African Industrialization Day 2024 is on Wednesday, November 20, 2024: History Question about industrialization.?

Wednesday, November 20, 2024 is African Industrialization Day 2024. BOAPP Bureau Of African Public

History Question about industrialization.?

Industrial workers and Farmers are the two I will focus on here.

Industrial workers were faced with a change in the way they did their jobs. This is similar to the way we see the workplace today. There are newer technologies coming in and we must adapt to their use. In the best of circumstances, they improve productivity and make the job easier for the employees. In the worst of circumstances, they improve efficiency to the point that workers lose their jobs.

Consider the source of power to run factories. Just for simplicity's sake, think of it as an engine used to turn an axle connected to gears that run a loom. In early days, this factory was placed next to a river, with a millrace built to move a water wheel. This changed in the early nineteenth century to steam power, allowing the factory to be built anywhere, regardless of the availability of water power. This then employed engineers to operate and maintain the steam engine. This requires a knowledge of the science involved in steam power, plus a mechanical ability to repair the equipment that breaks down.

Now, fast forward to the 1870s. Following the war, industry in the north began turning to newer technologies. As newer methods were employed, such as electrical power plants and diesel engines, the science changed, though some of the mechanics remained the same. The changes in these power sources would gradually change those mechanics, requiring fewer people to maintain the machines. This meant people lost their jobs.

For the worker on the factory floor, more technology increased productivity, but often required fewer workers to operate the loom. This also cost people their jobs.

For the factory owner, the goal is to produce goods at a minimum cost and a maximum profit. This is good for the owner, and for his or her stockholders.

For the employee, it requires more flexibility than some are capable of. A factory worker who had a 6th grade education, required to learn a new job, from a manual written for a high school graduate is in a bad spot. He may have worked at that plant for 25 years, and may be only 5 years short of retirement, but he still may face replacement by some youngster with a better education.

The farmer was faced with a different situation. Farm work is hard, and not always dependable. I mean you can always depend on having to work hard, but so much of what you're able to produce depends on forces you can't control. Grasshoppers may destroy your crop, hail may beat the new wheat to the ground and destroy it, rain may come after the wheat is up, saturating the tops of the plants and bending them down on to the wet ground, causing the wheat to rot. A drought may dry up your fields and keep the wheat from growing, or cause it to die before its ready to harvest. A severe drought, on the Plains, once covered in deep rooted grasses, may cause your topsoil to blow away, because you don't have the root structure to keep it in place. This happened in the Dust Bowl.

All of these things frustrated the farmers. They still frustrate the farmers. Seeing their father go through this all of their lives, caused many a young man to go to the city to find his livelihood. What developed in this period is a desire to improve your cash crops. Wheat was a staple crop, but the better you are at growing it, and the better your fellow landsmen are at growing it, the more there is, and the lower the price. This happened year after year, with wheat, cotton, corn, and other cash crops. Eventually, in the thirties, the government came up with a plan to pay farmers not to plant crops, and regulate the amount of a particular crop there was to keep the prices artificially higher.

All the time this is happening, the various factors that affect their income are still active. In the pioneer days, roads were so bad that farmers distilled whisky from grain because they couldn't get corn to market over the roads by wagon. In the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the railroads were there to ship the goods, but the railroads controlled the rates, often buying the grain at their price, and shipping it for the farmer. If the farmer shipped himself, the rates were set so he couldn't make a profit.

Add to this what man is doing to the environment himself. There are a finite amount of nutrients in the soil. Repetition of one crop, year after year, will deplete the soil, causing ever diminishing returns. This happened in the deep South, and all these white farmers, growing cotton every year, were faced with a crisis. So, who do you think showed them how to fix it?

A man named George Washington Carver, doing his research at Tuskegee, discovered that the peanut will reinvigorate soil that's been depleted by cotton, and it does it in one season. It sounds ideal, doesn't it? Well, the problem is a problem of pigment. Dr. Carver was an African American, so he had to show the farmers that it could be done. He bought a plot of cotton land, thoroughly depleted, and planted peanuts on it. he harvested his crops at the end of the season, sold them and then next year, he planted cotton on this used up land. It thrived.

So, this African American scientist, from the "Show Me" state of Missouri (originally) showed all these white farmers how to make their land pay again. Just rotate those crops, every other year, and replenish the soil.

But just in case anyone asks, he didn't invent peanut butter, someone else did.

Why do South African blacks look down upon other African countries?

Why do South African blacks look down upon other African countries?

Basically as you mentioned Blacks in S.Africa has forgotten their old days and their slavery to White Africanas ( Duetch), Other side they also feel proud that South Africans are more civilised and cultured unlike many other Africans with out realising that South Africa has more white Africanas than any other African countries. In directly this may also irritate them.

They feel that are on top of the world as they have a well established country with terms of Industrialisation, employment, oppurtunities, etc...

What year did the African slave trade begin?

What year did the African slave trade begin?

Well, in antiquity, because Africans were enslaving each other and selling their enemies to Arabs long, long ago. Every country has a slave trade in its past; people just make a big deal about slavery in American, I think, because it is a recent example, many people now living know they are descended from slaves, (most of us are, but it is not documented), and, mentioning documentation, the slave trade in the Americas is very well documented.

As an interesting aside, did your teacher ever tell you that the Saxons and the Celts of Britain and Ireland used to raid and enslave each other? In fact, long before he was a saint, or even a Christian, (if you believe such things) Patrick was kidnapped and sold as a slave in Ireland. He escaped and started his religious life and returned to Ireland to punish them for enslaving him by making them become Christian. (The last interpretation was mine. I'm sure he didn't think of it that way, but who knows?)

But, I know that you are talking about the American slave trade because that is all anyone in this country is ever talking about when they mention slavery. I think the transatlantic slave trade probably started in the 1500s and was started by the Spanish and Portugese. They needed people to work their plantations and mines in the Carribean and South America and discovered that the indigenous people, called Indians by them, thanks to Columbus's mistake, were not satisfactory slaves because they kept dying. So they started importing Africans to be their slaves. The English and the Dutch in North America also enslaved Indians when they could, and then imported African slaves. In the early days of the American colonies there was a large slave population in the North, as well as the South, but ultimately the industrialization of the North and the agrarian society of the South tended to encourage the use of slaves more in the South.

I hope this was helpful to you. It was fun for me to write.

Holidays also on this date Wednesday, November 20, 2024...