sharecroppers

Ancient Warrior Culture, Slavery, Concubines, Ancient Greece, Rome, and Israel
History

Ancient Warrior Culture, Blog 1, War, Slaves, and Concubines in Ancient Greece, Rome, and Israel

08/23/2023 Bruce Strom 13

The Greeks were the most formidable fighting force in the Near East. The mighty Persian empire loaded their army on ships to fight what they thought would be an easy victory, but were decisively defeated by Athens and Sparta and their allies both on land and on sea in two separate wars. This established the reputation of the Greeks, later a Persian prince, Cyrus the Younger, hired a Greek hoplite infantry army to fight for the crown of Persia. The Greeks dominated the battle, but Cyrus was killed in the fighting. Losing their patron, the Greeks were forced to fight their way through the Persian Empire back to the Black Sea and then to Greece. This showed that the mighty Persians were vulnerable, later Alexander the Great of Macedon would conquer all of Persia and some of India also.

The Greeks may have been the founders of Western Civilization, but they were first and foremost a warrior society. If the Greeks weren’t formidable warriors they would have been conquered by the mighty Persian Empire, which means that there would be no Socrates, no Plato, no Xenophon, the Greeks would not have been able to leave us a cultural legacy. […]

Benefits and Detriments of Slavery in the Deep South
Civil Rights

Benefits and Detriments of Slavery in the Deep South

07/28/2023 Bruce Strom 0

There was one very real benefit of slavery to the enslaved in the Deep South. Before the Civil War, slaves were far less likely to be lynched or killed than were freed slaves after the war. The reason for this was simple: it is illegal to damage someone’s property, and slaves were extremely valuable. Slaves were the most valuable asset class in America before the Civil War. Before the Civil War, a slave was worth as much as an economy car is worth today. […]

Civil Rights

Slavery By Another Name, Convict Labor in the Jim Crow Deep South

08/12/2022 Bruce Strom 0

In this blog we will reflect on the Pulitzer Prize winning book by Douglas Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name, with the subtitle, The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II. This book documents both on an individual level and historically how the convict labor system worked in the Deep South. These convict labor camps were often every bit as brutal as the Siberian gulag labor camps in Russia under Stalin, in both systems many of the prisoners died from overwork, neglect, abuse, and starvation. […]

Civil Rights

WEB Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk, Essays on Alexander Crummel, Black Episcopal Priest, and Sharecropping

08/10/2022 Bruce Strom 0

How does WEB Dubois start his essay on the life of Alexander Crummell? By how he confronted the temptations and doubts that faced all talented black men in a time when whites could not comprehend that a black man could actually be a true intellectual, that he could think independently of his white overlords. WEB starts his essay, “This is the history of a human heart, the tale of a black boy who” “struggled with life that he might know the world and know himself,” fulfilling the instructions written on the Temple of Delphi so many millennia ago. […]