Word: shipping
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Spam--unsolicited junk E-mail--is perhaps the most irritating feature of online life. Its purveyors use powerful software to "harvest" screen names and then ship out bulk electronic mail bearing sales pitches or get-rich-quick schemes. But erotic spam is more than just irritating. It is offensive to many, and if there are young kids in the house, it can be downright scary. Children may not be that interested in getting rich quick, but they may be tempted to peek at an X-rated Website. And while that is reasonably easy to do in any case...
...when Ball walks to the end of a pier where the sulfur smell of marsh grass rises, as rank as the tale he unspools. An estimated 40% of American slaves arrived first at this spot. Confused, terrified, usually sick, they spent two weeks quarantined in "pest houses" or onboard ship. Those who got better sailed on to Charleston and bondage. Those who didn't turned the island into a mass grave. "This ground is soaked in blood," says Ball...
...there is a spate of new books focused on slaves and enslavers. Velma Maia Thomas offers Lest We Forget (Crown; $29.95), an interactive children's book serious enough for parents. Readers remove slave sale receipts from envelopes and pull back a paper ship hatch to find slaves stacked like cordwood. British historian Hugh Thomas (no relation) has published The Slave Trade (Simon & Schuster; $37.50). Tracking the barter of Africans from 1440 to 1870, Thomas ranges through Europe, Arabia, Africa and the Americas. As societies spin and tug at one another like a warped solar system, a sad message emerges...
...certain their cause wouldn't be better served if they allowed the blacks to be martyred; a President, Martin Van Buren, running for re-election and trying to appease the slave states by suborning justice; Spain's child Queen furious over the loss of one of her ships; the slaves' owners' demanding return of their property; even the officers of the ship that intercepted the Amistad claiming salvage rights...
...recognize that slavery is something far worse than nonfreedom, that it is an institution that grants some men the right to utterly dehumanize other men. It completely justifies the bloody murders that ensue when this figure, Cinque (Djimon Hounsou), frees himself and leads the human cargo of the slave ship La Amistad in revolt. And slammed at us at the start of Amistad, Steven Spielberg's movie about that incident, it signals the director's intention to ignore the principle--lofty sentiments excusing clunky filmmaking--upon which most morally instructive movie epics are built...