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So they sold their personal weapons and any other army equipment they could obtain. The officers were worse than the men and the generals worst of all. By June 1948 the KMT army was down to 2.1 million; the CCP army had risen to 1.5 million, equipped with a million rifles and 22,800 pieces of artillery, more than the KMT (21,000); virtually all these weapons had been bought from government troops. The Americans, who had supplied Chiang with $1 billion worth of Pacific War surplus, thus equipped both sides in the conflict.62 There was a series of clear Communist victories in the closing months of 1948, culminating in the decisive battle of Hsuchow at the end of the year. By December virtually all Manchuria and North China was in Mao’s hands. Tientsin fell in January 1949 and Peking surrendered. Hsuchow cost the KMT 400,000 casualties. But of these, 200,000 prisoners, unpaid and hungry, were immediately integrated
Modern Times
Paul Johnson
In Virginia and the Middle Colonies, and farther south, there was a tendency to take the easy way out and settle for a tidewater existence. A planter could raise his crop of tobacco, and load it from his own wharf, by his mansion or farmhouse, directly onto a ship that took it to England. The same ship would bring out goods, both luxury products and basic manufactures. A planter was provided with a catalog and made his order, which was delivered the next voyage out, the ship taking his bale of tobacco in return. This was a primitive but highly convenient system, akin to barter, with everything done on credit. It eliminated the need for large market towns and thus impeded urban development. For the planter it was, again, the easy or lazy way out. But of course it operated very much to the advantage of the capitalist merchant in London, to whom the planter quickly got into debt and remained thus all his life. His heir inherited the plantation, the system, and the debts. In his letter to his half-sister, Washington’s mother, Joseph Ball gave some sound advice about the system. Rejecting the sea, he told her that a planter, if industrious, could live much better than the master of a ship. But she, and her son George, if he became a planter-farmer, must beware. “Neither must he send his Tobacco to England to be sold [there] and goods sent him; if he does, he will soon get in the merchant’s debt, and never get out again.” He advised using the market, and being patient: he must “not aim” at “being a fine gentleman before his time.” There is evidence that Washington did not exactly follow this advice to the letter. But it made him think; and he was beginning to acquire the practical habit of thinking in the long term, which was the secret of his success in life.
George Washington
Paul Johnson
The explosion had left a crater more than forty miles across—much too huge to be perceived from anywhere at ground level. At some time in the past Yellowstone must have blown up with a violence far beyond the scale of anything known to humans. Yellowstone, it turns out, is a supervolcano. It sits on top of an enormous hot spot, a reservoir of molten rock that rises from at least 125 miles down in the Earth. The heat from the hot spot is what powers all of Yellowstone's vents, geysers, hot springs, and popping mud pots. Beneath the surface is a magma chamber that is about forty-five miles across—roughly the same dimensions as the park—and about eight miles thick at its thickest point. Imagine a pile of TNT about the size of Rhode Island and reaching eight miles into the sky, to about the height of the highest cirrus clouds, and you have some idea of what visitors to Yellowstone are shuffling around on top of. The pressure that such a pool of magma exerts on the crust above has lifted Yellowstone and about three hundred miles of surrounding territory about 1,700 feet higher than they would otherwise be. If it blew, the cataclysm is pretty well beyond imagining.
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Bill Bryson
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