Notes and Essays -- John Brown

| By the  Editorial Board , The Washington Post , May 28, 2023 at 7:30 a.m. EDT image from article: Ukrainian soldiers ride an old Soviet-designed armored vehicle along a road in the Zaporizhzhia region of Ukraine on May 20. (Heidi Levine for The Washington Post) In addition to weapons, tactics and fighting spirit, time is the key variable that will determine the outcome of Moscow’s pitiless war in Ukraine. Russian President Vladimir Putin, convinced that Russia can out-suffer its adversaries and sustain a grinding war of attrition in Ukraine for months or years, is confident he can  wear down public support  among Kyiv’s backers in the United States and Europe. In Washington and other Western capitals, leaders are now taking long-delayed steps to turn the strategic tables on Moscow’s tyrant. Here’s hoping it’s not too late. In the lead-up to this month’s Group of Seven summit of leading industrialized nations, in Hiroshima, Japan, President Biden and some of his partners...

His two-volume study, written with Robert W. Fogel, used data to challenge commonly held ideas about American slavery, including that it was unprofitable and inefficient.  The economic historian Stanley Engerman in an undated photo. He argued that slavery, while shameful, was a rational and viable economic system. Credit... James Montanus/University of Rochester By  Richard Sandomir , The New York Times Published May 27, 2023 Updated May 30, 2023 Stanley Engerman, one of the authors of a deeply researched book that, wading into the fraught history of American slavery, argued that it was a rational, viable economic system and that enslaved Black people were more efficient workers than free white people in the North, died on May 11 in Watertown, Mass. He was 87. His son David said the cause was myelodysplastic syndrome, a rare form of blood and bone marrow cancer. In their two-volume “Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery” (1974), Professor Engerma...