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Mansa Musa was the ruler of the Mali Empire in West Africa. Details recorded here should be sourced; unknown information is left blank.
MORE →Reflects the personal views, recollections, and perspective of the author, Mike Davis.
This is a personal recollection on the Move fire on May 13, 1985
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| Forced labour and slavery |
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Booi Aha (Manchu: ᠪᠣᠣᡳ ᠨᡳᠶᠠᠯᠮᠠ (booi niyalma) for male, ᠪᠣᠣᡳ ᡥᡝᡥᡝ (booi hehe) for female; Chinese transliteration: 包衣阿哈) is a Manchu word literally meaning "household person", referring to hereditarily servile people in the Eight Banner system in 17th-century Qing China. It is often directly translated as "bondservant", although sometimes also simply rendered as the common word, slave, or more specifically within Chinese social and political context as nucai.
They were largely divided into three categories[1][2][3] translated into English:
According to Mark C. Elliott, the word "booi" could be confusing due to the absence of a proper Chinese word having the same meaning. The Manchu phrase literally means "of the household", but calling booi aha "slaves" conveys the wrong meaning. The reason is that there is no corresponding social status in Chinese society for booi, who often served in powerful positions and were sometimes intimates of the emperor.[5]
As a compromise in Chinese they were called "bao-yi", but this caused further misunderstanding. In Manchu documents, booi only sometimes means "bond servant", and despite the common belief it can simply refer to "people to my house" in some occasions.[5]
Pamela Kyle Crossley wrote in her book Orphan Warriors: "The Mongol is the slave of his sovereign. He is never free. His sovereign is his benefactor; [the Mongol] does not serve him for money." This Mongolian "traditional model of slave to owner" was taken up by the Manchu during the development of the Eight Banner military system.[6]
Crossley gave as the definition of Manchu: "A Manchu was, moreover, a man who used his skills exclusively to serve the sovereign....banners as institutions were derived from Turkic and Mongolian forms of military servitude, all enrolled under the banners considered themselves slaves of the emperor and called themselves so (aha, Chinese: 奴才; pinyin: nucai) when addressing him...".[6]
Booi was sometimes regarded as synonymous with booi aha, but booi usually referred to household servants who performed domestic service, whereas aha usually referred to the servile people who worked in fields.[7]
Manchu families adopted Han Chinese sons from families of bondservant Booi Aha origin and they served in Manchu company registers as detached household Manchus and the Qing imperial court found this out in 1729. Manchu Bannermen who needed money helped falsify registration for Han Chinese servants being adopted into the Manchu banners and Manchu families who lacked sons were allowed to adopt their servant's sons or servants themselves.[8]
The Manchu families were paid to adopt Han Chinese sons from bondservant families by those families. The Qing Imperial Guard captain Batu was furious at the Manchus who adopted Han Chinese as their sons from slave and bondservant families in exchange for money and expressed his displeasure at them adopting Han Chinese instead of other Manchus.[9]
These Han Chinese who infiltrated the Manchu Banners by adoption were known as "secondary-status bannermen" and "false Manchus" or "separate-register Manchus", and there were eventually so many of these Han Chinese that they took over military positions in the Banners which should have been reserved for Manchus. Han Chinese foster-son and separate register bannermen made up 800 out of 1,600 soldiers of the Mongol Banners and Manchu Banners of Hangzhou in 1740 which was nearly 50%. Han Chinese foster-son made up 220 out of 1,600 unsalaried troops at Jingzhou in 1747 and an assortment of Han Chinese separate-register, Mongol, and Manchu bannermen were the remainder. Han Chinese secondary status bannermen made up 180 of 3,600 troop households in Ningxia while Han Chinese separate registers made up 380 out of 2,700 Manchu soldiers in Liangzhou.
The result of these Han Chinese fake Manchus taking up military positions resulted in many legitimate Manchus being deprived of their rightful positions as soldiers in the Banner armies, resulting in the real Manchus unable to receive their salaries as Han Chinese infiltrators in the banners stole their social and economic status and rights. These Han Chinese infiltrators were said to be good military troops and their skills at marching and archery were up to par so that the Zhapu lieutenant general couldn't differentiate them from true Manchus in terms of military skills.[10]
Manchu Banners contained a lot of "false Manchus" who were from Han Chinese civilian families but were adopted by Manchu bannermen after the Yongzheng reign. The Jingkou and Jiangning Mongol banners and Manchu Banners had 1,795 adopted Han Chinese and the Beijing Mongol Banners and Manchu Banners had 2,400 adopted Han Chinese in statistics taken from the 1821 census.
Despite Qing attempts to differentiate adopted Han Chinese from normal Manchu bannermen the differences between them became hazy.[11] These adopted Han Chinese bondservants who managed to get themselves onto Manchu banner roles were called kaihu ren (開戶人) in Chinese and dangse faksalaha urse in Manchu. Normal Manchus were called jingkini Manjusa.
依照清初典制,只有八旗滿洲才有包衣,八旗蒙古和漢軍則無,各旗包衣主要分成滿洲佐領、旗鼓佐領、管領下人以及莊頭人等類型,其中旗鼓佐領多為漢人,且大部分集中在上三旗。
Source: Wikipedia. Article content is retrieved live through the MediaWiki API.
Booi Aha (Manchu: ᠪᠣᠣᡳ ᠨᡳᠶᠠᠯᠮᠠ (booi niyalma) for male, ᠪᠣᠣᡳ ᡥᡝᡥᡝ (booi hehe) for female; Chinese transliteration: 包衣阿哈) is a Manchu word literally meaning "household person", referring to hereditarily servile people in the Eight Banner system in 17th-century Qing China. It is often directly translated as "bondservant", although sometimes also simply rendered as the common word, slave, or more specifically within Chinese social and political context as nucai. They were largely divided into three categories translated into English: company servants (Chinese: 佐領下人; Chinese: zuǒlǐng xiàrén) half-company servants (Chinese: 管領下人; Chinese: guǎnlǐng xiàrén) estate bannermen (Chinese: 莊頭旗人; Chinese: zhuāngtóu qírén)
Solomon Northup (July 10, c. 1807/1808 — unknown; after 1857) was an American abolitionist and the primary author of the memoir Twelve Years a Slave. A free-born American of mixed race from New York, he was the son of a freed slave and a free woman of color. Northup was a professional violinist, farmer, and landowner in Washington County, New York. In 1841, he was offered a traveling musician's job and went to Washington, D.C. (where slavery was legal); there, he was drugged and kidnapped into slavery. He was shipped to New Orleans on April 24, 1841 by James H. Birch aboard the Brig Orleans from Richmond, VA. Northup was purchased by a planter and held as a slave for nearly twelve years in the Red River region of Louisiana; mostly in Avoyelles Parish. He remained enslaved until he met Samuel Bass, a Canadian working on his plantation who helped get word to New York, where state law provided aid to free New York citizens who had been kidnapped and sold into slavery. His family and friends enlisted the aid of the governor of New York, Washington Hunt, and Northup regained his freedom on January 3, 1853. The slave trader in Washington, D.C., James H. Birch, was arrested and tried, but acquitted because District of Columbia law at the time prohibited Northup as a black man from testifying against white people. Later, in New York State, his northern kidnappers were located and charged, but the case was tied up in court for two years because of jurisdictional challenges and finally dropped when Washington, D.C. was found to have jurisdiction. The D.C. government did not pursue the case. Those who had kidnapped and enslaved Northup received no punishment. In his first year of freedom, Northup wrote and published a memoir, Twelve Years a Slave (1853). He lectured on behalf of the abolitionist movement, giving more than two dozen speeches throughout the Northeast about his experiences, to build momentum against slavery. He largely disappeared from the historical record after 1857, although a letter later reported him alive in early 1863. Some commentators thought he had been kidnapped again, but historians believe it unlikely, as he would have been considered too old to bring a good price. The details of his death have never been documented. Northup's memoir was adapted and produced as the 1984 television film Solomon Northup's Odyssey and the 2013 feature film 12 Years a Slave. The latter won three Academy Awards, including Best Picture, at the 86th Academy Awards.
The Underground Railroad was an organized network of secret routes and safe houses for fugitive slaves to escape to the abolitionist Northern United States and Eastern Canada during the era of slavery in the United States. Slaves escaped from slavery as early as the 16th century; many of their escapes were unaided. However, a network of safe houses generally known as the Underground Railroad began to organize in the 1780s among abolitionist societies in the North. It ran north and grew steadily until President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. The escapees sought primarily to escape into free states or into Canada. The Underground Railroad started at the place of enslavement. The routes followed natural and man-made modes of transportation: rivers, canals, bays, the Atlantic Coast, ferries and river crossings, roads and trails. Locations close to ports, free territories, and international boundaries prompted many escapes. The network, primarily the work of free and enslaved African Americans, was assisted by abolitionists and other individuals sympathetic to the cause of the escapees. The slaves who risked capture and those who aided them were collectively referred to as the passengers and conductors of the Railroad, respectively. Various other routes led to Mexico, where slavery had been abolished, and to islands in the Caribbean that were not part of the slave trade. An earlier escape route running south toward Florida, then a Spanish possession (except 1763–1783), existed from the late 17th century until approximately 1790. During the American Civil War, freedom seekers escaped to Union lines in the South to obtain their freedom. One estimate suggests that by 1850, approximately 100,000 slaves had escaped to freedom via the network. According to former professor of Pan-African studies J. Blaine Hudson, who was dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Louisville, by the end of the Civil War, 500,000 or more African Americans had self-emancipated from slavery using the Underground Railroad.
Harriet Tubman (born Araminta Ross, c. March 1822 – March 10, 1913) was an American abolitionist and social activist. After escaping slavery, Tubman made some 13 missions to rescue approximately 70 enslaved people, including her family and friends, using the network of antislavery activists and safe houses known collectively as the Underground Railroad. During the American Civil War, she served as an armed scout and spy for the Union Army. In her later years, Tubman was an activist in the movement for women's suffrage. Born into slavery in Dorchester County, Maryland, Tubman was beaten and whipped by enslavers as a child. Early in life, she suffered a traumatic head wound when an irate overseer threw a heavy metal weight, intending to hit another slave, but hit her instead. The injury caused dizziness, pain, and spells of hypersomnia, which occurred throughout her life. After her injury, Tubman began experiencing strange visions and vivid dreams, which she ascribed to premonitions from God. These experiences, combined with her Methodist upbringing, led her to become devoutly religious. In 1849 Tubman escaped to Philadelphia, only to return to Maryland to rescue her family soon after. Slowly, one group at a time, she brought relatives with her out of the state, guiding dozens of other enslaved people to freedom. Tubman (or "Moses", as she was called) traveled by night and in extreme secrecy, and she later said she "never lost a passenger". After the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was passed, she helped guide escapees farther north into British North America (Canada) and helped newly freed people find work. Tubman met John Brown in 1858 and helped him plan and recruit supporters for his 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry. When the Civil War began, Tubman worked for the Union Army, first as a cook and nurse and then as an armed scout and spy. For her guidance of the raid at Combahee Ferry, which liberated more than 700 enslaved people, she is widely credited as the first woman to lead an armed military operation in the United States. After the war, she retired to the family home on property she had purchased in 1859 in Auburn, New York, where she cared for her aging parents. She was active in the women's suffrage movement until illness overtook her and she was admitted to a home for elderly African Americans, which she had helped establish years earlier. Tubman is commonly viewed as an icon of courage and freedom.
Before the 1921 destruction of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, Black residents had created a remarkable center of business and community life. The district included stores, professional offices, entertainment venues and homes owned by Black citizens. Understanding Greenwood means learning what was built—not only what was burned.
MORE →Madam C.J. Walker