Kona Coffee & The Influence of Coffee Industry on Hawaiian Agriculture Part 2
The relationship between coffee and Hawaiian agriculture began back in 1813 when the first coffee plants were introduced to the Islands.
The success of the coffee trees in those first years was relatively insignificant. Kona coffee farming really began in 1825 when Chief Boki, the Governor of Oahu brought a few Brazilian coffee seedlings as he traveled around the tip of South American on his way back from London.
According to historical documents, John Wilkinson is the first individual who managed to successfully plant a coffee orchard on Oahu. Later Reverend Samuel Ruggles went to Captain Cook and brought a few coffee seedlings with him and established the Kona coffee farm in that region. This is when the famous Kona Coffee Belt began.
The coffee industry grew and coffee began to compete with sugar cane shortly as the most profitable crop for the Hawaiian farmers. However, a decline came in the 1860s, when the coffee industry collapsed due to a deterioration of the local market and the coffee blight.
mauicoffeeco.com/hawaiian_coffee_selections
The Vietnam War: Reasons for Failure - Why the U.S. Lost
In the post-war era, Americans struggled to absorb the lessons of the military intervention. About the book:
As General Maxwell Taylor, one of the principal architects of the war, noted, First, we didn't know ourselves. We thought that we were going into another Korean War, but this was a different country. Secondly, we didn't know our South Vietnamese allies... And we knew less about North Vietnam. Who was Ho Chi Minh? Nobody really knew. So, until we know the enemy and know our allies and know ourselves, we'd better keep out of this kind of dirty business. It's very dangerous.
Some have suggested that the responsibility for the ultimate failure of this policy [America's withdrawal from Vietnam] lies not with the men who fought, but with those in Congress... Alternatively, the official history of the United States Army noted that tactics have often seemed to exist apart from larger issues, strategies, and objectives. Yet in Vietnam the Army experienced tactical success and strategic failure... The...Vietnam War...legacy may be the lesson that unique historical, political, cultural, and social factors always impinge on the military...Success rests not only on military progress but on correctly analyzing the nature of the particular conflict, understanding the enemy's strategy, and assessing the strengths and weaknesses of allies. A new humility and a new sophistication may form the best parts of a complex heritage left to the Army by the long, bitter war in Vietnam.
U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger wrote in a secret memo to President Gerald Ford that in terms of military tactics, we cannot help draw the conclusion that our armed forces are not suited to this kind of war. Even the Special Forces who had been designed for it could not prevail. Even Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara concluded that the achievement of a military victory by U.S. forces in Vietnam was indeed a dangerous illusion.
Doubts surfaced as to the effectiveness of large-scale, sustained bombing. As Army Chief of Staff Harold Keith Johnson noted, if anything came out of Vietnam, it was that air power couldn't do the job. Even General William Westmoreland admitted that the bombing had been ineffective. As he remarked, I still doubt that the North Vietnamese would have relented.
The inability to bomb Hanoi to the bargaining table also illustrated another U.S. miscalculation. The North's leadership was composed of hardened communists who had been fighting for independence for thirty years. They had defeated the French, and their tenacity as both nationalists and communists was formidable. Ho Chi Minh is quoted as saying, You can kill ten of my men for every one I kill of yours...But even at these odds you will lose and I will win.
The Vietnam War called into question the U.S. Army doctrine. Marine Corps General Victor H. Krulak heavily criticised Westmoreland's attrition strategy, calling it wasteful of American lives... with small likelihood of a successful outcome. In addition, doubts surfaced about the ability of the military to train foreign forces.
Between 1965 and 1975, the United States spent $111 billion on the war ($686 billion in FY2008 dollars). This resulted in a large federal budget deficit.
More than 3 million Americans served in the Vietnam War, some 1.5 million of whom actually saw combat in Vietnam. James E. Westheider wrote that At the height of American involvement in 1968, for example, there were 543,000 American military personnel in Vietnam, but only 80,000 were considered combat troops. Conscription in the United States had been controlled by the President since World War II, but ended in 1973.
By war's end, 58,220 American soldiers had been killed, more than 150,000 had been wounded, and at least 21,000 had been permanently disabled. According to Dale Kueter, Sixty-one percent of those killed were age 21 or younger. Of those killed in combat, 86.3 percent were white, 12.5 percent were black and the remainder from other races. The youngest American KIA in the war was PFC Dan Bullock, who had falsified his birth certificate and enlisted in the US Marines at age 14 and who was killed in combat at age 15. Approximately 830,000 Vietnam veterans suffered symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder. An estimated 125,000 Americans fled to Canada to avoid the Vietnam draft, and approximately 50,000 American servicemen deserted. In 1977, United States President Jimmy Carter granted a full, complete and unconditional pardon to all Vietnam-era draft dodgers. The Vietnam War POW/MIA issue, concerning the fate of U.S. service personnel listed as missing in action, persisted for many years after the war's conclusion.
2017 AM: Pacific Landscapes through the Holocene
Through comparative ethnographic analysis, archaeological and historical research this session aims to construct a model of social action ‘since’ the Holocene across the Pacific, from China to Australia. It explores the proposition that across this region humans devised a comparatively unique mode of action. Although there is considerable variation in it—variable influences from ENSO/Monsoonal dynamics, Continental/Island structures—throughout this axis of social action landscape manipulations, variable but deep cosmological systems, and modes of production and exchange struggle to create the conditions for in situ modes of existence. This appears to be in contrast to the pattern that developed at the western end of the Euro-Asia landmass and spread to the Americas and the rest of the world. There social systems became organized to extract necessities from other places, other social systems or processes external to the social system, e.g. entirely nature-created nutrient pools. This session samples and explores the spatial and temporal limit of this view running from China to Australia.
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