So for my AP United States History class we have to write a research paper; my topic is the gay rights movement in America. Today I began reading one of the books that I chose as a source
And I opened it up to the dedication page and found this
And if you don’t think that’s one of the sweetest and most romantic things ever then get out of my face
Ok, for the record, the author of this book, Jonathan Rauch, is a friend of my family, I’ve known him since I was a little kid, and I am here to tell you all that he and Michael have been together for 20-odd years now, got married in 2010, and remain to this day obviously, excessively, and adorably in love.
Anyway, they’re cute. Thought y’all would want to know.
I didn’t add explicitly in that little history infodump earlier, but yes that helps illustrate the moral backdrop leading to the gradual development of racialized chattel slavery in British Virginia. Whose system a number of later colonies drew from.
(In short: Divide and conquer tactics to avoid larger scale revolt against the whole abusive setup. And it unfortunately mostly worked.
At the turn of the eighteenth century, Virginia’s rulers faced a problem that no other New World colony had ever faced before, nor ever would again. They had about 15,000 adult colonists. Of these, roughly 9,000 were involuntary laborers. About 7,000 of the 9,000 Virginians held in bondage were of European descent and 2,000 were of Native American and/or African ancestry.17 In order to suppress rebellion, Virginia had to create a free yeoman class virtually overnight. They did not have enough time to grow one. They did not even have time to train one. Somehow, they had to split about 5,000 instantly recognizable yeomen from the total forced-labor population, so as to wind up with just as many Virginians with a stake in suppressing servile insurrection as there were in fomenting it. Again, what was unique was that 7,000 of the 9,000 Virginians held in bondage were Europeans.)
That site has some other interesting essays, BTW.
More history which kinda helps explain why things are how they are now.
[ETA: This also helps illustrate why I have absolutely no patience with the folks who want to bring up the existence of indentured servants they usually have no connection to as some sort of bizarre racist gotcha. That was not a good situation in any way, but things just kept getting so much uglier from that baseline of exploitation.]
Though, things apparently weren’t looking carby enough, so I couldn’t resist getting some of these too 🙄
Guessing they’re trying to invoke the whole “gastropub” experience, but that name still sounds…unfortunate.
They are good enough thick cut oven chips that I’m willing to overlook that, though. Still get amused every time.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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