Yet again I must commend Martyr Made to the assembled. His history of The Peculiar Institution gives a pretty horrifying exploration of the experiences of the white indentured servants in Jamestown before Virginia later began using Africans as slaves. Most cruelties we are familiar with in slavery were practiced first on indentured serva…
Yet again I must commend Martyr Made to the assembled. His history of The Peculiar Institution gives a pretty horrifying exploration of the experiences of the white indentured servants in Jamestown before Virginia later began using Africans as slaves. Most cruelties we are familiar with in slavery were practiced first on indentured servants, whose survival rate in the beginning was far worse than that of black slaves.
In every place at every time there are good people and bad people, and smart parents and stupid ones. As just an ordinary person unaffiliated with any organization or program, when I visited a poor Punjabi village in the early '80s, the women asked me about birth control because they figured a Western woman would have had access to more information than they did.
But the friend who brought me there to his family's home district used to joke about wanting a full dozen kids as he worked on the first half of that number. It took our boss's wife (my friend was the office electrician; I'd found my job there locally though it was an international engineering project) to insist on getting my friend's wife sterilized after she delivered the family's seventh kid, who died not long after, since the mom was pretty depleted of strength by then.
And that man was in other things a pretty smart guy, and he persuaded our boss's wife to pay for school fees for his older kids. But he didn't even have a fixed home of his own and still loved making his wife produce babies.
Yet again I must commend Martyr Made to the assembled. His history of The Peculiar Institution gives a pretty horrifying exploration of the experiences of the white indentured servants in Jamestown before Virginia later began using Africans as slaves. Most cruelties we are familiar with in slavery were practiced first on indentured servants, whose survival rate in the beginning was far worse than that of black slaves.
In every place at every time there are good people and bad people, and smart parents and stupid ones. As just an ordinary person unaffiliated with any organization or program, when I visited a poor Punjabi village in the early '80s, the women asked me about birth control because they figured a Western woman would have had access to more information than they did.
But the friend who brought me there to his family's home district used to joke about wanting a full dozen kids as he worked on the first half of that number. It took our boss's wife (my friend was the office electrician; I'd found my job there locally though it was an international engineering project) to insist on getting my friend's wife sterilized after she delivered the family's seventh kid, who died not long after, since the mom was pretty depleted of strength by then.
And that man was in other things a pretty smart guy, and he persuaded our boss's wife to pay for school fees for his older kids. But he didn't even have a fixed home of his own and still loved making his wife produce babies.