(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . History Nugget: Slavery was verifiably worse than the Irish Potato Famine [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2023-07-21 I wasn’t planning on writing today as I’m really bombed work-wise, but after seeing the FL Department of Education’s attempts at whitewashing of slavery, I just wanted to drop a quick historical note today. It should hardly need to be said that American slavery was indefensible and horrid, but apparently it needs to be said in this day and age of fascist white supremacist resurgence and revisionism. One of the most powerful historical papers I’ve ever read is written by a Professor of Economic History at The Ohio State University, Dr. Richard Steckel. Titled “A Peculiar Population: The Nutrition, Health, and Mortality of American Slaves from Childhood to Maturity” it looks at, from an economic perspective, how children of American slavery were treated in the mid-19th century. Dr. Steckel is world renown for his work on looking at links between height and economic prosperity. One challenge to economic historians has been the fact that reliable statistics on the economic wealth of past populations and nations are seen as much more unreliable before around 1960, and extremely difficult to analyze prior to around 1920. Dr. Steckel began analyzing contemporary data and demonstrated a close correlation between population height and average income and income inequality for populations. In particular, the data showed a close correlation between societal investment in the welfare of children and adult height in populations, explaining around 4-5 inches of height differences between different populations. There is strong evidence this holds true for historical populations. For example, Dr. Steckel’s research demonstrated that French nobility stood approximately four inches taller on average than French peasantry—explaining in part why beyond dress or other signals of social status, why many aristrocrats may have physically looked entirely different from their common born peers. This evidence held up to historical scrutiny over time. Investigations of skeletal remains reflects major changes particularly among child deaths during and following famines, where juveniles in past centuries that experience famines are measurably and statistically significantly shorter than their peers who grew up during prosperous times. The worse the famine, the worse the impact on the heights of the children that lived through the famine. Though there is a catch-up effect when the famine recedes, even adults who lived through famines tend to not recover entirely and show measurable famine-effects decades later. One of the worst famine effects Dr. Steckel’s studies encountered were children of the Irish Potato Famine. Dr. Steckel began looking into American slavery in response to some economists asserting the idea that American slaves must have been relatively well fed and cared for, as economic investments by their owners. the idea being, much as an owner of a car will maintain. conduct oil changes and provide gasoline for their vehicle, it doesn’t make sense for an owner of a slave to neglect the slave’s health. Dr. Steckel intuited that American slave children, particularly those too young to provide labor value, might have been subjected to the worst treatment. The results of the study were, frankly, horrifying. Dr. Steckel’s found that there was something to the idea that slaves of working age, between ages of 12-14 begin showing signs of decent nutrition, quickly growing reflecting an investment of resources. However, slave children younger than the age of 12 averaged under the first percentile of their 19th century American peers. Consistently. Slave children in the American South were shorter than any other sustained measurable free population comparative to other societies in even the most impoverished nations, historical or modern. The only comparative population that Dr. Steckel’s research could compare them to was children of the Irish Potato Famine. In other words, every American slave that was born and raised grew up year after year for decades and centuries in conditions comparative to Irish children during the Potato Famine—except this lasted not for four years, but over two centuries. [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/7/21/2182667/-History-Nugget-Slavery-was-as-bad-as-the-Irish-Potato-Famine Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/