A freed slave's most polite fuck-you to his former master

http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/01/to-my-old-master.html

by chewxy • 14 years ago

34 7 14 years ago

yread• 14 years ago

$11680 in 1865 is $164391.37 in 2010 inflation adjusted dollars according to [1]. But when considering monthly wage of $25 (although it includes clothing and food and might have been even under "minimal wage") it was probably much more. The ratio is perhaps closer to 20:1

[1] www.westegg.com/inflation

tkahn62• 14 years ago

Interesting but not Hacker News. Flagged.

willvarfar• 14 years ago

Interesting trumps. If its interesting to people who read HN, it belongs on HN.

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html is lax enough.

tkahn62• 14 years ago

> If its interesting to people who read HN, it belongs on HN.

Completely false. If that were true, there would be no need for guidelines.

In fact it says, "Anything that good hackers would find interesting" which is not semantically equivalent to "people on HN".

If everyone on reddit signed up for an account today, by your interpretation HN would be full of pun threads and cats and that would be acceptable.

rabbitrage2• 14 years ago

The grammar is wrong for the period. Snopes?

Despite• 14 years ago

The blog linked to an img of a newspaper from the period. Here is the Library of Congress's archive of the same paper, showing the same letter. Now, that doesn't show that the Tribune wasn't duped as to the letter's source, but it does show that the grammar is from that period. Assuming you trust the LOC.

http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030213/1865-08-22...

rabbitrage2• 14 years ago

I stand corrected.

A freed slave's most polite fuck-you to his former master

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