Carville Earle

Environment, disease and mortality in early Virginia

Abstract Early Virginia (1607-24) was a nightmarish world of disease and death, perhaps uncurpassed in the annals of English colonization. Typhoid fever and dysentery visited Jamestown in recurrent epidemics killing 30 per cent or more of the colonists with each onslaught. Yet Jamestown endured because the leaders of the Virginia Company misapprehended the nexus between the estuarine environment and water-borne, non-immunizing diseases. Each summer, death stalked the town as invading salt water pushed up the estuary and concentrated pathogens in the towns water supply. The prevention of disease and death required the abandonment of Jamestown and relocation into healthier niches, which occurred with the dissolution of the Virginia Company in 1624.

Socialism in America: a geographical interpretation of its failure

Abstract A geographical perspective illuminates one of the central problems in American politics: the failure of socialism in the United States. Previous interpretations have stressed the prosperity of American workers or the tactical division among socialists and trade unionists, yet neither interpretation has been attentive to spatial variations in the labor movement between 1865 and 1920. A geographical perspective on the failure of socialism suggests the following revisions. Socialism failed not so much because of the prosperity of American workers as because of the deep division in the wages and material interests of skilled and unskilled workers. This rift in the labor movement was especially deep in turn-of-the-century large cities where wage divergence and industrial diversification undermined support for a party of the working class. Conversely, class politics found a more fertile environment in smaller American communities, particularly those experiencing the transitional strains of industrialization. The failure of American socialism, unique among industrial capitalist nations, resulted from historically wide wage differentials and the spatial selectivity of wage convergence and industrial transition.