Research has shown that historical levels of slavery have an adverse impact on contemporary economic development in the U.S., including income inequality and education. This paper assesses the relationship between slavery and intergenerational mobility, both in the past and at present. We first use the IPUMS Linked Representative Samples between 1860-1910 to show two things: 1) intergenerationa...

The so-called unitarian (or unicist) concept of treponematosis emphasizes the evolutionary relationship of yaws, pinta, endemic syphilis, and sporadic syphilis, regarding them all as varieties or syndromes of one disease caused by one parasite, Treponema pallidum (Hudson, 1946). The unitarian view accepts the fact that there is no known test by which the parasites of these treponemal infections...

The article introduces Ilha Grande, a district in the municipality of Angra dos Reis, and describes its role within the subsistence market economy and the memory of slavery as found in the Angra dos Reis Civil Records. According to the Almanaque Laemmert, this district had the largest number of slaves in the municipality as of the 1870s. Most owners had few slaves, and the majority of landholdi...

Why did Cuba fail to become independent early in the nineteenth century, at the same time as most countries in Latin America? We will argue that economic and political incentives led the same segments of society that fought for independence elsewhere to prefer remaining a colony in Cuba. We show that economic conditions, slavery and a special relation with Spain TOGETHER led to the delay of ind...

Loic Wacquant applies Orlando Patterson’s seminal socio-historical work on slavery to compare historical conditions of African American enslavement to present conditions of imprisoned African Americans. Patterson argued that a condition of enslavement must meet the following criteria: natal alienation, violent subordination and general disshonorment. Wacquant breaks down the experience of Afric...

Morrison’s Song of Solomon could be viewed as a paragon of trauma fiction. Since no narrative of trauma can be told in a linear way, Morrison tries to depict the overwhelming power of trauma through a non-linear narrative, episodic delivery, and flashbacks. Accordingly, the readers are compelled to concoct the disjointed and fragmented memories in order to solve the riddle of the text, in which...

My goal in this paper is to shed light on how moral progress actually occurs. I begin by restating a conception of moral progress that I set out in previous work, the BNaïve Conception,^ and explain how it comports with various normative and metaethical views. I go on to develop an index of moral progress and show how judgments about moral progress can be made. I then discuss an example of mora...

After the Dred Scott decision in 1857, Abraham Lincoln embarked on a public campaign to prevent the expansion of slavery in the federal territories. Lincoln’s opposition to Dred Scott was, however, bound up with a certain theoretical orientation that is often rejected in the general milieu of modern constitutional theory. Within the context of two recent revisionist accounts of slavery and Amer...