I always find that sharing those little tedious details is what creates visceral understanding of a situation. In this case, the true horror of being a liberated Black person in the 1800s and having to relentlessly work to rescue others, while surrounded by people who truly don't care.
On a lighter note, I use the same approach in understanding user needs as a product builder. I focus on letting people share the minutiae of their day rather than have them editorialize the big topics. By doing so, I get a lot of visceral insight and intuition.
Thanks for sharing this. I really enjoyed reading it.
mncharity 2 days ago [-]
tfa> The streets of New York were famously the filthiest in the United States, too, lined with privies piled high, which overflowed into the streets. Loose pigs and dogs snuffled in the mire.
One of my visceral touchstones for early New York: All through the winter, excrement would accumulate, frozen in the streets. Then would come the spring thaw. Even New Yorkers found it notable. It would take several weeks, for hordes of ultimately-fat pigs, to consume that... bounty.
More on topic, I was years ago viscerally struck by a letter from a 1700's British officer embedded with an American militia. He was clearly gobsmacked - the American officer was... was talking with his men, and... asking the men what they thought!?!
Perhaps we might teach history as a "travel guide for the time traveler"? "Finding yourself in NY in December of 1836, ..."
Nice thought on user interviews.
Neonlicht 2 days ago [-]
Apparently Edo (now Tokyo) had a population of one million in the 18th century.
Always amazed me how they could pull that off. Japan was a very regulated society which must have helped with the chaos but Japanese people go to the toilet just like everyone else...
mncharity 2 days ago [-]
Interesing.[1] Looks like governance (better water supply, sanitation, lower density, a "polluted" caste[2]), intensive agriculture making night soil valuable fertilizer instead of city-as-cesspit waste, and domestic culture (cooking/boiling, cleanliness). The night soil diversion seems to have kept toilets out of sewers/water into the 1900s.
The problem with the old "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing" quote of uncertain provenance is that it leaves out most of the population: the people who truly don't care.
01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2 days ago [-]
"One-third of your population wants to kill another third, and the last third won't try to stop them"
Clippybara 2 days ago [-]
This was a great example for the point that the author is trying to make. The fact that after all that effort, Ruggles was only able to free 2 out of 5 enslaved men is apropos. His victory was incomplete, incremental at best, and nearly got him enslaved again as well, but it was still a victory and it counted, especially for the two men that did get their freedom.
Shout-out to a grindset abolitionist!
flocciput 2 days ago [-]
> Finally, on Christmas Eve, a group of armed black New Yorkers (reportedly not including Ruggles) boarded the brig Brilliante and managed to rescue two of the men.
This sentence kind of contradicts the author's point though? After all that tedious work within the legal system it wasn't even procedure that got any of these men freed, but actual direct action.
triceratops 2 days ago [-]
If anything it reinforces it. Imagine grinding away at a tiresome game, selecting each move perfectly, yet mostly losing. The few Ws you do eke out are often the result of external forces you had no control over. And doing that all your life.
Doing the right thing even when your actions don't matter, when you'll probably fail, and when most people won't thank you for it, is possibly the purest form of heroism.
delichon 2 days ago [-]
Here's a great candidate to stand on one of those empty plinths. The inscription could be "Social Justice Warrior" to return some valor to the epigram.
stronglikedan 2 days ago [-]
lol, there was never any valor associated with it to begin with
p3rls 1 days ago [-]
Etymologically it seems to have emerged independently (that is, leftists really meant it in earnest) and then converged into the same space as the pejorative "keyboard warrior" around the mid 2010s.
isleyaardvark 2 days ago [-]
If you enjoyed this article you would enjoy the book “The Kidnapping Club” by Jonathan Daniel Wells. It covers the history of pre-Civil War New York. (As the title suggests, the bit in the article about “probably have kidnapped him and sold him into slavery” was more common than you might think.)
JackFr 2 days ago [-]
I loved the article. This is a truly minor nitpick - he really wasn’t walking that far. As most of the streets and street names in lower Manhattan are the same you can mark the spots on Google maps and see the distances. None of the trips are more than a mile and many less. Someone running the same errands today would most likely walk too.
I work in the neighborhood though so it’s wild to imagine all that going down on the same streets I walk to work on.
shermantanktop 2 days ago [-]
18" of horse and human excrement covered with ice would probably make it a different experience to walk a mile.
mdnahas 23 hours ago [-]
I've been in the trenches trying to change housing policy in Austin and the description in this article is very real to me. It has taken my group, AURA, years to learn the ropes of local politics: what specific policy we want, who has control over that policy, and how to influence those people. It took us 6+ years, but we've elected a pro-housing City Council and are getting laws passed. Elections can be fun competitions, but most of advocacy is slow and boring and often feels like running in a labyrinth or torture with tedium.
The police reform groups have more difficulty. The police union is a well-funded well-organized opposition. The reform groups have a lot of public support, but it has been a long difficult slog. They were forced to passed their laws by ballot measure and, even after they pass, it is a struggle to get the city's staff and police to implement them! As I said, David Ruggles's work to get govt employees to actually do their job feels very real to me.
I think that’s one beautiful aspect of the scene in Schindlers list when they are agonizing over the list of names in tedious detail. It’s rare that this kind of work is dramatized without altering its quotidien nature.
treetalker 2 days ago [-]
Another high-quality source that I had never heard of but can now add to my RSS feed! Thank you!
Rendered at 17:51:07 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
On a lighter note, I use the same approach in understanding user needs as a product builder. I focus on letting people share the minutiae of their day rather than have them editorialize the big topics. By doing so, I get a lot of visceral insight and intuition.
Thanks for sharing this. I really enjoyed reading it.
One of my visceral touchstones for early New York: All through the winter, excrement would accumulate, frozen in the streets. Then would come the spring thaw. Even New Yorkers found it notable. It would take several weeks, for hordes of ultimately-fat pigs, to consume that... bounty.
More on topic, I was years ago viscerally struck by a letter from a 1700's British officer embedded with an American militia. He was clearly gobsmacked - the American officer was... was talking with his men, and... asking the men what they thought!?!
Perhaps we might teach history as a "travel guide for the time traveler"? "Finding yourself in NY in December of 1836, ..."
Nice thought on user interviews.
Always amazed me how they could pull that off. Japan was a very regulated society which must have helped with the chaos but Japanese people go to the toilet just like everyone else...
[1] https://wjsmith.faculty.unlv.edu/smithtest/Urban-Sanitation_... (1987) [2] off topic but interesting https://www.academia.edu/download/34028214/The_Creation_of_t...
[1] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C33&q=Gro...
The problem with the old "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing" quote of uncertain provenance is that it leaves out most of the population: the people who truly don't care.
Shout-out to a grindset abolitionist!
This sentence kind of contradicts the author's point though? After all that tedious work within the legal system it wasn't even procedure that got any of these men freed, but actual direct action.
Doing the right thing even when your actions don't matter, when you'll probably fail, and when most people won't thank you for it, is possibly the purest form of heroism.
I work in the neighborhood though so it’s wild to imagine all that going down on the same streets I walk to work on.
The police reform groups have more difficulty. The police union is a well-funded well-organized opposition. The reform groups have a lot of public support, but it has been a long difficult slog. They were forced to passed their laws by ballot measure and, even after they pass, it is a struggle to get the city's staff and police to implement them! As I said, David Ruggles's work to get govt employees to actually do their job feels very real to me.