Modern History (1800 – present)

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This Christmas, Remembering Sam Sharpe and the Baptist War in Jamaica
by Kristen Thomason
December 21, 2023

Introduction:

(Baptist News Global) “I would rather die upon yonder gallows than to live in slavery.”

Sam Sharpe wrote these words in a letter to the British Parliament from his jail cell in Jamaica. Sharpe, a Baptist deacon and lay preacher, faced execution for organizing and leading a rebellion of 60,000 enslaved persons — the largest such revolt in the British Caribbean.

The rebellion began the day after Christmas in 1831 and brought about the end of slavery in the empire. It became known as the Baptist War.

Sharpe was born in 1801 to an enslaved mother. She was one of 300,000 Africans in Jamaica laboring on sugar cane plantations to satisfy the British sweet tooth. The enslaved outnumbered the white plantocracy in Jamaica 12 to 1.

Conclusion:

There is still much work to be done. But Sam Sharpe and William Knibb show what is possible when Christians preach and live with conviction the gospel that sets all people free.

Read more here: https://baptistnews.com/article/this-c ... jamaica


Destruction of the Roehampton Estate, January 1832
Public domain image, Painting by Adolphe Duperly

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ELIZA, one of the very first chatbots, programmed from 1964–1967. https://web.njit.edu/~ronkowit/eliza.html

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Documents Show Fossil Fuel Industry Knew of Climate Danger as Early as 1954
by Oliver Milman
January 30, 2024

Introduction:

(The Guardian) The fossil fuel industry funded some of the world’s most foundational climate science as early as 1954, newly unearthed documents have shown, including the early research of Charles Keeling, famous for the so-called “Keeling curve” that has charted the upward march of the Earth’s carbon dioxide levels.

A coalition of oil and car manufacturing interests provided $13,814 (about $158,000 in today’s money) in December 1954 to fund Keeling’s earliest work in measuring CO2 levels across the western US, the documents reveal.

Additional Extract:

The fossil fuel interests backed a group, known as the Air Pollution Foundation, that issued funding to Keeling to measure CO2 alongside a related effort to research the smog that regularly blighted Los Angeles at the time. This is earlier than any previously known climate research funded by oil companies.

“The possible consequences of a changing concentration of the CO2 in the atmosphere with reference to climate, rates of photosynthesis, and rates of equilibration with carbonate of the oceans may ultimately prove of considerable significance to civilization,” Epstein, a researcher at the California Institute of Technology (or Caltech), wrote to the group in November 1954.
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They contain smoking gun proof that by at least 1954, the fossil fuel industry was on notice about the potential for its products to disrupt Earth’s climate on a scale significant to human civilization,” said Geoffrey Supran, an expert in historic climate disinformation at the University of Miami.

Read more here: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/20 ... e-denial

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Shipwreck hunters stunned by discovery at bottom of world’s largest freshwater lake

3 minutes ago

Shipwreck hunters were stunned to find a ship that sank in Lake Superior, the world’s largest freshwater lake, that dated back to 1940.

The Great Lakes Shipwreck Historical Society and shipwreck researcher Dan Fountain announced on Monday the discovery of the 244ft (74-metre) bulk carrier Arlington in about 650ft (200 metres) of water some 35 miles north of Michigan’s Keweenaw peninsula.

The Arlington left Port Arthur, Ontario, on 30 April 1940, fully loaded with wheat and headed to Owen Sound, Ontario, under the command of Captain Frederick “Tatey Bug” Burke, a veteran of the Great Lakes.

But as the Arlington and a larger freighter, the Collingwood, made their way across Lake Superior, they encountered dense fog and then a storm after nightfall that battered both ships. The Arlington began to take on water.

The ship's first mate ordered the Arlington onto a course to hug the Canadian north shore, which would have provided some cover from wind and waves, but Burke countermanded and ordered his ship back onto a course across the open lake, the discoverers said.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/scie ... 95249.html