5/11/2013

Luxury as Gatekeeper

Over the weekend, Talking Points Memo published “Why Do Poor People ‘Waste’ Money on Luxury Goods?,” a fantastic meditation on the invisible power of consumer products over the upward mobility of poor folks:

Why do poor people make stupid, illogical decisions to buy status symbols? For the same reason all but only the most wealthy buy status symbols, I suppose. We want to belong. And, not just for the psychic rewards, but belonging to one group at the right time can mean the difference between unemployment and employment, a good job as opposed to a bad job, housing or a shelter, and so on. Someone mentioned on twitter that poor people can be presentable with affordable options from Kmart. But the issue is not about being presentable. Presentable is the bare minimum of social civility. It means being clean, not smelling, wearing shirts and shoes for service and the like. Presentable as a sufficient condition for gainful, dignified work or successful social interactions is a privilege. It’s the aging white hippie who can cut the ponytail of his youthful rebellion and walk into senior management while aging black panthers can never completely outrun the effects of stigmatization against which they were courting a revolution. Presentable is relative and, like life, it ain’t fair.

The author, Tressie McMillan Cottom, considers the way her mother, though as poor as her neighbors, would dress up in clothes which signaled to others — white folks in educational and social service bureaucracies — her respectability, clothes which helped her navigate those bureaucracies and gain advantages or resolve problems for herself and her neighbors. Cottom considers the casual discrimination the working poor often face when trying to climb above their current status, all the while wearing clothes or driving cars that declare their working poverty. Luxury goods, Cottom suggests, are about much more than luxury, unless the term simply describes the luxury of not being considered poor, or worse, poor and profligate.

The Myth of the Surge Endures

Photo courtesy the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Used in accordance with Creative Commons guidelines.

Former CIA Director General David Petraeus shared his thoughts on the current state of affairs in his old bailiwick of Iraq via Foreign Policy on Wednesday.

This is not a road that Iraqis had to travel. Indeed, by the end of the surge in 2008, a different future was possible. That still seemed to be the case in December 2011, when the final U.S. forces (other than a sizable security assistance element) departed; however, the different future was possible only if Iraqi political leaders capitalized on the opportunities that were present.

Petraeus claims “a different future for Iraq was possible,” but the bulk of his opinion piece centers around his belief in the success of the Surge. Addressing the quality of that argument is a necessary step toward evaluating the feasibility of Petraeus’ claim suggesting the possibility of post-Surge Iraq markedly different than the Iraq of reality.

Although I halted the transition of tasks from coalition to Iraqi forces shortly after I took command, we knew that ultimately such transitions would be essential to our ability to draw down our forces and send them home. As President Bush used to observe, “U.S. forces will stand down as the Iraqi forces stand up.” We knew that ultimately the U.S. military could not support the replacement of the five surge brigades and the other additional forces deployed to Iraq in 2007. It thus was imperative that Iraqi forces be ready by the latter part of 2007 to assume broader duties so that coalition forces could begin to draw down and the surge forces could go home.

Translation: The Surge was unsustainable. The US military was not able, or its civilian leaders were unwilling, to replace the forces sent to Iraq as a temporary wedge against the unfolding civil war. Narrowly defined, the Surge had limited success. Once it reached its denouement, however, the violence in Iraq picked up essentially where it had left off, except for one important thing: the violence became more likely to kill Iraqi women (and, presumably, children) than Iraqi men. The study of Iraqi fatalities in the Iraq War published by PLOS Medicine earlier this month backs this up.

Amy Hagopian et al., “Mortality in Iraq Associated with the 2003–2011 War and Occupation: Findings from a National Cluster Sample Survey by the University Collaborative Iraq Mortality Study,” PLOS Medicine.

Petraeus continues:

Counterinsurgency operations depend on a keen understanding of the political, historical, cultural, economic, and military situation in each area, and our initiatives built on those begun earlier in the war to further our understanding of the dynamics of each province, district, and community. Truly understanding the human terrain was vital to our ability to improve its security. The heart of the struggle in Iraq was a competition for power and resources between the major factions in the country — the majority Shiite Arabs and the minority Sunni Arabs and Kurds. (There were subfactions of each group as well, of course, in addition to other minority sects and ethnicities such as Turkoman, Yezidis, and Iraqi Christians, among others.) Achieving enduring progress in Iraq thus required achievement of political agreements on a host of key issues that divided the various factions. Consequently, seeking to foster agreement on such issues was yet another important component of the overall approach, and it developed into one to which Ambassador Crocker and I devoted considerable focus and effort. During the course of the surge, there were important laws passed and initiatives agreed upon — for example, a provincial powers act, an elections law, a reform of the de-Ba’athification decree, an amnesty law, and so forth; however, it was in this area that the most additional progress was (and still is) needed. Nonetheless, the surge made politics once again the operative mechanism through which Iraqis would divide power and resources — even as they struggled to create the political impetus and find the common ground to seize the moment and the opportunity offered to them.

One might imagine that a committed counter-insurgency operator like Petraeus would appreciate that the ethnic and sectarian hatreds of well over a millennium would could not be halted, much less reversed, by the commitment of about 30,000 American troops, for a limited period of time, in a country with a fledgling democratic government but no modern history of democracy.

It is near the end of the fourth page that Petraeus serves up his whopper:

The decline in violence overall, and the substantial reduction in car bombings in particular, as well as gradual improvements in a number of other areas of our effort made possible by the improved security, enabled Ambassador Crocker and me to report guarded progress in congressional hearings in September 2007. While highly charged emotionally at the time, those hearings gained us critical additional time and support, without which it is likely that the mission in Iraq would have failed. And, after we were able to report further progress when we testified again in April 2008, having already commenced the drawdown of the surge as well, we were able to gain still further time and support for our efforts in Iraq.

The progress continued throughout the remainder of the surge and beyond, with periodic upticks in violence, to be sure, but with the overall trajectory positive, despite continued inability to resolve many of the major political issues that divided the Iraqi people. Nonetheless, the comprehensive civil-military endeavor pursued during the surge made it possible over time to transfer tasks from U.S. and other coalition forces to Iraqi soldiers and police and, ultimately, for the United States to withdraw its final combat elements at the end of 2011 without a precipitate descent back into the violence and civil conflict that made the surge necessary in the first place.

The team, previously mentioned, that researched Iraqi fatalities in the war published this graph illustrating part of its findings:

The Surge began in January 2007 and continued through July 2008. As the graph illustrates, combat-related deaths were high in 2007 and lower, though still significant, in 2008. Following the fewest combat-related deaths of the war in 2009, the toll of violence began to grow once more in 2010. What has happened since is difficult to say, but any perusal of news items coming from Iraq will paint a rather bleak picture. What short term success the Surge might have won has been lost. The Washington Post’s foreign affairs blogger Max Fisher assessed the data:

This study confirms two components of the Iraq War narrative: that fighting dropped sharply after 2007 and that 2008 was a relatively successful year in reducing combat deaths. You can see that the dark-red bars get smaller, meaning there are fewer deaths from direct violence. But this chart still contradicts our overall understanding: It turns out that deaths picked back up in 2009 and then even further in 2010, to 2005 levels. The gain was temporary and in the process of reversing by the time we left.

Whatever positive anecdotal evidence David Petraeus might care to highlight from his time as commanding general of the Multi-National Force — Iraq, the data collected by a team of American and Canadian researchers cooperating with the Iraqi Ministry of Health reveals that the Surge achieved little in lasting terms. Petraeus himself admits the situation has worsened:

In many respects, Iraq today looks tragically similar to the Iraq of 2006, complete with increasing numbers of horrific, indiscriminate attacks by Iraq’s al Qaeda affiliate and its network of extremists. Add to that the ongoing sectarian civil war in Syria — which is, in many aspects, a regional conflict being fought there — and the situation in Iraq looks even more complicated than it was in 2006 and thus even more worrisome — especially given the absence American combat forces.

The general’s recommendations to Iraq’s leaders?:

As Iraqi leaders consider the way forward, they would do well to remember what had to be done the last time the levels of violence escalated so terribly. If Iraqi leaders think back to that time, they will recall that the surge was not just more forces, though the additional forces were very important. What mattered most was the surge of ideas — concepts that embraced security of the people by “living with them,” initiatives to promote reconciliation with elements of the population that felt they had no incentive to support the new Iraq, ramping up of precise operations that targeted the key “irreconcilables,” the embrace of an enhanced comprehensive civil-military approach, increased attention to various aspects of the rule of law, improvements to infrastructure and basic services, and support for various political actions that helped bridge ethno-sectarian divides.

The ideas that enabled progress during the surge are, in many respects, the very ideas that could help Iraq’s leaders reverse the tragic downward spiral that we have seen in recent months. As we discovered in the run-up to the surge of 2007, a singular focus on counterterrorist operations will most likely fail to stem the violence gripping Iraq. If Iraq and the Iraqis are to have yet one more opportunity to move forward, they would likely find it useful to revisit the entire array of approaches pursued in 2007 and 2008. It is heartening, thus, to know that some of the veterans of the surge, American as well as Iraqi, are engaged in the effort to help Iraq determine and then pursue the initiatives needed to address the terrible increase in violence in that country. This is a time for them to work together to help Iraqi leaders take the initiative, especially in terms of reaching across the sectarian and ethnic divides that have widened in such a worrisome manner. It is not too late for such action, but time is running short.

Read against this latest fatality data, Petraeus’ prescription appears unreasonably sanguine. As the raft of initial histories of the Surge appears on the horizon, readers will do well to consider the best available data alongside the assertions of the officers and civilian leaders — many of them named and feted by Petraeus in this opinion piece — who orchestrated the Surge and have the most at stake in how it is regarded historically.

One final item which shouldn’t go unnoticed: Petraeus’ missive coincidentally appeared the same day his former executive officer’s book on the Surge became available from Yale University Press.

foreign policy Iraq War war

29/10/2013

Speaking Up for Big Pharma

Photo courtesy Bart Heird. Used in accordance with Creative Commons guidelines.

Last week, Barry Werth published “Why New Drugs are So Expensive,” a must-read piece on pharmaceutical companies and drug pricing in the MIT Technology Review. Werth’s article hit particularly close to home with me. Over the last twenty years, my family has been engulfed by the American health care system.

One brother survived the mysterious disappearance of his entire immune system at 22 months; thanks to IGG infusions and a team of incredible doctors at the University of Minnesota Children’s Hospital, he is a healthy, productive college student today. Another brother survived childhood leukemia thanks to the Mayo Clinic, but struggles with debilitating epilepsy which may be related to the cancer treatment he received as a toddler. My dad wasn’t as fortunate as my brothers. He was diagnosed with Stage IV colon cancer in 2008 and, despite aggressive treatment and several surgeries, died on Bright Monday 2011 at 52 years old. My wife was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease at age 15, and while her health was relatively good through much of our relationship, since the summer of 2012 she has had four surgeries, five hospital stays, a complete treatment overhaul, and one gastroenterologist essentially abandon her after determining she was in over her head. For most of my life — not just my adult life, but my entire life — my family has been at the mercy of insurance companies. It probably won’t surprise you to learn that my opinion of our health care system is abysmal and trending downward.

The one bright spot, at least as far as there can be one, has been how the industry in the best position to profit off my family’s misfortune, Big Pharma, has essentially saved my wife and me from at least one bankruptcy. More than once has my wife’s insurance company, The Alliance, attempted to thwart treatment plans developed by her gastroenterologists — some of them very major figures in GI medicine — by “reviewing” her case internally with doctors who have never examined or even met her. More than once has this review came back with a firm denial of the treatment plan developed by doctors who have actually examined her, including the world-class doctor at the University of Chicago who first diagnosed her and was her GI for over a decade. These reviews would invariably recommend half the drug treatment my wife’s actual doctors had recommended. Drugs that treat Crohn’s are very expensive; some of them are also used to treat multiple sclerosis, ulcerative colitis, and rheumatoid arthritis, among other conditions.

Fortunately for us, my wife’s doctors have been very adept at figuring out alternative means to obtain the drugs she needs. Most of the time this has come in the form of patient assistance from major drug companies. In effect, people like us help Big Pharma keep itself from paying higher taxes by providing desperately needed medicine at steeply discounted rates. We’re talking thousands of dollars here. My wife is currently taking a drug for which our insurance company wanted to charge us $7500 a month, while Big Pharma has provided the drugs for free for an entire year. A copay for a previous drug would have cost us $3500 per month under our insurance. We got that drug for free from a different Big Pharma company over a couple years of treatment. Big Pharma gets a lot of bad press in this country, some of it richly deserved. Every time I hear this, I want to tell people that our insurance company would have thrown us to the wolves long ago. Big Pharma is the reason we haven’t yet lost our house.

Once I feel more prepared to talk about it there will certainly be a few posts on the Affordable Care Act in this space. My under-educated view of it is very dim. Essentially, it gives more money to the insurance companies, an industry I consider an a plague infesting our health care system. Not all insurance companies are terrible. My dad was fortunate that his union and my stepmom’s union both believed in purchasing quality insurance, insurance which kept my dad from worrying about his family losing their home, first as cancer forced him into retirement, and later as he was dying. My wife’s insurer, retained by her former employer (an accounting firm) is good for covering routine visits to the doctor and normal medications, but when you ask them to cover things for which one generally pays protection money to insurance companies — catastrophic health changes, chronic illness, etc. — they balk and “review” the case to determine to what degree they’re going to leave you hanging.

Werth’s article sheds some useful, needed light on the pricing schemes Big Pharma uses to support itself and — certainly as crucial — reward it investors. Hearing about how the sausage is made can cause dismay and anger. Big Pharma is far from faultless and should not be excused from merited reproach. But I wanted to add one small data point to explain another side of Big Pharma alongside Werth’s article, the side that frightened, needy patients and their families sometimes see — the sight of Big Pharma riding to the rescue.

health care insurance

16/10/2013

(Nearly) Half a Million Dead in Iraq

A study published today by PLOS Medicine has estimated the number of Iraqis killed in the Iraq War (much of it the dubiously-named Operation Iraqi Freedom) at 461,000 men, women, and children. The results are pretty grim:

According to [co-author] Amy Hagopian and her colleagues, at least 60 percent of the excess deaths were the result of violence. The rest were linked to so-called secondary causes.

“War causes a huge amount of chaos, disruption and havoc,” Hagopian said. “Some deaths are direct, but there are also deaths that result from destroyed infrastructure, increased stress, inability to get medical care, poor water, poor access to food. … These are all reasons why people die.”

Of those deaths determined to be the result of direct violence, the study attributed 35 percent to coalition forces, 32 percent to sectarian militias and 11 percent to criminals. Contrary to public perception of mayhem in Iraq, bombings accounted for just 12 percent of violent deaths. The overall majority of violent deaths, 63 percent, were the result of gunfire.

If the study is accurate, Iraq’s liberators were the single group most likely to kill Iraqis. As an Iraq War veteran, that’s a pretty brutal statistic to confront.

Max Fisher, foreign affairs blogger for The Washington Post, took a look at some of the figures Hagopian et. al. published and came away with two significant conclusions. The first concerns the violence in Iraq over the course of the war:

The results, charted below, show the number of war-related Iraqi deaths over time. It’s grim — and a direct challenge to our understanding of the war as having improved after 2007:

Amy Hagopian et al., “Mortality in Iraq Associated with the 2003–2011 War and Occupation: Findings from a National Cluster Sample Survey by the University Collaborative Iraq Mortality Study,” PLOS Medicine.

This study confirms two components of the Iraq War narrative: that fighting dropped sharply after 2007 and that 2008 was a relatively successful year in reducing combat deaths. You can see that the dark-red bars get smaller, meaning there are fewer deaths from direct violence. But this chart still contradicts our overall understanding: It turns out that deaths picked back up in 2009 and then even further in 2010, to 2005 levels. The gain was temporary and in the process of reversing by the time we left.

The Surge, it seems, was an utter failure in the long term. This ought not be surprising. Fisher’s second conclusion addresses the likelihood of death for Iraqi men and women, respectively:

This chart also complicates our understanding of the war. The y-axis, which is labeled with that confusing “45q15” notation, indicates the probability of dying between age 15 and age 60. In other words, this chart shows the chance that an Iraqi man or woman, age 15 to 60, had of being killed due to the war.

Amy Hagopian et al., “Mortality in Iraq Associated with the 2003–2011 War and Occupation: Findings from a National Cluster Sample Survey by the University Collaborative Iraq Mortality Study,” PLOS Medicine.

Two trends should jump out at you right away: The war got a lot less dangerous for Iraqi men, but it stayed about consistently dangerous for women. There seem to be two most-likely explanations for that. First, a lot of men who might have fought were killed in the war’s first five years, so by 2008 there were fewer of them around to fight and die. Second and perhaps more plausible is that the nature of the war changed. For the first several years, violent deaths tended to come from combat, which disproportionately kills men. But over time, more of it came from bombings and other acts of terrorism, which target civilians and thus have a high probability of killing women. This sort of violence has been getting much worse since 2011.

As the war in Iraq has progressed, women have disproportionately been more likely to be killed. Presumably the same is true for children due to the change in the means with which the Iraq War, and now the civil war which continues there, was (and continues to be) fought. This paints a very grim picture of life for Iraqi women and children for much of the last generation.

Last week I touched on my anger and chagrin as a veteran of the Iraq War. Figures such as these do little to ease that feeling.

Iraq Iraq War war

8/10/2013

Our Longest War Continues

Marine Sergeant Jeremy Holsten, Lima 3/3, greets children while on patrol at Kuchiney Darvishan, Helmand province, Afghanistan, on 18 Dec 2011. Department of Defense photo, used in accordance with Creative Commons license.

Yesterday marked the twelfth anniversary of the beginning of the American war in Afghanistan. Yesterday the Department of Defense announced the 2,285th American death since the beginning of the war. LCpl Jeremiah M. Collins, Jr. was from Milwaukee, He was only nineteen. If, when I deployed to Iraq in 2004, I had been told that kids who were merely in elementary school would one day die fighting in Afghanistan, I wonder if I would have believed it.

My feelings on the war in Afghanistan are mixed. Even this late, I have trouble resolving my belief that seeking out Osama bin Laden and those who aided him was a just cause with the years of neglect and mismanagement of operations in what became a second-tier front in the Global War on Terror. I also struggle with what might seem an odd wish — that I were an Afghanistan veteran, and not an Iraq veteran. Or that I had joined the Marines earlier, and was both.

A desire to double one’s exposure to danger, particularly a desire felt in retrospect, ought to seem suspicious. I distrust this desire, even while understanding it. As an Iraq veteran, I know full well that the war I was a part of will forever be an unjust, ill-reasoned, senseless waste. I essentially went to war for less than nothing, a war that got a lot of good-intentioned young Americans killed. Many of those kids, like me, joined up after 9/11, wanting to do their part. Those of us who served in Iraq were misdirected by our leaders, sent on a snipe hunt that too often proved lethal. Sending us to Iraq and frustrating our intentions to do good by our fellow citizens was and is an atrocity in its own right. I sometimes think that, had I served in Afghanistan, I could at least have a little pride in my service overseas. I would have played a small role in a just war instead of a bit part in an unjust one. I have no pride in my service in Iraq; I simply did my job as I promised I would, and now I continue to deal with the anger and shame I feel as a result of what our country did there. It might seem like a small thing, but when you’re searching for meaning without finding any, the emptiness is corrosive to your soul.

Of course, I could have died in Afghanistan. The counterfactual allows for it. I was nineteen when I enlisted in the Marines, and twenty-one when I went to Iraq. Had I died in Afghanistan in 2003 or 2004, as I well could have in the cosmic scheme of things, my family might have the insufficient comfort of knowing I died as part of a broader effort to catch Osama bin Laden. I left the Marines in 2006. Had I reenlisted, I still could have been dead or out of the Marines before Bin Laden was killed in 2011. As it was I narrowly missed a second deployment to Iraq.

Between Bin Laden’s death and the Pentagon’s announcement of LCpl Collins’ death, 890 days elapsed. I wonder how the families who lost loved ones in Afghanistan over those 890 days think about what that loss means. I wonder if they feel it has any connection to that just mission to catch Bin Laden, or if, in these waning days of the war, they feel more connection to a pointless cause like Iraq (or post-Tet Vietnam), or to something altogether different or in between. It’s a question some journalist with enough tact and humanity might want to ask a family: “Apart from it standing as a eternal testament to his faithful service to his country, what meaning do you find in your son’s death in Afghanistan over two-and-a-half years after Bin Laden was killed?” Print the family’s answer.

It’s a question that has an easy military or political answer. Retrograde movements — a dignified euphemism for “retreats” — take time, much more time than we might care to contemplate, and certainly more than we feel reasonable or tolerable. Casualties will be taken before the retreat is completed. But the easy answer is a cold comfort to those left behind to grieve. At some point between one day elapsed after Bin Laden’s death and 890, some hard-boiled journalist might want to ask the President or Secretary of Defense: “Apart from it standing as a eternal testament to his faithful service to his country, what meaning do you find in a young Marine’s death in Afghanistan over two-and-a-half years after Bin Laden was killed?”

Lance Corporal Jeremiah M. Collins, Jr. probably won’t be the last American killed in Afghanistan. He probably won’t even be the last Marine. Each time another young American dies in Afghanistan, I wish somebody out there would ask that question of someone in a position to take responsibility for the answer.

Afghanistan War Iraq War Marines military USMC Vietnam War war Wisconsin

1/10/2013

The Midwest & Settlement

Present-day view of the portage de Chicagou, one of the crossroads of the Pays d’en Haut, from the new map created by Dustin Cable of the University of Virginia’s Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service.

From the Wired piece on Dustin Cable’s new map that I linked to yesterday:

Looking at the map, every city tells a different story. In California, for example, major cities aren’t just diverse, they’re integrated to a great degree, too. We see large swaths of Sacramento dotted variously with reds, blues, oranges, greens and browns. Los Angeles is more distinctly clustered, but groups still bleed into one another.

In the Midwest, though, the racial divide can be shockingly exact. In Chicago, bands of whites, blacks, and Latinos radiate out from the city center like sun beams. In St. Louis, a buffer of a few blocks separates a vast area of largely black citizens from another of white and Asian ones. In Detroit, the most segregated city in America according to one recent study, there’s no buffer at all. We see how 8 Mile Road serves as the dividing line between two largely homogenous swaths–one predominantly white and one predominantly black.

But the map doesn’t just tell us about distinct cities. Cable points out how the area comprising the Northwest Territory–Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota–sees a good deal of population distributed by major roadways, as opposed to the states in the East where the populations often developed along natural features (compare the sweep of dots in Eastern Pennsylvania to the same area in this detailed map of the area’s rivers).

I’m pleased that Wired included Cable’s second point about population distribution in the Midwest. The Midwest is more than just Chicago and St. Louis, or even other major metropolitan areas like Minneapolis, Milwaukee, and Detroit. What Wired doesn’t say, though I suspect Cable knows, is that the Midwest is also much more than a bunch of metropolitan areas strung along major roadways. Before the roadways came the railroads and population centers like Omaha and Kansas City. Before the railroads, settlements — including Chicago, St. Louis, Minneapolis and Detroit, but also places like Green Bay, or Pepin, or West Lafayette — were founded along the waterways that tied the region, and much of the early United States’ western economy, together. Many of those cities can trace their roots back to the frequently multi-racial, multi-ethnic fur trade settlements — Fort La Baye, Fort Beauharnois, Fort Ouiatenon — active in the Pays d’en Haut (Upper Country) of New France. Indeed, this pattern of water-dictated settlement doesn’t contrast with, but in fact matches the pattern in eastern Pennsylvania of settlements along the Allegheny River anchored by Fort Duquesne (now downtown Pittsburgh) and Fort Presque Isle (present-day Erie, PA).

At the same time, the “bands of whites, blacks, and Latinos” which “radiate out from the city center like sun beams” Wired ascribes to Chicago may just as well describe Baltimore, a city whose problems with race and ghettoization I’ve previously discussed:

Baltimore metropolitan area, from the new map created by Dustin Cable of the University of Virginia’s Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service.

or even Philadelphia:

Philadelphia metropolitan area, from a new map created by Dustin Cable of the University of Virginia’s Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service.

For whatever reason, Wired didn’t have much to say about the East. When viewed from the same level of zoom on the map, much of metropolitan New York doesn’t resemble the integrated diversity of Los Angeles or San Francisco so much as it does its patchy Eastern and Midwestern brethren:

New York metropolitan area, from a new map created by Dustin Cable of the University of Virginia’s Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service.

At any rate, as a historian, Wired’s sloppiness regarding settlement along roadways vs. waterways bothered me. Settlements in the Midwest existed well before the region was part of the young United States’ Northwest Territories, before it was connected to the East via railroad, or within itself via highways. Those early settlements of Indians, French, and the métis are noteworthy part of a longer history of American urban diversity, and worth remembering as we continue the struggle for integrated diversity in the urban Midwest. And, I might add, the urban East.

Chicago history maps Midwest Pays d’en Haut race urban America

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