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I always find that sharing those little tedious details is what creates visceral understanding of a situation. In this case, the true horror of being a liberated Black person in the 1800s and having to relentlessly work to rescue others, while surrounded by people who truly don't care.

On a lighter note, I use the same approach in understanding user needs as a product builder. I focus on letting people share the minutiae of their day rather than have them editorialize the big topics. By doing so, I get a lot of visceral insight and intuition.

Thanks for sharing this. I really enjoyed reading it.

tfa> The streets of New York were famously the filthiest in the United States, too, lined with privies piled high, which overflowed into the streets. Loose pigs and dogs snuffled in the mire.

One of my visceral touchstones for early New York: All through the winter, excrement would accumulate, frozen in the streets. Then would come the spring thaw. Even New Yorkers found it notable. It would take several weeks, for hordes of ultimately-fat pigs, to consume that... bounty.

More on topic, I was years ago viscerally struck by a letter from a 1700's British officer embedded with an American militia. He was clearly gobsmacked - the American officer was... was talking with his men, and... asking the men what they thought!?!

Perhaps we might teach history as a "travel guide for the time traveler"? "Finding yourself in NY in December of 1836, ..."

Nice thought on user interviews.

Apparently Edo (now Tokyo) had a population of one million in the 18th century.

Always amazed me how they could pull that off. Japan was a very regulated society which must have helped with the chaos but Japanese people go to the toilet just like everyone else...

Interesing.[1] Looks like governance (better water supply, sanitation, lower density, a "polluted" caste[2]), intensive agriculture making night soil valuable fertilizer instead of city-as-cesspit waste, and domestic culture (cooking/boiling, cleanliness). The night soil diversion seems to have kept toilets out of sewers/water into the 1900s.

[1] https://wjsmith.faculty.unlv.edu/smithtest/Urban-Sanitation_... (1987) [2] off topic but interesting https://www.academia.edu/download/34028214/The_Creation_of_t...

2nd link is a 404 for me

Thx! That's [1]. So I guess beware direct links into academia.edu.

[1] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C33&q=Gro...

> people who truly don't care

The problem with the old "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing" quote of uncertain provenance is that it leaves out most of the population: the people who truly don't care.

"One-third of your population wants to kill another third, and the last third won't try to stop them"

This was a great example for the point that the author is trying to make. The fact that after all that effort, Ruggles was only able to free 2 out of 5 enslaved men is apropos. His victory was incomplete, incremental at best, and nearly got him enslaved again as well, but it was still a victory and it counted, especially for the two men that did get their freedom.

Shout-out to a grindset abolitionist!

> Finally, on Christmas Eve, a group of armed black New Yorkers (reportedly not including Ruggles) boarded the brig Brilliante and managed to rescue two of the men.

This sentence kind of contradicts the author's point though? After all that tedious work within the legal system it wasn't even procedure that got any of these men freed, but actual direct action.

If anything it reinforces it. Imagine grinding away at a tiresome game, selecting each move perfectly, yet mostly losing. The few Ws you do eke out are often the result of external forces you had no control over. And doing that all your life.

Doing the right thing even when your actions don't matter, when you'll probably fail, and when most people won't thank you for it, is possibly the purest form of heroism.

Here's a great candidate to stand on one of those empty plinths. The inscription could be "Social Justice Warrior" to return some valor to the epigram.

lol, there was never any valor associated with it to begin with

Etymologically it seems to have emerged independently (that is, leftists really meant it in earnest) and then converged into the same space as the pejorative "keyboard warrior" around the mid 2010s.

If you enjoyed this article you would enjoy the book “The Kidnapping Club” by Jonathan Daniel Wells. It covers the history of pre-Civil War New York. (As the title suggests, the bit in the article about “probably have kidnapped him and sold him into slavery” was more common than you might think.)

I loved the article. This is a truly minor nitpick - he really wasn’t walking that far. As most of the streets and street names in lower Manhattan are the same you can mark the spots on Google maps and see the distances. None of the trips are more than a mile and many less. Someone running the same errands today would most likely walk too.

I work in the neighborhood though so it’s wild to imagine all that going down on the same streets I walk to work on.

18" of horse and human excrement covered with ice would probably make it a different experience to walk a mile.

I've been in the trenches trying to change housing policy in Austin and the description in this article is very real to me. It has taken my group, AURA, years to learn the ropes of local politics: what specific policy we want, who has control over that policy, and how to influence those people. It took us 6+ years, but we've elected a pro-housing City Council and are getting laws passed. Elections can be fun competitions, but most of advocacy is slow and boring and often feels like running in a labyrinth or torture with tedium.

The police reform groups have more difficulty. The police union is a well-funded well-organized opposition. The reform groups have a lot of public support, but it has been a long difficult slog. They were forced to passed their laws by ballot measure and, even after they pass, it is a struggle to get the city's staff and police to implement them! As I said, David Ruggles's work to get govt employees to actually do their job feels very real to me.

Excellent article, with a great point. For those interested in learning more, "Gateway to Freedom" by Eric Foner is a good book. My review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2499848091

I think that’s one beautiful aspect of the scene in Schindlers list when they are agonizing over the list of names in tedious detail. It’s rare that this kind of work is dramatized without altering its quotidien nature.

The cartoon "The Disappointed Abolitionists" that prefaces the article, is about the case involving the fugitive slave of John Darg who stole $7000 from him, fled, and was harbored and assisted by African American abolitionist and writer David Ruggles, Quaker arbitrator Barney Corse, and Quaker abolitionist Isaac T. Hopper (1).

Corse had arbitrated a deal with Darg that in exchange for the return of the money, the slave’s freedom would be granted, and a small stipend would be paid to Corse.

The arbitration was discovered and annulled by the New York police who then arrested Ruggles and Corse, although they eventually won the slave’s freedom. The illustrator seems to criticize the Quakers and Ruggles for their supposed timidity and self-interest when confronted by the slave owner.

In the cartoon, Quaker Isaac Hopper says: “Verily friend Darg since we have returned thee thy money, I claim the reward of $1000. Brother Barney Corse was merely my Agent, verily!!”

David Ruggles: “I don’t like the looks of this affair. I’m afraid my pickings will not amount to much!”

White Man Barney Corse (Quaker arbitrator): “Yea verily I was but thy instrument Brother Hopper as Brother Ruggles here knoweth!

Man with a Chair: "Of all the d—-d pieces of impudence I ever know, this surpasses! Reward indeed! Get out of the house! The only reward you deserve is the halter or the States Prison, you scoundrels!”

--- (1) Quakers were a Christian denomination very involved in human rights since the 17th century.

Another high-quality source that I had never heard of but can now add to my RSS feed! Thank you!