“Sometimes this high-tech world calls for low-tech solutions”*…
Our human war against infectious microbes has escalated. As bioscience has produced a stream of anti-bacterial and anti-fungal treatments, the continuously-evolving micro-organisms they target evolve in ways to protect themselves… and so our antibiotics become less effective.
This antibiotic resistance is estimated to result in more than 2.8 million infections from antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and more than 35,000 people die as a result. Antibiotic resistance adds $20 billion in excess direct healthcare costs each year in the US. Additional costs to society for lost productivity could be as high as $35 billion a year. All of this is driven in some measure by over-prescription (the CDC reckons that over 25% of antibiotics prescribed in US outpatient settings are unnecessary)– but the evolutionary dynamics of our microbial “enemies” being what they are, the problem would be material in any case.
So effective non-antibiotic treatments are especially valuable. Ian Ingram reports on one of the latest..
The FDA cleared medical-grade Australian sheep blowfly (Lucilia cuprina) larvae in what maker Cuprina Holdings believes marks the first debridement product to use this particular species.
Dubbed Medifly Maggots, the product [pictured above] is indicated for removing dead or infected tissue from non-healing necrotic skin and soft tissue wounds — such as pressure or neuropathic foot ulcers — and non-healing traumatic or post-surgical wounds.
A healthcare worker is required to oversee the application of the prescription maggot product, which was cleared based on demonstration of equivalence to the previously cleared medical-grade green bottle blowfly larvae — Lucilia sericata (Medical Maggots).
“Maggot debridement therapy has earned its place in modern wound care, and adding a second FDA-cleared species strengthens the entire field,” Ronald Sherman, MD, the company’s medical and scientific director, said in a statement.
“Lucilia cuprina has a meaningful international track record,” and the new clearance “gives clinicians and their patients more flexibility in how this therapy is delivered,” added Sherman, who has worked on the development of medical-grade maggots for decades and was instrumental in getting the first product cleared by the FDA in 2004.
According to recent estimates, anywhere from 1-2% of people in developed countries have chronic wounds, which are associated with greater risks of limb amputation and mortality.
Maggots, long used for clearing dead or non-healing tissue before the invention of antibiotics, can spare antibiotics and have also been associated with a lower risk of lower-limb amputation in diabetics with non-healing lesions…
As poet A. R. Ammons wrote (in “Catalyst“): “Honor the maggot, supreme catalyst.”
“New Type of Maggot Cleared by FDA as Medical Treatment,” from @medpagetoday.com.
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As we rethink remedies, we might spare a thought for Alice Stewart; she died on this date in 2002. A physician and epidemiologist, she specialized in social medicine and the effects of radiation on health. Starting in WW II, she investigated the health effects of exposure to TNT in ammunitions factories, of carbon tetrachloride, and a prevalence of tuberculosis among shoe industry workers.
In the 1950s, Stewart led a pioneering study of x-rays (especially the pre-natal x-rays of expectant mothers) as a cause of childhood cancer. Her results were initially regarded as unsound, but were eventually accepted worldwide; the use of medical x-rays during pregnancy and early childhood was curtailed as a result– though it took around two and a half decades.
And after a visit to the U.S. in 1974, Stewart consulted on a major investigation of the health of workers in the nuclear industry there: she examined the sickness records of employees in the Hanford (WA) plutonium production plant and found a far higher incidence of radiation-induced ill health than was noted in official studies (produced by the nuclear industry).
Stewart was awarded the Right Livelihood Award in 1986 “for bringing to light in the face of official opposition the real dangers of low-level radiation.” In 1997 she was invited to become the first Chair of the European Committee on Radiation Risk.
“Soft as the earth is mankind and both need to be altered”…
Indeed, especially over the last 150 years or so, both have been. And as a consequence, John MacDonald reports, the Anthropocene is presenting a challenge to geologists:
I’m standing on a beach at Workington, on the western edge of the Lake District in England [pictured above and throughout the article linked below]. Here I find myself contemplating a very unnatural object, while pondering a pretty fundamental question: what, exactly, is a rock? For a geologist like me, this should be easy to answer, but what I’m looking at has made me think otherwise.
At Workington, all seems natural – the sounds of the waves lapping the shore, the call of seabirds, the smell of the ocean, the sight of the stony beach and high cliffs. At first glance, the beach is made largely of a rock platform, which is not a particularly unusual phenomenon – many coastal areas are ‘rock coasts’ made of sandstone, basalt or granite. These rocks are ancient in human years – often millions or even billions of years old – and have been sculpted into their current cliff or platform shapes over hundreds to thousands of years.
Yet among the waves is an object that shouldn’t be there: a wheel and tyre, embedded in the rock that makes up the shore. It’s not stuck in a crevice – the rock has actually formed around it. How can this have happened? The wheel and tyre are of a mid-20th century style, but rocks are ancient, often millions of years old. Aren’t they?
Closer inspection of this hard rock platform shows it is what geologists call conglomerate: a sedimentary rock made of rounded pebbles and cobbles deposited on the Earth surface. Over thousands to millions of years, this material is buried and heated causing minerals to form and fill in the gaps between the pebbles and cobbles, fusing them together into a hard rock mass. At Workington though, this can’t have happened: as well as the tyre, my colleagues and I found several other human-made objects, under 100 years old. The pebbles and cobbles in the conglomerate aren’t natural either: they are all made of slag, a solid by-product of the iron- and steel-making process.
As a geologist, I have studied various types of natural rocks, but recently I have become interested in ‘anthropogenic geomaterials’ – things like industrial slag – and how they become entwined in geological and environmental processes. I came to Workington originally to look at the slag, because I was interested in its potential to scrub-capture carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. However, when encountering the rock platform with the wheel in it, I was drawn by its incongruity. After studying the geomaterials of Workington more closely with my colleagues Amanda Owen and David Brown, we believe that this little-known section of the English coastline represents a tangible and potentially long-lasting signature of the impact humans are having on the planet.
Unlike many industrial landscapes, nature here has mostly returned, so it would be easy to miss that the beach is composed of human materials. Here a process that normally takes millennia or aeons has happened in a matter of decades. And it’s not the only example: new forms of anthropogenic geology are emerging around the world. These new materials are blurring the borderline between the natural and unnatural. They are also raising a rather fundamental question for geology: what actually is a rock?…
And what becomes of geology as its tasks come to resemble archaeology and anthropogy? Read on for the backstory and the answers.
Not natural, not quite unnatural, the strange new rocks of the Anthropocene stretch the boundaries of geology: “What is this rock?” from @aeon.co.
* W. H. Auden, “In Praise of Limestone“
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As we ruminate on rocks, we might spare a thought for William Logan; he died on this date in 1875. Born in Montreal in 1798, he was sent to Edinburgh for an education, after which, he lingered in Britain to work in Wales at his uncle’s coal and copper-smelting business. Logan made geologic maps of coal fields in Wales, in attempt to understand the sources of coal and ores. He noted the relationship between the underlying clay layers and fossil tree roots with local coal beds– which helped substantiate the theory that coal beds are formed in place.
On returning to Canada in 1842, he became the founding director of the Geological Survey of Canada. At the time, the country’s geology was virtually unknown; but as a product of two decades of his research, the CGS published the monumental Report on the Geology of Canada in 1863. Known as “the father of Canadian geology,” Logan was knighted by Queen Victoria; and after his death Mount Logan, Canada’s highest mountain, was named in his honor.
“The remedy is worse than the disease”*…
Your correspondent is a co-founder and director of Common Sense Media, an organization devoted to understanding the fraught media environment in which we live, to helping children, their families, and educators navigate it, and to advocating for “common sense” protections for kids. When we began, over 20 years ago, the terrain was largely TV, movies, books, and video games. They remain, of course, but the spotlight moved to social media, and now, to AI.
Advocacy, as it turns out, can be a tricky needle to thread. As Francis Bacon (and following him, a stream of others) observe, sometimes “the cure can be worse that the disease.” And that’s especially true when the “disease” one is fighting is the province of a powerful, richly funded cabal who market their moves as cures, even though, through their lens, disease is the desired state.
By way of one (chilling) example, Joe Wilkins outlines one dimension of the current state-of-play…
The White House and Congress are working on a deal to clamp down on what US citizens are allowed to say online. According to new reporting by Axios, the Trump administration is negotiating with key senators in an effort to shoehorn a massive legislation package which would limit states’ abilities to regulate AI in exchange for placing broad federal limits on digital speech.
Plenty of ink has been spilled about the Trump administration’s push to revoke AI regulation from individual states. Though the White House and its allies frame this as a matter of “safety” and “national security,” the timing is telling, coming as progressive state governments move to restrict the building of AI data centers and hold tech companies liable for harms their AI systems cause.
What makes this deal particularly insidious is the trade-off at its core. Per Axios, congressional lawmakers lead by Republican Marsha Blackburn are essentially offering to surrender their ability to regulate AI in exchange for three federal censorship bills: the Kids Online Safety Act, the NO FAKES Act, and a federal age verification mandate.
While the language around these three measures suggests common-sense cyber regulation, activists say they really amount to a massive censorship regime that is fundamentally anti-democratic.
In a blistering statement, the first amendment group Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) warns that “taken together, these bills would fundamentally change the internet as we know it.” That’s especially striking because FIRE is funded by conservative private interests like billionaire Charles Koch, meaning its opposition highlights the degree to which Trump is butting heads against fellow members of the US ruling class.
The Kids Online Safety Act (KORA) for example, would force social media giants to restrict lawful speech based on Federal Trade Commission regulations. FIRE complains that this would give the federal government too much power to hold platforms like Meta accountable for their harms — which, many would argue, is long overdue. But given that just a few corporations own the vast majority of web infrastructure and social media, KORA would give the Trump-controlled FTC major power to bend the internet to its will.
To put this power into perspective, just regulating Meta’s Instagram would impact about 71 percent of US citizens who say they regularly use the app.
It’s a powerful weapon, in other words — and like any weapon, it matters a great deal who wields it. Should the White House and Congress push KORA through, it’s likely it would functionally end the possibility of surfing the internet anonymously, while supercharging Trump’s efforts to criminalize left wing opposition groups in the US.
Whether it passes will depend on some shrewd maneuvering on the Trump administration’s part to secure Congressional support. But it all underscores a frustrating reality of AI regulation in the US: Americans overwhelmingly support stricter regulation on AI — but with the current cabal running the Oval Office, there’s no guarantee that the cure won’t be worse than the disease…
Common Sense Media continues to fight– both overt malignancies and the faux remedies that promise to be as bad or worse. So, I would argue, should we all.
Pending federal bills would fundamentally change the internet as we know it: “Trump Moves to Deeply Censor the Entire Internet,” from @joeonhere.bsky.social in @futurism.com.
A resonant reminder of the poisonous program to be resisted: “The Side That Won the Civil War is Now Banning Books About Why the Civil War Was Fought.”
And a look at the politicial economics that may drive it.
(Image above: source)
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As we seek sanity, we might recall that it was on this date in 1788, with the ratification of the ninth state (New Hampshire), that the Constitution of the United States came into effect. It was, of course, briskly amended to include what we call the Bill of Rights— the first 10 of 27 amendments (so far).
“The system, to a large extent, causes its own behavior”*…
Alan Jacobs quotes from Freeman Dyson‘s epic 1998 book, Imagined Worlds…
It often happens that a scientific revolution is accompanied by a change in style. I like to use the names of Napoleon and Tolstoy to symbolize two contrasting styles: rigid organization and discipline represented by Napoleon, creative chaos and freedom represented by Tolstoy. In the world of computers, Napoleon is the massive IBM main-frame; Tolstoy is the humble Macintosh. The computer revolution was an escape from the Napoleonic ambitions of von Neumann to the Tolstoyan anarchy of the Internet. Future revolutions will bring more such escapes.
Jacobs goes on to observe…
The big AI companies are the apotheosis — literally, in the view of many who work for them — of Napoleonic science. The open web and the world of hobbyist and small-scale devices (often built on the Raspberry Pi) are our remaining refuges of Tolstoyan computing.
See also: “Twenty Five Years After Imagined Worlds, What World Are We Living In? – Our surprisingly Napoleonic twenty-first century,” in which Erik Larson unpacks Dyson’s thinking and reconciles it to the world of 2022 (when Larson wrote the piece).
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As we contemplate culture, we might spare a thought for Jack Kilby; he died on this date in 2005. An electrical engineer, he made a– if not the— foundational advance that moved us into the age we’re now navigating: the integrated curcuit (or as we know it, the chip).
In mid-1958, as a newly employed engineer at Texas Instruments, Kilby didn’t yet have the right to a summer vacation. So he spent the summer working on the problem in circuit design known as the “tyranny of numbers” (how to add more and more components, all soldered to all of the others, to improve performance). He finally came to the conclusion that manufacturing the circuit components en masse in a single piece of semiconductor material could provide a solution. On September 12, he presented his findings to the management: a piece of germanium with an oscilloscope attached. Kilby pressed a switch, and the oscilloscope showed a continuous sine wave– proving that his integrated circuit worked and thus that he had solved the problem.
Kilby is generally credited as co-inventor of the integrated circuit, along with Robert Noyce (who independently made a similar circuit a few months later). Kilby has been honored in many ways for his breakthrough, probably most augustly with the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics.
“A Country is not a mere territory; the particular territory is only its foundation. The Country is the idea which rises upon that foundation; it is the sentiment of love, the sense of fellowship which binds together all the sons of that territory.”*…
The “nation state” as we know it grew from the Treaty of Westphalia (which ended the Thirty Years’ War in 1648) and the “Westphalian system” of states that it spawned. While scholars debate the emergence of the modern nation-state, most see it as a 19th-century European phenomenon facilitated by developments such as state-mandated education, mass literacy, and mass media.
From the beginning, some scholars (and speculative authors), pondered what might come after the nation-state. Some foresaw a global government; some, an evolution into communal anarchy or zero world government, in which nation states no longer exist. In the 1990’s, Samuel P. Huntington suggested the devolution of the world into clashing civilizations.
In the event, how are nation-states doing?
As we skate up toward the (date on which we choose to celebrate the) 250th “birthday” of the U.S., we might feel that the “idea,” that sense of love and fellowship in the U.S., is under strain. And as we look around the world, we see those “national virtues” fraying in country after country.
So it’s auspicious that Will Davies and Andrew Barry have collected several colleagues views on the state of The State…
Events in the 2020s have raised the question and problem of ‘the state’ anew, in ways that few could have predicted, even if there was a clear sense that neoliberalism was already faltering or dying over the previous decade. A new era of mercantilism, protectionism and economic nationalism apparently dawned, as successive US administrations increasingly sought to weaponize trade policy to resist rising Chinese power in the global economy. The Biden administration’s rhetoric, which elevated national security concerns alongside economic growth, questioned the allocative efficiency of international markets and pressured European powers to similarly foreground geopolitical considerations in their economic policies (Sullivan, 2023). The Inflation Reduction Act and CHIPS Act, both passed by the US Congress in 2022, demonstrated a more concerted effort by the Federal government to direct private and public sector investment towards strategic national security goals. The second Trump administration’s determination to press ahead with tariffs on dozens of US trading partners, despite causing financial instability and harm to US corporations and consumers, has further signalled a new era of state economic interventions and geopolitical tactics.
Significantly, one thing that distinguishes the present conjuncture from the immediate post-2008 world is that prominent liberal elites in ‘the West’ are now notably reflexive and at pains to declare a new policy paradigm (e.g. Foroohar, 2022). For example, following large investments by the Hewlett Foundation in 2018 and 2020, a research agenda developed in pursuit of ‘post-neoliberalism’, which has seen high profile attempts to draw a line under a ‘free market’ economic model. Indeed, some argue that there is a need to celebrate the state as a source of economic dynamism, security and technological strategy (Mazzucato, 2013, 2021). Ideas of ‘modern supply side’ economics, ‘new productivism’ and ‘abundance’ have also emerged in the United States to provide strategic direction for a more active and interventionist state (Klein & Thompson, 2025; Rodrik, 2022; Yellen, 2022). In a striking public manifestation of this movement, Britain’s then shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, outlined a vision of what she termed ‘securonomics’ that wedded goals of prosperity with those of national security (Reeves, 2023).
The new fusion of geopolitical strategy and economic policymaking in the United States and Europe, evident in renewed enthusiasm for industrial policy, ‘onshoring’ and ‘friend-shoring’ of supply chains, was catalyzed in part by both the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It is also associated with the continuing long wave of competitive innovation in digital technologies, including AI, the rise of China as an alternative economic model, and the contested political response to climate change. In these circumstances, juridical problems of borders and sovereignty have become entangled with material problems of energy, natural resources and ‘critical minerals’, leading to heightened geopolitical interest in areas of the globe (such as the Arctic, the DRC, Ukraine, Venezuela) that are now thought to be of particular geological and strategic importance in an era of ‘transition’ (Barry & Gambino, 2024). Disruption to supply chains and energy security, following the crises of 2020–2022, led to worldwide inflation, driven by supply-side factors that policymakers were ill-equipped to respond to, and for which most incumbent political parties were punished in the 60 national elections of 2024 (Weber et al., 2024). Attention turned toward the capacity of states to govern in areas of national strategic importance, where infrastructure, technoscientific innovation, energy security and critical resources are needed to sustain competitiveness and boost productivity.
The international order appears to be in a state of flux, to a greater extent than at any point since 1989, and arguably earlier. The global economy is fragmenting along with the ideology of a ‘rules-based international order’ (Amoore, 2023). The decentring of ‘the West’ in the global economy and the over-arching challenges of technological change and climate breakdown are profoundly altering what is expected of ostensibly autonomous states vis-a-vis competitors. Assumptions about neoliberal or ‘advanced liberal’ rule which achieved hegemony in the 1980s and 1990s, no longer seem adequate in a geopolitical, ecological and technological context in which the state is being asked to do far more, by capital, by publics and by emerging technologically mediated epistemological arrangements that offer novel ways of perceiving, characterizing, classifying and knowing the increasingly uncertain world.
Arguably, the question and problem of the state have been posed most forcefully by illiberal, authoritarian nationalist regimes, driven by the rising popularity of many radical and far right political parties. ‘Populist’ parties of the Right have been in the ascendence in many democracies around the world since the global financial crisis (Hopkin & Blyth, 2019; Revelli, 2019). Given electoral successes in India, Brazil, Hungary, Italy and the United States, populist leaders and parties are no longer simply critics of the status quo. They have pushed forward policies for targeting their ideological and ‘cultural’ opponents, whether these are to be found in universities, the ‘old’ print and broadcast media, independent civil service and so on. In these states in particular, ethno-nationalist, patriarchal and ‘anti-woke’ agendas have been threaded through public policies in areas of education, culture, welfare and border control, with fiscal policy also being remade to serve radical Right agendas.
Here and elsewhere, rising authoritarianism and nationalism appear able to co-exist with a new strain of anarcho-capitalist libertarianism that further challenges liberal assumptions about jurisprudence and bureaucracy, as arbiters of public goods (cf. Hall, 2017). ‘Neo-reactionary’ and anti-democratic ideologies, which first achieved hegemony in relatively niche online communities, now threaten to disrupt the basic capacities of the modern bureaucratic liberal state, casting doubt on the value and durability of democracy and the rule of law (Slobodian, 2024; Smith & Burrows, 2021). As illustrated by the example of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in the second Trump administration, the collapse of trust in government, politicians and the mainstream media in many democracies potentially offers greater freedom and political power to private wealth and rentiers, as a substitute for public institutions.
The above are somewhat disparate examples, drawn from the midst of a fast-moving situation of apparent state transformation for which we do not yet have an adequate theoretical framework or name. They may not all belong to the same tendency and may contradict each other in various ways. Despite the temptation, we should avoid the urge to bring them under a single conceptual umbrella, at least for the time being. Rather than offer a sweeping diagnosis of this conjuncture, then, in this collaborative essay, five members of the Editorial Board of Economy and Society each reflect on their own theoretical and conceptual equipment, its genealogy, possibilities and limitations for interrogating the present state of the state, especially in what we might call the ‘actually existing neoliberal states’ of the Global North.
In the 1980s and 1990s, this journal helped to forge a heterodox perspective on power in modern societies, urging scholars to look beyond the state to understand the power and politics of liberalism, to those non-state centres of calculation, knowledge, control and standardisation, which (after Foucault) were collectively understood as core to government (Burchell, 1993; Miller & Rose, 1990; Rose,1993; Walters, 1995). In an era when orthodoxy held that ‘neoliberalism’ was leading to a contraction of ‘the state’ and the expansion of ‘the market’, this journal exuded scepticism towards these categories and assumptions, in favour of empirical attention to the heterogeneity, historicity and contingency of shifting technologies of power. Deconstruction of familiar sociological and political categories allowed the play of power and politics in (neo)liberal societies to be seen afresh, without the conceptual edifice of ‘the state’ getting in the way.
We suggest that now is a useful moment in which to think again, to bring ‘the state’ back into view and examine the tools that are available to make sense of the present. The problems of the 2020s are different from those of the 1980s and 1990s, or indeed the 1930s or 1900s, and so should our problematizations be too. In this essay, we do not seek to name or singularly theorize the present crisis or conjuncture of the state, but rather to address it from different perspectives, both reflecting on and updating the journal’s longstanding preoccupations with the power and politics of knowledge and economy in liberal states.
The five contributions that follow do not offer a unified response to the question of the state of the state today. William Davies begins by situating analysis in debates over ‘neoliberalism’ that have, in many respects, dominated the social sciences in recent decades. Davies excavates a host of rich insights from a diverse range of perspectives, highlighting how the challenge of theorizing state transformation is closely bound up with wider reaching power relations of shifting ideas, policy paradigms and ideologies, alongside cultural and material transformations. In this reflection on post-2008 theoretical and empirical literatures, Davies invites us to think beyond historical precedents and models of ‘crisis’, and to recognize the heterogeneity of the present, the intermingling of ‘neoliberal’ and ‘post-neoliberal’ tendencies, which have contributed to the renewal of the problem of the state.
Samantha Ashenden’s contribution stresses the centrality of the idea of crisis to the current conjuncture. On the one hand, one might say that the state is ‘in crisis’ – a legitimation crisis to use Jürgen Habermas’s term. On the other hand, the state has come to act in the context of what proponents of state action themselves conceive as a series of crises. This has given a renewed justification for state action, or interstate action, whether to address financial, environmental and security crises or, as Ashenden argues, crises of fertility and population. What does the burgeoning of crisis talk tell us about the state today?
If the question of fertility – and population and demography – has long been a preoccupation and justification for the state, so is the milieu, the natural and unnatural environment. Andrew Barry’s contribution directs us to the way in which the chemical composition of the world has provided both the object and means for state action. The state has long been engaged in both managing and sustaining a ‘chemical regime of living’. Barry’s intervention points to the conjunction of state efforts to control access to mineral resources in the name of security (so-called ‘critical minerals’) with growing concern with what some have called the ‘chemical crisis’ of pollution and public health.
Ilias Alami’s contribution proposes an explicitly Marxist account of the present-day state. His contention is that state transformations are the manifestation of the political mediation of ‘determinate mutations in planetary capital accumulation’. He outlines a range of critical mutations, including the concentration of industrial production in East Asia, the displacement of labour by machines and consequent underemployment and industrial overcapacity, environmental degradation, and the geopolitical competition for resources. These are the conditions for growing economic interventionism by the state, and tighter relations between state and capital which are taking increasingly anti-democratic forms.
Finally, in her contribution, Linsey McGoey does not deny the significance of rising state intervention today. Yet, McGoey questions accounts of its history and its novelty. In doing so, she draws inspiration from Giovanni Arrighi (2009) who argued that the idea that the nineteenth century was an era of free trade is part of the mythology of the twentieth century, and from Friedrich List who highlighted the ‘inconvenient facts’ not acknowledged by Adam Smith. McGoey directs us to consider the history and politics of substantial efforts to deny the close relation between the state and the ‘free market’ which has been present all along…
Eminently worth reading in full: “The State of the State.”
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As we contemplate countries, we might recall that today is Juneteenth.
Though the Emancipation Proclamation was issued on September 22, 1862 (effective January 1, 1863), word was slow to spread. Indeed, in Texas (which had been largely on the sidelines of hostilities in the Civil War, had continued its own state constitution-sanctioned practice of slavery, and so had become a refuge for slavers from more besieged Southern states) it took years… and federal enforcement.
On June 19, 1865, Union General Gordon Granger, who’d arrived in Galveston, Texas, with 2,000 federal troops to take possession of the state and enforce the emancipation of its slaves, read “General Order No. 3” from a local balcony:
The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor. The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.
Former slaves in Galveston celebrated in the streets; Juneteenth observances began across Texas the following year, and are now recognized as state holidays by 41 states– and as of 2021, as a federal holiday.
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