More »