Letters to the Editor
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DeSoto figures are off.
Multiply by ten if they approximate Antietam.
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History from the native point of view
Folks, if you want to read the history of the New World (American West) from the native point of view read: A Vast Winter Count, by Colin G. Calloway. It's not that all we know about America history is plain wrong. It's that its horribly white-washed, too. (no pun intended)
The native americans recorded the years events pictorially in what was called a Winter count. Calloway does a masterful recount of the "invasion" of "America".
He estimates that there may have been up to 20 million native americans on the continent before the arrival of the whiteman. After 75% to 90% died because of introduced disease, the job of conquering was quite manageable.
Cheers, Quimo Sabe.
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weary of demystification
As much as other commenters are weary of the old news that the settlers were imperialists, I'm tired of the old "the natives actually were savages, not the peaceful, wise, nature-revering, blah blah blah." The aboriginals were human beings, with good and bad aspects to their distinct and diverse cultures. Certainly the Mayans and Aztecs had brutal rites of human sacrifice, by credible accounts. For all that, I think we should have monuments all over the continent to the people whom our ancestors wiped out. They may not have been saints, but it seems that they did practice an animistic reverence for their environment that the monotheistic conquerers had long forgotten. We might still have something to learn from them. There really is something sacred about the earth, you know, which will be disaster to ignore.
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more folks know this than you might think
In Memphis we were taught about DeSoto in grade school... the "new bridge" across the Mississippi is the Hernando DeSoto bridge. Memphis is another example of a place that was first settled, then abandoned by the Spanish; I'm sorry I can't remember the name of the first fort on the bluffs (Fort Rosalia? something like that) but I assure you I knew it at one time.
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aha
The wonders of the internet. The French built Fort Assumption first, then there was a Spanish fort San Francisco de las Barrancas built later. I don't know where I got Fort Rosalia... I have a vague idea that although I'm not finding it online, there was an early fort by that name that was abandoned. Or I may just be hopelessly confused.
Anyway, although I've forgotten the details in the 20-odd years since high school, I hadn't forgotten that there were other Europeans here before there were English-speaking ones, and before that, several successive nations of natives as well.
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Zinn's People's History of the US
I suggest that a lot of this was covered in Zinn's book...
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thank you Louis Bayard and Salon
for this interesting book review- I'm beginning to think I should stay away from the political jabbering in Salon and stick with these articles.
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Read this book before......
I suggest that a lot of this was covered in Zinn's book...
-- yogi
Also much of this was in "Lies My Teacher Told Me" by James Loewen (an excellent book, I might add).
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History in schools
I attended some pretty mediocre schools, but every history textbook had a chapter--usually after the excrutiatingly boring one dealing with geography--about the Conquistadors. The details were not lurid/truthful; if they had been, history would have been a much more popular subject. (Just the venom penis story would create a whole new generation of history buffs...) It wasn't until high school that I began to wonder about the events that the textbooks kept offstage, and not till I discovered Howard Zinn that I began to understand. But it never occurred to me that the history of the US began with the Pilgrims.
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The History Conspiracy
I have to say that as a professional historian, I'm a little tired of this particular genre: I'll call it the "History Conspiracy" genre. Every so often, an author and publisher and reviewers agree to take the strategy, "This is what THEY didn't teach you in school! The history THEY didn't want YOU to know!"
It reminds me of that guy on TV who sells all the cures THEY don't want US to know! (Baking soda cures cancer, etc.)
The truth is there are a lot of hard working, decent, thoughtful, honest history researchers and teachers, and have been for a long time. History curricula are constantly under revision (for good and bad reasons), but people have been trying to diversify, complicate, revise, etc., history for a long time. And even the 'bad old history', if read generously and attentively, is very instructive.
What I think this genre is all about is something else: it flatters the pride of those who blew off their high school history classes; who felt above it all but couldn't name why; or who simply didn't give a damn at the time--maybe they were watching animes and/or strategizing their law school applications--and so didn't really take anything in.
Whatever. The point is that there is no vast "history conspiracy" out there seeking to prevent Americans from knowing "real history." It's a complicated field. There are thousands of voices, some good, some bad, some half-truthful, some totally confused, and a very few that are excellent. LIKE ANY FIELD OF HUMAN ENDEAVOR!
And simply blaming "them" because at somepoint YOU didn't get the memo --- well, it may sell copies, but it flatters one of America's most disgusting vanities: namely, that our ignorance is someone else's fault.
If you'd wanted to know, you'd have known. Now you do. Keep learning, this time!
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This isn't relevent or new.
In grade school we learned that the conquistadors came first and English settlements many, many years later. This was fifth grade at a public school. Maybe this information was held back for people much older than myself, but I think for those in their thirties or younger this isn't much of a surprise.
His description of the Indians living in a Hobbesian world is slightly racists. Hobbesian suggests living completely in nature without culture or government. It's true the Indians warred against one another but there were no wholesale slaughters like they had in medieval Europe. I also just finished 1491, which suggests that most Europeans encountered Native Americans after their society was devastated by disease. So the description of the starving Native Americans may not be an accurate representation of their society.