THE KOSCIUSKA HEALING GARDEN
  • Riverkeeping
    • Forest City >
      • Gallery of the Original Flowers >
        • Their Legacies p.1
        • Honor Kosciuska
      • Additional Info
    • History of the Area >
      • The Purpose
      • Native Americans
      • Contact >
        • More Info
    • Early Efforts

​Why Did  70,000,000 Europeans Emigrate from 1820-1920
​35,000,000 to the United States
Throughout the 1800s and intensifying in the latter half of the 19th century, ensuing political instability, restrictive religious laws and deteriorating economic conditions in Europe began to fuel the largest mass human migration in the history of the world.
http://www.libertyellisfoundation.org/ellis-island-history

​Transformation of Agriculture
​

           European Population Explosion

Picture
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:IRPmagnates1.PNG
In the 1700’s 80% of western Europe’s population, with the exception of Holland’s, were involved in agriculture. Agricultural methods had remained the same for centuries. Landowners, nobility and the clergy, controlled the economy, the land and the peasants and serfs that went with the land. Crop rotation in the form of fallow fields restrained output as well as the practice of communal meadows for hay and pastures for livestock.   from "A History of Western Society by McKay, Hill and Butler" 
​

In the 1800‘s land began to be permanently marked off for families. Landowners moved beyond subsistence to market oriented agriculture to increase their wealth. Once fallow fields were utilized for crop production and fodder to keep livestock alive longer throughout winters increasing fertilizer for improved crop production. The increasing demands for greater productivity took a toll on the peasants and serfs especially when the market  required  specific crops such as wheat and flax. Droughts and crop failures took devastating tolls in the form of famines and plagues. Even the introduced Native American potato that better insured the survival of peasant families through the winter was vulnerable as the notorious Irish Famine proved. Although the Irish peasant grew tons of wheat for his landlord, he and his family had to subsist on a patch of potatoes for the winter. The increasing stress led to peasant and serf uprisings that resulted in the promise of freedom. After “freedom," the imposed taxes on the “freed” peasants’ land holdings, enacted to offset losses to wealthy landowners, insured true freedom remained elusive.
Picturehttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3987379/figure/F1 /

In IIIn In In In In In Europe: the modern demographic transition started to take place in the middle of the 18th century. Until then, years of extremely high death rates were quite frequent. Extremely high crisis mortality could be the consequence of epidemic diseases or failed harvests and famine, or a combination of both. As a consequence of better hygiene and a better transportation infrastructure (for one, the canals and roads constructed by Austria in the 18th century), amongst other reasons, crisis mortality became less and less frequent. Later on in the 19th century, child survival began to improve. Vaccination against smallpox for example led to an eradication of the disease, with the last European smallpox pandemic dating from 1871. This way, not only the years of crisis mortality became less frequent, but also the average death rate decreased, from an average 30 deaths per 1000 inhabitants in the beginning of the 19th century to around 15 deaths per 1000 citizens by the beginning of the 20th century. In the meantime, the birth rate however stayed at its previous, high level of 30-35 births per 1000 inhabitants. The death rate went down but the birth rate still didn’t: this caused a large growth in population. It was only near the end of the nineteenth century (a bit earlier in some countries, later in others) that married couples in large numbers started to reduce their number of children. By the middle of the 20th century, the middle class ideal of a two children household had gained enormous popularity and influence. The reaction by the Church, for example in the encyclical Humanae Vitae (1968), came much too late to bring this evolution to a halt.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3987379/

                     Near Extermination of the Indigenous Population of two Continents
                                                                     76,000,000 lives                         

Picture
Photo from the 1870s of a pile of American bison skulls waiting to be ground for fertilizer.
Picture
Massacre at Wounded Knee of Lakota Sioux 1891

Appropriation of  Indigenous Land, Resources and Crops

Picture

Treaties between the federal government and Native Nations rest at the heart of American history, yet most Americans know little about them. In Nation to Nation, thirty-one essays and interviews from the country’s foremost scholars of Native history and law explore the significance of the diplomacy, promises, and betrayals involved in two hundred years of treaty making between the United States and Native Nations, as one side sought to own the riches of North America and the other struggled to hold on to its homelands and ways of life. http://nmai.si.edu/store/books-and-products/#4003
​

TATAMY & the Walking Purchase
"Fraud... great fraud!" he lamented. No brotherhood. No harmony. No peace, love and understanding. People he admired and trusted had betrayed him. 
Moses Tunda Tatamy was born in the mid 1690s in New Jersey. By 1733 he was living in Pennsylvania in a region called the Forks of the Delaware. There he lived like the white newcomers, spoke English well and owned a farm of three hundred acres. Unfortunately for Tatamy and his Lenape neighbors, their land was in the territory taken by Penn's sons in 1737 in a fraudulent land deal known as the Walking Purchase. When the purchase was complete, the Pennsylvania authorities forced the Lenape to leave. ......
 In order to keep the peace and salvage a portion of his people's homeland, Tatamy spent years trying to convince the Pennsylvanians and the Iroquois to provide a permanent home for the Lenape along the Susquehanna. Although the Pennsylvania Assembly endorsed the concept in principle, they never acted on it.

http://explorepahistory.com/hmarker.php?markerId=1-A-23
​

Picture
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?p=175727004
Monoculture versus Polyculture
Since A.D. 1492 the world has increased its population 4-5 times and doubled between 1650-1850. Many scholars have proposed a variety of causal factors, but the increase and improvement of the food supply is clearly the most important factor in population explosions since the beginning of the Columbian Exchange. It is also clear that the addition of Native American food plants is the most significant change for that world food supply. http://www2.palomar.edu/users/scrouthamel/maize.htm

Table I: Average crop yields of English farms in the 18th century
                     Average Yield per Acre    Energy Value of Crop             .                                                                                            
                                                                                           
                       Bushels         Kilograms      Megajoules   Acres of land
Wheat                  23                 650               8,900             1.70
Barley                  32                 820             11,400             1.40
Oats                     38                 690               9,300             1.60
Potatoes             427            10,900             31,900             .50
Notes : Data are from 18th century England, recorded in Young's (1771, p. 20) The Farmer's Tour
through the East of England Volume 4; reproduced in Davidson et al . (1975).

The history of the potato provides a grim warning of the need to maintain genetic diversity in our staple food crops. In the 19th century, Ireland was heavily reliant on only a few varieties of potato, and those types contained no resistance to the devastating disease known as late blight. When late blight destroyed the 1845-1846 potato crop, widespread famine followed. An estimated one million people starved to death and more than a million were forced to migrate abroad.
To combat pests and diseases, increase yields, and sustain production on marginal lands, today's potato-based agricultural systems need a continuous supply of new varieties. That requires access to the entire potato gene pool. But potato biodiversity is under threat: ancient varieties cultivated by Andean peoples for millennia have been lost to diseases, climate change and social upheaval.
http://www.fao.org/potato-2008/en/potato/biodiversity.html


https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/12/04/the-worlds-most-popular-banana-could-go-extinct/?utm_term=.50900186844f

The End of the Napoleonic Wars                   From Wind and Water to Steam and Coal

Picture
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Battle_of_Waterloo_1815.PNG
The Napoleonic Wars changed the landscape of war, politics and national borders....
Warfare, which was previously treated as more of a sport between kings, increased dramatically in scope. Previously, armies of 30,000 were considered large, but by the end of these wars around 1815, armies of 500,000 had been fielded, and more than 3 million Frenchmen had been involved in the war. At Leipzig alone, nearly 150,000 men were killed or wounded.
https://www.reference.com/history/impact-napoleonic-wars-c55be3b3d62f37d8#


Picture
http://www.eoht.info/page/Miner%E2%80%99s+friend
A physical comparison between a 1600 hand pump, previously used to remove water from flooded mines, and the mechanical Savery engine (aka Miner's friend) able to remove water from far greater depths, effortlessly.

The Loss of an Entire Generation

The Cost of War: Killed, Wounded, Captured, and Missing
​The Civil War was America's bloodiest conflict.  The unprecedented violence of battles such as Shiloh, Antietam, Stones River, and Gettysburg shocked citizens and international observers alike.  Nearly as many men died in captivity during the Civil War as were killed in the whole of the Vietnam War.  Hundreds of thousands died of disease.  Roughly 2% of the population, an estimated 620,000 men, lost their lives in the line of duty.  Taken as a percentage of today's population, the toll would have risen as high as 6 million souls. The Numbers Illustrated The human cost of the Civil War was beyond anybody's expectations.  The young nation experienced bloodshed of a magnitude that has not been equaled since by any other American conflict.  Military Deaths in American Wars The numbers of Civil War dead were not equaled by the combined toll of other American conflicts until the War in Vietnam.
https://www.civilwar.org/learn/articles/civil-war-casualties

Proudly powered by Weebly