Word: lites
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...fact that manumission, the formal emancipation from slavery, was open to the most resourceful of them, that a few of the manumitted prospered and that blacks and laboring whites interacted on intimate terms. This was typical of nearly all new multiethnic settlements in the Americas. The colony's élite remained committed to indentured white servitude as the backbone of the labor force until at least the middle of the 17th century because indentures were cheaper than African slaves. And since the élite viewed their indentured servants as lazy "salvages"--the very scum of English society not above cannibalism...
...slavery did not reduce the inflow of white immigrants, as happened in the sugar islands. Instead, a large white population developed of small and even midsize farmers who relied on their own or nonslave white labor. As the black population grew and increasingly became the labor force of élite whites, both attitudes and laws changed. By 1662 the children of all slave women were declared slaves in perpetuity. Five years later, Christianity ceased to be an obstacle to enslavement, and by 1669 a master could legitimately kill his slave while inflicting punishment. At the same time, the distinction between...
...which white settlers, committed to the creation of a new social order, remained in the majority and thus had no incentive to create alliances with free blacks or mixed populations. The second reason is offered by Yale historian Edmund Morgan in his celebrated study of Virginia: the élite, fearful of an insurrectionary union of white servants and slaves, actively promoted racism and a racially exclusive popular democracy as a way of dividing and ruling black and white workers. By glorifying whiteness and restricting the electorate to whites, a bond of racial solidarity emerged between all classes of whites predicated...
...collapse into chaos that is generally considered to be China's only alternative to political change. Twenty years from now, he says, China could still be as authoritarian as it is today. Far from ushering in democracy, it's possible that China's newly rich urban élite, with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, could keep its rural masses disenfranchised indefinitely. The U.S. needs to keep that scenario in mind when dealing with Beijing, Mann says-and not just assume everything will work...
...Within days of taking office, Yeltsin began shaking the complacency of the city's entrenched party élite. He spurned the usual perquisites of public office - the country dacha, the ZIL limousine, the special shops and the insularity of working behind a telephone-covered desk. He and his wife, Naina, lived in an apartment near the center of town, from which he drove to work or, frequently, took a bus or the subway - to the shock and delight of citizens accustomed to seeing nothing of party big shots but the gray curtains of their speeding ZILs. His popularity increased when...