"Craig Bergren" > wrote in message
news
> On Sun, 12 Dec 2004 23:26:18 -0800, Steve Jackson wrote:
>
>> "Craig Bergren" > wrote in message
>> news >>
>>> Rice originates from somewhere near Thailand. It was first grown in the
>>> United States on large plantations in the Carolinas (Carolina Golden).
>>> The North American slave trade was based on acquisition of labor to
>>> cultivate rice, Africans having natural immunity to malaria that white
>>> endentured servants from Europe lacked.
>>
>> I'm wondering where you got the info. Isn't malaria still more than a
>> little problematic in sub-Saharan Africa? And I was under the impression
>> that cotton supplied more of the demand for slave labor than anything
>> else. But I'm far from an expert on either point, so my impressions could
>> be way off.
>
> Where did I say Africans were immune to malaria?

Go exactly seven lines of text above that question. "The North American
slave trade was based on acquisition of labor to cultivate rice, Africans
having natural immunity to malaria that white endentured servants from
Europe lacked.

> I said they were the
> basis of the slave trade, imported to work the swamps in the Carlolinas
> because they were more resistant to malaria. They were also more resistant
> to yellow fever. These beliefs may not be real, but the importers of the
> slaves certainly thought they were true at the time. Cotton was also a
> demand for slaves, but the trade was already well established by the
> earlier rice plantations. It wasn't until introduction of the cotton
> gin that cotton began to replace rice and rice cultivation moved to
> Louisiana, Texas, and Arkansas. Certainly when this country was founded,
> rice was king in the deep south with indigo a close second.

And now that you mention this, the fog's lifting a bit from that corner of
my brain. IIRC, the cotton gin and resultant increase in cotton cultivation
sparked a revivial of sorts in the slave trade and upped demand for slaves.

> Please speak for yourself. I didn't say that Bud is un-American, only
> that Miller is more American than Bud. Not only does Miller use
> ingredients that are grown in the US, they use ingredients that are
> indigenous to the US. Bud not only uses foreign grown hops, their grain
> bill is completely of imported varieties of grain. After all, what could
> be more Irish than the potato. The answer is Guinness!

I'm not even sure what you're getting at, but doesn't Guinness use English
hops? That's hardly "Irish" under your accounting of what makes something
worthy of a nation-of-origin adjective.

>
>> pasta Chinese, because they came up with the noodle long before the
>> Italians. We don't say that hamburgers aren't very American because
>> cattle aren't native to the Western Hemisphere. We don't say that
>> Hershey's is
>
> I would never say that hamburgers, or for that matter, hot dogs are not
> American.

Hamburgers come from beef, which comes from cattle, which are not indigenous
to the United States. Hot dogs are typically made from pork, which is a
different species than the wild boars present in North America and come from
elsewhere. Under your definitions, hamburgers and hot dogs are not American.
Which is just daft.

> However, I would say that corn flakes are more American than
> either. Nothing is more American than the BATF.

You're good at that non-sequiter thing.

>
>> really more Mexican than anything, since that's where Europeans
>> discovered
>> chocolate, or that Starbucks is more Colombian than American.
>>
>
> Every educated American knows that the best chocolate is Belgian or Swiss
> and Starbucks is communist, the worst thing an American can be.

Starbucks is communist? Yes, I guess so, seeing as how the rampant
capitalist spread of cookie-cutter shops to every corner of the earth is one
of the centerpieces of Marx's writing.

-Steve