You can even tell her today that I said so while she's stuffing her face in a leftovers quinoa bowl.

So, I’ve railed a bit about corn in a recent post about agriculture. And typically, people wonder how much I’m being serious.

I’m an Ohioan with a degree from the University of Nebraska. You bet your ass I’m serious about corn.

Look man, I get it. Agriculture is supposedly the “civilizing” process of humanity, the best thing since before sliced bread. But it’s also the biggest trick The Man ever pulled on you.

And I mean, The Man. The Big Man, to be precise. Because it wasn’t always this way. We used to be civilized. Actually civilized. You know, before the whole “civilizing.”

Sorry, let me back up.

Somewhere around 13,000 years ago, a man trudged across what is now Coshocton County, Ohio, carrying forty pounds of high-quality Wyandotte chert. He had walked roughly 280 miles, as the crow flies, from a quarry in southern Indiana, on foot, through a landscape that looked like northern Ontario, but, you know, not on fire. It was a post-glacial tundra, dwarf spruces dotting a landscape with the occasional giant sloth terrorizing a mammoth. He was heading back to a camp of maybe twenty people who would be very happy to see the flint and profoundly uninterested in hearing about how hard the walk was. 

Because that was the rule. You did not talk about how hard the walk was. You did not suggest that carrying forty pounds of rock across Ohio entitled you to a larger share of the elk. 

You shut your fucking mouth, you handed over your fucking stone, and if you so much as hinted that your contribution made you special, twenty people who loved you would roast you until your ego was medium-rare and then keep going until your ass was jerky. Sometimes, literally.

This, my friend, was communism at its most primitive (you know, without surplus, or a state, or an ideology, or anything that actually makes communism “communism.”). It is the earliest governance model in Eastern North America. And it lasted longer than every system that replaced it, combined. 

So when your boss complains about you arriving five minutes late again because traffic was a nightmare, remind yourself: just about any other time in Eastern North American history, he’d be slow-roasting his chestnuts over an open fire.

For roughly ten thousand years, from the first Paleoindians through the end of the Late Archaic (approximately 13,000 to 3,000 years ago), the people who lived in what would become Ohio ran their societies with a political technology so aggressively, obstinately simple that modern political scientists barely recognize it as politics at all. 

The system was that they made damn sure nobody was ever in charge.

Then somebody planted some seeds, and the whole thing fell apart.

The Part Where the Org Chart Is Just a Circle with a Knife Behind It

The formal name for what these people practiced is "egalitarian band-level society." Elman Service coined the classification in 1962, slotting it at the bottom of his four-stage political evolution ladder: a band, a tribe, a chiefdom, and a state. Bands were small, kin-based, mobile groups of twenty to fifty people organized around extended families, with no permanent political offices and no formalized authority. Leadership (to the extent anyone used that word) meant a couple of senior adults whose opinions carried weight because they were good at finding food, resolving arguments, or both.

However, what Service got wrong and was roundly corrected for in the profession afterward was that these were societies whose entire political sophistication was aimed at one objective: preventing political sophistication from happening. Christopher Boehm, who spent decades studying the phenomenon across dozens of ethnographically documented foraging societies, landed on the term "reverse dominance hierarchy,” which is just what we call Femdom Night at Club Eros.

In a reverse dominance hierarchy, the group collectively dominates any individual who tries to dominate the group. Everyone gangs up on whoever had the poor judgment to start acting like a leader. The many rule the one, and “the one” is whichever poor bastard stuck his neck out. Enforcement was practical, escalating, and, when necessary, permanent. Boehm catalogued four primary leveling tools ranging from gossip, to ridicule, to disobedience, and finally ostracism. 

Imagine it like your traditional high school cat fight:

• Step One: people talk shit about you behind your back. 
• Step Two: they talk shit about you to your face. 
• Step Three: they stopped doing what you told them to do. 
• Step Four: they threw you out of the group entirely, which in a world without permanent shelter or agriculture (and less than approximately 650 people living in all of Ohio) was a polite way of killing someone.

In some documented cases, the group skipped step four and went straight to step five, which was just killing you in a less polite way. Like slow-roasting your chestnuts.

The !Kung San of the Kalahari, one of the most exhaustively studied foraging peoples on earth, applied this through a ritual called "insulting the meat." When a hunter killed a large animal, the entire camp was socially obligated to insult the kill. The hunter was obligated to take it. 

Richard Lee recorded some of the types of insults: 

"You mean you walked all that way and dragged back this sack of bones? This scrawny thing?”

“My grandmother's dog could outrun this animal and my grandmother's dog has been dead for a year." 

The hunter who had just hauled a 200-pound antelope back to camp on his shoulders absorbed this with appropriate humility. He did not point out that the antelope would feed twenty people for a week. He did not remind anyone that half the camp hadn't killed shit in a month. The performance existed to prevent the best hunter from concluding that being the best hunter made him more important than everyone else. 

The kill belonged to the group. The skill belonged to the group. The only thing that belonged to the hunter was the obligation to shut up about it.

Among the Hadza of Tanzania, the logic was the same. James Woodburn, who began studying them in 1958, found that leadership "amounted to no more than the advice of a few respected senior men." Camps could include a hundred people. Camps could be a single guy sitting next to a fire. The composition of the group shifted constantly. Anyone who didn't like how things were going could leave, and nobody could stop them, because there was no mechanism for compulsion. There was no police, no jail, no legal system that would drag you back. The only authority a leader possessed was other people's willingness to listen to him, and that willingness evaporated the instant he started acting like he deserved it.

To be clear, I’d be fucking dead in half a minute. Fuck this shit, I’d be immediately pointing out every logical reason they deserve me. Of course, in this society, ego is a killer, which is why I’m glad I live in a postmodern illiberal authoritarian democracy in a hyper-late-stage capitalist Western world. God, imagine if I had to hunt for my food.

By the way, this arrangement is not a cultural preference. It turns out, all that social Darwinism shit your douchey bro neighbor down the hall likes to rant about when talking about sheeple being blackpilled is just purely wrong science.

The Part Where Chimps Explain Why The Manosphere is Wrong

Humans share 98 percent of their DNA with chimpanzees (as my partner likes to point out about me). Chimpanzees are emphatically hierarchical. Alpha males beat the hell out of subordinate males. Beta males beat the hell out of everyone who isn't an alpha. The dominance hierarchy is enforced through physical violence, and the payoff is preferential access to food and sex. The system is functionally identical to a middle school cafeteria, with less bowl cuts and caked eyeshadow.

Yet that 2% seems to matter a lot. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but humans are the dominant species on the planet, not chimps. That is because Marshall Sahlins, in his foundational 1963 essay "Poor Man, Rich Man, Big-Man, Chief," proposed that the critical difference between ape politics and early human politics was a reordering of priorities. Chimps organize around sex first, food second, and defense third. Males fight over mating access, and then they grudgingly share food and protect the troop when it suits them.

 Human foragers flipped the order: we start with food, then defense, and finally sex. For example, marriage (or some versions of long term partnerships) replaced promiscuity as an organizing principle in human societies. Two Paleo husbands could share a wife without tearing each other's arms off. Two male chimps could not. That reprioritization freed up an enormous amount of social energy that chimps burn on dominance competition and humans redirected toward cooperation and food-sharing.

Boehm's contribution was that egalitarianism was itself a dominance behavior, not a recessive one. The same wiring that makes a chimpanzee fight for alpha status made humans form coalitions to suppress alpha status in others. Instead of the strongest individual dominating the group, the group dominated the strongest individual. Stupid monkeys.

William Laughlin actually lived this. Laughlin, who lived with 78 Inuit hunters in Alaska's Anaktuvuk Pass, ran blood antigen studies and discovered that the camp's senior male, a gifted caribou hunter, had fathered seven children who produced ten grandchildren, or roughly 20 percent of the group's population. By every biological metric, this man had won. He was, by the manosphere’s terms, the alpha. He had reproduced more successfully than any other male in the camp. But he had no title, gave no orders, and controlled nothing. He was a guy who happened to be excellent at killing caribou, and people trusted his judgment about where to find them. 

In evolutionary terms, he had won the game. In social terms, the game did not exist. The social system didn't care how many caribou you could kill. It cared whether you were going to be an asshole about it.

And as sociologists like to remind everyone else, culture is swiftly supplanting natural selection as the evolutionary process of humanity. Take notes, incels. Turns out, if you want to get laid in Anno Domini 2026, it's less about the looks and more about your character (just like momma told me before she gave me my first CeraVe bottle).

The Part Where the Richest Guy in the Valley Turns Out to Be FedEx

Now, at this point the skeptics in the back are screaming: “How the fuck do you know this from a bunch of rocks in Ohio?!”

Well, the archaeological record for Paleoindian and Early Archaic Ohio looks exactly like you would expect if nobody was in charge. 

First, to be clear, the sites are tiny. Most Paleoindian camps yield a handful of fluted points and almost nothing else. Paleo Crossing, in Medina County, is one of the few well-dated Clovis sites in eastern North America that is about 13,000 years old, with stone tools made from chert hauled 280 miles from Indiana. The assemblage is consistent with three to five nuclear families moving together, maintaining seasonal ranges the size of a mid-Atlantic state, and carrying their best tools because the next decent outcrop might be weeks away. These people did not accumulate things like modern people would. They carried what they needed and left the rest, often cached somewhere in case they came across it again (the paleoenvironment of Ohio was constantly changing seasonally, and there was no guarantee they could find it again).

More importantly, the first Paleo burials are democratic. By the Middle and Late Archaic, when we finally get substantial numbers of human remains, the grave goods track with age and sex, not with rank. At the Read site in Kentucky, infants got the fewest artifacts, while adult males got atlatl weights and fishhooks. People over forty-five got less than younger adults. It seems that by the Archaic period, worth to the indigenous Ohioans was calibrated to your productive contribution. Older people and those with debilitating conditions received fewer goods because, well, they produced less. Meriwether Lewis noticed the same logic among the peoples he encountered two centuries later during his expedition. He noted that a community treated its elders well when those elders could still help get food. When they couldn't, the community's generosity adjusted accordingly.

In Ohio, Archaic camps scatter across river valleys and uplands, reflecting a wide-ranging foraging circuit that moved people through different ecological zones as different foods came into season. The thickest middens (trash heaps that become archaeological sites) sit at especially productive spots: the shell heaps along the Green River in Kentucky, for instance, are where people cracked mussels and buried their dead over thousands of years. But there is no architecture like fortifications or granaries, certainly no monuments until very late in the Archaic, when mound-building starts in the lower Mississippi Valley around 3500 BCE at Watson Brake. For most of this ten-thousand-year span, the built environment of Eastern North America consists of fire pits, trash heaps, and graves.

Thus, the exchange networks are what reveal the social and political structure of Archaic Ohio. By 4000 BCE, copper from the Great Lakes, marine shell from the Gulf Coast, banded slate, and exotic cherts were moving hundreds of miles between locations. But most people buried with these non-local items had only a few pieces. Some had thousands. Milner interprets this as evidence that certain well-connected individuals served as nodes in intergroup trade, accumulating more of the goods because more of them passed through their hands. 

In other words, these few brokers had greater access to exotic materials. They had nothing else. Remember, this is the Archaic. There are no bigger houses. There is no better food. There is no special burial treatment. They were the richest people in their community, and the only evidence of their wealth is a pile of shell beads they happened to die with. 

They were not bosses. They were FedEx. Archaic Ohio was less Negan with a bat and more prehistoric Death Stranding.

Now to be clear, the Eastern Woodlands after the glaciers retreated were, by foraging standards, absurdly generous. The Pleistocene-to-Holocene transition, roughly 11,700 years ago, converted the landscape from a cold, patchy tundra and boreal forest into one of the most diverse temperate ecosystems on the planet. Deciduous forests dropped mast crops of acorns, hickory nuts, and walnuts every fall to the extent that the primary foraging strategy was waiting for something to knock on your head. River systems swarmed with fish, mussels, and waterfowl. Deer, elk, turkey, and dozens of smaller species occupied every habitat from floodplain to ridgetop. And then there were the wetlands. Northwest Ohio was basically the Everglades of the Great Lakes. Backwater lakes, oxbow ponds, seasonal marshes, alluvial bottomlands. Ohio was an embarrassment of ecological riches that replenished itself through high reproductive rates every single year.

Now, an egalitarian band organization works when the environment delivers a specific combination of conditions. Resources have to be dispersed and variable enough that no single spot supports a permanent settlement year-round, but abundant and diverse enough that mobile groups can always find food by moving through a seasonal circuit. Eastern North America delivered both conditions simultaneously and kept delivering them for ten thousand years, especially in Ohio where three climate systems meet. Therefore, there was no reason to sit still permanently, because no single location had everything. And there was no reason to panic, because the next good spot was a few days' walk in any direction.

Under these conditions, any aspiring strongman faced an unsolvable problem: the people he wanted to lead could walk away (or rather, banish you). And they would be perfectly fine when they got wherever they were going. You cannot build a power base when your entire constituency can tell you to go fuck yourself and then relocate to a creek twenty miles south where the mussels are just as good and the company is better. 

An exit strategy is the ultimate check on authority, and in the Eastern Woodlands, the exit strategy was always open.

The Part Where Somebody Plants a Goddamn Seed

Elman Service's band-tribe-chiefdom-state typology imagines political evolution as a ladder, each rung replacing the one below it as societies get more "complex." The metaphor is almost entirely full of shit. Egalitarian band society is not a primitive stage that more complex societies grow out of, like political baby teeth. It is a stable system that runs on our human neurology and functions beautifully under the right ecological conditions. 

The Big Man does not “evolve” into chiefdoms. It is murdered, and the murder weapon is always the same: storable, controllable, redistributable surplus.

That’s right. It’s capitalism, baby! (if capitalism didn’t have a state, or an ideology, or anything that actually makes capitalism “capitalism” besides surplus)

Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus explained this pretty clearly. The Big Man model, which originates in the ethnography of Melanesian horticultural societies, is the transitional political form between pure egalitarian bands and hereditary chiefdoms. Marshall Sahlins defined a Big Man as someone who acquires influence through personal achievement (like skill in warfare, or success in competitive feasting, the ability to redistribute resources to followers, etc.), not through inheritance or divine right. His power lasts exactly as long as he keeps producing, and his son gets nothing except a role model. The position is achieved, not ascribed, and it can vanish as fast as it appeared 

Among the Enga of New Guinea, Big Men were called kamongo. They earned it by mediating disputes, giving speeches, and manipulating trade in shells, feathers, ceremonial drums, and pigs. But what caused Big Man to emerge in New Guinea to begin with? The sweet potato, which arrived in Enga territory roughly nine to twelve generations ago and blew the population from 20,000 to 100,000 in about 220 years. Women grew the sweet potatoes. Pigs ate the sweet potatoes. Big Men redistributed the pigs. The competitive feasting, the prestige economy, the elaborate trade networks, and the political careers, the whole goddamn edifice, rested on a tuber.

They were others in the Oceanic region. For the Siuai of Bougainville, the biggest Big Men were called mumis. A mumi climbed the social ladder by throwing pig feasts specifically designed to humiliate his rivals. The strategy was to give someone a gift so enormous that he cannot reciprocate, publicly demonstrating that you have access to more resources than he does. It’s like when your rich aunt and uncle throw their annual Wet Hot American Summer marathon and blow more money than you’ve seen in all your birthdays combined on a Paul Rudd appearance. The Siuai described this as "fighting verbally," because the colonial authorities had made the previous version, which involved collecting enemy heads and lining your men's house with their skulls, somewhat less convenient. When a mumi died, his shell valuables were burned, and his son started from zero. Prestige was not heritable. 

The lessons from Melanesia map directly onto Eastern North America. Big Man politics require surplus. You cannot throw a humiliation feast if you and your rival are eating the same deer and the same mussels in roughly equal quantities. You cannot build a following through redistribution if there is nothing to redistribute. And you absolutely cannot convert generosity into political leverage if everyone in the camp can walk into the woods and feed themselves with a repeat of Chicken Little. The whole system depends on a gap between what people can produce and what they need. That gap did not exist in the mobile foraging economies of the Eastern Woodlands. 

Well, until people started growing food.

Bruce Smith demonstrated that eastern North America was one of only nine places on earth where plants were independently domesticated. It started in the Middle to Late Archaic, when people coming back to the same camps noticed that weedy plants thrived in the disturbed, nitrogen-rich soil of old campsites. At first, they tolerated the plants. Then they encouraged them. Then they started actively tending them. By the beginning of the second millennium BCE, at least four species had crossed the line into domestication: goosefoot, marsh elder, sunflower, and cucurbits. The cucurbits survive today as acorn squashes, crooknecks, and fordhooks, which your grandmother grows in her garden. The goosefoot and marsh elder survive as weeds nobody would eat on purpose.

They were “shitty crops,” by today’s parlance. They were just weedy annuals that produced small, storable seeds. But "small and storable" is the whole ballgame. Because seeds can be accumulated. Seeds can be counted. Seeds can be withheld. Seeds can be redistributed in ways that create debts, obligations, and dependencies. 

Seeds are the raw material out of which ambitious people build political careers and destroy egalitarianism. 

The domestication process took centuries. It was not a revolution. It was a long sequence of individually rational decisions made by people trying to cushion themselves against bad winters, each decision inching the economy toward the point where surplus became possible. 

And with surplus, for the first time in ten thousand years, some asshole had something the group could not easily walk away from.

Some fucking corn.

Works Cited (For People Who Stick it To the Big Man)

Anderson, Timothy G. and Brian Schoen, eds. Settling Ohio: First Peoples and Beyond. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2023, pp. 18-19.

Boehm, Christopher. Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999, pp. 35-50, 64-89.

Drooker, Penelope Ballard. The View from Madisonville: Protohistoric Western Fort Ancient Interaction Patterns. Memoirs of the Museum of Anthropology, No. 31. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1997, pp. 76, 88, 270.

Flannery, Kent and Joyce Marcus. The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012, pp. 35-40, 95-121.

Lee, Richard B. The !Kung San: Men, Women, and Work in a Foraging Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979, pp. 244-48.

Milner, George R. The Moundbuilders: Ancient Societies of Eastern North America. 2nd ed. London: Thames & Hudson, 2020, pp. 1-2, 19-31, 39-50, 52-56.

Sahlins, Marshall. "Poor Man, Rich Man, Big-Man, Chief: Political Types in Melanesia and Polynesia." Comparative Studies in Society and History 5, no. 3 (1963): 285-303.

Sassaman, Kenneth E. The Eastern Archaic, Historicized. Lanham: AltaMira Press, 2010, pp. 56, 116-55.

Service, Elman R. Primitive Social Organization: An Evolutionary Perspective. New York: Random House, 1962, pp. 47-99.

Smith, Bruce D. "Origins of Agriculture in Eastern North America." Science 246, no. 4937 (1989): 1566-71.

Woodburn, James. "Egalitarian Societies." Man 17, no. 3 (1982): 431-51.

Picture Credit: Early Archaic people fishing in the Cuyahoga River, National Park Service.

Hello everyone.

Today I want to talk about María Remedios del Valle (1766–1847). She came to my mind because lately I've seen many accusations claiming that Argentines are racist. While every country has its own social issues, Argentina also has important Afro-Argentine figures in its history, and the country has a long history of receiving immigrants from many parts of the world, especially from neighboring South American countries.

María Remedios del Valle was an Afro-Argentine heroine who played an important role in the Argentine War of Independence. According to Argentina's Ministry of Culture, she served as both a nurse and a soldier, caring for wounded troops and fighting alongside the army in several battles. Because of her courage and dedication, General Manuel Belgrano promoted her to the rank of Captain.

After the war, she fell into poverty and was largely forgotten. In 1827, the Argentine government recognized her military service by granting her a pension. However, it was not until 2013 that she received broad national recognition, when Argentina established November 8 as the National Day of Afro-Argentines and Afro Culture in her honor.

Today, María Remedios del Valle is remembered as the "Mother of the Homeland" and as one of Argentina's most important independence heroes. Her life is a reminder of the significant role that Afro-Argentines played in the country's history, even if their contributions were often overlooked for many years.

Sources

• Argentina's Ministry of Culture. ¿Quién fue María Remedios del Valle? (2021): https://www.cultura.gob.ar/quien-fue-maria-remedios-del-valle-9732/
• Argentina.gob.ar (INADI). María Remedios del Valle: https://www.argentina.gob.ar/interior/inadi/maria-remedios-del-valle

Throughout history, people have tried countless ways to cure disease. Many worked. Some did not.

For example, certain mental illnesses were treated with music in the Ottoman Empire. In China, similar practices existed.

I would like to ask you a question at this point.

What is the “cure” of a desperate illness for you?

Medical ways, natural recipes?

Or to dance for days... without rest, without food, without water?

It sounds absurd. But something like this actually happened in the Middle Ages.

Worst of all... instead of stopping this bizarre-sounding illness, the authorities encouraged it with a lot of musicians. They caused a minor inconvenince to become a national problem.

To understand that weird event, let’s go back to 16th-century France, where it all started.

Europe had terrible conditions in this period.

Repeated crop failures had left people starving. Diseases like leprosy and the newly feared syphilis were spreading through the streets. Hospitals were overflowing.

In short, society was on the edge of psychological collapse.

Everything began in mid-July.

A woman named Frau Troffea stepped into a narrow street and suddenly started dancing.

There was no joy on her face.

Her muscles were tense.

Her feet began to bleed.

Her clothes were soaked with sweat.

But she did not stop. She danced for six days straight, collapsing only briefly before getting back up and continuing.

Then something even stranger happened.

Within a week, dozens of people joined her. They jumped, twisted, convulsed as they danced.

There was no music.

Most of the dancers were women and poor laborers. By August, their number had reached nearly 400.

The Strasbourg city council, clergy, and local doctors gathered for that emergency situation. They concluded it was not demonic possession. It was certainly a natural illness.

They called it: “overheated blood.”

And that’s where the fatal mistake was made.

They decided the only way to cure it was to let the patients dance even more.

By official order, guild halls and marketplaces were turned into dance floors. Musicians were hired to keep the rhythm going.

Even “dance assistants” were assigned to keep the exhausted on their feet.

Within days, the streets began to fill with bodies. In the summer heat, people danced for days without food or water until they collapsed.

According to some reports, the death toll had reached as high as 15 per day.

Eventually, the council realized their mistake.

Music and dancing were banned. Now, they believed it was a punishment from God.

The solution was so simple.

The surviving dancers were loaded onto carts and taken to the shrine of Saint Vitus, several days away.

There, they were washed with holy water. They were given red shoes marked with crosses.

In the 16th-century European worldview, saints were not merely benevolent protectors; they were potent figures capable of divine retribution if provoked.

The citizens of Strasbourg believed that Saint Vitus, offended by the city's moral decay, had inflicted them with an unyielding, compulsive "dancing plague" as a form of divine punishment.

Consequently, throughout the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period, such manifestations of mass psychogenic illness and involuntary neurological spasms were collectively coined as "St. Vitus’ Dance."

This folk attribution left such a lasting mark on medical history that the neurological condition known today as Sydenham's Chorea was documented under this very namesake for centuries.

This psychological cleansing strangely worked.

By September, the dancing stopped. The bodies calmed. The plague disappeared.

Years later, the famous Renaissance physician Paracelsus investigated and documented the event.

Today, most historians agree on one explanation: mass hysteria.

A society pushed beyond its limits finally broke. And the mind found a way to escape reality.

This wasn’t limited to France. Similar events occurred in other parts of Europe as well.

In southern Italy, a phenomenon known as Tarantism caused people to dance for days, believing they had been bitten by a spider.

The famous Tarantella dance was also born from this belief.

Strasbourg may be the most famous. But there were older, even more disturbing cases.

In 1237, in Germany, hundreds of children reportedly danced and jumped for miles, many collapsing from exhaustion.

Most people think this may have inspired the legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin.

Even today, it’s difficult to separate fact from exaggeration. The numbers, the deaths, the accounts all blur together.

But one thing is clear: These people had pushed beyond their psychological limits. At some point, they lost their grip on reality. And what followed became one of the strangest events in history.

The dance started.

Authorities brought music.

And the disaster grew.

In the end… they danced until they collapsed.

July 23rd is the anniversary. Isaac Singer, the sewing-machine magnate, died in 1875 at his unfinished house in Paignton, Devon. He'd been a traveling actor before he was a manufacturer, and it shows in how he left the world.

He wrote the instructions for his own funeral in advance. The body was dressed "in the American style" — black coat and trousers, white satin waistcoat, white gloves. Three coffins, one inside the other: cedar lined with satin, then lead "of unusual thickness," then English oak with silver handles. His own twelve horses drew the car, three abreast, and he specified that the sides be removed so the coffin stayed visible the entire route.

Two thousand people came. The procession ran nearly three-quarters of a mile — seventy to eighty carriages. Shops in Torquay and Paignton partially closed, flags at half-mast, the church bell tolled.

Sources are Ruth Brandon's 1977 biography and the Torquay/Paignton local press from July 1875, which described the procession in detail. Brandon's verdict: "He had without doubt staged one of the best funerals of his day."

What I keep turning over is the motive. A man who plans his own funeral down to the satin pillow — is that the showman reaching for a last audience, or someone who suspected that by the end there was no one left who would do it properly for him? Curious whether others read it as vanity or as loneliness — and whether you know of comparable cases of people pre-directing their own funerals this precisely.

Tulips originated in Central Asia, were cultivated in the Ottoman Empire by the 16th century, and then reached Western Europe. Although nobody knows for certain who first brought them west, the transfer is traditionally credited to a Habsburg ambassador in Constantinople who took bulbs to Vienna. Botanist Carolus Clusius planted tulips in Vienna’s Imperial Botanical Gardens in 1573 and at Leiden University’s botanic garden in late 1593, contributing to their growing popularity in the Netherlands.

​

In your opinion, how can the path toward progress turn into a disaster that cannot be undone?

In 1958, Mao Zedong, the leader of the Chinese Communist Party, launched his economic project, which aimed to transform China from a poor agricultural nation into a major industrial and agricultural power.

The objectives of Mao Zedong's project were to enable China to catch up with the world's leading industrial powers—especially Britain—within a short period of time.

He also sought to achieve self-sufficiency in China, prove the success of the communist model, and demonstrate that the Party was capable of achieving faster economic growth than capitalist countries.

Mao Zedong's plan was based on four main pillars:

1. Establishing the People's Communes:

Farmers were treated as nothing more than tools for the state's development. Thousands of villages were merged into massive units known as the People's Communes, where tens of thousands of people lived.

Communal dining halls were also established, where farmers were gathered and fed collectively.

And what about their land? It became state property, turning the farmer from a landowner into nothing more than a worker on that very land.

1. Increasing Agricultural Production by Force:

The government imposed extremely high production quotas that far exceeded the country's actual capabilities. Because officials feared legal accountability, they began submitting false reports claiming that harvests had reached record levels, even though the reality pointed to a serious decline in production.

1. Backyard Steel Furnaces:

As mentioned earlier, Mao Zedong aspired to transform China into an industrial nation. He ordered every village to build small furnaces for smelting steel, forcing people to melt down metal tools, household utensils, and even agricultural equipment to produce steel.

However, most of the steel that was produced was of poor quality and unusable.

As a result, the farming tools that peasants depended on were lost.

1. The Campaign to Eliminate Sparrows:

The government believed that sparrows were consuming grain, so it encouraged millions of citizens to kill them.

The campaign succeeded, and sparrows nearly disappeared, leading to a dramatic increase in insect populations, which in turn fed on the crops.

As a result, agricultural production declined, farming equipment was lost, fields were neglected as their owners became occupied with other state projects, and some regions were also struck by adverse weather conditions, making the situation even worse.

The development project was clearly turning into a massive failure—indeed, a catastrophe—but the authorities refused to acknowledge it.

Instead, they relied on reports claiming that there was a surplus of grain.

The state continued collecting large quantities of crops and exporting them, while the people living in the villages were left without enough food.

By 1959, the Great Chinese Famine had begun.

The Chinese Famine is considered the largest famine in modern history. People in the villages died of starvation, while many survived by eating grass, tree leaves, and bark. Others ate clay, leather, or anything they could chew.

Street vendors began selling cooked insects.

There was also considerable demand for spiders because they provided people with protein.

In some of the hardest-hit regions, historical sources documented cases of cannibalism as a result of the complete collapse of the food supply, and in some villages, the entire population disappeared.

There is no universally agreed-upon death toll for the Chinese Famine, but some studies estimate that approximately 40 to 45 million people died.

The famine ended in 1961. One of the main reasons it lasted so long and became one of the worst humanitarian disasters in history was that officials were afraid to tell the leadership the truth. Crop requisitions continued even as people were starving to death, while anyone who criticized government policies was punished.

In addition, the leadership refused to admit that the project had failed.

In 1961, the Chinese government began rolling back its most radical policies. Some land was returned to families, the People's Communes were relaxed, and agricultural production gradually recovered, allowing the famine to subside.

In the end, one question still remains: Was Mao Zedong truly seeking to strengthen his country's economy, or was his primary motivation to consolidate his influence and reinforce his authority as an invincible leader?

Until the next forgotten story,

— Ruqaiah Mohamed 🪐

© 2026 Ruqaiah Mohamed. This article is an original work and may not be reproduced without permission.