but I'm not entirely shocked.

As an African American I always (even as a young child in school) wondered where all the "indians" were if they lived here when the "pilgrims" arrived.

When I found out the truth, everything else became suspect and downhill we went from there. (it was unfathomable to me as a child that people could work and not be rewarded i.e. paid)... These things were "santa claus isn't real" moments for me, frankly.

This country (although not unique in its inhumanity) has an ugly foundation it has been built on. I cannot blame the "history makers" for not wanting it completely exposed. Its really ugly. My fear is that damn karma thing, you know? If i became a billionaire by stealing and enslaving those around me, I'd sincerely be looking for the "other shoe to drop" some day. I fear for my country (America) and hope we can somehow prevent ourselves from winding up on the receiving end of the equation, what with the way things are going in the world it seems like were moving in that direction.

This article was just another attempt to explain how, Europeans, really viewed America, what their motives were and how they founded it earlier than we all know.

NO!

The Native Americans were here. There was NO FOUNDING OF AMERICA. Get over it. Stop trying to lie about it, spin it, and work your way around it.

The continued attempt to not only fight for the status quo that Europeans somehow founded this country, but the more recent attempts to argue they actually FOUNDED IT EARLIER (be it the Spanish, these so-called Nordic conquests by Erik the Red and others for which there is absolutely no evidence and other ideas) is a sad part of our continued history to insist that Europeans somehow, anyhow FOUNDED this country.

You can't found a place someone else lived. Deal with it.

We need to learn to treat this as the Romans treated their conquest of Britain. They just admit they it was a conquest not a founding, that sure the people already there (Celts, Saxons, etc.) seemed barbaric to them but on closer inspection they actually were very unique, intelligent, and brave with traditions of their own. Through the intermingling of the TWO traditions and a variety of other factors they ended up where they are today.

Would that we could do the same with the Native Americans. But that would require realizing, on some level, that they weren't inferior but rather had a society of their own which we chose to conquer and then use those lessons to form our country. We're not the first to do so. And we won't be the last.

We're just the last to admit it.

Every word Amerigo Vespucci wrote was God's truth.

"You can't found a place someone else lived. Deal with it."

The world this week is celebrating the 60th anniversary of Israel's founding.

So, did no one live there either??

Huh. Where'd you guys go to school? I remember learning about the bloodthirsty Spanish in seventh grade. "Gold, Guns and God" and all that. All the stuff in this article was in our curriculum, except for Amerigo Vespucci's NSFW fantasizing.

It was all pilgrims all the time in elementary school, but that was just an excuse to get the kids making paper turkeys and pilgrim hats anyway.

you would be hard-pressed to find a modern-day American who knows any of this

Just curious, do students today not learn this stuff? I'm sure Horowitz goes into a lot more detail, but I remember learning about the Spanish in Florida, the Huguenots, the Vikings. Maybe it's because I grew up in Virginia, where it's all about Jamestown and the Pilgrims are considered a bunch of interlopers. But we learned about the Spanish and the French and the Vikings too. (And yes, at a public school.)

Are kids today so busy with "no child left behind" that they don't learn basic history?

According to the National Park Service historians, the story of the massacre by the evil Spanish of the innocent Huguenot women and babies just may be a bit different from the reviewed book's version. Read a more balanced account here:

http://www.nps.gov/foma/historyculture/the_massacre.htm

Seriously, everyone needs to realize where ever they live that somebody probably lived there before. It doesn't matter if European, Native American, Asian, or African. Human history has been about conquest and occupation. Up until the recent past, it's been commonly understood that the land was yours if you could hold it.

We can spend eternity righting past wrongs only to create more wrongs to be righted. Let's go over that, and worry about where we're going and not about where we've been. Regardless of who you are, it's not pretty.

So, did no one live there either??

The phrase "a land without people for a people without land" comes to mind.

Doesn't everybody do this?

I imagine what I would need to do to save a certain small part of the dunes and the shore near Grand Haven, Michigan. I think about going back to about 1600 CE, and taking some sort of control, along with the Ottawa natives, and then guiding the people and the area through four more centuries.

As it is, as it was, we Americans cannot be proud of ourselves. Our progress is weighted down by our barbarity.

I started to read the article when I came across this sentence: "In conquering the settlement of Mavila, De Soto's army succeeded in massacring between 2,500 and 3,000 Indians -- a single-day death toll that rivals Antietam."

I think the number of Native Americans killed at Mavila was supposed to read "between 25,000 and 30,000." Estimates for the dead at Antietam are about 23,000 to 25,000 which is a whole lot more than 2500.

Correction to this article is needed.

It seems there were 23,000 casualties at Antietam--not deaths. The numbers in the article in regard to the Native American town is correct. I stand corrected.

I'll try to remember to think before I type next time!