Best native american history books according to redditors
We found 2,125 Reddit comments discussing the best native american history books. We ranked the 469 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the top 20.
13. An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (REVISIONING HISTORY)
11 mentions
Beacon Press
As you're probably aware, the Spanish and Portuguese colonised large portions of South and Central America in the time between Columbus 'discovering' America and the first English settlement in North America, which was the so-called 'lost colony' of Roanoke in 1585. Previously the Spanish and French tried and failed to colonise the eastern coast of what is now the US, their colonies mostly failed due to disease, starvation and hostile natives. The Treaty of Torsedillas divided the New World up between Portugal and Spain, and the east coast of North America fell within the Spanish claim, so the Portuguese didn't attempt to colonise it.
There are several reasons that the English took a relatively long time to begin their colonisation effort. The first of these is that colonies were very expensive to establish, maintain and defend. English relationships with Catholic countries in mainland Europe were very poor due to Henry VIII's establishment of the Anglican Church and Elizabeth I's eventual excommunication, so it would have been very difficult for England to defend any colonies from attack, especially since England at this point could hardly be considered a great power. The English contented themselves with raiding Spanish galleons instead.
With the accession to the throne of James I in 1603, Anglo-Spanish and French relations mellowed somewhat due to his less radical brand of protestantism and the marriage of his son Charles I to a french princess. The fact that James I was also King of Scotland meant that the threat of invasion from Scotland was also lifted. The establishment of colonies was still prohibitively expensive (an attempt by Scotland to establish a colony in South America is estimated to have cost as much as 1/3 of all the money in the country) so much of the early colonisation effort was undertaken by private companies, albeit with the approval of King James, who issued charters such as this one in 1620 and this one in 1609 which gave the companies the right to govern their colonies and official status as territory of England.
Further Reading:
Nicholas Canny and Philip Morgan, The Oxford handbook of the Atlantic world c.1450-c.1850
Richard Middleton, Colonial America: A History to 1763
American Colonies: The Settlement of North America to 1800
I have this book, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. It has a decent reputation among historians AFAIK, and one of the main points of the book is that Native Americans had fairly sprawling and diverse civilizations across North America before European contact. Lots of European accounts of Native Americans describe them as clean, healthy, tall, beautiful actually.
So yeah, Branco can eff right off with his summation of indigenous civilization as human sacrifices, slavery, and early death. I'm not an expert of pre-Columbus American civilizations and cultures. I know these things did happen in the Americas before European contact, but I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that it's pretty stupid to suggest Europeans were automatically the harbingers of civilizations and decency.
Christopher Columbus and his men helped decimate the population of Puerto Rico and other Caribbean islands. They forced native Tainos to collect gold. They severed the hands of men and boys if they didn't meet their gold quotas. They sexually enslaved women and young girls. They met any resistance with indiscriminate cruelty. An opening salvo in centuries of European barbarism towards indigenous people in North and South America.
Christopher Columbus was a monster and deserves to be remembered as such.
There is a book called Lies My Teacher Told Me that has a chapter that talks about how these high school text books are written. It is very leftwardly slanted, but overall a pretty good read.
EDIT would you consider doing an AMA?
That'd be 1491 by Charles Mann.
EDIT: Just to note. This is a controversial book among historians. Much of the info presented can largely be seen as conjecture without a lot of veritable proof behind it. So take it with a grain of salt.
Hi!
It looks like you are talking about the book Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond.
The book over the past years has become rather popular, which is hardly surprising since it is a good and entertaining read. It has reached the point that for some people it has sort of reached the status of gospel. On /r/history we noticed a trend where every time a question was asked that has even the slightest relation to the book a dozen or so people would jump in and recommending the book. Which in the context of history is a bit problematic and the reason this reply has been written.
Why it is problematic can be broken down into two reasons:
In an ideal world, every time the book was posted in /r/history, it would be accompanied by critical notes and other works covering the same subject. Lacking that a dozen other people would quickly respond and do the same. But simply put, that isn't always going to happen and as a result, we have created this response so people can be made aware of these things. Does this mean that the /r/history mods hate the book or Diamond himself? No, if that was the case we would simply instruct the bot to remove every mention of it, this is just an attempt to bring some balance to a conversation that in popular history had become a bit unbalanced.
It should also be noted that being critical of someone's work isn't that same as outright dismissing it. Historians are always critical of any work they examine, that is part of they core skill set and key in doing good research.
Below you'll find a list of other works covering much of the same subject, further below you'll find an explanation of why many historians and anthropologists are critical of Diamonds work.
Other works covering the same and similar subjects.
Criticism on Guns, Germs, and Steel
Many historians and anthropologists believe Diamond plays fast and loose with history by generalizing highly complex topics to provide an ecological/geographical determinist view of human history. There is a reason historians avoid grand theories of human history: those "just so stories" don't adequately explain human history. It's true however that it is an entertaining introductory text that forces people to look at world history from a different vantage point. That being said, Diamond writes a rather oversimplified narrative that seemingly ignores the human element of history.
Cherry-picked data while ignoring the complexity of issues
In his chapter "Lethal Gift of Livestock" on the origin of human crowd infections he picks 5 pathogens that best support his idea of domestic origins. However, when diving into the genetic and historic data, only two pathogens (maybe influenza and most likely measles) could possibly have jumped to humans through domestication. The majority were already a part of the human disease load before the origin of agriculture, domestication, and sedentary population centers.
This is an example of Diamond ignoring the evidence that didn't support his theory to explain conquest via disease spread to immunologically naive Native Americas.
A similar case of cherry-picking history is seen when discussing the conquest of the Inca.
> Pizarro's military advantages lay in the Spaniards' steel swords and other weapons, steel armor, guns, and horses... Such imbalances of equipment were decisive in innumerable other confrontations of Europeans with Native Americans and other peoples. The sole Native Americans able to resist European conquest for many centuries were those tribes that reduced the military disparity by acquiring and mastering both guns and horses.
This is a very broad generalization that effectively makes it false. Conquest was not a simple matter of conquering a people, raising a Spanish flag, and calling "game over." Conquest was a constant process of negotiation, accommodation, and rebellion played out through the ebbs and flows of power over the course of centuries. Some Yucatan Maya city-states maintained independence for two hundred years after contact, were "conquered", and then immediately rebelled again.
The Pueblos along the Rio Grande revolted in 1680, dislodged the Spanish for a decade, and instigated unrest that threatened the survival of the entire northern edge of the empire for decades to come.
Technological "advantage", in this case guns and steel, did not automatically equate to battlefield success in the face of resistance, rough terrain and vastly superior numbers. The story was far more nuanced, and conquest was never a cut and dry issue, which in the book is not really touched upon. In the book it seems to be case of the Inka being conquered when Pizarro says they were conquered.
Uncritical examining of the historical record surrounding conquest
Being critical of the sources you come across and being aware of their context, biases and agendas is a core skill of any historian.
Pizarro, Cortez and other conquistadores were biased authors who wrote for the sole purpose of supporting/justifying their claim on the territory, riches and peoples they subdued. To do so they elaborated their own sufferings, bravery, and outstanding deeds, while minimizing the work of native allies, pure dumb luck, and good timing. If you only read their accounts you walk away thinking a handful of adventurers conquered an empire thanks to guns and steel and a smattering of germs. No historian in the last half century would be so naive to argue this generalized view of conquest, but European technological supremacy is one keystone to Diamond's thesis so he presents conquest at the hands of a handful of adventurers.
The construction of the arguments for GG&S paints Native Americans specifically, and the colonized world in general, as categorically inferior.
To believe the narrative you need to view Native Americans as fundamentally naive, unable to understand Spanish motivations and desires, unable react to new weapons/military tactics, unwilling to accommodate to a changing political landscape, incapable of mounting resistance once conquered, too stupid to invent the key technological advances used against them, and doomed to die because they failed to build cities, domesticate animals and thereby acquire infectious organisms. When viewed through this lens, we hope you can see why so many historians and anthropologists are livid that a popular writer is perpetuating a false interpretation of history while minimizing the agency of entire continents full of people.
Further reading.
If you are interested in reading more about what others think of Diamon's book you can give these resources a go:
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
The reason tribes were small when Europeans arrived was because European disease arrived first, often with 95% death tolls. Except for the very first explorers (Pizarro, etc.), what European settlers saw was a post-apocalyptic society. Prior to that, Native Americans had as large and complex (and as violent) societies as any that existed on the other side of the Atlantic.
A good book about the modern scholarship on the subject is Mann's 1491, which I highly recommend.
I've recently read Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse by Jared Diamond and found them to be quite intriguing.
GG&S
Collapse
*Sees recommendation of Guns, Germs and Steel as a credible source in a history-centric conversation*
3312! We've got a 3312! This is not a drill! I repeat, this is not a drill!
Edit: Was just informed you english-speaking weirdos know it as 2319. I apologise for the international incident.
I'm sorry, and absolutely nothing personal. The book is a great introduction to aspects of anthropology and history not often talked about. Not all of his points are bad (some quite good, actually), and many historians and anthropologists will cite Diamond's book as the inspiration that brought them to their fields; but I think it's quite telling many of those same historians and anthropologists often retell it like that silly stuff they did as teenagers.
From r/history AutoModerator (yes, they need an automoderator for this thing):
Hi!
It looks like you are talking about the book Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond.
The book over the past years has become rather popular, which is hardly surprising since it is a good and entertaining read. It has reached the point that for some people it has sort of reached the status of gospel. On /r/history we noticed a trend where every time a question was asked that has even the slightest relation to the book a dozen or so people would jump in and recommending the book. Which in the context of history is a bit problematic and the reason this reply has been written.
Why it is problematic can be broken down into two reasons:
In an ideal world, every time the book was posted in /r/history, it would be accompanied by critical notes and other works covering the same subject. Lacking that a dozen other people would quickly respond and do the same. But simply put, that isn't always going to happen and as a result, we have created this response so people can be made aware of these things. Does this mean that the /r/history mods hate the book or Diamond himself? No, if that was the case we would simply instruct the bot to remove every mention of it, this is just an attempt to bring some balance to a conversation that in popular history had become a bit unbalanced.
It should also be noted that being critical of someone's work isn't that same as outright dismissing it. Historians are always critical of any work they examine, that is part of they core skill set and key in doing good research.
Below you'll find a list of other works covering much of the same subject, further below you'll find an explanation of why many historians and anthropologists are critical of Diamonds work.
Other works covering the same and similar subjects.
Criticism on Guns, Germs, and Steel
Many historians and anthropologists believe Diamond plays fast and loose with history by generalizing highly complex topics to provide an ecological/geographical determinist view of human history. There is a reason historians avoid grand theories of human history: those "just so stories" don't adequately explain human history. It's true however that it is an entertaining introductory text that forces people to look at world history from a different vantage point. That being said, Diamond writes a rather oversimplified narrative that seemingly ignores the human element of history.
Cherry-picked data while ignoring the complexity of issues
In his chapter "Lethal Gift of Livestock" on the origin of human crowd infections he picks 5 pathogens that best support his idea of domestic origins. However, when diving into the genetic and historic data, only two pathogens (maybe influenza and most likely measles) could possibly have jumped to humans through domestication. The majority were already a part of the human disease load before the origin of agriculture, domestication, and sedentary population centers.
This is an example of Diamond ignoring the evidence that didn't support his theory to explain conquest via disease spread to immunologically naive Native Americas.
A similar case of cherry-picking history is seen when discussing the conquest of the Inca.
> Pizarro's military advantages lay in the Spaniards' steel swords and other weapons, steel armor, guns, and horses... Such imbalances of equipment were decisive in innumerable other confrontations of Europeans with Native Americans and other peoples. The sole Native Americans able to resist European conquest for many centuries were those tribes that reduced the military disparity by acquiring and mastering both guns and horses.
This is a very broad generalization that effectively makes it false. Conquest was not a simple matter of conquering a people, raising a Spanish flag, and calling "game over." Conquest was a constant process of negotiation, accommodation, and rebellion played out through the ebbs and flows of power over the course of centuries. Some Yucatan Maya city-states maintained independence for two hundred years after contact, were "conquered", and then immediately rebelled again.
The Pueblos along the Rio Grande revolted in 1680, dislodged the Spanish for a decade, and instigated unrest that threatened the survival of the entire northern edge of the empire for decades to come.
Technological "advantage", in this case guns and steel, did not automatically equate to battlefield success in the face of resistance, rough terrain and vastly superior numbers. The story was far more nuanced, and conquest was never a cut and dry issue, which in the book is not really touched upon. In the book it seems to be case of the Inka being conquered when Pizarro says they were conquered.
Uncritical examining of the historical record surrounding conquest
Being critical of the sources you come across and being aware of their context, biases and agendas is a core skill of any historian.
Pizarro, Cortez and other conquistadores were biased authors who wrote for the sole purpose of supporting/justifying their claim on the territory, riches and peoples they subdued. To do so they elaborated their own sufferings, bravery, and outstanding deeds, while minimizing the work of native allies, pure dumb luck, and good timing. If you only read their accounts you walk away thinking a handful of adventurers conquered an empire thanks to guns and steel and a smattering of germs. No historian in the last half century would be so naive to argue this generalized view of conquest, but European technological supremacy is one keystone to Diamond's thesis so he presents conquest at the hands of a handful of adventurers.
The construction of the arguments for GG&S paints Native Americans specifically, and the colonized world in general, as categorically inferior.
To believe the narrative you need to view Native Americans as fundamentally naive, unable to understand Spanish motivations and desires, unable react to new weapons/military tactics, unwilling to accommodate to a changing political landscape, incapable of mounting resistance once conquered, too stupid to invent the key technological advances used against them, and doomed to die because they failed to build cities, domesticate animals and thereby acquire infectious organisms. When viewed through this lens, we hope you can see why so many historians and anthropologists are livid that a popular writer is perpetuating a false interpretation of history while minimizing the agency of entire continents full of people.
Further reading.
If you are interested in reading more about what others think of Diamon's book you can give these resources a go:
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
I highly recommend 1491 to anyone that wants to read more, specifically about the depopulation of the new world in the first years of contact, and generally about new world people before and just after contact. Fantastic book.
The episode that stands out most notably in my mind was exploration of Hernando de Soto, who led the first European expedition deep into the interior of the continent. He actually went some distance up the Mississippi River and recorded large populations of natives living in cities. By the time the next European made it that far, the cities and culture and almost the entire population of the "Mississippians" had simply been obliterated. The few people left had reverted back to hunting and gathering and what little we know about the civilization of their antecedents is from what we can dig out of the ground.
I'm a socialist with anarchist/Marxist sympathies, so I'm probably more receptive than most people to the economic/materialist critique you're offering, but just about everything you wrote here is wrong. It's historically uninformed. It romanticizes and idealizes. And it badly misses the point:
> Consumerism was forced upon the populace by profit-creation machines like corporations and advertisement agencies to drive our natural need to consume up beyond sustainable or even logical levels
Human beings have been destroying ecosystems since long before the birth of capitalism. The indigenous people you romanticize are guilty of it as well. It's not the fault of the elite. The elite are exactly what the rest of us would be and do what we'd do if we had their resources and power.
Humans are no different from any other animal, and the rich are no different from the poor; when you let us, we'll devour everything in our path until there's nothing left.
> Humans didn't always seek status and elevation - in fact, most peasantry throughout history was quite content with the wealth given to them by the natural world.
This isn't true. To the extent that it's even a claim that can be tested, it's false in every single instance I can think of. Human beings have always sought power, status and resources. Always.
If all you were saying were that corporations are parasitic, disastrous, amoral and hostile to the flourishing of any and all life that can't be extracted and converted into profit, I'd agree with you. But your historical critique is wrong -- and also dangerous, misguided and irresponsible. It deflects blame. It goes out of its way, very, very incorrectly, to argue that this is all the fault of a single economic system and a small sliver of the population.
All people are the problem, not just the rich or people who live in first-world countries. All social and economic systems have contributed to it, not just capitalism.
1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles Mann is a great read. It's astounding how little we know about the nations and civilizations that occupied and shaped the Americas before Europeans arrived. Great cities with amazing architecture and infrastructure, science and agriculture on a massive scale, but also wars and slavery, and sometimes human sacrifice. People are people.
https://www.amazon.ca/1491-Second-Revelations-Americas-Columbus-ebook/dp/B000JMKVE4
I'm in the middle of an amazing book that goes into great details about the current narrative and academic belief of Pre-Columbus Americas. It counters most common notions and really has some interesting points to back it up. The main one being that North and South America were not pristine wilderness lived in harmoniously with its people; it was actually very much so engineered by the hand of man to accommodate extremely large civilization centers. Some far greater than any European city at it's time.
It's really cool to hear how they piece together some of the political dramas of the Mayan culture based on their findings. From what I remember in the earlier chapters, part of the reason the Maya didn't need iron/bronze weapons was because their method of conquering was through assimilation and trade. They would provide surrounding city-states vast trade networks to gain wealth and knowledge, then redistribute populations around their giant network. Once a city became dependent on the income, the Maya would instate their own leadership into said town and slowly it would become Mayan.
If you're interested. Check it out 1491 by Charles Mann
Checked out her facebook page. Who decided this idiot Julie Williams should be on a school board? Her highest level of academic achievement was attending a 4th tier local community college. Her facebook page still cites junk “studies” linking vaccines to autism. She’s a proud fan of Hannity and a bunch of other extremist right wing talking heads, and she cites mostly Koch sock puppet think tank “articles”.
It would be nice to have school board members who actually have a quality education. As to the history texts - I suggest Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. Its been a long time since I’ve been in school and I learned a lot.
This emphasizes different points from those made in Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me. https://www.amazon.com/Lies-My-Teacher-Told-Everything/dp/0743296281
Texas is the most populous state to approve textbooks at the state level. That means textbook publishers cater to Texas or their books fail, and schools elsewhere are often stuck with whatever Texas approved.
Texas is a Red state still deeply in denial about slavery and racism. Last I checked, kids in Texas public schools are still taught that the Civil War started for a "variety" of reasons, only one of which was slavery.
Publishers who want a successful textbook must therefore cater to Texas by downplaying the viciousness and significance of slavery. This is a primary reason why teachers have a hard time finding the materials they need.
There isn't a universal tech tree in real life. It's kind of hard to say any culture is "more advanced" than another when they're so different. It's especially hard when we just don't know that much about the native societies in the Americas pre-Columbus. There's a really amazing book called '1491' by Charles C. Mann that's a pretty easy read and probably the best summary of our understanding of pre-Columbian America and would answer a lot of your questions.
Hey look at that, my evening is booked now.
Speaking of books, has anyone read his followup: Collapse?
As much as I love this book for its radical views, one has to take it with a grain of salt. Zinn gives food for thought but occasionally forgets to cite his sources.
What I like even better:
http://www.amazon.com/Lies-My-Teacher-Told-Everything/dp/0743296281/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1253761663&sr=1-1
Have you read 1491? It's a few years old now and isn't just about the Inca, but it's a good start. https://www.amazon.com/1491-Second-Revelations-Americas-Columbus-ebook/dp/B000JMKVE4/
For anyone who hasn't read it, Dark Tide is a great book that goes into depth about the lead up, accident, and aftermath.
http://www.amazon.com/Dark-Tide-Great-Boston-Molasses/dp/0807050210
Disease and climate. We're finding more and more that disease and climate had a huge effect on how cultures managed to dominate the world by the beginning of the 19th century.
I don't think that's a fair representation of New Amsterdam.
There is a great lay history book called ["The Island at the Center of the World"] (http://www.amazon.com/The-Island-Center-World-Manhattan/dp/1400078679) in which the author spends a lot of time speaking with people who translated what are probably those manuscripts from the original Old Dutch. He paints a much more nuanced picture of New Amsterdam, and suggests that the image of the colony as filthy and chaotic is largely an image encouraged by the British, who were not on good terms at the time and of course took over the colonyat gunpoint.
The book is a good read. One of the things he goes into is the diversity and tolerance of people in the colony, and why this ended up being the case. According to him, some of it was the hands-off approach taken by the Dutch East India Company, and some of it was the nature of the Dutch as being rather no-nonsense people, and of course like any colony there was the sense of new beginnings and adventure.
edit: How deceptive... the author of the article actually quotes the book, but not entirely honestly.
James S Scott speculates that this is actually very common. His main case study is Southeast Asia, where there is a lot of evidence of people fleeing heavily agricultural civilizations for a horticultural life in the highlands both as a result of conflict and simply because the life of the latter is freer and (at least in many ways) richer as compared to the heavily-taxed life of an agricultural serf in a stratified society. Of course, horticulture might not be rice paddy cultivation but it's still agriculture. Nonetheless, he finds signs that this is a worldwide dynamic that shows up where ever you have a geographic or temporal transition between densely settled agriculture and a lower-density space that makes "less civilized" lifeways possible. One space he keeps coming back to is the Eastern/Midwestern US of the 1500s and 1600s, when the post Columbian contact plagues and their associated population collapses gave the survivors plenty of elbow room to make this transition.
TL;DR The site's real, the clip is misleading.
The structures at Gobekli Tempe are real, and their origins are indeed something of a mystery. There is real, honest-to-goodness archaeology going on at the site. This video clip however, shows quite clearly why a great deal of the programming on the History Channel needs to be taken with a grain of salt. Here are a few issues I have with the clip that's been presented.
Hancock is famous for writing such 'alt-history' books as 'Fingerprints of the Gods' and 'Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization', which assert that all human civilizations are the product of an ancient, hyper-advanced civilization (like Atlantis, for example), that either inspired or outright taught the younger civilizations that followed. His views are, to put it mildly, not supported by either the archaeological community, nor by the archaeological evidence.
Expert number three is Robert M. Schoch, a geologist and geophysicist who's current pet theory is that all ancient pyramids (Egyptian, Mayan, etc.) are the products of an ancient, global civilization that was destroyed by some pre-historical cataclysm in ages past, possibly by a century-long rain of asteroids.
Next on our list of History Channel approved 'experts', is one Andrew Collins, author of 'Gateway to Atlantis', a book which alleges that ancient Middle-Eastern civilizations may have had transoceanic contact with ancient meso-Americans, possibly via contact with Atlantis or some other ancient global civilization.
Oh Gawd... at 6:00 in the clip, the 'documentary' begins to speculate if this find has anything to do with Noah's Ark.
Next up, Phillip Coppens: ancient aliens, 2012, ancient global civilizations and catastrophes. Seeing the pattern here?
Most, if not all of these 'experts' are cult archaeologists who have, at one time or another, flirted with or explicitly endorsed the concept of 'hyperdiffusion', which is the belief that all ancient cultures sprang from an older, advanced, global culture such as Atlantis, Lemuria, or Mu. This is one species of pseudohistory that has been quite popular over the years. The ideas that are stated (or sometimes simply implied) in this clip are a fairly obvious attempt to graft the assertions of the pseudoarchaeologists onto an actual archaeological site. The video even concludes by splashing a 'See the Evidence: Check out Ancient Aliens on History Channel' graphic. Others in this thread have warned against dismissing a claim because one doesn't approve of the source, and that is generally a good rule to follow, but in this case, a fair degree of skepticism is warranted. A good analogy here would be that these 'experts' are to the field of archaeology what homeopaths are to the field of medicine. This clip isn't history; it's pseudohistorical speculation attempting to masquerade as legitimate archaeological inquiry.
A very captivating read about this exact question/subject. This changed the way that I look at civilization:
https://www.amazon.com/Fingerprints-Gods-Graham-Hancock/dp/0517887290
It details the similarities to the written/oral prehistories of cultures from around the world.
Not really a written/oral tale of ancient prehistory, but here's a followup to this book that is equally captivating, and goes into some detail about Gobekli Tepe, which is dated conservatively to 13,000 years ago (thirteen thousand): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe
There's a couple:
In elementary school, I Love Paul Revere Whether He Rode or Not was my first introduction to the idea of history with an agenda. It's mostly a collection of interesting facts, but it does spend some time talking about why people (Americans specifically in this case) mythologize our history.
In Middle School I went totally crazy over the US Civil War, largely because of Gettysburg.
In high school came Marx & the concepts of class and progressive history. I'm not a Marxist politically (not anymore at least, but how else does a history nerd rebel in high school?), but I do think these ideas inform my personal historical narrative.
Then came the reason I finally returned to school for history: Lies My Teacher Told Me. I'd already been bothered by American politicians and citizens presentizing the opinions and actions of our founding fathers, as well as the myth of our unified national ideology, but this book illustrated how we pass that flawed narrative along, dooming people to make the same mistakes.
>It is difficult to discredit or ignore the accounts of many Native Americans and indigenous people that ALL have stories of this same creature whilst being so far spread and some not even interacting with one another.
Trade networks in North America reached across the entire continent. Recent evidence suggests trade all the way into South America. Pre-Colombian civilization in the America's was much more complex than you're giving it credit for. The book "1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus" is a good start on this topic.
Thomas Sowell and a number of others have argued African American hip hop culture is basically white redneck behavior, Sowell in "Black Rednecks And White Liberals" which I'm about to begin. Colin Woodward's "American Nation's" touches on this as well, as do other authors who've penned books on the topic, although his book is more about all of the regional cultures that make up our country dating back to the groups that founded those regions and how their beliefs are still resoundingly alive and well and how politicians actively exploit these differences we have between one another. There are other academics I've heard doing research like this but I'm having trouble recall their names, I heard about them in some podcasts. But, there's definitely more reading you can do to explore this idea more.
Amazon links to check out both titles I mentioned:
https://www.amazon.com/American-Nations-History-Regional-Cultures/dp/0143122029
https://www.amazon.com/Black-Rednecks-Liberals-Thomas-Sowell/dp/1594031436/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1502125308&sr=1-1&keywords=black+rednecks+and+white+liberals
If any of you are interested in American history (including South and Central American) , I recommend checking out
1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
Get that knowledge famo
>Was being a "stateless" person just as simple as not paying your taxes, and hiding when the taxman rode through once a year?
It's more complex than that. There are many strategies which stateless people have adopted over time in order to avoid state rule.
One is to engage in subsistence methods which are difficult to appropriate to state needs. If a community relies on a diverse array of foods which come into season all at different times or - even worse from the state's POV - can be left underground for a few years and dug up and eaten as needed, the taxman will need to do a hell of a lot more to extract taxes than roll through once a year. It would require a tremendous effort to make sense of and quantify all of the labor that is going on, much less extract a portion of it.
This is why early states typically promote mono-cultures. Mono-cultures transform the product of a community’s labor into a form which comes into season all at the same time in vast fields. This makes it easy to quantify and appropriate to state use in the form of taxes. An added benefit is that individuals who are stationary, as when rendered dependent upon monolithic agricultural projects, are generally easier to govern. Such states typically rely on slavery in order to get started. The Great Wall was built to keep individuals from fleeing state servitude just as much as to keep "barbarians" out.
There's a fascinating book called The Art of Not Being Governed which describes this and a number of other state evading techniques which communities have adopted in the past. Although written mostly about Southeast Asia, it provides an amazing model for understanding stateless (and state) societies in general. You can also watch a short video of the author, James Scott, going over many of the ideas in his book here.
Actually archaeologists are now moving past the Bering land bridge theory, and tracking 5 distinct immigration events into the pre-Columbian Americas.
I wish I had more to back it up, but I just started reading this book this week. I'm hoping I'll have more to say about that when I'm finished.
Read 1491 by Charles Mann - great read, and covers the Amazon (and the rest of the Pre-Columbian Americas) quite a bit.
Charles Mann's book 1491 is excellent and exactly on your topic.
Oh, if we are lucky they can unpack the body part order a wolf will eat you.
I heard about it in this book called Coyote America by Dan Flores
I'll give some historical context.
After WWII all our factories were still at full capacity and switched back to making personal cars, and all these returning vets on the GI bill want to college or back to good factory jobs and started buying homes and settling down.
Now the popular notion at the time was that city life was dying. Why get at best a row house or apartment in New york or philadelphia when you can build or buy a crafstmen house for the same price out in the suburbs. Also as civil rights was coming about it was convenient to cede the inner city to African Americans and poor and use things like loan restrictions to zone and price them out of the nice crime free suburbs.
So given the popular notion that the city and urban life was dying. Most city planning resources when into road construction so everyone could live out in the surburbs and take the new highways to their jobs. Entire cities were built up around this concept. In order to pay for this essentially halted Urban public works like subways and light rail. Why would you want to go on a stuffy subway with negroes when you can commute in your cadillac with radio and select-a-matic transmission?
So the results are profound and easy to verify. Any city that become major and modern after world war II has terrible public transportation: Examples include LA, Houston, Denver, Portland. Any city that was major before WWII tends to have still strong public transportation like Chicago, New york, Boston, D.C.
We basically decided as a nation that surburban life was awesome and gave up on public transportation. We even went steps further in places like LA where they actively bought out trolley lines just to close them down and pave over the tracks. Also the very way we designed our suburbs actively discourage pedestrainism and many live in places that "have no where to walk to". I'm ashamed to say that even my hometown Ann Arbor fell into that spiral and built many planned developments that have no feasible options of walking or biking to get to any retail area.
TLDR: city planners after WWII decided everyone (who was white) should live in suburbs and stopped funding public transportation.
Edit: for those who don't believe me this was covered by sociologists in the way things never were http://www.amazon.com/The-Way-Things-Never-Were/dp/0595348084
and lies my teacher told me http://www.amazon.com/Lies-My-Teacher-Told-Everything/dp/0743296281/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1457056096&sr=1-1&keywords=lies+my+teacher+told+me both fascinating reads
These should be the top recommendations hands down, both of these books were designed with your specific goal in mind:
A People's History of America - This focuses on history of the US from the perspective of the everyman rather than the 'big man' side of history where every politician is a gentle statesman. It shows just how barbaric and ghoulish those in charge often are.
Lies My Teacher Told Me. - Similar to the last one, this one shows how modern history loves to pretend all sorts of shit did not happen or ignore anything that's even slightly discomforting, like the idea that Henry Ford literally inspired Hitler, both in a model industry and anti-semitism.
These are both relatively easy reads with lots of praise.
Adam Curtis docs are always good, I recommend starting with one called "Black Power" which answers the question "What happens to African countries when they try to play ball with the west?"
So, if you knew the position of every atom in the universe, you could write perfect history? So what?
One of the difficult things about history is you have limited evidence. Every written document from Anglo-Saxon England we possess would fit into a small box. The largest amount of surviving text we have from Ancient Rome is monument and gravestone inscriptions.
Our most sophisticated computer models can't predict the weather in 10 days or the stock market opening tomorrow, and we know way more about the current prices of stocks or the current weather data than we do about, say, Ancient Sparta. The data for any model based approach just isn't there. It some ways, environmental determinism in history is like being given a puddle of water and the room temperature and trying to figure out what the ice cube looked like.
There's a reason economic determinism in history has gone out of fashion, and that ecological determinism never really went in: it's a less useful model for understanding why things happen compared with a more nuanced approach.
FWIW, Diamond's follow up book, Collapse contained several sections specifically rebutting the suggestion that he was an "environmental determinist."
http://www.amazon.com/The-Art-Not-Being-Governed/dp/0300169175
Fire in the Grove: The Cocoanut Grove Tragedy and Its Aftermath
Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919
Under a Flaming Sky: The Great Hinckley Firestorm of 1894
The White Cascade: The Great Northern Railway Disaster and America's Deadliest Avalanche
Curse of the Narrows: The Halifax Disaster of 1917
Chicago Death Trap: The Iroquois Theatre Fire of 1903
To Sleep with the Angels: The Story of a Fire
Albatross
"One late summer's day, the yacht Trashman set sail from Annapolis to Florida. On board were five young people: John, the captain; Meg, Mark, Brad, and Debbie Scaling. When the boat sailed into a gale, the eighty-knot winds shredded the sails. Forty-foot seas crashed through the cabin windows, and Trashman sank, leaving the crew adrift in a rubber dinghy. Albatross tells the story of how Debbie and Brad survived and how the tragedy changed Debbie Scaling's life forever."
have not read yet, supposed to be good:
Flight 232: A Story of Disaster and Survival
Check out a book called 1491 by Charles C. Mann. It's mind-blowing, will completely change the way you think about early Americans.
Lies My Teacher Told Me
Helen Keller was a communist, FDR and Gandhi hated black people, and lots of other really tremendously interest things that american 'history' books tend to ignore, gloss over, or downright lie about.
Highly recommend 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus.
Incredibly well researched and goes into great depth about the pre-Colombus histories of the varying distinct American regions (the Andes, Mexico and the Yucatan peninsula, the Great Plains tribes of North America specifically).
Actually it’s a pretty half-assed article. Great subject, but the so-called mystery is pure hype. The only revelation, and it’s not much of one, is offering an explanation of the speed that the molasses traveled. But the rest — why the tank collapsed, how people died (duh!), etc. — is explained in detail in “Dark Tide,” a very good book on the subject. Rather shoddy reporting on the part of the Times to be unaware of the book’s existence. But then there wouldn’t have been a “mystery” to write about.
https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Tide-Great-Boston-Molasses/dp/0807050210/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1480173259&sr=1-2&keywords=dark+tide
Do I have the book for you.
You should read 1491 and America Before. Also there a numerous journal entries that have been published about the true history of Columbus and westward expansion.
Edit: words and formatting
We can always dream that politics and short-term interests won't overshadow an existential crisis.
For those interested:
Have you read Collapse? Fascinating book dealing with that exact question. Not everyone agrees with his ideas but it's still a good jumping point.
From the Amazon page:
> Environmental damage, climate change, globalization, rapid population growth, and unwise political choices were all factors in the demise of societies around the world, but some found solutions and persisted.
> "nation to nation" relationship
Warning - probably sounds pedantic. sorry.
'Nation' is often confused with 'state' - with states being legal, political entities with borders. ['Nations' being cultural, political entities, but no borders.] (https://www.amazon.com/American-Nations-History-Regional-Cultures/dp/0143122029)
Add to that and the our constitution recognizes that bands have legal standing equal to the federal government, and nation to nation makes sense.
(Provinces, unlike bands, have essentially delegated authority. Even though areas of authority - health, education, etc are delegated. Municipalities have an even lower level of authority. Only the Federal government has the 'authority' to negotiate with the bands, regardless of issue.)
Being a completely separate 'nation' within a state is pretty much normal for most of North America.
Potatoes are more finicky than rice, wheat, and corn?
The only reason those crops are so popular is because they are more easily taxed and they travel well to feed armies. Root vegetables have a long history of being "rebellious" crops. Harder to tax, harder to burn or destroy if the peasants get uppity, and can be stored by simply leaving them in the ground. Not to mention much more nutritious.
Read The Art of not Being Governed James C Scott
Yes, and indeed certain anthropologists theorize that real-world hill tribes do in fact deliberately live in terrain that is difficult or useless for lowland states to access in order to escape serfdom, slavery, military conscription, corvee labor, etc.
I'd recommend reading Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong if you're curious about the accuracy of American high school history textbooks.
It's only recently that America's forestation rate has increased, and only in the north. South and west are still in decline.
Excellent book if you're interested in learning why cultures would cut down the last tree, even when they know it's the last tree: Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.
There are a lot of regional cultures in the US. and they are somewhat distinct.
The Virginia Tidewater region that she talked about was very very English. Lots of second sons, lots of Episcopalians and high church english (crypto catholics), cavilers and people who sought to escape England's civil war. My family is this kind of Virginian. They are proud of a history that goes back to 1650 in the area and being related founding fathers like Washington and Jefferson. Total anglophiles as well. So they hold on to any connection to England and Wales.
There are isolated communities in the tidewater with accents that are supposed to go back to England. There are older people isolated in the backwoods I can not understand. Their accents so crazy we are not mutually intelligible.
Here is Tangier Island. An oddball even in the tidewater area. It's in no way received english like she did but it is some kind of english accent.
> New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
https://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Columbus/dp/1400032059
I need to get me a hard copy of this puppy.
The last excellent work of fiction I read was City of Dreams by Beverly Swerling. The book that I feel best captures the feeling of New York City, however, is Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin.
I mostly read nonfiction books about New York City history, and I'll share a few of my favorites with you. The definitive tome, of course, is Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 by Mike Wallace and Edwin Burrows. Another favorite of mine, as I love the history of New Amsterdam, is Island at the Center of the World:The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America by Russell Shorto. One of the most fascinating subjects I have been learning about is Native American history at the period of first European contact, and I really recommend checking out Adriaen Van Der Donck's A Description of New Netherland (The Iroquoians and their World), which many scholars agree is just as much of a significant work as William Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation, and would be the definitive guide to the new world if it had been written in English. Evan Pritchard's Native New Yorkers: The Legacy of the Algonquian People of New York also offers an incredible look at native culture.
If you are interested in the subway system, check out Stan Fischler's fantastic Uptown, Downtown. One of the most underrated books I have picked up recently explores the construction of the amazing Grand Central Terminal, and I learned an incredible amount from it: Grand Central's Engineer: William J. Wilgus and the Planning of Modern Manhattan. If you are interested in urban planning, I would also suggest The Measure of Manhattan: The Tumultuous Career and Surprising Legacy of John Randel Jr., Cartographer, Surveyor, Inventor.
At this point I've read a ton of nonfiction books about the city, so if you have any questions or want any other recommendations, feel free to ask!
The Boston Molasses Flood of 1919.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Molasses_Flood
https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2015/01/14/nearly-century-later-new-insight-into-cause-great-molasses-flood/CNqLYc0T58kNo3MxP872iM/story.html
http://www.amazon.com/Dark-Tide-Great-Boston-Molasses/dp/0807050210
not exactly. When Cortes landed in Mexico in 1519 Tenochtitlan had a population larger than any city in Europe. His first attempt to sack the city he was routed and barely escaped with his life. He spent the next few years bringing smaller tribes to his side that had been at war with the Aztec empire. During those years the population of Tenochtitlan, and much of the region was ravaged by waves of small pox, hepatitis and other diseases. And then after more than 30% of the population died, widespread famine set in which further weakened the population. It's really the only reason that Cortes was able to conquer the capital city at all.
Some estimates put the population of pre-Columbus Central America at 25 million. It wasn't until the 1960s that the population reached the same levels again. Over 80% of these people were killed through disease and approximately another 15% died in the slave trade.
By 1630, the population that had once numbered 25 Million was down to 700,000.
edit: if you want to read more about the massive and sophisticated indigenous civilizations that were completely wiped out, I highly recommend the book 1491
I have been reading Lies my Teacher Told Me by James Loewen. He does a very decent and attempted unbiased approach at describing the interactions between European colonists and the indigenous cultures.
Christopher Columbus, for example, was a greedy Spanish imperialist seeking riches for himself and the monarchy. He condoned and promoted genocide (against the Haitians), sex trafficking (of young native females), and slave trading on a vast scale. I won't go into the bucket list of his atrocities, but they were the templet used moving forward into the continental genocides (North & South America, Australia, Africa) that followed.
Yet we are told in our schools that he "sailed the ocean blue," and was a swell guy who founded America.
1491 seems pretty alright, though /r/history can probably comment further
I really like 1491 and 1493. Anything that smashes this revisionist history thing we've got going in the US.
Every tribe was different, many of the eastern tribes did have permanent cities and complex agriculture. The tribes that settled in our region didn't do a lot of permanent agriculture, but they definitely managed buffalo herds with some sophistication.
According to Charles Mann's 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, pre-Columbus plains Indians actually created and maintained healthy grazing grassland through controlled burning, and carefully regulated the bison population.
According to Mann, the huge "seas" of tens of thousands of bison that white settlers reported were actually the result of out-of-whack ecosystem, after European disease epidemics decimated the populations of the Plains tribes.
So it wasn't "ranching" in the way that we know it today, but it was definitely intentional herd management and cultivation of the land, not just disorganized nomadic hunting.
Searched for: coyote america
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Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History: Dan Flores ...
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... This item:Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History by Dan Flores Hardcover $18.70.
... "Historian Dan Flores tracks the pedigree, chronicles the plight, and ...
'Coyote America' Honors An Animal Making North America Home ...
>Jul 7, 2016 ... David Greene talks to historian Dan Flores about his book, Coyote America, a biography of an iconic animal of the American West.
... The animal's been living near humans in North America for centuries.
... Now in his book "Coyote America," Flores explores the qualities that have allowed ...
Book details : Coyote America - Perseus Academic
>In the war between humans and coyotes, coyotes have won, hands-down.
Coyote America is the illuminating five-million-year biography of this
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Nazi Germany actually sent lawyers to the United States to learn about the racist legal system in the US to help them create their own. When they returned other Nazis didn't believe some of the laws could be so racist like anti miscegenation laws.
https://www.amazon.com/Hitlers-American-Model-United-States/dp/0691172420/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1505057658&sr=8-1&keywords=hitler%27s+american+model
This assumes America is or was one culture. Different historians classify people differently, but in the broadest sense there are at least:
Embedded in these groups is the idea of a founding culture (going back centuries) that informs attitudes and ideals. To your point regarding skepticism toward education, I think that's a feature primarily of the Appalachian group who were founded by one of the last waves of British immigrants. Glossing over a lot of history: they were poor, desperate, war-torn, and generally uneducated. Late to the party and culturally incompatible with many of the existing colonists, they headed for the hills and subsisted in a romantic but precarious manner. This is where we get the frontiersman and the rugged individualist myth. While tied to "southern" culture (for a number of interesting reasons that we will ignore for simplicity of this comment), they're really pretty distinct. For whatever reasons, this group has asserted itself and suggested their version of "American culture" is the correct one--and we've been living through this friction for a while.
For a layperson, I suggest the following for further reading:
If you're up for a more academic and thorough examination:
THIS
The book 1491 https://www.amazon.ca/1491-Second-Revelations-Americas-Columbus/dp/1400032059
should give you a basic answer to your questions. And you are welcome to dig more.
American History classes are far more focused than World History classes. That and American textbooks are whitewashed in a big way.
Everybody should read this book for a good grasp on what's happening with American
History classesindoctrination.https://www.amazon.com/Lies-My-Teacher-Told-Everything/dp/0743296281
What about "Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything your American History Textbook Got Wrong" by James W. Loewen? I imagine they'd like the title, then get progressively more horrified as they proceeded.
Whew, okay. Pulled out my actual computer to answer this.
So, a lot of what I could recommend isn't short stuff you could read in an afternoon because 1. it's depressing as fuck, and 2. it's likely heavy with the sheer volume of references wherein at least one book attempts to bludgeon you with the facts that "this was depressing as fuck." Frequent breaks or alternating history-related books with fiction/poetry/other topics is rather recommended from my experience. Can't remember if I got onto this topic through Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States or Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong or just some random book found in the library.
The very clean cut, textbook Wikipedia definition of "sundown town", aka "Don't let the sun set (down) on you here.", (Ref: BlackThen.com), is:
> sometimes known as sunset towns or gray towns, are all-white municipalities or neighborhoods in the United States that practice a form of segregation by enforcing restrictions excluding people of other races via some combination of discriminatory local laws, intimidation, and violence.
For my intro into the subject however, read Buried in the Bitter Waters: The Hidden History of Racial Cleansing in America. This is a very emotionally draining, mentally exhausting book though, frequently with lists of atrocities in paragraph form. I think it's an important read, one which frankly should've been covered my senior year of highschool or so, but it's a difficult one. Also on my reading list is The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration which is a surprising and sneakily hopeful title for such a depressing topic, so only guessing the narration may be somewhat more accessible.
Also, 'cause I totally didn't run to my kindle app to list out titles before fully reading your post, here's some below, and relisted one above, by timeline placement, best as can be figured. These might not be the best on each topic, but they're the ones available to my budget at the time and some are still on my reading list.
The Fires of Jubilee: Nat Turner's Fierce Rebellion
Buried in the Bitter Waters: The Hidden History of Racial Cleansing in America
The Mis-Education of the Negro
At the Dark End of the Street: A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power
Assata
Revolutionary Suicide
Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion
Sister Outsider
See also:
Black Street Speech: Its History, Structure, and Survival
Women, Race, & Class by Angela Y. Davis
Black Feminist Thought
Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations by Bell Hooks
Brainwashed: Challenging the Myth of Black Inferiority
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
https://www.amazon.com/Lies-My-Teacher-Told-Everything/dp/0743296281
Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong
Archaeologists are finding increasing evidence that large portions of the Amazon are, to a certain extent, man-made. 1491 discusses these finds and I highly recommend the book if you like popular history reading.
Edit: People destroy things, the only that changes is the scale of the damage.
Intrepid museum:
https://www.intrepidmuseum.org/The-Intrepid-Experience/Exhibits.aspx
South Steet Seaport Museum, but you might want to check right before you come to see which ships are open and when:
https://southstreetseaportmuseum.org/visit/
You might especially enjoy a morning or afternoon at Governor's Island, with Castle Williams and Fort Jay:
https://govisland.com/map
Also near where the ferry departs is Castle Clinton in Battery Park:
https://www.nps.gov/cacl/index.htm
This is an excellent book on early NYC history:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Island-Center-World-Manhattan-Forgotten/dp/1400078679
This might be a better question for r/bowyer as they are more experts on bow making.
Other than that sub I would check out some of the archery videos by shawn wood including one on a yew bow but I would suggest watching all of the Otzi the iceman series he did so you can see how to make all the tools as well as the arrows. He recogmends the Bowyer's bible so I would suggest investing in that resource.
I also like this video from shawn though the bow is probably a lot less powerful than the one you are envisioning, it would be ideal for small game and birds and certainly a good practice bow if you haven't made one already. I made a bow based on this method and it did work rather well, until it snapped but I think I may have whittled the ends too much.
Shawn also did some good videos on bow strings, including; sinew, flax and hemp which I found interesting.
Read an interesting book about the different nations/cultures in America. I don't think it's so straightforward that Americans are all the same. People in Alabama, for example, want very different things out of life and see things very differently than people in NYC, for example.
It predates modern politics by quite a bit, at least in my understanding. I've read Albion's Seed and American Nations, and from my understanding Appalachia and the Scots-Irish culture, plus the Deep South, have always supported war. All of them. The South is also saddled with a culture of honor, and, having been raised in Texas, I can say you lose serious face walking away from a fight.
We like to attribute the contemptuousness towards education as an outgrowth of their poverty, but I think the reverse is true. And I think the contempt for education comes from all the admiration going to "men of action," soldiers, fighters, etc. If you have to distinguish yourself with books and fancy words, you probably can't fight. Or worse, you're afraid to.
That was more likely to be in American Nations and not in Albion's Seed, which covers only British immigration and is, as I remember it, more anthropological than political.
From a summary by Woodard:
> NEW NETHERLAND. Established by the Dutch at a time when the Netherlands was the most sophisticated society in the Western world, New Netherland has always been a global commercial culture—materialistic, with a profound tolerance for ethnic and religious diversity and an unflinching commitment to the freedom of inquiry and conscience. Like seventeenth-century Amsterdam, it emerged as a center of publishing, trade, and finance, a magnet for immigrants, and a refuge for those persecuted by other regional cultures, from Sephardim in the seventeenth century to gays, feminists, and bohemians in the early twentieth. Unconcerned with great moral questions, it nonetheless has found itself in alliance with Yankeedom to defend public institutions and reject evangelical prescriptions for individual behavior.
From skimming this wiki page, it appears there were multiple rounds of immigration, and that the Dutch who live in Michigan moved 200 years after those who settled New Amsterdam.
I recently finished Ibram Kendi's Stamped from the Beginning, which I recommend both as an excellent book in general, and because towards the end he addresses topics like racial intelligence, and even addresses the controversy around the book The Bell Curve. He's great, and contains a few footnotes that you can follow, one of which is in my Amazon wishlist, Race Unmasked by Michael Yudell. Currently reading Adam Cohen's Imbeciles, which talks about the eugenics movement in America, which is obviously related, although it's more focused on the legal logistics rather than the science and ideology (so far!). Sitting on the shelf is James Whitman's Hitler's American Model, which I'm looking forward to.
For a more fun and accessible take on the topic, ContraPoints is wonderful.
Disclaimer: I do not normally condone the presence of Learns^TM in this sub, but this seemed like a special case. We now return to our previously scheduled programming of philosophy memes.
And after just finishing An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States, much less fervently. Actually, I've mainly done it for the BBQ for quite a few years now.
And even still, that doesn't justify supporting/honoring the Confederacy. Though the United States committed genocide against the Native Americans, Southerners still participated in that genocide, still fought a war to own slaves, and then lost that war. And today is a state holiday in honor of the man that led that failed rebellion.
Honestly I don't think you need to come up with complex religious justifications - just read 1491. There's a lot of knowledge that's been lost or purposefully destroyed, but all across the Americas there were stunningly complex civilizations that largely didn't use metals at all.
It is probable that Indigenous American civilizations had several of the most advanced agricultural systems in the world, politics, philosophy, writing, mathematics, science and astronomy, etc. Architecture and engineering were somewhat different, but still complex and advanced, and their city planning was completely different than Europe's - Tenochtitlan was literally unbelievable to the Europeans who showed up, it was so clean, organized, and beautiful.
Post contact, or if there was no contact, it's very difficult to say what trajectory they would have gone, or if you can have a 'modern' or industrial society that skips metallurgy altogether - I can't really see how that would happen. Then again what do I know.
http://www.amazon.com/Island-Center-World-Manhattan-Forgotten/dp/1400078679
You're welcome. Amazing book.
I'm not sure if these necessarily meet the standard for this sub, but two layman-friendly and highly interesting books you might like are Lies My Teacher Told Me and Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches.
China is the newest hegemony. The US didn't have a choice in Germany or Japan after WWII, since it was either step in or let Stalin take over. Read this fascinating article:
> Stalin had been secretly plotting an offensive against Hitler’s Germany, and would have invaded in September 1941, or at the latest by 1942. Stalin ... wanted Hitler to destroy democracy in Europe, in the manner of an icebreaker, thereby clearing the way for world communism. The book undermined the idea that the USSR was an innocent party, dragged into the second world war. Russian liberals supported Suvorov’s thesis; it now has broad acceptance among historians
The US was founded by slaveowners using the pretext of representation, but it was all about commerce. They put in place a horrific non-democratic system, the Electoral College. The US has intervened repeatedly in democracies and put in place brutal regimes. Read All The Shah's Men, for example.
One reason you might have started with a rosy view is that republicans control how US history is taught to schools across the country; see last two chapters of this book.
As for California, your Congressional representatives are amazing. I'm counting on them to nail that fucking orange traitor.
To counter the criticism above, it was the US that finally shoved the UN aside in Bosnia and stopped the genocide with a few well-placed missiles, albeit three years and 100,000 civilians too late, and it was the US that shoved the UN aside very early when Serbia attacked Kosovo later in that same decade. Fucking Kofi Annan and his inaction in Rwanda... (The hero of that story is Canadian: Romeo Dallaire.)
That ELI5 is, of course by nature, too simplistic. The Germans didn't "install the Tutsi into power". Instead, Rwanda as it exists today is one of the few countries where the current borders pretty closely approximate with the borders of a complex hierarchical kingdom that existed before the country became a colony.
Colonial powers prefer using existing governing structures as it saves them the time and effort to set up an entire administrative system of their own, and in the case of Rwanda, this was easier than usual. They simply solidified the existing system, so in their eyes, at this point they weren't inducing volatility at all, but strengthening a stable system.
After WWI, the Belgians took over the administrative functions and they not only continued to rely on these governing structures, but, guided by the racist and eugenics movements of the time, came up with a racial explanation for the Tutsi rule: their superiority was demonstrated by their lighter skin, aquiline nose, tall stature, etc. as opposed to the broad-nosed, darker and shorter Hutus. According to this new racial mythology, Hutu were Bantus while the Tutsi were part-Caucasian.
So they didn't intend to induce volatility, but they certainly weren't well-intentioned when they decided how to rule. As to direct economic gain, Rwanda has few resources and covers a small and landlocked territory, but it was well-suited for cash crop production of mainly coffee and some tea.
This is another important cause of the volatility of the country in itself. The post-colonial one-party dictatorship under Hutu rule relied almost entirely on a mix of foreign aid and profits from the coffee trade, and purposely kept the country rural and the population uneducated in order to maximize the exploitability of its only profitable natural resource.
When coffee prices plummeted in the late 1980ies, this caused serious problems for the regime as both the international and domestic communities as well as the exiled Tutsi community in Uganda mounted a serious opposition to the dictatorship. They were eventually forced to agree to political reforms, but hard-liners who were unwilling to relinquish their power seized control after the assassination (probably by the RPF - Tutsi rebels from Uganda) of the President, were able to use the years of anti-Tutsi propaganda, trained submission through dictatorship, and fears about the rebels from Uganda to organize the genocide.
There still is a lot more to it, and it is also interesting, but worrying to see many parallels between the current post-genocide Tutsi government and the pre-genocide Hutu government. I mostly based the above on academic sources, but more accessible reading I could recommend about the country and the region would include Dancing in the Glory of Monsters and anything by Prunier and Mamdani. Jared Diamond's Collapse has a chapter on Rwanda which focuses on the economic dimension; it's a bit controversial, but based on some very interesting research.
I did miss your modern. I am not sure what you mean by "modern Confederate." I highly recommend Confederates in the Attic for a nuanced picture of a variety of modern folks, neo and otherwise, interested in Confederates.
In my short time on /r/AskHistorians, it seems that 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus is consistently and almost universally recommended.
Everyone should read the book 1491 by Charles Mann! He talks about this a lot. There is actually already a significant amount of evidence that the hypothesis humans came across the Bering Strait and migrated southward during the Ice Age is not correct. There were some people that crossed the Bering Strait but some evidence in the past couple decades has been tending to show that the people that crossed tended to stay up there, and the people that made it farther south got there by other means.
For one, the speed of it is implausible because during the Ice Age most of Canada was covered in massive glaciers that early humans would not have been able to traverse. There was a melting period where it would have been traversable, but this was only for a few hundred years (if I remember the numbers correctly). It takes much longer than that for populations to permanently migrate. Archaeologically speaking, that amounts to a sprint southward, and there is no apparent reason why they would have pushed so far south so fast. There is also a curious dearth of archaeological evidence of human presence to be found along the proposed routes.
For another thing, the language evidence is consistent the Bering Strait crossers staying up north. The language of present day native peoples of the far North seem much more distantly related, or not even part of the same language family as those of more southern native peoples.
And there is also the fact that OPs post is not the first time archaelogoists have found evidence of human presence inconsistent with the Bering Strait hypothesis.
If I remembered more specifics I would say them but my friend has borrowed the book from me. But everyone should read this book!
http://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Columbus/dp/1400032059
Wow. Okay. Start here, it's an awesome book about Native American civilization before Europeans.
Then go further back and find literally any source talking about the way modern humans spread from Africa around the globe.
while that is on the high end of estimates, it uses new knowledge to revise the much lower estimates you referenced. great read with methodologies, sources, and explanations of how and why the estimate is actually closer to 100 million: 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
How about this?
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1400032059?pc_redir=1408504945&robot_redir=1
Try 1491 by Charles Mann.
Read 1491 by Charles C. Mann. It's about civilization in the Americas before the influx of Westerners. It's meticulously well-documented, with lots of good notes for further reading / source checking. The writing is well-done -- it's academic information written for a popular audience, basically a history-book version of "A Brief History of Time". It will completely revolutionize your understanding of the incredible cultures and societies that existed before Europeans showed up.
James Loewen cover this very well in Lies My Teacher Told Me. He makes a very good case for not only how we can improve how we speak of the tribes but also why they are still important today.
That being said we just don't have a lot of information about these people before they had contact with Europeans.
For a few reasons.
That's definitely a failure of your school system, though I'm not going to comment on Georgia's in general since I know nothing about it. I'm a former teacher who's had experience in several school districts, and all of them required a basic world history course that heavily covered Europe. Heck, when I was in school we covered European geography and history in 5th grade, then again in middle school, and again in high school.
Sounds like you got robbed. Luckily, there's lots of great books out there you can use to catch yourself up if you care to, and some of them are free. (I tried to only highlight affordable ones, but libraries are a great resource too!)
>can you please clarify your ideological position
Sure.
I'm a paleoconservative deep ecologist. This means I adhere to the oldest values of American conservatism and pair them with an interest in environmentalism through a more wholesome design of society.
I moderate /r/new_right because the new right ideas are closest to paleoconservatism in some ways. I tried to write a description of new_right that encompassed all of the ideas that the movement has tossed around.
Beyond that, I think politics is a matter of strategies and not collectivist moral decisions, am fond of libertarian-style free market strategies, and take interest in many things, hence the wide diversity of stuff that I post.
I've learned that on Reddit it's important to ask for people to clarify definitions before ever addressing any question using those terms. If you want me to answer any specific questions, we need a clear definition first agreed on by all parties.
I recommend the following books for anyone interesting in post-1970s conservatism beyond the neoconservative sphere:
Other than that, I'm pretty much a mainstream Republican. Not all links I post constitute endorsement, such as this fascinating article.
> The social, cultural and linguistic differences between Oregon and North Carolina are minuscule, even though they're thousands of miles apart.
Not true whatsoever.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/American-Nations-History-Regional-Cultures/dp/0143122029/ref=pd_bxgy_14_img_2?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=K526VH57QKR69R5TXQ8F
> Can you disagree?
Of course, because your position is false, not to mention ridiculous. The claim that the US has "yet to develop much of its own culture" is simple ignorance. I can only assume that you're merely doing what this sub criticizes Americans for doing, talking about something of which you have no direct experience or education.
> My point is that American refusal to just describe themselves as American, without all these ridiculous qualifiers, is part of why America continues to lack a distinct culture.
Your point is invalid in both premise and conclusion. You're taking anecdotes about silly behavior from a circlejerk sub, ignorantly extrapolating that to encompass an entire population of 320 million people consisting of probably hundreds of diverse cultures, to reach a conclusion that's every bit as silly as the silliest things Americans are made fun of for in this sub. Hence my original comment, this is just shityuropoorsay - you're the precise equivalent of what you're mocking.
There are many different cultures in the US, varying significantly by region. The book American Nations identifies 11 regional cultures in North America, and those are just broad regional divisions - there's significant variation within each of those. An example of an area where there's a great deal of local cultural variation is Louisiana, but there are many other similar regions throughout the US. The local culture in particular areas is often a variation of a larger regional culture, for example the Culture of Georgia is a variation of Southern US culture.
The US attitudes about ancestry and ethnicity have perfectly reasonable roots in the fact that many people in the US are in families that immigrated quite recently, often in living memory. For those families, their X-American identity is a real feeling that has to do with where they or their parents or grandparents came from, and the culture they brought with them and passed on, to some extent, to their children. It's not some sort of attempt to make themselves feel special, it's who they are.
Yes, you then also get people who try to turn their distant ancestry which is no longer actually remembered in the above sense into some sort of claim on the culture and identity of countries they've never visited. That's quite rightly made fun of here, because it's silly. But drawing broad conclusions from such behavior, while simultaneously lacking any real knowledge of what you're drawing conclusions about, leads to nonsense.
If you study cultures in the US, you'll find that the history of migration in a given area has a strong influence on the culture - the Louisiana example above is a good one. But the fact that these cultures are strongly influenced from the culture of earlier immigrants doesn't mean there's no unique local culture. Quite the opposite. When people live in a place for centuries, they develop a culture - that's just how human societies work. Your ignorance of those cultures doesn't mean they don't exist.
> The Holocaust was certainly the biggest genocide by death toll, in history and across the world. The highest estimates are ~6 million Jews, ~17 if we include non-Jewish victims of other Nazi atrocities.
The death and destruction during the 13th century Mongol conquests have been widely noted in both the scholarly literature and popular memory. It has been calculated that approximately 5% of the world's population were killed during Turco-Mongol invasions or in their immediate aftermath. If these calculations are accurate, this would make the events the deadliest acts of mass killings in human history.
...
China reportedly suffered a drastic decline in population during the 13th and 14th centuries. Before the Mongol invasion, Chinese dynasties reportedly had approximately 120 million inhabitants; after the conquest was completed in 1279, the 1300 census reported roughly 60 million people.
source
His murderous Mongol armies were responsible for the massacre of as many as 40 million people. Even today, his name remains a byword for brutality and terror. But boy, was Genghis green..
Why Genghis Khan was good for the planet
Also:
https://www.amazon.com/American-Holocaust-Conquest-New-World/dp/0195085574/ref=pd_sim_14_5?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=0195085574&pd_rd_r=NZKZ7CNNHRRAGZBEERD0&pd_rd_w=FwxUw&pd_rd_wg=NjrbR&psc=1&refRID=NZKZ7CNNHRRAGZBEERD0
I really recommend reading Coyote America by Dan Flores. Fascinating book about the long history and track of coyotes.
Fingerprints of the gods - Graham Hancock
>scruples
 
>Nazism triumphed in Germany during the high era of Jim Crow laws in the United States. Did the American regime of racial oppression in any way inspire the Nazis? The unsettling answer is yes. In Hitler's American Model, James Whitman presents a detailed investigation of the American impact on the notorious Nuremberg Laws, the centerpiece anti-Jewish legislation of the Nazi regime. Contrary to those who have insisted that there was no meaningful connection between American and German racial repression, Whitman demonstrates that the Nazis took a real, sustained, significant, and revealing interest in American race policies.
 
>As Whitman shows, the Nuremberg Laws were crafted in an atmosphere of considerable attention to the precedents American race laws had to offer. German praise for American practices, already found in Hitler's Mein Kampf, was continuous throughout the early 1930s, and the most radical Nazi lawyers were eager advocates of the use of American models. But while Jim Crow segregation was one aspect of American law that appealed to Nazi radicals, it was not the most consequential one. Rather, both American citizenship and antimiscegenation laws proved directly relevant to the two principal Nuremberg Laws―the Citizenship Law and the Blood Law. Whitman looks at the ultimate, ugly irony that when Nazis rejected American practices, it was sometimes not because they found them too enlightened, but too harsh.
 
>Indelibly linking American race laws to the shaping of Nazi policies in Germany, Hitler's American Model upends understandings of America's influence on racist practices in the wider world.
https://www.amazon.com/Hitlers-American-Model-United-States/dp/0691172420
 
America was "founded" through genocide and built with slavery.
Lots of prominent Americans liked Hitler, including Ford and Disney and Lindbergh. Hitler liked America's segregationist laws too: Hitler's American Model. His private train was actually originally named Amerika.
Do you have anything specific you are interested in?
These are just some off the top of my head: http://www.amazon.com/Lies-My-Teacher-Told-Everything/dp/0743296281/ref=pd_sim_b_1
http://www.amazon.com/Death-Haymarket-Chicago-Movement-Bombing/dp/1400033225/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1335220339&sr=1-2
http://www.amazon.com/An-American-Betrayal-Cherokee-Patriots/dp/0805089551/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1335220408&sr=1-4
http://www.amazon.com/Sin-Second-City-Ministers-Playboys/dp/0812975995/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1335220450&sr=1-1
http://www.amazon.com/The-Hanging-Thomas-Jeremiah-Encounter/dp/0300171323/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1335220494&sr=1-1 (this is my favorite out of all of them)
http://www.amazon.com/The-Rise-American-Democracy-Jefferson/dp/0393329216/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1335220469&sr=1-1
http://www.amazon.com/What-Hath-God-Wrought-Transformation/dp/0195392434/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1335220477&sr=1-1
http://www.amazon.com/Muckraking-Landmark-Articles-Ellen-Fitzpatrick/dp/0312089449/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1335220555&sr=8-1
If you read Lies My Teacher Told Me the author touches upon this concept. A certain cultural and societal mindset was required - for the most part (vastly simplified) the Chinese simply lacked the motivation or mindset to do what Europe did.
There are tons of examples out there. American interventionism was following an upward trajectory in the late 19th century. The Philippines, Cuba, Haiti, Mexico, Russia, etc, etc were all targets of American intervention. Wilson invaded more nations than any other president in US history.
This book is a pretty good starting point:
http://www.amazon.com/Lies-My-Teacher-Told-Everything/dp/0743296281
Some suggestions:
Oral History/Stories
Historical/Educational material
Native Authors
Non-Native Authors
Region Specific
And just for fun, a Movie
Feel free to point out any mistakes, I'll add more should I think of them.
These are just suggestions.
Have you read An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States?
There's a section on North America and the intertribal relations and commerce that existed in precolonial times.
As a body the Grand Council of the Haudenosaunee pursued a policy of neutrality with both Britain and France. This was the general of the Haudenosaunee towards the Europeans from the time of the first wampum belt with the Dutch, the famous two row wampum and from before contact stretching back to the Great Peace which united the Haudenosaunee. Haudenosaunee policy was one of non-interference (as symbolized with the two rivers of purple wampum running in parallel but not crossing). The Great Peace was a policy to pursue peaceful relations whenever possible, however, in defense the Haudenosaunee were a formidable fighting force and their expansion across the continent during the Great Pursuit shows that once war was triggered the Haudenosaunee would fight fiercely. In 1760 the Grand Council met with William Johnson to reaffirm this neutrality with regards to British affairs.
However the grand council governed by consensus and each of the nations under the confederacy had considerable freedom to pursue their own affairs. When war broke out the Haudenosaunee heard appeals from both the British and the French for support but decided to remain neutral in keeping with their long standing treaties and the core policy of the Grand Peace. Primarily the Oneida and Tuscarora favored the Americans. William Johnson, however, tried to use his influence to bring the Kainen'keha (Mohawk) into the conflict. During a speech to the council fire of the eastern door Johnson suffered a heart attack and never recovered. However Thayendanegea (Joseph Brant) who had a family relationship with Johnson through his half sister and ties to England continued to push for Kainen'keha to enter the conflict. Theyendanegea already had a considerable position within the British military and was pursuing promises on the part of the crown to redress territorial grievances by settlers on Haudenosaunee territory. Thayendanegea managed to win promises of support and land in quebec in exchange for supporting the British cause in the war. Through marriage to Adonwentishon who became clan mother of the Turtle Clan of Kainen'keha (clan mothers had the power to appoint and revoke the sanchem of each clan who sat at the council fire and represented the nation at the grand council), and his skill in negotiation and european education, Thayendanegea had considerable influence in the Kainen'keha council. Through this he was able to muster forces within Kainen'keha which in defiance of the Grand Council, Thayendanegea led into attacks into Canada and against the United States.
In 1777 the British launched a plan to cut off the other colonies from New England by seizing the Hudson Valley. However this meant moving south through the heart of Haudenosaunee territory and required the consent of the Grand Council. Thayendanegea argued the Haudenosaunee were in danger of losing their territories by remaining neutral in the conflict and managed to win over the Seneca and Cayuga but was still opposed by the Oneida. Unable to resolve the issue and come to consensus the Onondaga extinguished the council fire. Officially the Haudenosaunee had not sided with the British but the individual nations were free to pursue their own affairs and the general support was towards England. When fighting broke out some Oneida sided with the Americans and some Seneca and Kainen'keha sided with England.
sources:1 2 3
I'd recommend 1491 by Charles Mann over Guns, Germs, and Steel. It tries to answer the same questions regarding the apparent gap in technology between new world and old world peoples without resorting to geographical determinism--which, to me at least, felt like a bit of a stretch. 1491 is a good source for learning about science/technologies that fell by the wayside as new world clashed with old world (textile technology, using fire to shape one's environment, etc.).
I'm traditionally more into literary fiction, but I've been exploring non-fiction recently.
Currently Reading: 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
Recently Finished: The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration and Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam Trilogy
Next on the List: Either Guns Germs and Steel or Devil in the White City. Haven't decided yet
In our era carbon capture brings the greatest measurable benefit, and it's young growth that accomplishes that most effectively.
Given the degree to which Native Americans cleared brush before their populations were encumbered by European disease and predation (see: http://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Columbus/dp/1400032059), "more trees than 1900" pretty much means more trees than at any time in human history."
Together: That means a hell of a lot.
Read a book called 1491 opened my eyes to a lot of ideas id never heard.
https://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Columbus/dp/1400032059
The book 1491 goes into this at length.
Largely what we would call circumstantial, but convincing, although you'll probably be reluctant to be convinced (as I was) because it's so mind-numbing depressing to think about.
Note: This was just after Columbus.
Books?
For anyone interested in trying: The bowyer's bibles are a great reference. I've read all four and they made my bows go from shitty to meh.
Sure here: http://www.amazon.com/1491-Second-Edition-Revelations-Americas-ebook/dp/B000JMKVE4 & you can learn a little here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1491:_New_Revelations_of_the_Americas_Before_Columbus#Reception
The book is worth a read it aggragates many peer-reviewed scientific studies. Much of the disease on the continet arrived before Columbus the native people were already in a biological disaster due to disease. Migratory animals spread smallpox before Columbus arrived. It actually makes perfect sense when you stop and think about it. Still don't take my word for for it, it's in a book take a look reading rainbow.
Lies My Teacher Told Me
I remember reading this one in a college history class and thinking it was pretty powerful:
Custer Died For Your Sins by Vine Deloria Jr.
It's time once again for the AskHistorians Book Giveaway! This month we picked two winners: Eric Hacke and Alec Barnaby! The selection of books we have available this month are:
Want a chance to get a free book? Help support the podcast via Patreon!
Agreed, His section in this book is horrible
https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/reconciled-to-colonialism-ireland-in-the-virginian-sea-colonialism-in-the-british-atlantic-1.1803796?mode=amp
https://www.historyireland.com/book-reviews/the-mere-irish-and-the-colonisation-of-ulster-1570-1641/
https://www.amazon.com/Indigenous-Peoples-History-ReVisioning-American/dp/0807057835
1491 by Charles Mann is a good read, and it gives some great population stats for the Americas.
I would also recommend searching out some peer-reviewed articles using Google Scholar and search terms like "Cahokia prehistoric population" or something. I don't have specific articles off the top of my head.
PRobably the Cahokia Mounds in IL. If you are interested in learning more about this topic, check out the book "1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cahokia
http://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Columbus/dp/1400032059/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1321907090&sr=8-1
For books, /r/askhistorians (which has a strong group of indigenous American studies academics) often recommends 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus and downplays Guns Germs and Steel, because Jared Diamond's research process was basically 1. create theory, 2. seek facts to justify theory, and the result is about as flawed as you would expect from that reversal of normal historical analysis. (Mind you, his book blew my mind as much as anyone's when I first read it...)
Or, if you're just asking for rpg books: I don't think White Wolf has anything set in Texas at all. It might be interesting to do 'banes as they lived in Texas before Pentex, and how the arrival of an organizing structure changes them' though. Especially if you take into account the difference in timing between the colonization of the east coast, central america, and texas, there could be repercussions in the spirit world long before your players see human impact. (ex: California didn't have major colonial impact until the 1800s, which is kind of crazy to think about.)
Read 1491: https://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Columbus/dp/1400032059
And: https://www.amazon.com/1493-Uncovering-World-Columbus-Created/dp/0307278247
And: https://www.amazon.com/Columbus-Quest-Jerusalem-Religion-Voyages/dp/1439102376
Please, anyone wanting to understand the Native American / colonial period better please read the books "1491" and "1493" by Charles C Mann
1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus https://www.amazon.com/dp/1400032059/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_hKgrybZMMSVPF
They're the most insightful books on the reality of the European migration west and what really happened to the natives of North and South America. Whenever I hear someone opine about the plight of the Native Americans I tell them to read these books first.
I'm someone who has a big heart for their situation, it's just that there's a lot of history to understand on how we got here and it's not all what libs will spout off about.
I'm a big fan of the books 1491 and 1493 by Charles C. Mann regarding the history of the Americas before and after Colombus and all of the misconceptions about it and the most up to date analysis of the american cultures.
You should check out the book 1491, which details the reality of the world the North American civilizations live in. It's a very good book, and shows that it wasn't all eco-paradise and peace-pipes before the Europeans showed up.
I can't find the actual text, so I'm paraphrasing from Shorto's excellent Island at the Center of the World
Since the basic needs of living were far exceeded for a small subsection of people living in colony of New Amsterdam, that cultural section could afford luxuries. And so the luxuries sprang up, including fine women's clothing and pastry shops creating non-essential sweets, such as cakes - in 18th century dutch, "koek." The smaller versions became known as "koekje" or "koek-yees" or any of the other spellings. Yada yada yada, that's why Americans call them "cookies" and Britons call them "biscuits."
I'd recommend you to start by reading the bowyer's bible: http://www.amazon.com/The-Traditional-Bowyers-Bible-Volume/dp/1585740853
Also http://www.3riversarchery.com/traditional+bowyer's+bible+complete+set_i5366-3_baseitem.html
There are four volumes. I once found 1 and 2 online if you can't afford them right now.
Worth mentioning that Greenland was far more green in the days of Erik the Red.
If you want to read more about how the viking settlers of greenland fared, I would recommend this book called Collapse.
Honestly, if I try to present a comprehensive and detailed explanation, I won't be very convincing (plus I'm too lazy).
Shame is, the two books I usually recommend, so people don't have to rely on my imprecise blabber to decide what they think, are from french speaking authors and haven't been translated yet (don't think they will be, come to think of it).
How everything can collapse: A small manual of collapsology for the use of present generations : Why and how our civilization is prone to collapse. Pretty comprehensive analysis of the current situation.
The age of low tech. Towards a technically sustainable civilization : Focused on resources management and technology consumption. How we can prepare our society to technically adapt to this collapse.
You can still read Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (that one I haven't read yet) to better understand the similarities between past fallen civilizations and our own.
Great map, one of the best I've seen.
You may enjoy this book: American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America
https://www.amazon.com/American-Nations-History-Regional-Cultures/dp/0143122029
I'll advocate for one small change to the map, New York City and the Hudson Valley should be its own thing. Call it New Amsterdam or New Netherlands. This would range from Brooklyn (excluding Long Island) and up the east side of the Hudson River to Albany.
My misconception was that were common standards of decency. As in "universal". That isn't the case, and I acknowledge that now.
What Trump does is completely indecent according to myself and most people I've ever interacted with. I also find most of the behavior of Trump's supporters at his rallies, etc, to be indecent. Revolting, even.
Obviously, the communities who voted for Trump find him to be decent, and think its decent to behave as they did during and after the election.
So we clearly disagree on what constitutes decency. There is no common standard of decency. There is no consensus on "American" values. We are (at least) two peoples, and we can either acknowledge that and start coming up with a federal system that respects that, or we can devolve into chaos. I don't think we need to split into two countries, but we need to start separating the culture wars from federal governance, and that likely means decentralizing certain legislative functions.
Great book on the subject, and there's a 2016 follow-up
>Show me an example of a system like this working. I dare you.
https://www.amazon.com/Anarchy-Unbound-Self-Governance-Cambridge-Economics/dp/1107629705
https://www.amazon.com/Private-Governance-Creating-Economic-Social/dp/0199365164
https://www.amazon.com/Invisible-Hook-Hidden-Economics-Pirates/dp/0691150095
https://www.amazon.com/Not-So-Wild-West-Economics/dp/0804748543
https://www.amazon.com/Machinery-Freedom-Guide-Radical-Capitalism/dp/1507785607
https://www.amazon.com/Art-Not-Being-Governed-Anarchist/dp/0300169175
There is also a whole ton of economic literature out there about groups who resolve disputes using game theory, or long term contracts, things like that, instead of relying on a central governing body with a strong threat of violence.
288 pages, according to Amazon.
It depends on what you're interested in really. You can get the general explanation of Federal Reserve, Illuminati, 9/11, CIA, NSA, etc from just about any YouTube video. Some books that have recently opened my mind to other topics, however include:
The Source Field Investigations by David Wilcock - The best written and most well-sourced book I've read concerning alternative history, conspiracy theories, suppressed science, and a host of other topics. Main thesis being that consciousness is a nonlocal field.
Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock - Some of the best evidence out there for a lost civilization which fell out of power and memory sometime around the end of the ice age. A bit outdated, but a sequel is due this year.
Genesis Revisted by Zecharia Sitchin - Read this if you want to understand why some people think the Annunaki are a thing. Some interesting info, but I don't really buy into it that much.
Dark Mission by Richard Hoagland - Occult history of NASA, coverups of what was found on the Moon, Mars, and some suppressed science.
The Holographic Universe by Michael Talbot - Exactly what it sounds like
Rather than reading about the same theories in different words over and over, these books gave me perspective on possible reasons why TPTB do what they do. And an idea on what some deeper purpose for their intensive consumerism propaganda might be for, other than profit. Additionaly they exposed me to new/old ideas on what the universe fundamentally is and how it works, with some good science to back it up. Highly recommend all of these books.
https://www.amazon.com/Confederates-Attic-Dispatches-Unfinished-Civil/dp/067975833X
"I would save the Union. … If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it" - Abraham Lincoln
I highly suggest you read this book. Changed my world, it did.
States rights were a secondary issue to slavery, but they have been pushed as the issue of the civil war in a campaign that began in Woodrow Wilson's day (if I remember correctly from the book) as the country's backslide back to racism gained a lot of steam.
> Racism isn’t rampant. Its factually not.
You and I live in different worlds, with different facts.
> If you really believe racism is thriving, you either don’t interact with real people or you are projecting your own bigotry onto the rest of the world.
LOL. First of all, I'm not a bigot, and if I was, I can't imagine how I would "project" that onto the world and convince myself that racism was both rampant and a serious problem. Bigots do not think that way. Bigots think that the way they think is normal, that everyone agrees with them, and that they are not bigots.
And, I definitely do talk to real people, including real people of color, and I know what they have to deal with on a day-to-day basis. Look, I get where you're coming from -- I grew up in a part of the country that was heavily segregated, where the public schools taught a lot of lies about equality while papering over every bad thing that ever happened in U.S. history. Our 10th grade U.S. history teacher told us that black slaves in the antebellum South were happy to be slaves, and weren't ready for freedom. I later learned that these lies and more are rampant across the South.
And, if you know your history, it makes perfect sense! The Civil War wasn't even that long ago, and the resentment lingers. People don't want to believe that their ancestors were evil, so they tell themselves that blacks are inferior and subhuman. Hell, we get at least a post a day on this forum telling us that blacks do terrible on IQ tests and that there's a conspiracy to hide this. Racism is everywhere around us. It's woven into our culture, inextricably. I could start pointing to examples but it would never end. If you're not seeing it, that's because your eyes aren't open.
The Redneck Manifesto, Jim Goad puts a good finger on why exactly people in the US confuse class with race and even predicted the rise of SJWs to some extent years ago. Other material such as Lies my Teacher Told me and A people's history of the United States help put a better perspective from a historical standpoint.
TL;DR the books: The Wealthy (read: Not rich, but wealthy) decided that after the Civil War and after the conclusion of the French Revolution, they would pit the poor against each other and fight for the scraps instead of turning their eyes upward and see who is dropping the scraps. Seems to be working well.
+1, definitely read as much history as you can. I'd highly recommend Lies My Teacher Told Me in addition to Zinn.
As a follow up to yesterday, we started working on a revised version of the comment today. We will probably implement it later this week. Below you'll find it.
>
> Hi!
>
> It looks like you are talking about the book Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond.
>
> The book over the past years has become rather popular, which is hardly surprising since it is a good and entertaining read. It has reached the point that for some people it has sort of reached the status of gospel. On /r/history we noticed a trend where every time a question was asked that has even the slightest relation to the book a dozen or so people would jump in and recommending the book. Which in the context of history is a bit problematic and the reason this reply has been written.
>
> Why it is problematic can be broken down into two reasons:
>
> 1. In academic history there isn't such thing as one definitive authority or work on things, there are often others who research the same subjects and people that dive into work of others to build on it or to see if it indeed holds up. This being critical of your sources and not relying on one source is actually a very important history skill often lacking when dozens of people just spam the same work over and over again as a definite guide and answer to "everything".
> 2. There are a good amount modern historians and anthropologists that are quite critical of Guns, Germs, and Steel and there are some very real issues with Diamond's work. These issues are often overlooked or not noticed by the people reading his book. Which is understandable given the fact that for many it will be their first exposure to the subject. Considering the popularity of the book it is also te reason that we felt it was needed to create this response.
>
> In an ideal world, every time the book was posted in /r/history, it would be accompanied by critical notes and other works covering the same subject. Lacking that a dozen other people would quickly respond and do the same. But simply put, that isn't always going to happen and as a result, we have created this response so people can be made aware of these things. Does this mean that the /r/history mods hate the book or Diamond himself? No, if that was the case we would simply instruct the bot to remove every mention of it, this is just an attempt to bring some balance to a conversation that in popular history had become a bit unbalanced.
> It should also be noted that being critical of someone's work isn't that same as outright dismissing it. Historians are always critical of any work they examine, that is part of they core skill set and key in doing good research.
>
> Below you'll find a list of other works covering much of the same subject, further below you'll find an explanation of why many historians and anthropologists are critical of Diamonds work.
>
> ## Other works covering the same and similar subjects.
>
> - Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest
>
> - 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
>
> - Last Days of the Inca
>
> - Epidemics and Enslavement: Biological Catastrophe in the Native Southeast, 1492-1715
>
> - The Great Divergence
>
> - Why the West Rules for Now
>
> - Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900
>
> - 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
>
>
> ## Criticism on Guns, Germs, and Steel
>
> Many historians and anthropologists believe Diamond plays fast and loose with history by generalizing highly complex topics to provide an ecological/geographical determinist view of human history that. There is a reason historians avoid grand theories of human history: those "just so stories" don't adequately explain human history. It's true however that it is an entertaining introductory text that forces people to look at world history from a different vantage point. That being said, Diamond writes a rather oversimplified narrative that seemingly ignores the human element of history.
>
>
> Cherry-picked data while ignoring the complexity of issues
>
> In his chapter "Lethal Gift of Livestock" on the origin of human crowd infections he picks 5 pathogens that best support his idea of domestic origins. However, when diving into the genetic and historic data, only two pathogens (maybe influenza and most likely measles) could possibly have jumped to humans through domestication. The majority were already a part of the human disease load before the origin of agriculture, domestication, and sedentary population centers.
> This is an example of Diamond ignoring the evidence that didn't support his theory to explain conquest via disease spread to immunologically naive Native Americas.
>
> A similar case of cherry-picking history is seen when discussing the conquest of the Inca.
>
> > Pizarro's military advantages lay in the Spaniards' steel swords and other weapons, steel armor, guns, and horses... Such imbalances of equipment were decisive in innumerable other confrontations of Europeans with Native Americans and other peoples. The sole Native Americans able to resist European conquest for many centuries were those tribes that reduced the military disparity by acquiring and mastering both guns and horses.
>
> This is a very broad generalization that effectively makes it false. Conquest was not a simple matter of conquering a people, raising a Spanish flag, and calling "game over." Conquest was a constant process of negotiation, accommodation, and rebellion played out through the ebbs and flows of power over the course of centuries. Some Yucatan Maya city-states maintained independence for two hundred years after contact, were "conquered", and then immediately rebelled again.
> The Pueblos along the Rio Grande revolted in 1680, dislodged the Spanish for a decade, and instigated unrest that threatened the survival of the entire northern edge of the empire for decades to come.
> Technological "advantage", in this case guns and steel, did not automatically equate to battlefield success in the face of resistance, rough terrain and vastly superior numbers. The story was far more nuanced, and conquest was never a cut and dry issue, which in the book is not really touched upon. In the book it seems to be case of the Inka being conquered when Pizarro says they were conquered.
>
> Uncritical examining of the historical record surrounding conquest
> Being critical of the sources you come across and be aware of their context, biases and agendas is a core skill of any historian.
>
> Pizarro, Cortez and other conquistadores were biased authors who wrote for the sole purpose of supporting/justifying their claim on the territory, riches and peoples they subdued. To do so they elaborated their own sufferings, bravery, and outstanding deeds, while minimizing the work of native allies, pure dumb luck, and good timing. If you only read their accounts you walk away thinking a handful of adventurers conquered an empire thanks to guns and steel and a smattering of germs. No historian in the last half century would be so naive to argue this generalized view of conquest, but European technological supremacy is one keystone to Diamond's thesis so he presents conquest at the hands of a handful of adventurers.
>
> The construction of the arguments for GG&S paints Native Americans specifically, and the colonized world in general, as categorically inferior.
>
> To believe the narrative you need to view Native Americans as fundamentally naive, unable to understand Spanish motivations and desires, unable react to new weapons/military tactics, unwilling to accommodate to a changing political landscape, incapable of mounting resistance once conquered, too stupid to invent the key technological advances used against them, and doomed to die because they failed to build cities, domesticate animals and thereby acquire infectious organisms. When viewed through this lens, we hope you can see why so many historians and anthropologists are livid that a popular writer is perpetuating a false interpretation of history while minimizing the agency of entire continents full of people.
>
>
> ### Further reading.
>
> If you are interested in reading more about what others think of Diamon's book you can give these resources a go:
>
> - /r/askHistorians section in their FAQ about GG&S
> - Jim Blaut on Jared Diamond
> some people may have looked for someone who had a bit more experience writing or negotiating treaties specifically
Fellow liberal here. To help ease some of these concerns I'd point out that most of what an oil CEO does is negotiate with foreign governments for complicated agreements.
Also the oil industry is actually far ahead of other industries in terms of environmental protection in spite of what you might assume. Two books on the subject I highly recommend are The Quest (which is on Bill Gate's reading list and probably one of the single best books I've ever read) and Collapse.
I recommend the book Collapse by Jared Diamond if you are into lost civilizations and why they did not survive.
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed is a great book by Jared Diamond (follow up to Guns Germs and Steel) dedicated to this subject of collapse, but it is based on older societies.
Part 1 of a video series on it
And here is the author's version
You might be interested in the Shadowrun universe and how they dealt with a futuristic devolution of the US and Canada.
Theres also this book that might pique your interest.
Just got the New Joe Abercrombie book, Short stories set as prequel to the First Law Trilogy. Pretty interesting. Also going to pick up that book I recommended in the Book Club thread yesterday about the history of american politics as different nations/tribes. (http://www.amazon.com/American-Nations-History-Regional-Cultures/dp/0143122029)
Different regions of America were settled by different groups with different values, and those haven't gone away. I highly recommend the book American Nations, which is an accessible overview of the differing histories of the 11 major cultural regions.
I study colonial history and even as early as the 1600s, New England cares about education and community welfare more than anywhere else, New York City is diverse and driven by finance, the Southern backcountry is violent and fiercely independent, and the Southern tidewater is driven by inequality and reputation/personal honor.
This article is not written by Sowell. It's slyly written referencing Sowell ideas, by Prof. Richard Cocks (Cocks is white, so I think he [correctly?] believes that referencing the black Sowell gives him cover to express these ideas).
That being said----I think there are solid points here.
The idea that there are distinct cultures in the U.S. that bring baggage with them is interesting to me (see this book https://www.amazon.com/American-Nations-History-Regional-Cultures/dp/0143122029 ).
I think there's a lot of merit to it, and it does explain a lot of our race and culture war.
But ummmm..... a huge part of the collective culture is slavery and an extended apartheid, and it clearly kneecapped black attempts at success repeatedly. Not 200 years ago, not 100 years ago. Oprah Winfrey and Denzel Washington were born during Jim Crow. It had a real depressing effect on accumulating wealth, on strengthening inroads in various sectors, and of developing a culture that believed that effort would be fairly treated and compensated----I mean it really WAS crazy for a black person to believe they could go to medical school a few generations ago, or buy a home in any but a few segregated neighborhoods. That wasn't in their heads, they were openly excluded.
So I think these issues should be added, but not entirely take the place of, discrimination as an explanation for why black folks are struggling relative to whites in America.
Thanks for bring this.
This is actually a big and important point that our media didn't cover properly.
There is also an interesting theory that says America could be divided in 11 different nations. Which one with their own culture and identity.
https://www.amazon.com/American-Nations-History-Regional-Cultures/dp/0143122029?tag=bisafetynet-20
Obviously golden rice isn't purely humanitarian, but pretty close. It's 20 years old, so any patents have expired. There's PR benefits to GMOs, but considering that the vast majority of research into GMO harm has found none (Though I do see secondary effects of GMO's causing harm, such as roundup exposure causing maladies because GMO corn and soy allow roundup to be sprayed). In any case, golden rice isn't roundup resistant; it has vitamin A not otherwise present in the diets of the poor in SE Asia. SE Asian governments like rice production, it stores well and is therefore easy to tax (See generally The Art of Not Being Governed.)
The humanitarian effort line was referring to the difference between your suggestions, which I find admirable and would gladly vote for given the opportunity, and the Marshall Plan which you compared your suggestions to. I wasn't really interested in a tu quoque-off. The Marshall plan happened because of the Cold War. Maybe there's a way to phrase your reforms in a way that advances the National Interest in a way similar to a modern-day Marshall plan.
We have a crop that can be grown and the seed saved and reused by peasant farmers with nutritional deficiencies with little change to their lifestyle. The only thing keeping it from them is a massive campaign that relies on dubious to nonexistent evidence of GMO harm. Your best argument against it without reliance on that evidence (which I note you made no reference to, and I thank you for that), is that it would impair a Marshall Plan-type campaign to eliminate poverty in SE Asia. I find this argument underwhelming. Why not both? First the easy one, yellow rice, then the hard one, eliminating poverty in SE Asia?
Fun fact - Civil War re-enactors will soak their buttons in urine to get them to look authentic. Yes, they consider this to be a good use of their time.
Source: This book, which is chocked full of BTMR goodness.
If you are interested in this, I highly recommend Lies My Teacher Told Me by James Loewen. He covers several history books and looks how how each one addresses important events in american history. sometimes it's kinda depressing, but it's a great read.
Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong by James Loewen
https://www.amazon.com/Lies-My-Teacher-Told-Everything/dp/0743296281
Dark Tide is a great book all about the flood and why it happened, both the science and the politics.
Also, the notion that "for nearly 100 years, the Great Molasses Flood has remained a great mystery," is pretty far off the mark.
Not exactly what you want but all three of these books give rare perspectives on US history:
A People's History of the United States
Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong
An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
Africa: A Biography of the Continent by John Reader
1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann
Both cover some of the same concepts as GG&S, but in a much more rigorous fashion. Both are better reads with a less self-congratulatory tone and much more interesting information. GG&S is a kids book compared to these works, which is fine because GG&S is a great introduction to these sorts of concepts. Now you can get down to reading the good stuff.
Especially considering the major population centers were, depending on the time period, mostly in Central America and the North American Mid-west. All of those cultures were definitely sedentary.
For good information on this I'd check out Mann's flawed but interesting 1491. I (and many archaeologists) feel he overestimates the size of pre-Columbian populations, but it's as exhaustive a look at demographics in the Americas just before contact as you will find, and it's very approachable for the layperson.
The upshot is, per capita, by European Contact, absolutely most Native Americans lived in sedentary, agriculture based state or chiefdom level societies. Maybe by geographic area nomadic hunter-gatherers might win out, but certainly not by population.
Comparing invasive species to GMO crops is a false equivalence. Also, your entire post rests on an outdated and bullshit view of the natural world as existing in this pristine state upon which modern man has recklessly trampled. I highly recommend reading the book 1491, which does a good job unraveling the thesis that 'nature=pristine, man's interference=bad'.
Also, we aren't talking about zebra mussels or rabbits in Australia, we're talking about domesticated crop species that are the result of thousands of years of breeding and cultivation, and generally don't thrive in the wild without human intervention. I'm not talking GMO, I'm talking your 'heirloom' varieties. Inserting a gene which codes for a vitamin A synthesis is nothing like releasing birds because we think they'd be pretty. The rice plant already grows in the Philippines. The fundamental biological method by which the plant grows and reproduces has not changed. If we accept farming as part of the natural tableau of the area, then we're changing nothing in the status quo, aside from providing more rounded nutrition to the population
> Armchair generals can argue over and over about what the English 'should have done', but the fact remains that the decline in archery training led to the downfall of the longbow.
To be honest, half the reason for my asking this question was because I've been reading 1491, rather than trying to be an armchair general for the English. The book mentioned that guns weren't all that much better than bows (in terms of accuracy, etc.), so I was wondering how long that would have been true for.
>Also, you seem to buy into the the impoverished savage theory, which can be remedied by even a cursory overview of the journals of the Spanish who landed in Haiti -- it was the wealthiest place on Earth, and there was no capitalism there.
You seem to be buying into the racist theory that native americans were a bunch of "naked savages" (1). In fact, they had highly complex societies, trade, and many areas (New England in particular) had personal and economic freedom unrivaled in Europe.
Capitalism/Trade:
>By at least 2,500 years ago, trade networks brought copper from the Great Lakes region, mica from the Appalachian Mountains, shells from the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, and obsidian from the Rockies into the Tennessee region. During the Mississippian period, traders may have come from as far away as the Aztec cities of Mexico.
I also can't recommend the book 1491 highly enough.
(1) The modern PC type will describe Native Americans as peaceful natives living in perfect balance with nature. It's no less racist, but at least sounds prettier.
http://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Columbus/dp/1400032059/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1341950879&sr=8-1&keywords=1491
You might like this
Link in case you want to buy it but are too lazy to search.
Your picture of Pre-European Native American Life is not as bad as that Pocahontas DVD, but it is still way off. For a good look at what it was actually like in the New World pre-European, see the book 1491 by Charles Mann. This has been generally well recommended on /r/AskHistorians and /r/askscience.
For example, they made extensive use of fire to convert dense forests to less dense forests, open woodlands, or grasslands which lead to huge population increases in the kind of herbivores they liked to hunt, and made it much easier to hunt them. They did not just passively live at the mercy of Nature.
The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America is a fantastic read!
The beauty of NYC is that it's total chaos. That is something to dive into. People try to re/make NYC as kind of cleaned up Toronto. Doomed.
For in the middle of chaos, well that the secret of it all I guess. If you can't handle. Well I guess you can leave. No one will notice. It's a tough town. No tears will be shed. NYC is in/different to your suffering. Sorry.
But the good news, as they say (updated): "If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere, even on Mars."
Friend has an amazing rooftop view of Manhattan from Greenpoint. At night he points to the glimmering Manhattan skyline and says to us gathered there:
"We're all pirates here, we go to Manhattan and we plunder their gold and silver created from unfettered capitalism, and we bring it back to Brooklyn. That is our goal. To plunder Manhattan and bring those riches back to Greenpoint. Our true home, where the artists live and thrive. For this is what pirates do."
He is kind of a sane guy, thought that was an insightful observation of all things NYC.
OH, HIGHLY recommend this book, it's really a great read about the history of NYC, of all people, Charles Schumer pointed it out to us at a conference, and said "Read this book. It's cool." He was right. :-)
The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America (on amazon of course!)
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1400078679/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_U_sZkACbVX4PEDT
If you liked this there's a fantastic book on the subject titled The Island at the Center of the World.
over in r/history they programmed a bot to say this any time someone mentions ggs, and the bot says it better than I can
>Hi!
>
>It looks like you are talking about the book Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond.
>
>The book over the past years has become rather popular, which is hardly surprising since it is a good and entertaining read. It has reached the point that for some people it has sort of reached the status of gospel. On r/history we noticed a trend where every time a question was asked that has even the slightest relation to the book a dozen or so people would jump in and recommend the book. Which in the context of history is a bit problematic and the reason this reply was written.
>
>Why it is problematic can be broken down into two reasons:
>
>In academic history there isn't such thing as one definitive authority or work on things. There are often others who research the same subjects and people that dive into work of others to build on it or to see if it indeed holds up. This being critical of your sources and not relying on one source is actually a very important skill in studying history often lacking when dozens of people just spam the same work over and over again as a definite guide and answer to "everything".
>
>There are a good amount of modern historians and anthropologists who are quite critical of Guns, Germs, and Steel and there are some very real issues with Diamond's work. These issues are often overlooked or not noticed by the people reading his book. Which is understandable, given the fact that for many it will be their first exposure to the subject. Considering the popularity of the book it is also the reason that we felt it was needed to create this response.
>
>In an ideal world, every time the book was posted in r/history, it would be accompanied by critical notes and other works covering the same subject. Lacking that a dozen other people would quickly respond and do the same. But simply put, that isn't always going to happen and as a result, we have created this response so people can be made aware of these things. Does this mean that the r/history mods hate the book or Diamond himself? No, if that was the case, we would simply instruct the bot to remove every mention of it. This is just an attempt to bring some balance to a conversation that in popular history had become a bit unbalanced. It should also be noted that being critical of someone's work isn't the same as outright dismissing it. Historians are always critical of any work they examine, that is part of their core skill set and key in doing good research.
>
>Below you'll find a list of other works covering much of the same subject. Further below you'll find an explanation of why many historians and anthropologists are critical of Diamonds work.
>
>Other works covering the same and similar subjects.
>
>Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest
>
>1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
>
>Last Days of the Inca
>
>Epidemics and Enslavement: Biological Catastrophe in the Native Southeast, 1492-1715
>
>The Great Divergence
>
>Why the West Rules for Now
>
>Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900
>
>Criticism of Guns, Germs, and Steel
>
>Many historians and anthropologists believe Diamond plays fast and loose with history by generalizing highly complex topics to provide an ecological/geographical determinist view of human history. There is a reason historians avoid grand theories of human history: those "just so stories" don't adequately explain human history. It's true however that it is an entertaining introductory text that forces people to look at world history from a different vantage point. That being said, Diamond writes a rather oversimplified narrative that seemingly ignores the human element of history.
>
>Cherry-picked data while ignoring the complexity of issues
>
>In his chapter "Lethal Gift of Livestock" on the origin of human crowd infections he picks 5 pathogens that best support his idea of domestic origins. However, when diving into the genetic and historic data, only two pathogens (maybe influenza and most likely measles) could possibly have jumped to humans through domestication. The majority were already a part of the human disease load before the origin of agriculture, domestication, and sedentary population centers. This is an example of Diamond ignoring the evidence that didn't support his theory to explain conquest via disease spread to immunologically naive Native Americas.
>
>A similar case of cherry-picking history is seen when discussing the conquest of the Inca.
>
>Pizarro's military advantages lay in the Spaniards' steel swords and other weapons, steel armor, guns, and horses... Such imbalances of equipment were decisive in innumerable other confrontations of Europeans with Native Americans and other peoples. The sole Native Americans able to resist European conquest for many centuries were those tribes that reduced the military disparity by acquiring and mastering both guns and horses.
>
>This is a very broad generalization that effectively makes it false. Conquest was not a simple matter of conquering a people, raising a Spanish flag, and calling "game over." Conquest was a constant process of negotiation, accommodation, and rebellion played out through the ebbs and flows of power over the course of centuries. Some Yucatan Maya city-states maintained independence for two hundred years after contact, were "conquered", and then immediately rebelled again. The Pueblos along the Rio Grande revolted in 1680, dislodged the Spanish for a decade, and instigated unrest that threatened the survival of the entire northern edge of the empire for decades to come. Technological "advantage", in this case guns and steel, did not automatically equate to battlefield success in the face of resistance, rough terrain and vastly superior numbers. The story was far more nuanced, and conquest was never a cut and dry issue, which in the book is not really touched upon. In the book it seems to be case of the Inka being conquered when Pizarro says they were conquered.
>
>Uncritical examining of the historical record surrounding conquest
>
>Being critical of the sources you come across and being aware of their context, biases and agendas is a core skill of any historian.
>
>Pizarro, Cortez and other conquistadores were biased authors who wrote for the sole purpose of supporting/justifying their claim on the territory, riches and peoples they subdued. To do so they elaborated their own sufferings, bravery, and outstanding deeds, while minimizing the work of native allies, pure dumb luck, and good timing. If you only read their accounts you walk away thinking a handful of adventurers conquered an empire thanks to guns and steel and a smattering of germs. No historian in the last half century would be so naive to argue this generalized view of conquest, but European technological supremacy is one keystone to Diamond's thesis so he presents conquest at the hands of a handful of adventurers.
>
>The construction of the arguments for GG&S paints Native Americans specifically, and the colonized world in general, as categorically one step behind.
>
>To believe the narrative you need to view Native Americans as somehow naive, unable to understand Spanish motivations and desires, unable react to new weapons/military tactics, unwilling to accommodate to a changing political landscape, incapable of mounting resistance once conquered, too stupid to invent the key technological advances used against them, and doomed to die because they failed to build cities, domesticate animals and thereby acquire infectious organisms. This while they did often did fare much better than the book (and the sources it tends to cite) suggest, they often did mount successful resistance, were quick to adapt to new military technologies, build sprawling citiest and much more. When viewed through this lens, we hope you can see why so many historians and anthropologists are livid that a popular writer is perpetuating a false interpretation of history while minimizing the agency of entire continents full of people.
>
>Further reading
>
>If you are interested in reading more about what others think of Diamon's book you can give these resources a go:
>
>/r/askHistorians section in their FAQ about GG&S
>
>Jim Blaut on Jared Diamond
>
>I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
https://www.reddit.com/r/history/comments/crqxqi/what_is_the_most_interesting_history_book_you/excqr0d?
I'm not talking specifically about war crimes.
History textbooks ignore the role that Native American had in our history. For example, for the first 2 centuries of American history, our government waged constant war against Native American tribes. Many of the democratic principles incorporated into the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were present in the Iroquois Federation. This wasn't coincidence.
When they are discussed, they are written from a one sided view, removing any controversy and often written from the archetype of the savage.
Textbooks also try to give you the impression that if only Native Americans assimilated into European culture, they would have been accepted. However the reality is that Americans did not want Native Americans to assimilate and denied them their basic rights.
Did you use one of these textbooks? These were all critiqued by James Lowen in his book.
> He was a warhawk and an imperialist.
And a big racist. See Lies My Teacher Told Me
There's a really good book that I'm reading right now that goes into detail with this. The book's theme is basically ripping on common American History textbooks for gratuitously false and misleading representations of history and the dangers of it - there are several chapters dealing with race relations and how the North is far from innocent, despite the common view of American history.
I went to a top 100 high school and a top 30 university. Didn't actually learn about the destruction of the Americas until my sophomore year of college. The "Thanksgiving" myth is one of the most insulting--which public school only reinforces.
I don't think a proper account of the destruction of the Americas is school-appropriate. You know, stabbing pregnant women's bellies with spears and throwing children into pits of knives. Cutting off their hands and tying them around their necks to "go send a message" to the others. Mass executions by hanging or burning at the stake. Dismemberment. Sending the dogs to tear villagers apart from limb to limb. Entire clans hanging themselves in the woods to escape the horrors. Friendly competition on who could torture the best. Slavery. Don't really think the PTA was so keen on this rated R account.
As a matter of fact, I don't believe that any textbook I read actually acknowledges uses the term "genocide" in public education.
You should really read Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, if you actually believe that US public education adequately describes genocide in the Americas. Also, Las Casas is the source for my first paragraph.
___
Edit: Yes, I understand that Las Casas was writing about South America, but I still didn't learn about the Spanish Inquisition in any detail. We were tested more on what resources were valuable, and the names of European Kings.
Read Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong
https://www.amazon.com/Lies-My-Teacher-Told-Everything/dp/0743296281
Lies My Teacher Told Me by James W. Loewen was an eye-opener for me. I read it years ago, and haven't read the updated version, but I did find that one interesting.
Also Michio Kaku's "Hyperspace" is thoroughly entertaining and educational.
You should read this book, I think you might like it...
https://www.amazon.com/Lies-My-Teacher-Told-Everything/dp/0743296281
If you want a good comparative analysis of colonial history in North America, Alan Taylor's American Colonies is probably one of the better books for casual readers out there.
I personally think it's not religion that invoke people to kill Ahmadis or any other minority of the world. Just study any persecution in the world whether it's Rwanda, Sudan or North Korea. The main motive to kill is not religion. It's either economic or political reasons. I would highly recommend Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. We as a nation are either angry at our poverty or social conditions and then we try to blame it on the minorities.
Jared Diamond wrote a terrific book about this subject called Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed in which he outlines the various times in history civilizations have completely collapsed and why. Societies such as the Maya, the Anasazi, the Vikings in Greenland and the people of Easter island. He also has some thoughts about the likelihood of a modern societal collapse and what we can do to prevent it. It's a fascinating book and I highly recommend it.
This book is awesome.
http://www.amazon.com/Collapse-Societies-Succeed-Revised-Edition/dp/0143117009
Democrats vs Republicans is largely a conflict between liberal and conservative whites, who are very culturally different. They use minorities as a pawn. I read a book called American Nations that discussed this.
Check out Joel Garreau's Nine Nations of North America, Colin Woodward's American Nations, and Dante Chinni's Our Patchwork Nation -- these are excellent primary sources for such a project.
If you're not already familiar with it, you might be interested in Colin Woodard's American Nations.
Here's his version of the map.
American Nations, by Colin Woodard. It's a good book, with a fascinating take on why, e.g., people in New England and the Pacific Northwest are liberal and why people in Appalachia hate the government. He basically boils it all down to the reasons why the white people who settled those places left their respective European homelands, and how those attitudes persist to this day.
Honestly I would start with the U.S. Civil War.
Then work your way backwards in time from the Civil War, tracing the events (cultural and political) that led to the Civil War. This will eventually include the 3/5ths compromise in the Constitution, as well as a discussion of the cultural differences between the different original colonies, such as those outlined in Up in Arms, a review of American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America. Deep diving into the Antebellum period also will take you by the history of everything from how the US was formed, the revolutionary war (which slammed multiple very different cultures together against a common foe), to the impact of slavery, the economics of the North's industry and the South's plantations, and how things like the Cotton Gin gave southern slavery a second life.
Antebellum compromises even shaped the northern and southern borders of the United States. The South didn't want the North to push upwards into Canada (and add more free states, upsetting the balance between Free and Slave states), just as the North stopped a Southern push into Mexico and central America for the same reason.
Also, working your way forward from the Civil War, you can trace the threads from a shortened southern Reconstruction period, as well as an increased impetus towards westward expansion driven by an economy left in ruins. (Interesting fact: in terms of absolute numbers more American died during the Civil War than in all other wars America was involved with, including World Wars I and II--combined.)
Tracing forward from the Civil War you can see the effects of a failed Reconstruction on racism, eventually leading to the Civil Rights Movement 100 years later, as well as subtexts of racism on everything from the how we handled the Great Depression to our involvement in World Wars I and II.
If you also look at the U.S.'s approach to military affairs, you can also see it sharply echoed in how we fought the Civil War. And that warrior culture has painted U.S. attitudes towards foreign wars and even underlies the irony of a population that, as soon as the shooting starts, becomes extremely patriotic.
tl;dr: I really think the U.S. Civil War is an extremely important event in U.S. history, and a lot of U.S. history prior to the Civil War and afterwards can be framed in terms of the Civil War itself.
Edit: stupid typos.
For more, check out Woodard's American Nations, which expands the conversation to eleven regional cultures, including those mentioned in Albion's Seed, and fills in a lot of the gaps Scott Alexander wonders about.
American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World by David Stannard.
Stannard argues that the European takeover of the New World was made possible by a genocide of disease.
>Yeah but there's also the rest of the paragraph, anarchists agree that monopolies on force will exist, we just want to democratically control them.
That is not true. If anarchists believed in a democratically controlled monopoly of force, they would be "Democrats", not "anarchists". Hell, in much of the world today we do have a monopoly of force which is technically "democratically controlled" by the generally accepted definition of "democracy", so by this conception of what anarchists think we might as well say we already have anarchy which is obviously a ludicrous conclusion. Anarchists do often use the language of "direct democracy" (erroneously, in my view) because this concept is often associated to people having control over their own lives and getting together to discuss stuff that is important to them, but any way anarchists do still oppose any sort of "democracy" ("direct" or otherwise) as a system of government insofar as it is a system of government and are more likely to write general critiques of democracy^[1] than to try and make the monopoly on force "democratic".
Social order does not require a monopoly on force, the establishment of fixed rules or the existence of particular parties with the political authority to enforce them. We know this because we actually know of societies that have existed with out any political authority or social hierarchy (Graeber^[2] for example cites the Bororo, the Baining, the Onondaga, the Wintu, the Ema, the Tallensi, the Vezo...) and the Yale professor of anthropology James C. Scott even wrote a book^[3] about stateless peoples from the region of Zomia who have - for millenia - consciously resisted integration into State based civilization because they actually prefer anarchy (largely because life in the neighbouring State societies was characterized by "slavery, conscription, taxes, corvée labor, epidemics, and warfare").
The real question for most anarchists today is how can these same basic social forces that are at play in those anarchic societies scale and adapt to an post-industrial, large scale society. The general idea is to make those social forces take the form of inter-locking networks of self-managed associations (with no monopoly on force or central bureaucracy), oriented around the social ownership of the means of production and a organized gift or mutualistic economy. There have been all sorts of experiments with particular anarchist principles and practices (experiments in worker's self-management, experiments in gift economies such as Linux, real communities like Freetown Christiania, etc) and even mass revolutions which saw these experiments applied in a larger context (Paris Commune, Shinmin, Catalonia, etc), and while so far no lasting anarchist mass society has come into being (mostly due to the quick repression that follows and the lack of international support to defend itself from it) this does not mean anarchy cannot work.
Our fellow anarchist /u/humanispherian has for a long time openly criticized^[4] (and i agree with him) the curious phenomenon of anarchists who are "much more comfortable with the language of governmentalism and authority than they are with the concept of anarchy" and this curious phenomenon is certainly very prevalent on the Reddit anarchist milieu, but i don't think i have ever seen anyone go as far as state that "anarchists agree that monopolies on force will exist, we just want to democratically control them."
Probably the most obvious person to look at is David Graeber as he's probably the best known self-identified anarchist anthropologist. Aside from him, however, you may also be interested in the work of James C. Scott - specifically his book The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia.
That being aid, I don't remember if Graeber or Scott actually lay out plans for what an anarchist society would look like.
It's also worth noting, I think, that's there's a big difference between a stateless society and an anarchist one, if by the latter we mean one explicitly organized according to anarchist ideas. A lot of anarchists nowadays point to the EZLN as a model for a contemporary stateless society, which is quite understandable. However I don't believe the EZLN actually considers itself to be anarchist, though I think they're sympathetic.
The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Southeast Asia by James Scott
This book is a fascinating examination of state-resisting societies in the Zomia region of Southeast Asia.
This is probably the best for getting an anthropological view on it: http://amzn.com/0300169175
You may want to look into the history of the Paris Commune and the Spanish Civil War.
Check out this book if you want to really understand how coyotes work but u/Balsak_T_Baghar is right. Dan mentions in this book how coyotes talk to each other to take a census of the nearby populations. If the population is below carrying capacity, it will trigger an estrus in the female who will have a larger than average litter. There's a reason it's the only animal that has adapted to every single habitat on the planet besides humans.
This book is what he is referring to I believe.
http://www.amazon.com/Fingerprints-Gods-Graham-Hancock/dp/0517887290
also you can listen to him on some Podcasts (he's been on the joe rogan experience a few times): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7zfnNH1GD0
Hmm ... The names were always of Arabic origin for me. Alnilam, Mintaka, Alnitak.
And it was always curved somewhat ... an arc of sorts.
Ancient Islam actually had very advanced astronomy and named so many of the stars and constellations. That was before the dark ages and all of that. Not exactly a history expert (but working on this) so I'm not sure of the exact terminology or timeframes, but you get what I mean. From early civilization to medieval times to Romantic times to now. Or something like that.
I am somewhat of an amateur astrophotographer and astronomer as well, and I particularly focus on Orion, and Sirius in Canis Major, and Aldebaran and the Pleiades in Taurus, because of their relevance and mention in the ancient mysteries -- The Sirius Mystery, The Dogon people in Africa, and The Orion Mystery. The Great Pyramids at Giza align with the belt. I believe Graham Hancock mentions this variously in his works like The Message of the Sphinx and Fingerprints of the Gods.
"Confederates in the Attic is a cracking good read. If you like documentaries, Ken Burns "Civil War" is the gold standard.
> Fuck you. I bet you'd love a 2nd American civil war.
Why would I? My side won.
> Erasing our history is not okay.
It isn't erasing history. Have you ever actually visited a civil war memorial or battlefield? Because there are many of them around with statues. For example, here is some information on Lee's statue at Gettysburg.
Statues belong in the places where these men toiled: on the battlefield.
> Just because their side lost doesn't make the men who fought on that side any less important, or any more "evil" or something.
I don't think that is the case, but glorifyng a nation that lost against the USA only emboldens neo-Confederates, historical revisionism, or those who would want to contunue the "Lost Cause." Ever read Confederates in the Attic? It's a very good read that touches upon these issues, which are still problematic today as we saw from Charlottesville, VA.
BTW, I grew up south of the Mason-Dixon line, my father is from the South, and we had ancestors that fought on both sides during the war, so I am not just some Damn Yankee trying to oppress Southerners. I love the South in many ways -- its food, music, and climate, for example -- but that doesn't mean I support racialist people waving the Confederate flag.
> Every person involved in the civil war was an American.
That is true, but Southerners attacked the US and seceded from it because they had a different vision of America while the rest of the country (except the territories) was free soil. It's a key issue.
I'm not the person you are replying to, so no sourcing for their claim, but I can tell you that the Nazis were also extremely inspired by America not just Sweden. Hitler praised America numerous times in "Mein Kampf".
Here is an excerpt from a great New Yorker Article and I would really encourage you to read it. It also includes a good book recommedation, I read it as part of my studies and while it is not exactly academic literature, it is an accurate page turner.
>The Nazis idolized many aspects of American society: the cult of sport, Hollywood production values, the mythology of the frontier. From boyhood on, Hitler devoured the Westerns of the popular German novelist Karl May. In 1928, Hitler remarked, approvingly, that white settlers in America had “gunned down the millions of redskins to a few hundred thousand.” When he spoke of Lebensraum, the German drive for “living space” in Eastern Europe, he often had America in mind.
>Among recent books on Nazism, the one that may prove most disquieting for American readers is James Q. Whitman’s “Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law” (Princeton). On the cover, the inevitable swastika is flanked by two red stars. Whitman methodically explores how the Nazis took inspiration from American racism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He notes that, in “Mein Kampf,” Hitler praises America as the one state that has made progress toward a primarily racial conception of citizenship, by “excluding certain races from naturalization.” Whitman writes that the discussion of such influences is almost taboo, because the crimes of the Third Reich are commonly defined as “the nefandum, the unspeakable descent into what we often call ‘radical evil.’ ” But the kind of genocidal hatred that erupted in Germany had been seen before and has been seen since. Only by stripping away its national regalia and comprehending its essential human form do we have any hope of vanquishing it.
I added the emphasis myself, here are the relevant links (can't properly format in mobile):
Article:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/30/how-american-racism-influenced-hitler
Book:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0691172420/?tag=thneyo0f-20
> Peru. I want to learn more about the history of that place, and visit machu pichu. Very interested.
I've read and recommend:
Lies My Teacher Told Me was a good read, but kinda the opposite of textbook.
Lies my Teacher Taught Me: Everything your American History Textbook got Wrong by James Loewen. Fascinating book about what, and why, much of what is taught in Us history textbooks is inaccurate and why most of it is written in a manner that makes the subject boring as sin. Amazing read.
http://www.amazon.com/Lies-My-Teacher-Told-Everything/dp/0743296281/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_1
Gig: Americans Talk about Their Jobs. Over 120 masterfully conducted interviews with american workers; ranging from crime scene cleaners to lawn mowing men to transvestite prostitutes. Each interivew is about 4-5 pages long so there's no need to read it in order or in a long sitting. One of my most favorite books and one that helped me decide what I wanted to do for a living. Criminally overlooked and incredibly eye opening.
http://www.amazon.com/Gig-Americans-Talk-About-Their/dp/0609807072/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1261780756&sr=1-1
SO MANY!
["Lies my Teacher Told Me"] (http://www.amazon.com/Lies-My-Teacher-Told-Everything/dp/0743296281) by James Loewen. This is about how the world really works, basically. It's all about history and politics and economics and how world powers interact with each other and their own population. It's incredibly eye-opening and will make you understand why everything is the way it is today! It's also ridiculously fun to read :D
["The Quantum and the Lotus by"] (http://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Lotus-Journey-Frontiers-Buddhism/dp/1400080797/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1383171898&sr=1-1&keywords=the+quantum+and+the+lotus) by Matthieu Ricard and Trinh Xuan Thuan. This is a super fascinating read! It's actually a transcribed conversation between a Buddhist who became a quantum physicist and a physicist who left science and became a Buddhist! It's this AMAZING look into complicated science and it's explained in such simple terms anyone can understand it. But beyond that, it's this really fascinating glimpse into a world where science and spirituality can co-exist. It's like science explaining spirituality, or spirituality giving a wholesome quality to science. It's just so unique and amazing!
["The Power of Myth"] (http://www.amazon.com/Power-Myth-Joseph-Campbell/dp/0385418868/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1383172215&sr=1-3&keywords=joseph+campbell) by Joseph Campbell. If you can, read EVERYTHING by this guy that you can get your hands on! This book is especially poignant because it's addressing all of the aspects of our modern day society, from religion to gangs to marriage, even education. It is incredibly powerful and eye-opening and explains so much about the way we work as humans and the way the individual interacts with society. Plus, you'll learn a shit ton about mythology that you never knew before! And you'll be looking at mythology from a ridiculously profound perspective that I've never seen anyone else address before.
I can give you more if you tell me what you're interested in learning more about :)
EDIT: Typos.
James Loewen gives a convincing argument in Lies My Teacher Told Me that slavery was indeed the primary cause of the Civil War. He also directs the reader to South Carolina's Declaration of Secession, in which the string "slave" appears 18 times.
And it's been going on for quite a while. American Textbooks are biased, uninformative, and often filled with outright lies designed solely to promote the American Mythos (the idea that certain historical figures were almost godlike or otherwise infallible and filled with pro-american spirit and viewpoints.)
And you can read more about it. Lies my Teacher Told Me is an excellent book on the subject. The author went through dozens of textbooks paragraph by paragraph and counted the inconsistencies, errors, and outright lies he found.
I think you misunderstand me, or at least you're using a different definition of "hero" than I am.
My point is that a hero is someone who does the right thing at the right time, despite his fears or weaknesses. Someone who runs into a burning building to save a child is not necessarily a wonderful human being in every way possible; he might be an embezzler who cheat on his wife. For the moment in which he committed the heroic act, however, he is a hero. The moment of heroism (and its effects) is admirable, even though the other behavior is not.
There's a marvelous book called Lies My Teacher Told Me, which is about the way American History is taught in high school. In it, the author goes to great lengths to describe how we're taught a whitewashed history in which the people we're expected to admire (such as presidents and the founding fathers) were all wholly admirable. Yet, as the author points out, it's not the human weaknesses of these people that is notable but that they rose above them. Flawed human beings managed to work together to create a Declaration of Independence that is somehow a reflection of the best of our ideals, and gives us something to work towards.
I see scientology the way I do the vision of the founding fathers. We start with the premise that the ideals are attainable, and we work towards attaining them -- even if we do not reach any kind of perfection.
I don't think that LRH was any kind of saint. I think he could be an asshat, and worse. I think he could have done far better with scientology if he let it continue to be okay for others to contribute to it, both technically and in leadership ways, and if he had acknowledged the contributions others did make. But he did devote most of his life to finding ways to get us all out of the mess -- including himself, even if he did not succeed.
1491 by Charles C. Mann
In the Spirit of Crazy Horse by Peter Matthiesson
Custer Died For Your Sins by Vine Deloria Jr.
Those are the three that I always answer this question with.
Mods: I'm not Native but I found these books immensely helpful when I had the same questions over the years. Please delete if this if it's not allowed.
If you want to know about America's indigenous people, go to the source. I suggest avoiding books written by non-Natives, although there are of course special exceptions. This is because history, research, and literature by non-Natives tends to have an underlying motive heavy with inaccuracies or romanticism. It's also written from a Eurocentricm perspective where European culture is the standard against which difference is measured. There is an excellent post over on /r/AskHistorians that breaks the difference down at length, which illustrates why these texts are often not representative of the people they're discussing. In particular, an indigenous perspective "places the emphasis of understanding on the actual relationship between two things" whereas a non-Native emphasizes the "understanding on the actual object rather than the relationship." The distinction is important and, in my experience, it's been difficult not to see the faults in non-Native written information afterward.
An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States for Young People is a really good place to start. Yes, it's written for young folks, however, it doesn't dress up American history and instead presents it as is. You can use this book as a springboard for other topics. A lot of American history books present a cleaned up narrative that glosses over the human atrocities in favor of "unity." You see this jargon time and time again, even recently. So You Want to Write About American Indians? is also excellent, even if you're not a writer because she breaks down many of the self serving reasons behind non-Natives' discussions of Native America. And Custer Died for Your Sins is a classic in this discussion. This book was probably the most instrumental in peeling the romanticism away from my worldview. The chapter Anthropologists and Other Friends is an honest, raw, and direct dressing-down of non-Natives "studying" Native populations. And Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science has been one of the foremost books I've read (aside from the first one I linked) that dismantled my understanding of history and colonized misconceptions we take as fact when it comes to the social and historical misrepresentations of cultural, racial, ethnic, and national ideas of America's indigenous peoples. All of these items were written by indigenous people, from varying different cultural backgrounds and tribes. There are over 560 different federally recognized tribes, and they all have their own cultural backgrounds, languages, and history. Everyone is different. Try and be mindful of that when it's otherwise easy to say, "Native Americans believe that/Native American beliefs say/etc/etc."
Dark Tide
http://www.amazon.com/Dark-Tide-Great-Boston-Molasses/dp/0807050210
If you like this story you have to read Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919 by Stephen Puleo. I couldn't put it down and ended up reading it in one sitting. Looks like you can get it for 90 cents used on Amazon!
I had to read it in college. It is actually very interesting. I provided a link to the book for those that are interested.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0807050210?pc_redir=1405433114&robot_redir=1
Had this book suggested to me recently:
An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (ReVisioning American History)
>by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
https://www.amazon.com/Indigenous-Peoples-History-ReVisioning-American/dp/0807057835
> 2015 Recipient of the American Book Award
>
> The first history of the United States told from the perspective of indigenous peoples
>
> Today in the United States, there are more than five hundred federally recognized Indigenous nations comprising nearly three million people, descendants of the fifteen million Native people who once inhabited this land. The centuries-long genocidal program of the US settler-colonial regimen has largely been omitted from history. Now, for the first time, acclaimed historian and activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz offers a history of the United States told from the perspective of Indigenous peoples and reveals how Native Americans, for centuries, actively resisted expansion of the US empire.
>
> In An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, Dunbar-Ortiz adroitly challenges the founding myth of the United States and shows how policy against the Indigenous peoples was colonialist and designed to seize the territories of the original inhabitants, displacing or eliminating them. And as Dunbar-Ortiz reveals, this policy was praised in popular culture, through writers like James Fenimore Cooper and Walt Whitman, and in the highest offices of government and the military. Shockingly, as the genocidal policy reached its zenith under President Andrew Jackson, its ruthlessness was best articulated by US Army general Thomas S. Jesup, who, in 1836, wrote of the Seminoles: “The country can be rid of them only by exterminating them.”
>
> Spanning more than four hundred years, this classic bottom-up peoples’ history radically reframes US history and explodes the silences that have haunted our national narrative.
Good point. That was an apocalypse.
1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
>So where are they or their civilizations today?
Lehite successor states were ground to pieces by a combination of disease epidemic, climate change, and European aggression like the rest of America's endemic nations.
If you haven't read them, I highly recommend 1491 and 1493.
>Where were they when they were at their peak?
That's a great question that is not answered by modern revelation. John Clark thinks Joseph Smith believed that Book of Mormon events occurred around the Yucatan peninsula. I agree with him but I'm happy to cede ground if future evidences don't support that.
> Based on DNA and archaeology, it's a tough case, no?
Not really. This is an article you may (or may not) enjoy:
https://www.lds.org/topics/book-of-mormon-and-dna-studies?lang=eng
I found that its cautions were very prescient.
And before that the indigenous population was highly managing the forests. The lie of The Pristine Myth is so interesting to study.
https://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Columbus/dp/1400032059
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/03/the-pristine-myth/303062/
> When John Smith visited Massachusetts in 1614, he wrote that the land was "so planted with Gardens and Corne fields, and so well inhabited with a goodly, strong and well proportioned people ... [that] I would rather live here than any where." But by the time the colonists reached Plymouth in the Mayflower six years later, they found one deserted village after another—the Indians had been felled by European diseases to which they had little resistance.
Cheers!
1491 was a great read that examined the technology and cultural developments of the Native Americans before the arrival of Europeans. One of its main conceits is to tear down the myth that they were simple people in touch with nature, when they actually actively worked to alter the landscape to fit their needs. It was one of the first history books I found so engrossing that I couldn't put down.
Collapse has a wider scope; it examines dozens of societies that have existed throughout history that for one reason or another "collapsed". It shows how combinations a society's choices and external forces caused the failure of Viking settlements in Greenland, the extinction of the people of Easter Island, to the failure of modern countries, like Rwanda. Each chapter is about seventy or eighty pages and fairly self-contained, so you can pick it up and jump in where ever you like.
Read these:
https://www.amazon.com/Peoples-History-United-States/dp/0062397346
https://www.amazon.com/Lies-My-Teacher-Told-Everything/dp/1620973928
https://www.amazon.com/Bartolome-las-Casas-Destruction-Indies/dp/1451526997
https://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Columbus/dp/1400032059
https://www.amazon.com/Cartoon-Introduction-Philosophy-Michael-Patton/dp/0809033623
I'm talking about the Inkans, based on this well received book.
https://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Columbus/dp/1400032059/ref=mt_paperback?_encoding=UTF8&me=
Check it out, it's good.
Yea I haven't really ever seen any documentary about the Mexica or other mesoamerican groups that wasn't built around the older conquest myths like Cortez was mistaken for a god or the spaniards single handily beat them, but that doesn't mean that those old ideas aren't changing. There's a few pbs ones I've seen about the Aztecs and new discoveries of the teotihucan culture. Watching a documentary is easy but if you can reading is your best bet. Conquest by Hugh Thomas is an extremely detailed and well researched account of the rise and fall of the Aztecs, buried Mirror by Carlos Fuentes is an examination of the rise of a unified Spanish nation state and the parrels with the cultures of the new world and shows that the two groups had more in common than one would think. 1491 by Charles C. Mann has some stuff on the Aztecs, but looks at different new world cultures and shows that overall they were more sophisticated than generally thought of
https://www.amazon.com/Conquest-Cortes-Montezuma-Fall-Mexico/dp/0671511041
https://www.amazon.com/Buried-Mirror-Reflections-Spain-World/dp/0395924995
https://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Columbus/dp/1400032059
If you are interested, you might like to read the book "1491". It is an actual history of north and south America. The author spend decades researching everything he could about the pre-Columbian Americas. Very interesting book, but it makes no mention of the book of mormon, or anything that lines up with the book of mormon.
http://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Columbus/dp/1400032059/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1377622534&sr=8-1&keywords=1491
1491 http://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Columbus/dp/1400032059 and Tastes of Paradise https://www.google.ca/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=http://www.amazon.ca/Tastes-Paradise-History-Stimulants-Intoxicants/dp/067974438X&ved=0ahUKEwjystjTu7LKAhXHFT4KHbZ8DO8QFggnMAM&usg=AFQjCNEaVOPvnv3ttzbPXAqKv20S9BF-vA are my personal faves.
You may be interested in https://smile.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Columbus/dp/1400032059.
Population of the Mississippi valley was quite high, farming was ubiquitous amongst East Coast tribes. Land bore signs of alteration due to agriculture.
Most of them did die during the Contact Plagues though.
Try the book "1491" -- it's fascinating and goes into detail about a lot of mesoamerican societies. I enjoyed it a lot.
What I can't tell you is whether it's accurate. Like rocket trajectories for Wernher Von Braun in Tom Lehrer's famous song, that's not my department.
If you haven't done so yet, seriously read 1491 by Charles Mann. You will not be disappointed.
I haven't actually read it yet, only excerpts, but I have the book 1491:New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus coming in the mail. It's about America before the Europeans came, and how vastly numerous and sophisticated Native Americans were.
If you want to learn more about 1550's - 1700's Dutch Manhattan, this book is one of the most interesting books I have ever read.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Island-Center-World-Manhattan/dp/1400078679/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1406703358&sr=8-1&keywords=island+at+the+center+of+the+world
I'd suggest looking at r/boywer, The Traditional Bowyer's Bible series, and Poor Folks Bows.
http://www.amazon.com/Lies-My-Teacher-Told-Everything/dp/1595583262/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1207154536&sr=8-1
oh wow, a new version came out... yesterday. I may have to buy it again.
You might enjoy the award-winning book 'Lies My Teacher Told Me'.
This is not restricted to China alone, although it's certainly more widespread there.
All three of these diets are loosely true for various areas and periods of human history.
If you're really wondering who is right or wrong, I think what's important to take away here is that humans haven't had one diet throughout our evolutionary history. Different diets have been necessary/possible in different environments, and changed depending on population needs etc. I highly suggest reading An Edible History of Humanity if you really want to get into it (which, along with 1491, is my source for this response).
Apologies if I've gotten any facts wrong.
That's exactly it. The excellent book 1491 really rams that home (also I'm guessing we both got the idea from that book or the research it cites.)
Charles C Mann, here's a link on Amazon
I feel like you're gonna want to start here:
https://www.amazon.com/Lies-My-Teacher-Told-Everything/dp/0743296281
I'm assuming here that you haven't really studied any history since high school, and at the time you likely found it dreadfully boring (don't we all). If this is correct, take solace in the fact that you were being taught history in likely the worst way possible, and the system almost seems designed to bore you and the rest of the students to death.
One tactic, then, would be for you to work on thinking about history more as it is: seeking answers to the fundamental "why" questions that tell what it means, collectively, to be us. It's a study of choices and struggles and understanding the challenging, horrible, daunting circumstances they faced. High school curriculum drives out such notions of struggle and difficulty because they invite controversial questions, like why the rich manipulated the poor or why the white mistreated and killed the black/Native American. In doing so they deny any of the historical actors, whether oppressed or oppressor, their humanity, and without that who cares about studying them?
I would hope that once you get more exposed to actual history and not names and dates, that you'll grow more of a natural interest for the subject. As such, I have two books to recommend you:
These books won't give you a complete view of American history but my hope is that they'll introduce you to a form of history that's interesting while also exposing you to a wide array of American history topics. From there you can see what you actually enjoy learning about and pick better books from there.
Everyone should read Lies My Teacher Told me.
Acting classes, plural! I took a few as electives in college because it was fun and I am so very grateful I did! Now, as a "seasoned" teacher, I recommend them to the student teachers and practicum students I deal with daily. You HAVE to know how to improvise for more reasons than I could explain here.
As far as books I would base my recommendations on the population you want to serve, and you have to WANT to serve. As a general rule I would start with Educating Esme, A Kind and Just Parent, Lies My Teacher Told Me, and a lot of kid and young adult books. If you want specifics just let me know. I teach banned books!
You might also enjoy Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me which was very popular some years ago. My husband was in college learning to be a history teacher and absolutely loved it.
>Modern American history books? I went to school in the south in the 90s
You were lucky to be educated when you were, or by the books your school district had.
Some examples of more modern rewrites to history books and the way the subject is taught (updated in 2006).
What about Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong ? It's a bit above his age group (high school level I'd say) but if he's the type of kid who wants to read books about American history then he's probably above his reading level. This will also allow him to be obnoxiously pedantic and quite possibly correct his teachers in school, which I feel like a good amount of 13 year old boys would enjoy. I also think it's perfect for his age, considering he's probably starting to question authority, and this book pushes back against some of the whitewashing and blind optimism that you see in some American history textbooks.
Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong is a great book. Importantly, to the study of history, it goes beyond debunking and setting the record straight and stresses history is not cut-and-try but a series of possibilities, arguments, and evidence. Very readable, too.
You cannot get more American than being racist.
The Union rehabilitated the Confederate leaders and put them in power instead of doing what they should have: hanging them all. During reconstruction the first public welfare programs were built and radical experiments in democracy kicked off, but then the ex-Confederate leaders killed that and began Jim Crow. The Confederates may have lost the battle for chattel slavery, but they won the war in racist domination. We are still living with that system, albeit in an advanced and evolved form.
Historian Eric Foner is the best on this topic:
>Lincoln did not live to preside over Reconstruction. That task fell to his successor, Andrew Johnson. Once lionized as a heroic defender of the Constitution against Radical Republicans, Johnson today is viewed by historians as one of the worst presidents to occupy the White House. He was incorrigibly racist, unwilling to listen to criticism and unable to work with Congress. Johnson set up new Southern governments controlled by ex-Confederates. They quickly enacted the Black Codes, laws that severely limited the freed people’s rights and sought, through vagrancy regulations, to force them back to work on the plantations.
Why Reconstruction Matters
His book, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863 - 1877 is essential reading.
EDIT: I just remembered hearing an interview with James Q. Whitman, American lawyer and Ford Foundation Professor of Comparative and Foreign Law at Yale University on how the Nazis emulated the United States:
>Nazism triumphed in Germany during the high era of Jim Crow laws in the United States. Did the American regime of racial oppression in any way inspire the Nazis? The unsettling answer is yes. In Hitler's American Model, James Whitman presents a detailed investigation of the American impact on the notorious Nuremberg Laws, the centerpiece anti-Jewish legislation of the Nazi regime. Contrary to those who have insisted that there was no meaningful connection between American and German racial repression, Whitman demonstrates that the Nazis took a real, sustained, significant, and revealing interest in American race policies.
>As Whitman shows, the Nuremberg Laws were crafted in an atmosphere of considerable attention to the precedents American race laws had to offer. German praise for American practices, already found in Hitler's Mein Kampf, was continuous throughout the early 1930s, and the most radical Nazi lawyers were eager advocates of the use of American models. But while Jim Crow segregation was one aspect of American law that appealed to Nazi radicals, it was not the most consequential one. Rather, both American citizenship and antimiscegenation laws proved directly relevant to the two principal Nuremberg Laws―the Citizenship Law and the Blood Law. Whitman looks at the ultimate, ugly irony that when Nazis rejected American practices, it was sometimes not because they found them too enlightened, but too harsh.
>Indelibly linking American race laws to the shaping of Nazi policies in Germany, Hitler's American Model upends understandings of America's influence on racist practices in the wider world.
https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0691172420/leftbusinessobseA
Interview with the author: http://shout.lbo-talk.org/lbo/RadioArchive/2017/17_05_25.mp3
You could narrow it to the 13 colonies that became the United States. But another way to frame the question is to consider the lands that eventually became part of the U.S. e.g. the Spanish missions in the southwest and California, the Russians in the Aleutian Islands, the French in the Great Lakes region. By comparing interactions across all the regions, and especially how the colonial policies of the respective European nations changed over time, you might see a trend (or lack of trend) that answers your question.
Check out American Colonies by Alan Taylor. He takes a broad geographic view and shares interesting detail about the internal politics of the indigenous nations as they interacted with the Europeans.
Alan Taylor - American Colonies
http://www.amazon.com/American-Colonies-Settling-America-Penguin/dp/0142002100/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1279493635&sr=1-1
This is a decent treatment of the beginning stages of settlement from multiple perspectives (British, Spanish, Native Americans).
This is a VERY good book on the topic of colonial history. It is not an in depth look at any aspect, but a fantastic overview from colonization to revolution. It focuses on a lot of topics I had never read about anywhere else. It was invaluable in picking a topic for my Sr. paper on early american history. :)
http://www.amazon.com/American-Colonies-Settling-America-Penguin/dp/0142002100
http://www.amazon.ca/American-Colonies-Settling-America-Penguin/dp/0142002100
Any book by Mary Roach- her books are hilarious, random, and informative. I like Jon Krakauer's, Sarah Vowell's, and Bill Bryson's books as well.
Some of my favorites that I can think of offhand (as another poster mentioned, I loved Devil in the White City)
No Picnic on Mount Kenya
Guns, Germs, and Steel
Collapse
The Closing of the Western Mind
What is the What
A Long Way Gone
Alliance of Enemies
The Lucifer Effect
The World Without Us
What the Dog Saw
The God Delusion (you'd probably enjoy Richard Dawkins' other books as well if you like science)
One Down, One Dead
Lust for Life
Lost in Shangri-La
Endurance
True Story
Havana Nocturne
Personally, I think the American Empire is declining. Sir John Glubb had a wonderful write up of this, and I have copied his conclusion below. The full PDF can be found here and it is only 27 pages long.
Glubb looked at eleven empires over the course of history. I copied a relevant summary from the end. The pdf is online here.
> As numerous points of interest have arisen in the course of this essay, I close with a brief summary, to refresh the reader’s mind.
> (a) We do not learn from history because our studies are brief and prejudiced.
> (b) In a surprising manner, 250 years emerges as the average length of national greatness.
> (c) This average has not varied for 3,000 years. Does it represent ten generations?
> (d) The stages of the rise and fall of great
nations seem to be:
> The Age of Pioneers (outburst)
> The Age of Conquests
> The Age of Commerce
> The Age of Affluence
> The Age of Intellect
> The Age of Decadence.
> (e) Decadence is marked by:
> Defensiveness
> Pessimism
> Materialism
> Frivolity
> An influx of foreigners
> The Welfare State
> A weakening of religion.
> (f) Decadence is due to:
> Too long a period of wealth and power
> Selfishness
> Love of money
> The loss of a sense of duty.
> (g) The life histories of great states are amazingly similar, and are due to internal factors.
> (h) Their falls are diverse, because they are largely the result of external causes.
> (i) History should be taught as the history of the human race, though of course with emphasis on the history of the student’s own country.
The real question is how technology will either speed up, slow down. or prevent the same thing from happening to America.
I also recommend the following books:
The Collapse of Complex Societies, By Joseph Tainter
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Succeed or Fail, By Jared Diamond
Overshoot: The Ecological Basis for Revolutionary Change
Finally, when it comes to survival information, I highly recommend www.survivalblog.com. To me, they are the best of the best.
I also would like to plug Radio Free Redoubt (podcast) as well as AmRRON (American Redoubt Radio Operator's Network).
Did you not notice that I said what the source is? Jared Diamond's Collapse?
You want chapter 15, starting on page 441, but it is a good idea to read the whole book.
http://www.amazon.com/Collapse-Societies-Succeed-Revised-Edition/dp/0143117009
Map reminds of a book I read and enjoyed last year:
https://www.amazon.com/American-Nations-History-Regional-Cultures/dp/0143122029
If you are into non-fiction, I recommend American Nations by historian Colin Woodard. It will make our current political polarization make much more sense.
Here is a WaPo review of the book.
That book is from 2012. Chovanec's post is from 2009.
Highly recommend this book:
http://www.amazon.com/Class-Through-American-Status-System/dp/0671792253
Class: A guide through the American Status System, by Paul Fussel. it was written in the mid 80s, but I think the information is still relevant and the writer basically spends the entirety of the book answering your question about social class signifiers (why do New England upperclass have an affinity for nautical decor? find out in chapter 3).
To the part of the question about regions, you might be interested in this book: http://www.amazon.com/American-Nations-History-Regional-Cultures/dp/0143122029
it is about the whys behind American regional political and class differences based on who immigrated to certain areas of the country, the values and ideals they brought with them and how it changed the American landscape and informs the current social and political climate. Interesting stuff.
Regarding competition, a lot of it is rooted in the types of people who settled the United States and the reasons why they came. Some of the people who came were religious or political dissenters trying to escape persecution, yes; but many, many of them were speculators here on behalf of some venture or company to see what they could discover/exploit the hell out of (and for how long) to get filthy rich and please the financial backers in the venture back home (some of whom were royal). That behavior was simply carried forward, both by Southern plantation owners and Northern industrialists: if you spend as little as possible running your venture, you'll have much greater profits in the end. And there is always somebody who will think they can do it more cheaply than you.
Here's an interesting book that might provide more insight: American Nations (Amazon)
An interesting article posted elsewhere on Reddit: NY Times article on American capitalism
Regarding college, there are many factors that have sort of dovetailed over the last 70 or so years to create the current situation. There's a big obsession ("madness") with attending college because the vast majority of employers now seemingly require college degrees for basic, halfway decent positions, and nobody wants to be left behind. This has led to a lot of bloat and the (unfortunate) de-valuing of the average degree. And this leads into why people are angry ("mad") about attaining/having college degrees: over that same period, college tuition has steadily gone up as costs have gone up. At the same time, wages have stagnated and subsidies (like for the public universities) have been slashed. Employers still want that degree, though, so many people take out loans to cover the difference in cost. And when they get to the end and get that job, they find out that they're going to be sorting garbage or filing widgets. And they still have to pay the loans back. You'll basically never get to use the university knowledge that you paid so much for, that the employer themselves required. So, yeah. Anger.
Of course, this doesn't explain why the US doesn't have a more robust (or publicized) vocational training system. Were I in office, I'd work to organize some kind of educational summit between industry and academia where they could hash all this out. What sort of knowledge does a university degree confer? Is it really necessary for most jobs? If you want your employees to have some kind of post-secondary training, what would be an acceptable alternative to university? Stuff like that. Then I'd work with the Department of Education to make it happen.
The interesting part of the book is how it compares Canadian culture to that of various regions of the United States. Canadian culture turns out to be most like Massachusetts and least like the deep south. To make this comparison the author had to first describe the various regional cultures of the United States.
An American author did a similar examination with similar findings in this book https://www.amazon.com/American-Nations-History-Regional-Cultures/dp/0143122029
American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America, by Colin Woodard. It is an excellent read.
Another book that is similar to this (but much longer) is Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America, by David Hackett Fischer
I found it, Colin Woodard's "American Nations".
"...pointing out that rebellion in the North American colonies against the rule of a distant king started not in the 1770s, but in the 1680s, and not “as a united force of Americans eager to create a new nation, but in a series of separate rebellions, each seeking to preserve a distinct regional culture, political system, and religious tradition threatened by the distant seat of empire.”
It's almost two books, with the first half describing how each of his eleven nations were settled and cultivated, then spending the second half discussing how those separate nations contribute to the current political climate.
Also from the book:
“Since 1877, the driving force in American politics hasn’t primarily been a class struggle or tension between agrarian and commercial interests, or even between competing partisan ideologies, although each has played a role. Ultimately, the determinative political struggle has been a clash between shifting coalitions of ethnoregional nations, one invariably headed by the Deep South, the other by Yankeedom.”
Edit: added references
> Just because something is out of the mainstream doesn't make it bad
Agreed. But white nationalism is bad for the reason that it's an attempt to break apart the American national identity. It is also bad because it attracts and empowers white supremacist groups who are motivated by hate rather than national identity.
> Segregation wasn't always mainstream.
I'm not really clear what you mean by this? Segregation was mainstream in the pre-civil rights era, but is very much not mainstream now.
> I think a bunch of separate cultures staying separate and isolated
Oh, I think I follow. You're framing multiculturalism as a rejection of "melting-pot" theory. My understanding of multiculturalism differs in that I understand it to be a system that enables differences in culture united by law. I.e., you can worship whoever you like, as long as doing so doesn't violate other people's rights.
You should check out Colin Woodard's American Nations. His take is that "melting-pot" theory was the Puritan's approach, whereas "multiculturalism" stems from the Dutch colonies, and that these two theories of American nationalism have both existed and clashed over the last 300-odd-years. Great read.
Anyway, isn't "white nationalism" a greater threat to the american national identity than multiculturalism? It basically says that there can't be black Americans, or latino Americans. That they should go find their own national identity separate from white Americans.
I read an article recently about a book that remaps america (and part of canada and mexico) into 11 distinct cultural regions. Interestingly enough, the various cultural traditions in each region can be traced back to one of the original major colonies in that region.
If you think about it carefully, the religiosity of americans is not totally homogeneous in degree or even in the particular religious beliefs underline that religiosity. In other words, what you might be observing here, may have more to do with "regional american culture" rather than "religion" specifically. When thought of this way, it becomes possible to account for the pervasive puritan mentality and calvinistic traditions that appear even amongst secular americans.
Latin America is home to the forgotten genocide where 60 to maybe even 100 million were killed, and lets not forget about native Americans that barely even get recognition. And no one gives a shit because you're too busy focusing on those who died in ww2. Sadly this is nothing new, jist just another chapter in a terrible history of oppression.
Source:
https://www.amazon.com/American-Holocaust-Conquest-New-World/dp/0195085574
On the issue of the genocide in particular, since you request that, I recommend American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World by David E. Stannard. I found it very interesting. It is very much source and historical account aware and documented. He covers quite a bit of the religious motivations and justifications involved, which is upsetting to many people and provokes a several denialist response, so be forewarned. The truth is very different from the so-called (re-) education I received as a youth in state run schools, promoting stories that I later found were myths. I mention this only because your post suggests you have had a similar awakening. I don't find this topic to be easy or comfortable reading, and I commend your interest in pursuing the truth.
I have a rather large library myself at my home so I can list hundreds of titles that I have found interesting, so any list I give will be necessarily truncated. It's helpful that you specify the specific area you are interested in. I feel you might also find Peter Nabokov's Native American Testimony of interest, since it contains nothing but first person accounts, one after another, and gives a lot of insight into our perspectives and the way we view things.
There is also the exceptionally well produced 500 Nations documentary which was hosted by Kevin Costner, and the excellent companion book by Alvin Josephy. The film documentary you can purchase on amazon, or watch on youtube, it's several hours long in multiple parts, and exceptional. The book fills in the details and contains a much more accurate history than we have been used to seeing presented.
Thank you for your interest in digging deeper.
That's actually not anything an-cap at all, but an anarchist history of nomadic stateless peoples in Asia through the lens of groups of people avoiding the rule of southeast Asian states. It's a pretty interesting book, although I'm not sure about the author's arguments or conclusions.
It seems libertarians/an-caps have appropriated it, though.
My Top 3:
James C. Scott has done very good anthropological work showing how states have used the barbaric/civilized binary to stigmatize statelessness. Highly recommend reading.
If you think that's an interesting point, here's a book you might like.
Oh hay! I was actually just reading something that was mentioning this intersection of politics and language. I was reading "The Art of Not Being Governed" in a section describing the process of how people or groups would deliberately avoid or remove themselves from the power of the state by a process he calls "dissimilation" (as opposed to assimilation). "State Space" for Scott isn't just that area under political state control, which could be rather small. It would project itself beyond the boundaries under direct control through cultural influence: religious ideas that would emphasize a divine king, social structures that emphasized hierarchical organization, and critically common languages that would allow people to easily communicate, trade, negotiate, or command if enslaved. So various peoples, both expats from the state and outsider peoples who resisted domination, would not just "run to the hills" to put physical distance between themselves and the state but also emphasize, embrace, or in some cases wholly construct separate cultural identities to "dissimilate" themselves from the culture of the state peoples. This would go as far as for a non-state people whose language would be linguistically similar to a state people language to claim ignorance, as though they're not speaking the same language, similar to how African and Indian slaves in the Americas would resist their colonial masters by claiming not to understand instruction.
So in opposite to the Nation-State idea of a shared cultural identity creating a political system, this is a political system creating a shared cultural identity.
Also random related question: I know in America-land, when people want to emphasize the differences between each other (for political or other reasons) we will quite often first emphasize the "weird" way the other talks. Like how resistance to the Bush administration loved to make fun of Texan accent, or rural populists will exaggerate an almost posh-like accent for city-folk. Is that also true for other languages/places?
Coyotes can live anywhere. There is even a pack that lives in downtown LA in an abandoned building. Check this book out. It is amazing.
https://www.amazon.com/Coyote-America-Natural-Supernatural-History/dp/0465052991
Maybe a little more than you'd realize...
A great read, or listen to Dan Flores on JRE.
https://www.amazon.ca/Coyote-America-Natural-Supernatural-History/dp/0465052991
You might enjoy Fingerprints of the Gods. I thought it was the best written and least kooky book when I was into the whole ancient astronauts thing.
And his more famous Sign and the Seal.
I don't think mention the legend of Gilgamesh, but if you're into such things, you'll probably dig them.
Fingerprints of the Gods, it describes some kind of weird theory that suggests as early as 4000 BC, the continent of Antarctica was free of ice, and speculates about how (possibly extraterrestrial) explorers were able to map the parts above sea level remarkably accurately many years before the first seismic probes through the ice were done (ca. 1949). Interesting, so far doesn't strike me as a crackpot kind of work like "The Philadelphia Experiment" did.
WhatShouldIReadNext is a good way to find new reading material based on stuff you and others already like.
The Joe Rogan Experience with Graham Hancock #142 These two episodes of the podcast are both a must watch
The Joe Rogan Experience with Graham Hancock #160
Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock is a good book to start with.
Revelations of the Pyramids is a great documentary. I've seen this one at least a dozen times.
Graham Hancock's "Quest For The Lost Civilization" documentary is a bit on the slower side, but still very informative. He also has a ton of conferences and videos on his youtube channel.
The Pyramid Code & Magical Egypt are both good series.
Hope this helps!
They Cast No Shadows: A Collection of Essays on the Illuminati, Revisionist History, and Suppressed Technologies. Also, Fingerprint of The Gods.
Was an interesting first read, when I was younger/first looking into things.
I'm an Agnostic, So I'm not gonna be of much help here..But as you said Signs & Eclipses & End times and your Connection with it as gay.. If you don't mind I'm gonna suggest you two books by two authors & which changed my life ..And my thought about religion , god , who we we & what we can do.. Before That, i was a person who was scared of Religious Dogmas..Like Apocalypse, Or Whatever..But After Reading these & more I'm not scared of anything & I Respect Nature & everything around me more..
There are Lot Things we Don't Know About..I Would Say Never Supposed to Know about..Till Today People Don't Know That Gospels are 4 Separate books belong to different Time written by different authors & have completely different stories..& discrepancies with one other if you know how to read it you can she for it yourself, other than how you are TAUGHT to read it..
Similarly,
some biblical views of women are superior to others. And so the
apostle Paul’s attitude about women is that they could be and should
be leaders of the Christian communities—as evidenced by the fact
that in his own communities there were women who were church
organizers, deacons, and even apostles (Romans 16). That attitude is
much better than the one inserted by a later scribe into Paul’s letter
of 1 Corinthians, which claims women should always be silent in
the church (1 Corinthians 14:35–36), or the one forged under Paul’s
name in the letter of 1 Timothy, which insists that women remain
silent, submissive, and pregnant (1 Timothy 2:11–15) ..See, if you know how to Read the Bible...You Get to Know More about religion..
Okay its Enough about Religion..As I Said If You Have Time..Please Read The Books I Suggested..It will be helpful for you to separate nature & religion.. Natural Phenomenon Happens whether you connect it with religion or not..Eclipses happened 30000 Years Before, Ancient People Recorded It for Thousands of Year & Made Calendars for next thousands of Year.. it is Happening Now, It Will Happen In Future.. There is no stopping it by any means.. Instead of Fearing it because of Religion..LOVE IT ..Respect It..Admire it..Its a beautiful Phenomenon, and Just a small part of Nature..
Whichever Religion It Doesn't Matter, Being a Good Human is Important..Instead of Thinking about these things & fearing it..Be A Good Person, Help Others In Need ..Be Truthful to Yourself, Don't be Afraid or Ashamed to be Who you are..Stand Up for Yourself..& Love Everyone..The World Needs Love today than Anything..
From the Ashes of Angels: The Forbidden Legacy of a Fallen Race by Andrew Collins
Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock
There are Ebooks too ..If you can't wait for Paperback :) ...
Tony Horowitz discusses this in his book [Confederates in the Attic] (http://www.amazon.com/Confederates-Attic-Dispatches-Unfinished-Civil/dp/067975833X) a great read
The world knew the war was about slavery the day the first shts were fired on Fort Sumter. I do, though, accept that a group of people who are very misguided, believe that the south seceded and fought for states rights. This contortion of history is the source of a lot of racial strife in our country, not to mention real violence.
Yes, acknowledge that some people are just wrong about the Civil War. But to treat their point of view as equally valid of consideration is wrong.
https://www.amazon.com/Confederates-Attic-Dispatches-Unfinished-Civil/dp/067975833X
This is a great book to read on the topic.
If it makes any difference, I've already backed your game.
Cracks knuckles. I, as what Tony Horwitz calls, "A Civil War Bore" (But also one for the American War of Independence) can give you some recommendations. You gotta read Gen. Grant's memoirs. Out of all the memoirs by the major players, Grant is the most readable of them all, it is so well written. Ken Burns' famous Documentary introduced me to the memoirs of two common soldiers. "Company Aytch" follows Sam Watkins as he fights in the Western Theater, from Shiloh to Nashville, and "All for the Union" by Elisha Hunt Rhodes follows one Federal soldier as he survives the entire war in the East, from 1st Bull Run to Appomattox. For a general history, "Battle Cry of Freedom" by James McPherson is the absolute best. For more detailed studies on the lives of the individual soldiers, the two classic works "The Life of Johnny Reb" and "The Life of Johnny Yank" are fantastic. Similar works and more modern works include "Fighting Means Killing", a detailed study on Civil War combat, and "The War for the Common Soldier", basically a general summary of the life of the common lad during the war. Now, if you want legacy, there is but one place to go: Tony Horwitz's legendary 1998 Magnum Opus "Confederates in the Attic." Over the course of two years, Tony takes you all across the American South, running into everything as varied as the KKK one county over from where I live in Kentucky (Yeah, I apologize on behalf of South-Central Kentucky in advance, but at least they're in Todd County and not Logan!!!), a Scarlet O' Harra impersonator in Atlanta, and a massive Civil War road trip in Virginia with a reactor buddy. Well written, Mr. Horwitz can make you feel whatever he wants. Tony is was of the best writers out there, and it is a shame we lost him in May. May he rest in peace.
Edit: Amazon Links
The Complete Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant
Company Aytch
All For the Union
Battle Cry of Freedom
The Life of Johnny Reb
The Life of Billy Yank
Fighting Means Killing
The War for the Common Soldier
Confederates in the Attic (If you buy no other book from this list, buy Confederates in the Attic)
> Hitlers' eugenics
Based on US eugenics and race policies, tbf. See: Hitler's American Model.
Unfortunately you'll have to be careful with finding accurate historical perspectives... especially for "celebrity figures" like the founding fathers, Einstein, etc. There's a lot of crap about that... David Barton, for instance, makes a career writing lies about American history and Christianity. American history is especially bad... some interesting books exist about such things, though not directly about religion:
e.g. http://www.amazon.com/Lies-My-Teacher-Told-Everything/dp/0743296281
You mean the same textbooks that taught me that Columbus discovered America and that the Native Americans attacked the colonists first? History =/= Science. Science has to be demonstrated, history cannot be demonstrated, which makes it far less reliable. Rejecting historical claims is not the same thing as rejecting scientific claims.
Forgive me if I don't expect information funded and regulated by the government to be honest about what the government has done. If you don't mind, I won't be getting my information about cancer from the Tobacco industry studies either.
Oh, and if you still believe everything in your history textbook, here's a good reason not to.
Too true and so sad. I'm in the process of reading James W. Loewen's "Lies my teacher told me". It is making me think that government run education, at least when it comes to social topics and history, is a SERIOUS conflict of interest. Generation after generation entering society just to become slaves.
http://www.amazon.com/Lies-My-Teacher-Told-Everything/dp/0743296281/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1323382768&sr=8-1
This is a pretty good one.
OP, you should definitely read "Lies My Teacher Told Me" by James Loewen (if you haven't already). This very subject is one of the major themes of this book.
Non-Fiction:
Life as We Do Not Know It
Rogue Asteroids and Doomsday Comets
Lies my Teacher Told Me
Fiction :
Lord of the Rings Trilogy.
The Ender's Game series of books.
If you like A People's History, you'll probably like Lies My Teacher Told Me. It talks about how mainstream U.S. history ignores the contributions of racial minorities. A really different perspective on what I just assumed was the "truth."
I'm not a historian, but a passionate student of history. I decided to pursue it as an academic discipline (and possibly as a career) when I read Lies My Teacher Told Me when I was 16. It's a fantastic introduction into the way history is taught in the US (so it might not be that relevant if you didn't grow up in America), and probes into the politics of the textbook system. And you get to find out that most of our nation's presidents were horrible racists, that we fought secret wars in Finland/Russia, and that J. Edgar Hoover tried to blackmail Martin Luther King, Jr. The essential story is that, as agentdcf so eloquently put it, history is by no means one-sided, and it's pivotal that we consider historical figures as people you could know in everyday life. No one's perfectly good or perfectly evil, but a lot of standard history curricula tend to present it otherwise.
Lies Told To Me By My Teacher
Read, develop a healthy skepticism, and then begin asking hard questions about everything you know, believe, and are told.
That's a path that will set you on really improving yourself.
>What other things have you said that support your claim that the U.S. somehow was responsible for WWII?
I made statements concerning present day conflicts in the preceding paragraph.
>I'm going to believe what I've been thought since grade school.
I'm sorry to hear that. The history we in the US are taught in grade school is often inaccurate on many important topics. Migh find this interesting.
http://www.amazon.com/Lies-My-Teacher-Told-Everything/dp/0743296281/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1412719114&sr=1-1&keywords=lies+my+teacher+told+me
Oh yeah no problem here's a a link to the amazon. Yeah it's pretty awful especially considering how interesting history is to most adults, once they have had some time away from highschool. It could be one of the subjects students get excited about just for the subject matter, instead it's entirely up to the teacher to go out of their way to make it interesting.
A History of the World in 6 Glasses.
It's describes how beer (Hey! Drinking this doesn't give us the runs!), wine, spirits, coffee (apparently the British Empires version of the NYSE had the stuff on IV drip), tea (Opium Wars), and soft drinks have affected history.
The best thing I remember from it is learning how similar baking bread and brewing beer are. At it's most basic level, beer is just really, really, wet bread, and bread is just beer that you didn't add enough water to.
This is patently false
Read Lies My Teacher Told Me.
Columbus spearheaded the intentional culling of the native population. He literally used cut off native ear's as currency. He was a genocidal sociopath.
​
>Up to 90% of natives died from disease spread almost entirely accidentally. That's not genocide its plague. Its epidemic.
Those were spread intentionally. It was methodical and purposeful.
Also lol
>Columbus explicitly wanted to bring natives under spanish rule, that's not genocide, that's conquest.
Hi!
It looks like you are talking about the book Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond.
The book over the past years has become rather popular, which is hardly surprising since it is a good and entertaining read. It has reached the point that for some people it has sort of reached the status of gospel. On /r/history we noticed a trend where every time a question was asked that has even the slightest relation to the book a dozen or so people would jump in and recommend the book. Which in the context of history is a bit problematic and the reason this reply was written.
Why it is problematic can be broken down into two reasons:
In an ideal world, every time the book was posted in /r/history, it would be accompanied by critical notes and other works covering the same subject. Lacking that a dozen other people would quickly respond and do the same. But simply put, that isn't always going to happen and as a result, we have created this response so people can be made aware of these things. Does this mean that the /r/history mods hate the book or Diamond himself? No, if that was the case, we would simply instruct the bot to remove every mention of it. This is just an attempt to bring some balance to a conversation that in popular history had become a bit unbalanced. It should also be noted that being critical of someone's work isn't the same as outright dismissing it. Historians are always critical of any work they examine, that is part of their core skill set and key in doing good research.
Below you'll find a list of other works covering much of the same subject. Further below you'll find an explanation of why many historians and anthropologists are critical of Diamonds work.
Other works covering the same and similar subjects.
Criticism of Guns, Germs, and Steel
Many historians and anthropologists believe Diamond plays fast and loose with history by generalizing highly complex topics to provide an ecological/geographical determinist view of human history. There is a reason historians avoid grand theories of human history: those "just so stories" don't adequately explain human history. It's true however that it is an entertaining introductory text that forces people to look at world history from a different vantage point. That being said, Diamond writes a rather oversimplified narrative that seemingly ignores the human element of history.
Cherry-picked data while ignoring the complexity of issues
In his chapter "Lethal Gift of Livestock" on the origin of human crowd infections he picks 5 pathogens that best support his idea of domestic origins. However, when diving into the genetic and historic data, only two pathogens (maybe influenza and most likely measles) could possibly have jumped to humans through domestication. The majority were already a part of the human disease load before the origin of agriculture, domestication, and sedentary population centers. This is an example of Diamond ignoring the evidence that didn't support his theory to explain conquest via disease spread to immunologically naive Native Americas.
A similar case of cherry-picking history is seen when discussing the conquest of the Inca.
> Pizarro's military advantages lay in the Spaniards' steel swords and other weapons, steel armor, guns, and horses... Such imbalances of equipment were decisive in innumerable other confrontations of Europeans with Native Americans and other peoples. The sole Native Americans able to resist European conquest for many centuries were those tribes that reduced the military disparity by acquiring and mastering both guns and horses.
This is a very broad generalization that effectively makes it false. Conquest was not a simple matter of conquering a people, raising a Spanish flag, and calling "game over." Conquest was a constant process of negotiation, accommodation, and rebellion played out through the ebbs and flows of power over the course of centuries. Some Yucatan Maya city-states maintained independence for two hundred years after contact, were "conquered", and then immediately rebelled again. The Pueblos along the Rio Grande revolted in 1680, dislodged the Spanish for a decade, and instigated unrest that threatened the survival of the entire northern edge of the empire for decades to come. Technological "advantage", in this case guns and steel, did not automatically equate to battlefield success in the face of resistance, rough terrain and vastly superior numbers. The story was far more nuanced, and conquest was never a cut and dry issue, which in the book is not really touched upon. In the book it seems to be case of the Inka being conquered when Pizarro says they were conquered.
Uncritical examining of the historical record surrounding conquest
Being critical of the sources you come across and being aware of their context, biases and agendas is a core skill of any historian.
Pizarro, Cortez and other conquistadores were biased authors who wrote for the sole purpose of supporting/justifying their claim on the territory, riches and peoples they subdued. To do so they elaborated their own sufferings, bravery, and outstanding deeds, while minimizing the work of native allies, pure dumb luck, and good timing. If you only read their accounts you walk away thinking a handful of adventurers conquered an empire thanks to guns and steel and a smattering of germs. No historian in the last half century would be so naive to argue this generalized view of conquest, but European technological supremacy is one keystone to Diamond's thesis so he presents conquest at the hands of a handful of adventurers.
The construction of the arguments for GG&S paints Native Americans specifically, and the colonized world in general, as categorically one step behind.
To believe the narrative you need to view Native Americans as somehow naive, unable to understand Spanish motivations and desires, unable react to new weapons/military tactics, unwilling to accommodate to a changing political landscape, incapable of mounting resistance once conquered, too stupid to invent the key technological advances used against them, and doomed to die because they failed to build cities, domesticate animals and thereby acquire infectious organisms. This while they did often did fare much better than the book (and the sources it tends to cite) suggest, they often did mount successful resistance, were quick to adapt to new military technologies, build sprawling citiest and much more. When viewed through this lens, we hope you can see why so many historians and anthropologists are livid that a popular writer is perpetuating a false interpretation of history while minimizing the agency of entire continents full of people.
Further reading
If you are interested in reading more about what others think of Diamon's book you can give these resources a go:
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Also, the idea of universal education was made possible with industrialization and the printing press. It just so happened that Europe was the first one to get it, and accelerated greatly ahead, while exploiting the remaining world. The fucked over people in the Americas, Australia, Africa, Middle Ease, China, Japan. Please read your history. Europeans had this whole Enlightenment, but a lot of them were barbarians. Read about who Columbus actually was. Stop circlejerking with an ethnocentric viewpoint. good book (http://www.amazon.com/Lies-My-Teacher-Told-Everything/dp/0743296281)
Here is a great way to learn more about the lies your teachers told you...
> Because most US history textbooks will gladly omit facts they don't find pertinent.
Recommended reading on that very subject.
Edit: I never would have expected a link to a book whose premise is "American history textbooks suck, and here's why" to be so controversial.
One thing that really grinds my gears about primary and secondary is the devolved method we have of textbook selection. If you have ever read Lies my Teacher Told Me then you will know what I am talking about. One of the best things that I think can happen for textbooks is for input on their adoption to be utterly removed from the School District and State School Board level. FAR too prone to fallow feel-good flag-waving instead of actual education. History is the most tragic example of this.
The Annenberg Foundation has an excellent online course in world history. It's challenging, but it'll give you a pretty thorough grounding in the major themes.
For American history, Lies My Teacher Told Me is one of the more entertaining reads.
But for Quiz Bowl, you're probably better off playing the History Channel's Quiz game. There are a few thousand questions.
Try reading Custer Died For Your Sins by Vine Deloria.
The Florentine Codex is a document of Aztec knowledge compiled by the Spanish. It's a really interesting read. When I read it I focused on parts which detail some pretty sophisticated medical knowledge--hampered of course by the Spaniard's lack of such knowledge.
I would say the Aztecs definitely surprised Europeans in their ways of life, what with human sacrifice and all.
Regarding Native Americans in the present day US, an idea of the "noble savage" emerged and played a large part in philosophies of romanticism.
This is a great book I read recently regarding Native issues in American today from a Native perspective. Truthful and good-humored too. You can get a sense of what Native Americans may feel about their historical interactions with white Americans, what they think that the white people wanted from them.
You can read to book dark tide if you want more info.
It would probably make a good movie actually...
https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Tide-Great-Boston-Molasses/dp/0807050210
Dark Tide by Stephen Puleo. Kind of niche topic, but a good read.
[Dark Tide] (http://www.amazon.com/Dark-Tide-Great-Boston-Molasses/dp/0807050210)
also [The Dante Club] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dante_Club) is a lighter fiction based book in boston
1st act of U.S. domestic terrorism i believe. "Dark Tide" about it was a pretty good read. the molasses was all about war supply chain / munitions (Industrial Alcohol) back in the day: http://www.amazon.com/Dark-Tide-Great-Boston-Molasses/dp/0807050210
Along with what /u/Riztonium suggested, I'd highly recommend reading An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz.
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz in her book An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States eloquently pointed out that for whites, the entire rest of the world is the Western frontier. The manifest destiny never stopped at the Pacific ocean; it extends far beyond the boundaries. In her book she contrasts the war on Iraq with the wars against the Indigenous tribes in the past. I am sure that many other examples come to mind. In this sense, we are all native Americans to whites, we even share the same stereotypes: backward, rife with mysticism and occasional brutality, willing women, fertile land, open to exploitation by whites. The only difference is our fate, but even that I am not so sure if we contemplate all the possibilities lying awaits us in the next couple hundred of years.
How about this one, then:
https://www.amazon.ca/1491-Second-Revelations-Americas-Columbus/dp/1400032059
Excellent book full of actual history.
I am not peddling an opinion. I have studied some of this history formally, and some of it because I enjoy reading about history. I am telling you what actual historians believe to be true.
1491 is fantastic. I learned a lot reading this book. Not the easiest read, but it is far from a text book.
http://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Columbus/dp/1400032059
You should read 1491. You'll drop the romanticism of a mystic native culture quickly.
http://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Columbus/dp/1400032059
I found these books very educational. They definitely have changed my worldview on the history of agriculture, human ecology, and economics.
They really make you think that if Anglo-Western style capitalism or agriculture were non-existent, the world would be just fine.
http://www.amazon.com/Mayflower-Story-Courage-Community-War/dp/0143111973/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1321693822&sr=8-1
http://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Columbus/dp/1400032059/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1321693987&sr=1-1
http://www.amazon.com/Omnivores-Dilemma-Natural-History-Meals/dp/0143038583/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1321694010&sr=1-1
http://www.amazon.com/Botany-Desire-Plants-Eye-View-World/dp/0375760393/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1321694049&sr=1-1
i strongly suggest you read 1491 to get a better understanding of what we thought we knew, and what we think we now know about ancient america and how archeology works (and sometimes doesn't.)
http://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Columbus/dp/1400032059?ie=UTF8&*Version*=1&*entries*=0
Upvote for The Lost City of Z!! Loved loved it.
Charles Mann's 1491 is wonderful.
It depends on what you're interested in, really.
The book 1491 discusses the devastation of native Americans by disease.
When the Pilgrams landed in MA, they easily found this great spot for a village. Why? Because most of the natives were dead. It is not clear if this epidemic occurred pre or post Columbus
Tell us a little bit more about yourself. What entertainment genres do you like? Are there any subjects you want to learn more about?
Here's a few good books I've read recently:
Not a paper but 1491 was a good read.
This is really good:
http://www.amazon.com/1491-Second-Edition-Revelations-Americas/dp/1400032059
It changes your perspective on any history of Native Americans interacting with Europeans. Native Americans were essentially in a post-apocalyptic society.
The vast majority of those deaths were due to diseases Native Americans had zero exposure to because the Old World had all the useful domesticated animals. Do you really think 150 conquistadors would've been able to conquer the Incan Empire if it hadn't been for repeated waves of terrible plagues visited on the populace? I'm not downplaying how violent Europeans were towards the people they conquered but compared to pre-contact populations they essentially were conquering a de-populated Americas.
You should read this book, it gives a real in-depth examination of just how developed and established many pre-contact Native societies were before everyone kept getting smallpox and measles and mumps and everything else Europeans brought with them because they grew up running around in pig shit.
1491 is a pretty solid book that talks a great deal about how things were before a lot of the conventional European settling went on in the Americas/pre Columbian Exchange.
Basically it'll exemplify why a lot of that "the New World was this empty place with nothing going on" way of thinking is a load of horse shit considering how there was pretty intricate stuff in play.
From Wikipedia:
"The population figure for indigenous peoples in the Americas before the 1492 voyage of Christopher Columbus has proven difficult to establish. Scholars rely on archaeological data and written records from settlers from the Old World. Most scholars writing at the end of the 19th century estimated that the pre-Columbian population was as low as 10 million; by the end of the 20th century most scholars gravitated to a middle estimate of around 50 million, with some historians arguing for an estimate of 100 million or more. Contact with the New World led to the European colonization of the Americas, in which millions of immigrants from the Old World eventually settled in the New World."
This book gives a good discussion, leaning more towards the higher figure for pre-Colombian populations:https://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Columbus/dp/1400032059/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1492454994&sr=8-1&keywords=1491
The enormous populations of Bison and Passenger Pigeons recorded was not a normal state, it was a temporary spike due to the sudden disappearance of the Native American populations who previously kept these species in check.
Source: 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
[1491] (http://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Columbus/dp/1400032059) by Charles Mann. Talks about how amazing the Americas were pre-Columbus.
May I recommend? http://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Columbus/dp/1400032059
In 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, Charles C. Mann Discusses a portion of your question.
> Was that statistically inevitable for a plague to be introduced?
Basically, yes. Most of 1491 is Mann tracing the history of and translating the results of years of academic research. He also explains various schools of thoughts on various issues. I don't have the book with me here at school, so excuse my foggy memory and paraphrasing.
First off, the number one killer of Indigenous peoples of the Americas was Small Pox. There were other diseased introduced, like the flu and the plague, but small pox was the most devastating.
Initial accounts of the new world by the spanish describe bustling civilizations. Only a few years later, entire civilizations had collapsed. Mann covers this in great detail.
Okay, back to statistical inevitability. Basically, not only did the indians have no immunity to diseases that europeans had been building resistance to for generations, but there is a school of academic research that believes indigenous peoples were more susceptible to diseases because of something called "haplogroups." . I don't fully understand the science behind it, but basically there are scholars who argue that the natives, because of their genetics, were more susceptible to these diseases. Mann describes the entire process which led to the experiments which support this belief.
Anyways, I hope this helps. I highly highly recommend 1491 if you are interested in the history of Native Americans. It is easily my favorite book I have read in my college career thus far.
relevant
The Island at the Center of the World
By Russell Shorto
Book
Author
basically new york
Island at the Center of the World by Russell Shorto. A great history of the Dutch establishment within Manhattan.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Island-Center-World-Manhattan/dp/1400078679
The War That Made America for an excellent overview of the French & Indian War. While often talked about in school, it's often just a prelude to the Revolution. While it was that, there is so much more to the struggle, and it's results changed and defined much of what came after.
The Island at the Center of the World the origins of New York, and the struggles of the Dutch Colony.
Here you go: http://www.amazon.com/The-Island-Center-World-Manhattan/dp/1400078679
It's a fun read, although occasionally a bit too speculative.
Edit: Oh, and Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan is really speculative, but also brilliant and fantastic. One of my favorite books of all time.
Dumbing Us Down by John Taylor Gatto
The opening essay of this short read is a condemnation of traditional schooling techniques---and it's also the speech he delivered when he (again) won the NY Teacher of the Year award. Gatto gets at the heart of why public schools consistently produce pencil pushers, not leaders. Every teacher should read this book.
How to Survive in Your Native Land by James Herndon
If Dumbing Us Down is the manifesto in favor of a more liberal pedagogy, Herdon's book is a memoir of someone trying to put that pedagogy in action. It's also a simple, beautiful easy to read book, the kind that is so good it reminds us just how good a book can be. I've read the teaching memoir that made Jonahton Kozol famous, this one is better.
The Montessori Method by Maria Montessori
In the early 1900s, Maria Montessori taught literacy to children that society had otherwise assumed were unreachable. She did this by using the scientific method to study each child's learning style. Some of what she introduced has been widely incorporated (like child-sized furniture) and some of it seems great but unworkable in overcrowded schools. The bottom line is that the Montessori method was one of the first pedagogical techniques that was backed by real results: both in test scores and in growing kids that thrive on learning and participation.
"Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?": A Psychologist Explains the Development of Racial Identity by Beverly Daniel Tatum
While not precisely a book on how to teach, this book is incredibly helpful to any teacher working with a diverse student population, or one where the race they are teaching differs from their own. It explains the process that white, black, and children of other races go through in identifying themselves as part of a particular race. In the US, race is possibly the most taboo subject, so it is rare to find a book this honest and straightforward on a subject most educators try not to talk about at all. I highly recommend this book.
If there is any chance you will be teaching history, definitely read:
Lies My Teacher Told Me and A People's History of the United States (the latter book is a classic and, personally, changed my life).
Also recommend: The Multi-player Classroom by Lee Sheldon and Teach Like a Champion by Doug Lemov
Finally, anyone who plans to teach math should read this essay, "Lockhart's Lament" [PDF at the bottom of the page].
PS, I was tempted to use Amazon affiliate links, but my conscious wouldn't let me.
A good place to start might be Charles Mann's 1491 https://www.amazon.com/1491-Second-Revelations-Americas-Columbus-ebook/dp/B000JMKVE4/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1511968556&sr=8-1&keywords=1491
OP means 1491. It is non-fiction historical/archaeological. It's a really good read. One of the books that really reframes you concept of the world. Just to clarify
I highly recommend the book 1491. It goes over a lot of the questions you are asking.
1491 by Charles Mann discusses pre-Columbus America.
Hi!
It looks like you are talking about the book Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond.
The book over the past years has become rather popular, which is hardly surprising since it is a good and entertaining read. It has reached the point that for some people it has sort of reached the status of gospel. On /r/history we noticed a trend where every time a question was asked that has even the slightest relation to the book a dozen or so people would jump in and recommending the book. Which in the context of history is a bit problematic and the reason this reply has been written.
Why it is problematic can be broken down into two reasons:
In an ideal world, every time the book was posted in /r/history, it would be accompanied by critical notes and other works covering the same subject. Lacking that a dozen other people would quickly respond and do the same. But simply put, that isn't always going to happen and as a result, we have created this response so people can be made aware of these things. Does this mean that the /r/history mods hate the book or Diamond himself? No, if that was the case we would simply instruct the bot to remove every mention of it, this is just an attempt to bring some balance to a conversation that in popular history had become a bit unbalanced.
It should also be noted that being critical of someone's work isn't that same as outright dismissing it. Historians are always critical of any work they examine, that is part of they core skill set and key in doing good research.
Below you'll find a list of other works covering much of the same subject, further below you'll find an explanation of why many historians and anthropologists are critical of Diamonds work.
Other works covering the same and similar subjects.
Criticism on Guns, Germs, and Steel
Many historians and anthropologists believe Diamond plays fast and loose with history by generalizing highly complex topics to provide an ecological/geographical determinist view of human history. There is a reason historians avoid grand theories of human history: those "just so stories" don't adequately explain human history. It's true however that it is an entertaining introductory text that forces people to look at world history from a different vantage point. That being said, Diamond writes a rather oversimplified narrative that seemingly ignores the human element of history.
Cherry-picked data while ignoring the complexity of issues
In his chapter "Lethal Gift of Livestock" on the origin of human crowd infections he picks 5 pathogens that best support his idea of domestic origins. However, when diving into the genetic and historic data, only two pathogens (maybe influenza and most likely measles) could possibly have jumped to humans through domestication. The majority were already a part of the human disease load before the origin of agriculture, domestication, and sedentary population centers.
This is an example of Diamond ignoring the evidence that didn't support his theory to explain conquest via disease spread to immunologically naive Native Americas.
A similar case of cherry-picking history is seen when discussing the conquest of the Inca.
> Pizarro's military advantages lay in the Spaniards' steel swords and other weapons, steel armor, guns, and horses... Such imbalances of equipment were decisive in innumerable other confrontations of Europeans with Native Americans and other peoples. The sole Native Americans able to resist European conquest for many centuries were those tribes that reduced the military disparity by acquiring and mastering both guns and horses.
This is a very broad generalization that effectively makes it false. Conquest was not a simple matter of conquering a people, raising a Spanish flag, and calling "game over." Conquest was a constant process of negotiation, accommodation, and rebellion played out through the ebbs and flows of power over the course of centuries. Some Yucatan Maya city-states maintained independence for two hundred years after contact, were "conquered", and then immediately rebelled again.
The Pueblos along the Rio Grande revolted in 1680, dislodged the Spanish for a decade, and instigated unrest that threatened the survival of the entire northern edge of the empire for decades to come.
Technological "advantage", in this case guns and steel, did not automatically equate to battlefield success in the face of resistance, rough terrain and vastly superior numbers. The story was far more nuanced, and conquest was never a cut and dry issue, which in the book is not really touched upon. In the book it seems to be case of the Inka being conquered when Pizarro says they were conquered.
Uncritical examining of the historical record surrounding conquest
Being critical of the sources you come across and being aware of their context, biases and agendas is a core skill of any historian.
Pizarro, Cortez and other conquistadores were biased authors who wrote for the sole purpose of supporting/justifying their claim on the territory, riches and peoples they subdued. To do so they elaborated their own sufferings, bravery, and outstanding deeds, while minimizing the work of native allies, pure dumb luck, and good timing. If you only read their accounts you walk away thinking a handful of adventurers conquered an empire thanks to guns and steel and a smattering of germs. No historian in the last half century would be so naive to argue this generalized view of conquest, but European technological supremacy is one keystone to Diamond's thesis so he presents conquest at the hands of a handful of adventurers.
The construction of the arguments for GG&S paints Native Americans specifically, and the colonized world in general, as categorically inferior.
To believe the narrative you need to view Native Americans as fundamentally naive, unable to understand Spanish motivations and desires, unable react to new weapons/military tactics, unwilling to accommodate to a changing political landscape, incapable of mounting resistance once conquered, too stupid to invent the key technological advances used against them, and doomed to die because they failed to build cities, domesticate animals and thereby acquire infectious organisms. When viewed through this lens, we hope you can see why so many historians and anthropologists are livid that a popular writer is perpetuating a false interpretation of history while minimizing the agency of entire continents full of people.
Further reading.
If you are interested in reading more about what others think of Diamon's book you can give these resources a go:
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It depends on what you want to go into.
For a general history of colonization I can't recommend Alan Taylor's "American Colonies" enough. It's a good overview of European colonization in North America.
If you're mostly into Slavery (that sounds weird), Slave Ship. I definitely have some issues with things he says, but it's still a good beginning.
The Island of the Center of the World talks about the Dutch in North America.
If you want more about Slavery in what would become the U.S. you could get American Slavery American Freedom.
That's all I can think of off the top of my head. I'll edit more in later. But yeah, I'd start with Taylor's book first.
American Colonies: The Settling of North America is, as the title indicates, strictly about the colonization of North America, but it's comprehensive, insightful, and highly detailed, dealing very strongly in the early years of colonization - how people lived, how their economies worked, relations with Native Americans good and bad, the politics of colonization, and much more. Even having read a number of other books on the topic, I learned a LOT from this. Recommended reading if you're interested in the subject.
Most of those I've read on South America have been focused on the pre-Colombian cultures of the continent and not as much on the colonization itself, so probably not what you're looking for.
In the last 500 years, conflicts in Europe have been slowly decreasing, until the last 50 years or so when it rapidly became much smaller than in any of the previous centuries. This has corresponded with a slow but sure improvement in living conditions. Some countries in Europe haven't seen a war in over 200 years (Sweden hasn't participated in a war directly in 250 years). These are the most developed nations on Earth.
If you've read Jared Diamon's Collapse, you'll know that many civilizations have vanished from the Earth due to over-consuming what their environments could provide. Japan is an example of a country that managed, centuries ago, to avoid self-destruction though managing the few resources it had. I have, therefore, seen evidence that peace and environment awareness seem to be the hallmark of progress in the very long term, not war as it is erroneously believed, and that failure to remain peaceful or manage the environment well can cause the "collapse" of a civilization, no matter how advanced.
So, yes, it's logical that civilizations that manage to develop for many millenia without killing itself and its environment must have learned how to achieve progress peacefully and taking good care of its environment.
Have you read Collapse by Jared Diamond? If not, pick it up right now!
https://www.amazon.com/Collapse-Societies-Choose-Succeed-Revised/dp/0143117009/
Relevant Jared Diamond reference.
You will notice the absence of A short history of nearly everything, which is a good book, but frankly it didn't speak very much to me. Bryson is almost only interested in geography.
Great conversation starter.
You have peaked my interest. In your ethical point of view, who's money is your money?
As for the people of Haiti, do they work harder to survive? Has the developed world influenced their country more than say the Domicanan?
If you want a good book on this and many other things, check this out.
First, sorry for the incredibly slow reply. I was watching wildlife in Sri Lanka. I never post online before I go away due to the risk of burglary.
> Disasturbation is a fun term I'm not sure I've heard before.
Then I'm glad I shared. Please use it and keep the word alive.
>> Coincidentally, the same age at which I first witnessed worse than death
>
> A friend of mine has HIV and I worry about him at times. He's had at least one recent suicide attempt too. He's still pretty healthy but I think the reality of it all can crash down on him at times.
I'm sure it does all crash down on him quite often. It's a horrible disease even with the numerous treatments that have come out since my friend's death in 1990. I wish your friend many years of reasonable health, and when the time comes, as little pain as possible.
> Anyway...
>
> Not only am I worried about methane release, there's the issue of how air and water currents will change, and when there's no longer enough movement the whole world will be in a dire situation, but we'd probably already be gone by then. I hope. I don't want to see the oceans turned in to a salt crusted casserole.
You may want to read Under a Green Sky by Peter Ward. Don't worry. The oceans will instead turn to an anoxic soup of sulfur producing bacteria. This will start from the bottom up as the lack of the convection current causes the bottom-most waters to become anoxic (no, or little oxygen). The anoxic level will gradually rise since no oxygen is getting below the surface. Of course, without oxygen, there will not be fish, or at least very very few. Once the anoxic layer hits the surface (i.e. becomes the whole ocean), the hydrogen sulfide gas from the bacteria will enter the atmosphere in toxic quantities bringing the mass extinction already in progress to land in a huge way.
This is what caused the Permian/Triassic extinction event, the largest in the history of multicellular life on our planet.
> For me suicide isn't something I seek. I enjoy being alive, it's the only thing I've ever had. If there's no existence elsewhere I'm going to make the most of the existence afforded me. I want to live, it's our collectively self-destructive behavior that might force me to kill myself. Similar to you I've come to terms with the idea of controlling how I die.
Yeah. I think we have a lot in common here.
> I think the sad reality is that humanity's progress has essentially always been straight towards a wall. Over-fishing and over-hunting. Strip-mining and over-grazing. Many of the gifts of our brain which enabled our progress so quickly are probably hurting us now. If nothing else we've been failing to adjust for sustainability over growth for a LONG time.
We have at times reached some degree of harmony. But, it requires zero externalizations and the ability for each person to see the entire habitat available for humanity. I forget the name of the island mentioned in Collapse that managed to find a balance. They did completely engineer the island, leaving only trees beneficial to the humans in some way. But, since they used many trees, this came into balance as a functioning forest that also doubled as their farm. They also managed to limit their population very successfully. I'm not sure if this is ever explained.
Unfortunately, such cases are very rare in human history. Mostly, we eat out our resource base and move on. But, there is nowhere to which we can move on now. The island is earth. And, we're totally fucking trashing the place.
I personally always love hearing people talk about terraforming. Really?
Does anyone seriously believe we can successfully terraform another planet without first learning to keep this one terraformed? It came that way! And, we can't even keep it that way. But, we're supposed to be able to create a viable ecosystem on another planet.
R-i-i-i-ight.
> And that was the Unabomber's point.
My problems with him run deep. First and foremost, he's a fucking terrorist. I can't ever condone terrorism!!
This means that his name is such a red flag to me that my brain shuts down when I hear it. I'm unlikely to actively read anything by him.
Second, he's a Luddite. I don't believe, much as I'd like to, that it's at all realistic to throw away all of our technology and go back to hunting and gathering. And, even if we did, humanity was not sustainable then. The anthropocene is alternately viewed as starting with the Industrial Revolution or with the Agricultural Revolution.
But, it started much earlier.
As soon as we left Africa, our advanced weaponry (stone tools, atlatls, etc.) began causing mass extinctions everywhere we went. That can't be sustainable. So, would you roll back the use of stone tools? Would you also roll back our control of fire? How would you do this? Anyone who didn't agree would continue to use the technologies thrown away to kill off those who eschewed such technologies.
Third, the idea that killing off the brightest minds of our generation to leave the idiotic masses to continue to breed like rabbits can't possibly be the solution to anything.
Sorry. I am not about to read the nonsensical ravings of the lunatic mind.
We'll have to agree to disagree on this. I respect your view. But, I'm not going to read anything by Kaczynski.
> The man felt he was going to war for the sake of humanity. He possesses an astoundingly brilliant mind and for precisely that reason I think anyone should read what he wrote.
Brilliance does not necessarily produce sanity. He may be extremely intelligent and deluded. The two are not mutually exclusive.
At the risk of invoking Godwin's Law, I must point out that there are still people talking about the brilliance of Hitler, usually his military genius rather than technological or scientific genius. But, still, the fact that someone possesses a powerful mind does not mean it is a powerful force for good.
> Here we are as misanthropes/misanthropists talking about inevitable disaster that we caused, maybe lots of murder was truly the hard pill that we needed to swallow. We spit it out though, at least when that murder was set to challenge the power of authority which does the very same thing with reckless abandon. Killing tons of people for one cause or another.
Maybe we're committing mass murder with every gallon of gasoline we burn or every ton of coal.
But, I'd prefer to reduce the human population via attrition. I don't think it will happen. I think we will experience a huge die-off caused by the natural laws to which we believe we're immune. But, I don't think murder at any level is the answer. In the 20th century, we had many of the greatest mass murders in history, the holocaust, Stalin's purges, Pol Pot, Rwanda, etc., etc., etc., and still the population climbs and climbs and climbs.
> But that's why I think we need a Hitlerian leader.
Now you're scaring me. And, not just because I would have been on the wrong side of the concentration camp fence.
>> Are you talking about stacking the living or the dead?
>
> Both work.
>
> I've been trying to think through my misanthropy and how to explain it to people "I hate people, not persons" or something along those lines. It's ultimately not that I can't be around people, I'm not exactly anti-social. I enjoy company and long conversations...
I generally just say exactly what's in my flair, "I Hate Our Species, Not All Individuals".
Though, I do often add that I do hate induhviduals. (Not a typo.)
> Whereas living simply in and among "nature" has always provided me with calm and relative happiness.
I wouldn't know how to live that way, but love traveling to people free (or mostly so) places to view wildlife. I describe this as feeling a oneness with the other sentiences with whom we share the planet, my distant and not-so-distant relatives.
> My creature comforts at this point are my laptop, my sound system and my kindle.
I like my creature comforts. I'm willing to pay more for renewable energy. And, I keep stuff much longer than anyone else I know, for example still using my 2002 20GB Archos which I've never replaced with an iPod. Obviously, music isn't a passion of mine if I can fit my entire collection in 20GB with room to spare.
if you are curious what destroys civilizations there's a book on the topic with some research / ideas on the topic https://www.amazon.com/Collapse-Societies-Choose-Succeed-Revised/dp/0143117009
the thesis of that book is resource appetite exceeding supply causes a dramatic collapse.
so you favor a homogenous culture? ideologically or racially?
If you liked that, you will most likely very much enjoy "Collapse", by Jared Diamond.
I'm in between Collapse -Jared Diamond and I've been struggling for weeks to grasp Hegel's Spirit.
You should check out the book American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America.
You should read [American Nations] (https://www.amazon.com/American-Nations-History-Regional-Cultures/dp/0143122029), it covers the background of this
I highly encourage anyone who sees this to read "The Nine Nations of North America" by Joel Garreau. Its a bit dated now (35 years old), but its a fascinating look at the differences that have shaped our regional cultures.
A more modern take on this would be "American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America" by Colin Woodard. I haven't actually read this one yet, but it seems to be the progression of the work that Garreau laid out.
>Thank you for that article, it did clarify your argument about cultural communities in America immensely.
I recommend picking up a copy of American Nations for yourself; it's quite illuminating. Our Patchwork Nation (book & website) and The Nine Nations of North America are also worth a look, but they are a bit ahistorical and place too much emphasis on economics rather than culture.
> I have to ask what the intentions are behind rejecting science...
With "science" lets be specific, as people (conservative or otherwise) tend to accept and promote scientific findings which confirm their biases. When people complain about conservative opposition to "science" they typically mean the following:
Rejection of Evolution
This position is assumed by many Evangelical Christians who embrace Biblical Litteralism. It is an article of their faith that the Bible, which states humanity was created in it's current form, is the true and inerrant word of God.
I think it's noteworthy that this issue has become more controversial, not less, over time; i.e. there are more people in America today rejecting evolution than there were in the 80s and 90s. I believe that for many Evangelicals rejecting evolution has become a necessary affirmation of their faith as part of the broader fight against Liberal cultural imperialism, which tends to be secular.
Rejection of Climate Change
The environmental movement in America is largely based in the liberal cultures of the Left Coast and Yankeedom (digression: I hate that name and tend to think of Woodard's "Yankeedom" as 'Greater New England'). In fact, the Left Coast was dubbed "Ecotopia" in The Nine Nations of North America, because of the importance of the environment to that culture.
This means that the primary proponents of climate science are the cultural enemies of America's Conservative cultures. By itself that would make the science suspect to those cultures.
Addressing the issues raised by climate change will require even more use of the federal government to enforce a cultural value of the aforementioned liberal cultures (specifically, environmentalism). It should come as no surprise that Conservatives increasingly suspect it's simply all propaganda meant to justify ever more cultural imperialism by the left.
Rejection of "Social Science"
On this front I have a lot of agreement with Conservatives. Much of "Social Science" seems, at best, to be a pseudo-science, heavily influenced by the biases and assumptions of its practitioners. Much of it also emerges from Universities based in liberal cultural regions, which explains why conservatives reject it.
Put simply, when it comes to the conservative "rejection" of science, what they are really rejecting is the arguments of Liberal Cultures, even when those arguments are right. The sad truth is, it doesn't matter if you've got the facts on your side, when the people you need to persuade can't trust you.
Scenario: two people come to you, asking you to choose a side in their argument. One is a trusted community leader or the representative of an industry that provides something you value and employs thousands of people. The other is someone who holds your beliefs in contempt and who promotes values you find offensive. Who would you believe?
Rejection of Healthcare
The great irony of the current health care debate is that the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. Obamacare) was based off a plan from the Heritage Foundation (a conservative think tank). So why are Conservatives so adamant in rejecting it?
Again, it's a matter of trust. All they can see is an effort to bring healthcare under the control of the federal government, and thus under the control of the liberal cultures.
If a conservative President had proposed the plan they would have supported it. Instead they are opposing it, because they don't trust the intentions of the people pushing it.
Rejection of Education
I actually went to the trouble to look up the Common Core standards which conservatives are up in arms about. Frankly, I found them so vague and innocuous that I suspect they were only passed as a "feel good" measure to make it look like the administration was taking education seriously.
Nothing in them innately challenges conservative cultural values, so again I believe it's simply a matter of trust. It looks to them like Liberals using the federal government to indoctrinate their children, so they are fighting it tooth and nail.
>there are instances in which the conflicting values of a larger nation must be resolved
Very true, but unless you are going to use force, such resolutions require compromise and compromise requires trust. The cultural imperialism of America's liberal cultures, their open contempt for conservative values and their willingness to use the federal government to enforce their values on conservative communities, has destroyed any hope of establishing such trust.
>The fight for Civil Rights was an extremely controversial movement at the time, and many communities rejected it as progressive imperialism, which it certainly was. It was also the minority demanding change from the majority. If you look at it like that, making many people change for few might seem unfair but that is an extremely limited way of seeing. First of all, what exactly did the majority have to give up?
What the majority had to lose, was exactly what it did lose: the national consensus. In the wake of the Great Depression the Democratic party forged a political consensus between Americas various cultures, which allowed the nation to progress economically and stand united in the face of foreign threats.
That consensus, which prevailed into the early 1960s, saw America rise to the status of a global super power, entailed the strongest sustained economic expansion in our nation's history (before and since), and vastly expanded the middle class. That consensus was based on a social contract which entailed the liberal cultures ignoring the racist policies of the south.
Look at where we are today: declining global influence, rising economic inequality, and extreme political dysfunction. We have arrived at this situation precisely because the national consensus was sacrificed on the altar of liberal cultural imperialism.
That being said, it wasn't the passage of the Civil Rights Act which dealt the fatal blow. That act was, in many ways, simply an evolution of the national consensus. It was the product of a democratic process; passed by an elected congress and signed into law by an elected president.
The legalization of abortion, deregulation of contraception, and abolition of school prayer, were qualitatively different. They were forced on the nation by un-elected judges. These decisions were not the product of a national search for consensus and they galvanized the formation of the religious right, without which the Republican party would not have an effective electoral coalition.
___
> It is infinitely less expensive to fund contraceptive services than to pay for pregnancy and childbirth
This is actually a very short sighted view. Since the wide spread adoption of contraception ,western nations have seen a marked demographic decline. If it weren't for immigration the U.S. population would be declining. Nations with aging and shrinking populations face stagnant or negative economic growth (see Japan).
Unfortunately, importing relatively uneducated workers from the third world to replace highly educated and productive first world workers who refuse to reproduce, is not a viable long term solution. Western nations might soon have to consider banning contraception in order to ensure their long term viability.
>insurance companies already "subsidize" men's sex lives, by covering erectile dysfunction drugs like Viagra. That insurance companies were already covering those drugs was part of the reason why the Employment Equal Opportunity Commission ruled in 2000 that insurance companies providing prescription coverage could not exempt birth control.
That's a specious comparison. Erectile dysfunction is a medical problem requiring treatment. Fertility is not a disease, it is in fact a sign of health in premenopausal women. Comparing one to the other is like comparing reconstructive surgery with purely cosmetic surgery.
It's worth noting that the EEOC is an appointed body, not an elected one. Their rulings are not the product of a national debate in search of a consensus.
>Actually all the Planned Parenthoods in my area provide a big bag of free condoms to any person who asks for them.
Bully for them, but are they being required to by federal law? It's fine for an institution to promote your values in your culture. It's not alright for the federal government to coerce institutions in other cultures to enforce values which conflict with their own.
>>Men pay 70% of the taxes in this country
>And I'm gonna need sauce on this please.
Good catch. This figure is repeated often in the manosphere, so I cited it without confirmation. I think it emerged from this British report, but I can't find comparable numbers for the U.S. Given the disparity between male and female income in the U.S. it's likely men are paying more in taxes than women, but I can't find any hard numbers.
http://www.amazon.com/American-Nations-History-Regional-Cultures/dp/0143122029/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1370907077&sr=8-1&keywords=american+nations
You seem to be asking for something that is larger in scope than the topics that this book covers, but it's an interesting history of the American political system. It discusses why certain states and regions vote the way they do, going back to colonial allegiances and the national origins of the original settlers.
look to American Nations for further reference on the original settlements --> colonies, etc, and how that culture has continued. i like your modern touches out west along the pacific.
Far more interesting, well-researched, and meaningful:
http://difficultrun.nathanielgivens.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/2013-11-15-The-American-Nations.jpg
Source: http://www.amazon.com/American-Nations-History-Regional-Cultures/dp/0143122029/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1408846175&sr=1-1&keywords=american+nations
The book's a great read as well
It's a book too.
I think that there is a cultural explanation beyond the automobile explanation. There is this great book called American Nations which argues that remnants of the historical cultures of the various peoples that populated different regions of the country of the US, are still relevant to this day. The people that originally immigrated to the deep south were of scots-irish hill people background and supposedly they were always very prickly and territorial. It makes sense that culturally they are more amenable to large lot sizes and being separated more from their neighbors, than having dense walkable cities where they would have to share multiunit buildings with other families.
Ahem. https://www.amazon.com/American-Nations-History-Regional-Cultures/dp/0143122029
For a different way of looking at it check out American Nations
Theorizes that the make up of the electorate is still heavily influenced by the culture of the populations that originally populated the U.S
That sounds super interesting. Do you think it sticks to bogus official stories (history written by the victors--like a typical US textbook)? Or does it go deeper? (I realize this is subjective, and I probably didn't word it well.)
On edit: Wow the reviews are great--
https://www.amazon.com/American-Nations-History-Regional-Cultures/dp/0143122029/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1501434602&sr=1-1&keywords=Colin+Woodard
On edit: I'd be interested in hearing your opinion on the last portion of the book, which a lot of readers mention is weaker.
America was founded by several groups, each with different backgrounds, lifestyles, and values. One of these groups were slave owners, who created their region of America in the tradition of a slave society, in which armed free rich whites controlled illiterate, bound black slaves. This is one of the regional models on which America was founded. Other groups, such as Quakers, Puritans, and Catholics, had a more egalitarian, race-neutral vision. But the idea of a society based on a racial hierarchy, with whites at the top and blacks on the bottom, is one of the founding models of the U.S.
https://www.businessinsider.com/the-11-nations-of-the-united-states-2015-7
https://www.amazon.com/American-Nations-History-Regional-Cultures/dp/0143122029
https://www.npr.org/2013/11/11/244527860/forget-the-50-states-u-s-is-really-11-nations-says-author
http://www.amazon.com/American-Nations-History-Regional-Cultures/dp/0143122029/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1421726310&sr=8-1&keywords=american+nations+a+history+of+the+eleven+rival+regional+cultures+of+north+america
This book is a good one on the subject, it's called American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America by Colin Woodard. It's about the distinct regions of the US, and the differences between them in terms of culture, identity, and to some extent, values. Some are more liberal, others more conservative. Some are more dominated by religion, others are more of a melting pot of different views. Some areas are "white utopias" and others are culturally diverse.
It obviously varies by individual, but in terms of media, it is usually an amplified reflection of the setting, if the writers are good and depending on the genre.
https://www.amazon.com/American-Nations-History-Regional-Cultures/dp/0143122029
Really interesting book if you want to learn more about this
There's an actual book that this is all based on, I was just interested in people's take on it.
https://www.amazon.com/American-Nations-History-Regional-Cultures/dp/0143122029?tag=bisafetynet2-20
Not foreign, no, but there are enough cultural differences between different parts of the US for there to be some culture shock.
A good book on this if you are interested is American Nations by historian Colin Woodard. As somebody from the cultural zone Woodard calls "Yankeedom" it really opened my eyes and made me realize that beliefs, ideals, and social norms that I subscribe to and that I believed were "American" and actually just typically "Yankee".
In addition to Albion's Seed mentioned above, "American Nations" is a broader overview of the various regional groups that settled the US, which includes both the Anglo-Scottish and Puritan-Quaker cultures.
See also
American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0143122029/
You may dig this book, American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America by Colin Woodard. In it he breaks America down into 11 distinct nations, analyzes their individual history and looks at how they've interacted with one another and shaped the country as a whole.
From Amazon:
>According to award-winning journalist and historian Colin Woodard, North America is made up of eleven distinct nations, each with its own unique historical roots. In American Nations he takes readers on a journey through the history of our fractured continent, offering a revolutionary and revelatory take on American identity, and how the conflicts between them have shaped our past and continue to mold our future. From the Deep South to the Far West, to Yankeedom to El Norte, Woodard (author of American Character: A History of the Epic Struggle Between Individual Liberty and the Common Good) reveals how each region continues to uphold its distinguishing ideals and identities today...
Here an article from the Washington Post that breaks it down into childish pseudo-news but at least gives you an idea of Woodard's concept. Which of the 11 American Nations Do You Live In?
Colin Woodard did this, then wrote a book on the whole thing. It's called American Nations and it's a very good read.
According to this guy.
Might be a mobile link, I'm in a hurry.
It's not necessarily that the USA is too geographically large, but its history does mean that the US contains many rival cultures. The fault lines between these cultures are manifest and complex. And with the mobility inherent with being an American, the US is a mosaic with no clear geographic dividing lines as to where the nation could be split. Though there are lots of ideas about it.
Also, the political process required for making such a split happen in a lawful way is very involved. It would require a Constitutional amendment, which is a very rare occurrence even under the best of circumstances.
I never said Christians or religions were perfect, however plenty of atrocities are created by non-believers as well. Christians, Atheists, Muslims and every other belief system is filled with men, and men are flawed. Some of the most petty people I know class themselves as "Christians," but I don't consider them true believers no more than I do suicide bombers true believers of Islam. You can say that you are a Christian, Muslim or Atheist, but being a good person actually takes work.
History is riddled with examples of atrocities by people of all walks of life and faith. There have been countless genocides, some in the name of religion, some not. One generation ago America treated blacks like second class citizens, that doesn't make me ashamed to be an American, it makes me want to learn from past mistakes. You can't change the past, and you can't control the actions of anyone other than yourself, all you can do is be the best person you can be.
There have been hundreds of billions of people that have walked the face of this earth, unsurprisingly many of them were bad people, regardless of how they classed their belief system. While religious persecution and genocides have killed millions, the people who have died from war over tea, spices, gold, land and countless other petty reasons far outweighs those killed for religious reasons. I'm not making excuses for the persecutions, but countries/governments have killed far more people than religion.
The numbers aren't even comparable. As an example, WWII killed upwards of 72 million people in just six years, while the Crusades killed upwards of 9 million people over 200 years. Yes, the Crusades were terrible, but there were far more, far bigger atrocities committed in the name of countries, flags, kings, lands and people. Millions of Native Americans were killed by the US Government as a further example (see the book American Holocaust). I could go on but hopefully the point is made.
>And what is my purpose for posting here? I am an ass who likes to argue (or a critic, as you put it) and correct people.
http://reddit.com/r/debatereligion - Go nuts. Most people from /r/atheism, /r/Islam and other religious subreddits would agree that is the place for challenging people and their beliefs.
>But at least I know what you opinion on faith is, although, one quick question, is it 100% or not?
My faith is absolute, I never doubt it... I used to, but not anymore. I embrace those who bring up questions that used to scare me, and rather than hide from things that would make most people doubt, I embrace and learn from it. The level of faith a Christian has is dependent on multiple things, including their walk with God, how the read and interpret the Bible (if at all), how often they pray, etc. My level of faith is different from others, just as theirs is different from mine.
> And I am sorry many atheists have the misconceptions that you actually have a valid reason to believe.
I don't have to have a valid reason to believe, this is a free country. Your definition of a valid reason and mine can be far different, so why waste my time trying to prove it to you? That is the beauty of living in a free society. You can believe in a flying spaghetti monster, and I can believe in Jesus Christ. When we're both dead we'll know who was right, or we'll both just become worm food.
I think the point is, you look down at believers because you can't comprehend people who "believe in imaginary friends" or any other common Atheist saying. Well I can't comprehend how you can't believe that there is a higher power, as nine out of ten people do. The difference between you and me? I don't need you to validate why you don't believe in God, because I realize that is your choice and I have no problems with you choosing it.
American Genocide is a must read.
https://www.amazon.com/American-Holocaust-Conquest-New-World/dp/0195085574
No, I'm talking about the systematic wiping out of the rest of the population who didn't die from disease, stealing their land, killing those who resisted, and herding the rest into the reservations on the worst land in the country with no way of sustenance. None of that had anything to do with lack of knowledge of communicable diseases.
No, not even the Japanese did that to the Chinese.
Also, 90% of North American Native Americans didn't die from disease. You're confusing with the natives in Mexico and the Caribbean Islands. It spread to some places in the south of the United States but not the rest of the country (which was not integrated or connected by kingdoms, etc.) Yes, a very large percentage of Natives in the Northeast (perhaps as many as 90%) died of disease because that's where the Europeans first landed. By the time the Europeans started taking over the Midwest and West, it wasn't as big of an issue.
For more fun reading: http://www.amazon.com/American-Holocaust-The-Conquest-World/dp/0195085574
> The British Empire didnt kill upwards of 50-65 million people in a decade.
Pretty sure they caused more deaths though. Just in Indians the British killed 29 million. Then we can look at the Native Americans and the British role in the destruction of a 100 million people. The Irish famine, where the British were exporting food out of Ireland while people were starving.
>If you combine all civilian and military deaths during historical events that happened during the British Empire, you wouldnt come anywhere near being close to the numbers of the people killed by the Chinese Communist Party.
You would come close, really close and probably go over it. Since you count a great famine, so if we are including famines into our numbers it would be probably be pretty easy to go over that number.
Of course we have left out 2 continents of murders, Namely oceania and Africa, while I can accept the numbers in Australia probably weren't as high, the UK did a pretty decent job genociding the local population there. While the actions in Africa were also less than pretty
> Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya
>Pretty sure they caused more deaths though
No they didnt.
>Just in Indians the British killed 29 million
Wrong. Citations needed. the only way you can get a number that high is if you include deaths from famines that occurred in Princely state lands.
>Then we can look at the Native Americans and the British role in the destruction of a 100 million people
There werent 100 million people living in North America, there were 2 million. You may get 100 million at an extreme stretch if you include central and south america, but Britain had little to do with those areas and as such any deaths there are nothing to do with the British. Secondly, almost all deaths of the natives was down to disease, not active warfare.
>The Irish famine, where the British were exporting food out of Ireland while people were starving.
It is well known fact that even if the British had stopped all food exports, there would still have been nowhere near enough food to feed the Irish.
>You would come close, really close and probably go over it.
Citation needed, because this is wrong.
>Since you count a great famine, so if we are including famines into our numbers it would be probably be pretty easy to go over that number.
Unlike the Socialist and Commie nations, Britain didnt cause any famines. All famines in India were caused by rain failures or natural disasters screwing up crops.
>the UK did a pretty decent job genociding the local population there.
The UK did not commit any genocide in the Oceanic regions. The Maori in New Zealand had very few issues with the British and in Australia, most of the tribes in western and northern Australia didnt even know the British were there and were still been contacted as late as the 1970's.
the only people that died off were the Tazmanian Aborigines, mainly because 12000 people of their original 15000 people were killed off by a wave of smallpox that spread down from Northern Australia after South East Asian fishermen made contact with north Australian natives. From them on, the population of Tazmanian natives was on a terminal decline. Conflict with small groups of colonists made the issue worse. In responce to this, the British tried to help the natives by moving them to similar areas far away from colonists, however due to the every growing number of colonists, conflict appeared again, until simmering down later on by which time the natives population had gotten too small and they died out.
There was no concerted effort to kill off anyone. Britains entire economy was built on trade and capitalism, which requires as many consumers as possible. So why the hell would Britain kill of people for no reason?
>Of course we have left out 2 continents of murders, Namely oceania and Africa,
Citation needed. The only conflict I can think of in Africa that is any type of controversial is the Mao Mao uprising and the only one I can think of in the Oceanic region is the Tazmanian natives, who were almost entirely killed off by disease and then slowly died out after losing most of their population.
>While the actions in Africa were also less than pretty
Ah, the Mao Mao. They deserved every last thing they got. Do you know what the ultimate goal of the Mao Mao was?
To wipe out all non-Kikuyu.
That meant wiping out the dozens of other peoples of Kenya, and all non-africans. The Mao Mao murdered hundreds of thousands of Kenyans and dozens of Europeans for no reason other than 'because they could'. Whilst the Mao Mao were gaining strenght, committing atrocities, setting off bombs and terrorising people, the British offered the Mao Mao a chance to peacefully end things which remained open for 18 months.
The offer stated that any Mao Mao member who came forward would be given a free trial and would be immune to the death penalty even if found guilty. The British stated they could come to a compromise.
Not one Mao Mao member came forward.
Britain then decided to come down on them like a ton of bricks after the Mao Mao carved up a little girl after raping her and her family members. Britain recruited auxiliaries from local tribes who had been suffering Mao Mao attacks, which led to Auxiliaries (and their British officers who were sympathetic to their men) beating and even killing Mao Mao POWs. The British let them do it as they saw it as just revenge for the persecuted Kenyans.
The Mao Mao were monsters. There is a reason they are hated even by modern Kenyans.
As for your links....
>https://www.amazon.com/American-Holocaust-Conquest-New-World/dp/0195085574
Natives werent killed off by the British. The US did that after independence during their manifest destiny. Natives usually allied with the British.
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_of_1876%E2%80%9378
Whilst the reactions of the Viceroy and various British officials in charge was a mixture of apathetic, incompetant and ineffective, the famine wasnt started by the British. It was, however, ended by the British once relief arrived.
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943
Only occurred because of WW2 as Burma (which was attacked and taken mostly under the control of Japan) provided 14% of India's food, including most of Bengals food. The British were also correct in the notion that there was more than enough food in India to feed the famine sufferers. The transit of the relief for Bengal from the muslim states granting aid was blocked by the non-muslim states between the states that had surplus food and Bengal. The British eventually had to act and grant British military escorts to the food to make sure it would reach its destination on time. Once the British started doing this instead of relying on the almost 100% Indian ICS (Indian Civil Service) to manage famine relief efforts, the famine was broken and relief flooded into Bengal.
That page uses the lowest estimate for Tenochtitlan I've come across. Most estimates put it over 200k and some peg it as high as 350k. Paris definitely appears to be smaller unless you use the smallest estimates of Tenochtitlan and the biggest for Paris. As for Constantinople, I would admit that it was likely bigger but it was in rapid flux so its hard to say. But given that half the city lives in Asia, its an odd choice to refute the claim that Tenochtitlan was bigger than any European city.
The initial source I had seen make the claim is here. The book allows you to preview it and you can see it on the bottom of page 3 and top of page 4. It provides scholarly citations backing up those claims.
I read a book, The American Holocaust by David E. Stannard where he mentions that George Washington earned the nickname Town Destroyer by the Seneca tribe. Also he committed horrible atrocities to Native American people. Some examples given were: Troops would make belts out of the skin of woman. They would also cut out a woman's vagina at fix it to their hat. Crazy shit man...here's a link to the book. American Holocaust
I don't have to argue this, it has long been settled in genocide debates whether Jews are the only ones to have experienced Holocaust. Your roughly 6 million Jews pales in comparison to the 17 million Native Americans in the Americas at the dawn of November, 1492, when the first European reached the shores of Aztec empire, and the hundreds of millions that have died since that time.
It is not asinine, you need to be better educated on this stuff. It is not Holocaust denial. It is about giving representation to people who have been denied because they are not seen as white (or adjacent to whites).
Your education starts with reading these comments.
The book "Art of Not Being Governed" talks about "Zomia" upland mountains of Southeast Asia.
It's very good, one of the books that I actually finished from start to finish in a single setting.
>Property is the coercive exclusion of others from entering certain areas or touching certain objects. That's what it is.
Aside from alll those times when it isn't.
Not enough words to make all the citations: more and more and more and more and more
I like the general way you're thinking. I've become interested lately in why states form and how they are destabilized or prevented from forming from an anthropological standpoint. What conditions, technological, ecological, cultural, can place limits on their growth and aggregation? Shatter them into small manageable pieces or keep them from forming in the first place?
This book really got me thinking about that angle, and you might enjoy it.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Art-Not-Being-Governed/dp/0300169175
This one also carries some similar thoughts, I recall an excerpt about the advantages of smaller city-states vs. large modern nations:
http://www.amazon.com/Antifragile-Things-That-Disorder-Incerto/dp/0812979680
This one also has some interesting thoughts about the vulnerabilities of modern states and what enables the groups that are currently able to resist them, though I'm still undecided as to how much of it was just current conventional military thought regarding guerilla warfare repackaged as Silicon Valley fluff for people that have never had a standard western military officer's education. I've read a couple of books by David Kilcullen, who I believe closely represents the current "establishment" thinking on western counterinsurgency doctrine, and he repeated some of Robb's points about the decentralized network nature of modern guerrilla movements. Still, food for thought.
http://www.amazon.com/Brave-New-War-Terrorism-Globalization/dp/0470261951/ref=la_B001ILOBMI_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1409237873&sr=1-1
Here's a book with a still living, 2000 year old answer to your question
I recently read a book, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland South East Asia. It isn't a discussion of whether nor not there should be anarchy and doesn't involve any philosophy at all. It simply observes that governments don't find these people despite more than a millennium of documented attempts and postulates why.
Many of the physical and social reasons for the lack of capture would also apply to a hypothetical space-based scenario. Also, there no way in hell that there would be a Terran Empire in thirty years, and at best you can play a Chinese Ship against an EU one, or a US Ship against an African Union one.
The Art of Not Being Governed In case you're curious about how much deeper Firaxis could go into the "Barbarian" mechanic. The Art of Not Being Governed takes a pretty deep look at how geography and the luxuries of the high ground and the fringe make for stateless states.
Check out The Art of Not being Governed by James C. Scott. He argues that the highlands of South-East Asia are the last places on earth that are not a part of modern nation-states. Also just a great geo-political history of SE Asia!
I agreed with you on the culling issue until I read this book:
https://www.amazon.com/Coyote-America-Natural-Supernatural-History/dp/0465052991
The tl;dr is that Dan Flores, an environmental historian, argues that trying to wipe them out actually causes them to yield higher litters--which increases their numbers in areas. The species is that of survivors--which is unfortunate for our pets.
Also, Dude, "Coyote American," please.
Here is the mobile version of your link
I'd add Fingerprint of the Gods by Graham Hancock. It makes you think on how you view the written history of mankind.
I think it's very possible that other species and or other genesis of humans have developed before us with high functioning language and scientific knowledge and that they are undiscovered and or all evidence has been wiped clean. very cool book http://www.amazon.com/Fingerprints-Gods-Graham-Hancock/dp/0517887290
Great Ancient archeology books
[Fingerprints of the Gods](
https://www.amazon.com/Fingerprints-Gods-Graham-Hancock/dp/0517887290)
Magicians of the Gods
Both by Graham Hancock
lol, I don't think the author ever went to Wisconsin. He focused on the States that fought in the War Between the States -- as the people interviewed in his book would call the Civil War ... They disagreed that it was inherently a symbol of slavery and racism -- that seems a distinctly Northern way of viewing it. Rather, they see it as a symbol of states rights and state sovereignty: The states had the right to secede; they lost the war and Lincoln tyrannically changed the balance of power declaring states did not have the right to leave the union. That's their understanding. They also see the flag as a means to honor their dead relatives who are otherwise being wrongly denigrated as racist: During the war, people fought out of loyalty to their state in addition to other reasons. Families even fought against each other for this reason, if they lived on opposite sides of a state border, which boggles my mind.
lol,
you've made work for me, because now I have to dig through my files to find the book... I will say that I would never have read it if it weren't for university, but it wasn't a bad read -- it was vaguely interesting.Oh, and lest I depict the journalist as if he were a racist apologist: He did describe some flagrantly racist and offensive people he encountered, which appalled him, so yeah, there's racism behind it sometimes too, as headline news today obviously demonstrates ...
Edit: Wow! I searched Amazon.com and it was one of the top results! You can even buy a copy for pennies, plus shipping...
Farbies Great book discussing that same problem.
More History:
Europe: A History
Europe: European History
The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914
The Iran-Iraq War
Hitler's American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law
They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else": A History of the Armenian Genocide
Postmodernism and academic nonsense:
The Sokal Hoax: The Sham That Shook the Academy
Beyond the Hoax: Science, Philosophy and Culture
Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left
More Politics:
A World in Disarray: American Foreign Policy and the Crisis of the Old Order
Human Nature/ Evolution:
The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature
On Human Nature
Clinical Psychology:
Introduction to Clinical Psychology (8th Edition) I'm not trained in psychology but I was told this one was quite good.
Ok, that's enough...
edit: double entry removed + sorting
Hitler was most certainly influenced by ideas of Biological Evolution. He was principally influenced by the American Eugenics Movement and often cited the racial injustices in America as both an example and justification for the equally vile and atrocious actions he sanctioned or directed in the interest of "Lebenraum" — that is, living space for the natural, German race.
>"At present, there exists one State which manifests at least some modest attempts that show a better appreciation of how things ought to be done in this matter. It is not, however, in our model, German Republic, but in the U.S.A., that efforts are made to conform at least partly to the counsels of commonsense. By refusing immigrants to enter there if they are in a bad state of health, and by excluding certain races from the right to become naturalized as citizens, they have begun to introduce principles similar to those on which we wish to ground the People's State." — Mein Kampf, Volume Two - The National Socialist Movement
Chapter III: Subjects and Citizens.
Hitler's adoration of American Eugenics and Race Laws, which were themselves founded on social and practical applications of the Darwinian Model of Evolution is undeniable.
I would also recommend that you read, "Hitler's American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law", James Whitman.
Here's a truly interesting blog on the matter of the continued prevalence of exceptionalism in America.
It is unfortunate that the dark side of Darwin's theory, played out in history, is rarely discussed among atheists and evolutionists. Darwin's theory is praised with little thought as what it produces when applied in real life.
Unchecked, Social Darwinism has profound social implications — it results in genocides, abortion, discrimination, forced sterilizations, marriage regulation, destruction of the unfit, racism, hatred — the opposite of everything the golden rule teaches us, that is, to "love your neighbour as you love yourself" and "to be kind to strangers in need".
This is echoed in a piece produced by History Hit, "Social Darwinism in Nazi Germany", where it is cited,
>"Charles Darwin's Origin of Species revolutionized accepted thought about biology. Despite being a highly universal theory, it is widely accepted now that the Darwinian view of the world does not transfer effectively to every element of life."
...
>"The most infamous instance of Social Darwinism in action is in the genocidal policies of the Nazi German Government in the 1930-1940s.
>It was openly embraced as promoting the notion that the strongest should naturally prevail and was a key feature of Nazi propaganda films..."
Hopefully, you will consider all of the evidence available that shows that when Darwin's theory of evolution is actively applied as social policy it results in nothing short of racism. On this basis I posed my proposition that racism, in all of its forms, can never hope to be eliminated from our social constructs as long as we continue to give a voice to Darwin's racist thought.
A few non U.S and non WWII books that I enjoyed:
The Last Days of the Incas
River of Doubt
Sea of Glory
It's been atleast 10 years since I've read 'Aztec', but I remember having the same urge to find similar books. In fact, it was this book that got me started in historical fiction (like you, my favorite genre).
Recently I came across The Last Days of the Incas, a true account of the Spanish conquest of Peru. Yes, it's non-fiction, but at times reads like a 'must find out what happens next' thriller. Many of the details of 'Aztec' have now faded from my memory, but I don't think I will ever forget the real history of the Incas as told in this account.
As for other historical fiction, the Master and Commander series by Patrick O'brian is outstanding. Action, adventure, deep characterization, historical accuracy and detail. The nautical terminology can be daunting at first, but the books become even more enjoyable once you learn some of it.
Lies My Teacher Told Me, first published in 1995 (?) describes the influence of the major text book publishers, especially on standardized testing at the state level. Total scam.
Please don't let that turn you against a college education. It can be a profound experience if you can get some of the education part and not just experience it as some kind of vocational training.
While you're at it, you may want to check out https://www.amazon.com/Lies-My-Teacher-Told-Everything/dp/0743296281. Not everything you may have been taught prior to 1960 is taught without bias.
Lies My History Teacher Told Me (Amazon link) looks at how history books do a terrible job of teaching American history. History books have improved since then, but there's still a lot that is glossed over or ignored.
Here's some random examples that I found interesting:
Two books off the top of my head. "Lies My Teacher Told Me" by James Loewen and while I normally would hesitate to recommend things from a Fox News Channel analyst, Judge Andrew Napolitano's "Lies The Government Told You", which I am currently going through for the second time, cross-referencing and reading critically, has proven to be a good read.
"Lies My Teacher Told Me", while written by an admitted Socialist, provides a good alternate viewpoint on American History "From the other side of the fence". Typically from the South's side during Reconstruction, from the views of a British Loyalist during the Revolutionary Era, on up to the Clinton Years in the last edition I managed to find. As for Napolitano's piece, I can't say I agree with everything the man espouses (I am, for example, still skeptical of his claim we need to get rid of regulatory agencies like the USDA and FDA) but he raises several good points on the abuses of agencies such as the DEA, NSA and other Federal Agencies and State Agencies throughout the years of American politics. It's at least worth a read for an alternate viewpoint, even if you don't agree with everything being said. That having been said, the book is definitely marketed towards the Center-Right/Independent demographic, so do with the info what you will.
Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong
EDIT: The same author recently published Teaching What Really Happened: How to Avoid the Tyranny of Textbooks and Get Students Excited About Doing History
Lies My Teacher Told Me by James Loewen
and
A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn
> That said, I largely remain in support of the people involved. That does not mean I support everything our military does but I will be good to the troops. I've seen what happens when people ignore them and their issues after war.
People seem to have a hard time to distinguish between the organization / structure as a whole and the individuals in them. I have sympathy for what many of them have and go through, I am still rejecting the military as an organization though, especially the way it is often use, as a short cut to a political solution.
As have said for a long time, and it almost always gets downvoted: Global politics are paid for in the blood of the young and stupid and I guess I should amendt it by adding "Patriots".
> Just in case... many of us don't wear clothes covered in flags. Our flag seems to be a biggie with people from other counties. More of a big deal than it is here. You'll usually find more people doing it on specific holidays like the 4th and at specific events. It's not 24-7 flag time.
I've lived in the states, I sort of know the reality on the ground. But there is definitely almost a fetishization of the flag in certain parts of the American population. Also, politicians seem to love the flag. Think of the little flag pin they all wear to show how "patriotic" they are.
> Change with weather. It's what Americans do.
Oh not disagreeing. My main point about the police though is that this is something that has been going on for a long time, as you said, that's been around at least since the '60s with the establishing of the first SWAT teams in LA. Funny how that all started around the time of the civil rights movement in the US started.
> It is a way to recycle equipment the military uses without junking it and letting it rot.
Here's a question for you: Do you think a police force that is part of the community should be equipped with tools that is used to suppress armed resistance? Because this is essentially what the police in North America seems to have become. There are the cops, and then there are the civis.
> Trailers and all terrain vehicles that can be used in search and rescue operations or to reach people during natural disasters such as floods or tornadoes.
You know how that works in other countries, and worked for along time in the US? Civil Defence. In Germany for example it's the "Technisches Hilfswerk" "Technical Support Department". They would be in charge of large scale search and rescue operation or disaster management. They have local troops that are drawn as volunteers from the community. Police and Military can be mobilized to assist, but if so, purely as man power under THWs direction.
The US had a civil defence department as well but in 2003 was rolled into the DHS, which means essentially it stopped existing.
But again, that sort of supports my point. It is all structured around military ideas, often invisible and, one could argue, with good intensions, at least at the outset.
> The police in my town are trained at a community college (it's a impoverished rural area) and they are not trained to be like the military.
Actually this is probably worse, because often these smaller department look at larger ones to "figure out how to do things" and this means they are sort of doing a "trial and error" kind of thing. There was an interesting documentary called "Peace Officer" I watched recently which looks actually at the smaller communities. It's only a handful of cases, but you have to wonder how often these things happen.
> They seem to be obsessed with American poloce having these deep web of connectivity that allows the police state to flourish. It's a bit out there considering our set ups.
Actually the people I have mostly listened to are your own politicians and the language they use, the terms. America loves to be at war with someone or something. The War on Drugs, the war on poverty, the fight against X, Y or Z etc.
I get why many people in the US do not see this and I am actually somewhat surprised I haven't gotten downvoted more because I just basically told most of America that in my opinion their country is a lie, which again, most other western countries these days are too to varying degrees.
Here's the problem. When people think "Dictatorship" they think of roaming kill squats and an iron fist. When they think "bad nationalism" they think Nazi Marches with torches and book burnings. These are powerful images no doubt, but people aren't stupid, the ones in power, they understand that people understand these images as for what they are, how could they not? They have established that narrative for 50+ years. But that's why you don't do it that way. You're more subtle. The boiling frog principle.
I think the next 20 years will be interesting for the West. Either we will indeed have "won the world" or we will all be in for a rough awakening. Personally I think the latter.
BTW, a book someone recommended to me last week and I am almost through and which explains a lot about the current SJWism as well as a whole host of other things I had wondered about with regards to the US is "Lies my teacher told me".
As someone who didn't attend the US school system I had always wondered about certain blind spots I had noticed with Americans when it came to their own history. Obviously we didn't deep dive into the US history to the same degree as we did to my countries, but there are a lot of things in the book that I was aware off that apparently is almost completely missing from the American education.
Wrong book. But close. Try this one:
Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong
Edit: Oops Dylio has already been there
What does Lies have to do with Christianity and the history of the Bible? Just curious, it's one of my favorite books.
Also, there's a new edition.
You might like Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong.
Lies my teacher told me.
A people's history of the united states
Probably Lies My Teacher Told Me.
I've got three books that would be pretty good. If you only read one, I would suggest the last one that I've listed. It focuses on US history after WWII. Not gonna lie, but most people in the US don't seem to care about much from events earlier than, oh, Desert Storm. This will give you a good idea of what has lead up to things more recent.
First is "That's Not in My American History Book" http://www.amazon.com/Thats-Not-American-History-Book/dp/158979107X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1406744669&sr=8-1&keywords=thats+not+in+my+history+book
Second is "Lies my Teachers Told Me"
http://www.amazon.com/Lies-My-Teacher-Told-Everything/dp/0743296281/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1406744669&sr=8-2&keywords=thats+not+in+my+history+book
Lastly: American Dreams: The United States Since 1945
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0143119559/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o01_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
Bonus books:
American Revolution:
http://www.amazon.com/The-American-Revolution-History-Chronicles/dp/0812970411/ref=pd_sim_b_14?ie=UTF8&refRID=1QADK50FADAGE3XG7JGE
Civil War:
http://www.amazon.com/Civil-War-Curiosities-Oddities-Coincidences/dp/155853315X/ref=sr_1_6?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1406745439&sr=1-6&keywords=US+Civil+War+books
Edit: This is a monster looking book, but it is visual as well. (Okay it is a monster book) but it touches on nearly everything. I've used it as a reference multiple times during college and Kurin is fairly spot on with his assessments.
http://www.amazon.com/Smithsonians-History-America-101-Objects/dp/1594205299/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1406745533&sr=1-1&keywords=a+smithsonian+book+of+history
A sort of thematically-similar book I've read is Lies my Teacher Told Me by James Loewen. He goes back through American history and restores a lot of perspective that's missing from the traditional narrative taught in highschool. It reminded me a lot of Guns, Germs, and Steel in that way.
This should be required reading for all high school grads.
Have you ever read Lies my teacher told me or any similar book?
American history books are almost always written "by the winner". So many little pieces of history are written ignoring our own history. People make a big deal about the fact Jefferson owned slaves.
I'm in no way saying "no American text" are authentic, but I find reading foreign accounts (or just historian's text). make me much happier and enrich the experience than just reading what the history books say.
I mean the best example off the top of my head is World War 2, when I was a kid it was "We were attacked for no reason by those Japanese". then it was "a suprise attack to blunt us" but everything actually says the Americans were going to war soon, and this just kicked us in to high gear. Hell there's even a rumor that America knew of the attack, and allowed it happen for a reason for us to go to war. In fact Pearl Harbour may have lost the war for the Axis, but more for the fact that it unified America, rather timing of us joining.
There's also a belief that it was the Russians rather than the Americans who might have won World War 2 (The Americans joined at the right time to get credit, but even if they didn't the Germans would be strained to keep up both wars, including the Russian Campaign that was at best very costly).
I know I'm late to the party, if this gets under your skin read Lies my Teacher Told Me. The author reviews key points in history like this and what several history books say. Not only does it expand on this it goes deeper than what I thought I knew.
A great read I highly recommend!
Lies my teacher told me is a favorite book of mine.
Lies my Teacher Told Me by James Loewen
I feel like this is a good place to start.
Read this book
Great book, I highly recommend it. Amazon page
>Counter-offer
https://www.amazon.com/Lies-My-Teacher-Told-Everything/dp/0743296281/
Clearly the book you've been getting your information from. I guess it's my turn to roll on the floor.
>I won't stop.
You say that like I care.
Counter-offer
https://www.amazon.com/Lies-My-Teacher-Told-Everything/dp/0743296281/
Get serious man. I won't stop.
This book my teacher chose for us to read kind of touch upon the subject for the classes in US. It's an interesting book and you'd probably gain some insight into what you're wondering.
http://www.amazon.com/Lies-My-Teacher-Told-Everything/dp/0743296281
> There would be no schools or colleges without Christianity. Read your history, then tell me these men evaded thinking. Without Christianity, we would all be uneducated barbarians. Christianity brought brilliance like Bach and Beethoven and created Western Civilization as we know it. Without Christianity, we would be blue-painted barbarians.
This right here tells me your friend has zero knowledge of actual history. The stupid fuck probably thinks that thanksgiving really happened and that Columbus wanted to prove the earth was round. Basically, your friend doesn't have the necessary foundation to even argue with. Your best bet is to ignore the topic of religion, and buy him books like this and this as birthday presents or maybe do a book trade and you both read each other's... and then moved into books like this.
Second, you shouldn't use quotes with people like this, or if you do just plagiarize and say it's your own. Giving quotes gives them something to attack without personally attacking your words, it makes it too easy for them to go on the offensive without thinking about what you're saying.
There is a really great book called Lies My Teacher Told Me. The prologue to the book has some really good info about Helen Keller's later life, and some theories as to why American history writers would prefer she died at 13.
I learned more about US history from the books below than anything I learned from my high school teachers. I did have some good college professors - but they are the ones who recommended these books. Also, "Untold History of The United States" documentary by Oliver Stone on Netflix. If you like dry stuff any Ken Burns documentary.
Lies My Teach Told Me
People's History of the United States
You should read the book Lies my teacher told me. Full of good stuff like this.
History textbooks (at least on a high school level) don't get history 100% right. A good book to read on that subject is Lies My Teacher Told Me
Check out Lies My Teacher Told Me. It's not comprehensive (despite the suggestive subtitle, "Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong"). But it certainly points out some nice highlights.
Congrats on getting hired!!! I'd recommend a mix of PD/teaching books and content. When you get bored of one switch to the other. Both are equally important (unless you feel stronger in one area than the other).
For PD, I'd recommend: Teach Like a Pirate, Blended, The Wild Card, and the classic Essential 55. Another one on grading is Fair Isn't Always Equal - this one really changed how I thought about grading in my classes.
As far as content, you have a couple ways to go - review an overview of history like Lies My Teacher Told Me, the classic People's History, or Teaching What Really Happened, or you can go with a really good book on a specific event or time period to make that unit really pop in the classroom. The Ron Chernow books on Hamilton, Washington, or Grant would be great (but long). I loved Undaunted Courage about Lewis & Clark and turned that into a really great lesson.
Have a great summer and best of luck next year!!
Fourty percent of U.S. students don’t know that 6 million Jews were killed. Everyone should read Lies My Teacher Told Me.
Anything technical relating to an interest you may have; fiction is good, but reading about topics like fuel cells or woodworking and then experimenting with it is just as fun / well-rounding.
As for history, "Lies My Teacher Told Me" is required reading for anyone wanting a better understanding of US history.
Probably because what you learned in school was sugarcoated. http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0743296281/ref=redir_mdp_mobile/191-4764182-0421806
Lies My Teacher Told Me by James Loewen. It's a fantastic book about American History.
https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Tide-Great-Boston-Molasses/dp/0807050210
Great book on the tragedy
Try this.
https://www.amazon.com/Indigenous-Peoples-History-ReVisioning-American/dp/0807057835/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8
I don't know why you think the fertile crescent is important. If it's because of the start of agriculture, then the Americans cradles are in Mesoamerica, the Andes, and the Eastern Woodlands. Also, agriculture was developed in three more "Old World" regions other than the Fertile Crescent: Western Africa, China, and New Guinea.
If you think its important because of writing, then the American cradle would be in Mesoamerica. However, knowing about the record systems of Ojibwe birchbarks, Mi'kmaq hieroglyphs, Haudenosaunee wampum, Lakota Winter Counts, and Andean/Incan Quipu is also important.
The most important regions are the Yucatan peninsula and the Mexican Valley, the Andean mountains, the Southwest US (e.g. Pueblo Bonito of the Hitsatsinom), and the Eastern Woodlands (e.g. Cahokia of the Mississippians).
You can go to /r/AskHistorians for more, or you can read the book 1491 (and an Amazon link).
Roffle ancaps.
Yes, the view of pre-Columbus American Indians as a monolithic group who tread lightly on the land is bullshit. That doesn't mean that your particular myth is not also incorrect, racist, and self-serving.
Go read 1491 by Charles Mann.
This will be my last reply in this chain, as I have better things to do if you choose not to educate yourself.
You make excellent points. In-group boundaries can indeed align with cultural experience, and we cannot discount the importance of past experiences - especially for groups that have been the victims of persecution, for example.
However, I think it is a testament to the larger project of human civilization that we can transcend our own personal experiences and use a more abstract form of compassion and empathy to inform policy, law, planning, and our collective efforts to structure and govern society. For example, even in the aftermath of the Holocaust following World War II, the international Jewish community made extraordinary contributions to the advancement of the humanist project worldwide. If ever there were a time when an in-group might have justification to demonize out-groups as "the enemy" that was it. And yet a broader, more abstract compassion arose as a guiding ideal. So I don't agree that hardship and persecution necessarily lends itself to a cynical view of "foolish empathy" as you phrased it.
Having said that, there is undoubtedly a tension among values like self-preservation and magnanimity, and I would never suggest that simply expanding one's sphere of empathy and the broadening of how an individual defines his or her self-interest flatly negates the reality of these types of tension. But these finer details are not an area for speculation or conjecture. Instead, this is a place where science can get to work trying to reveal what is actually going on. Jonathan Heidt has done some interesting cross-cultural research on political orientation, and so I would start by looking at his work.
As for the question of how cultures change with shifting economic, environmental, and geopolitical circumstances, there is a large and growing scientific literature that is trying to us give some answers. The disciplines where I have seen the most work along these lines are cultural anthropology and geography. There are some wonderful popular books on these topics, and I would recommend Charles C. Mann's 1491 and 1493 in particular.
Have you read 1491 and 1493?
A lot of good stuff on the latest archaelogical findings and theories. There is new evidence that Amazonian Indians weren't all hunter gatherers, that they actual practiced a tree based agriculture and left behind mounds and other physical evidence of some kind of civilization.
Charles Mann, the author, is just summing up and/or popularizing current trends in archaelogical thought, but I learned some stunning things that went against what is taught in the schools.
This might be semantics, but it does say 'American' soil - that would include both NA, SA and the bits in the middle. I won't touch on the other points... But I would recommend 1491 by Charles C. Mann for a great book on pre-European contact Americas.
If you don't mind my asking, what is the view of 1491? Or Why the West Rules--For Now?
I would encourage both candidates to read the following:
I'm sure they're somewhat fanciful - but I think the basic depictions of the Lenape villages and how they looked, the mix of hunting and farming etc, is about right.
But just did a wiki and here's a fascinating note: "By 1682, when William Penn arrived to his American commonwealth, the Lenape had been so reduced by disease, famine, and war that the sub-clan mothers had reluctantly resolved to consolidate their families into the main clan family. This is why William Penn and all those after him believed that the Lenape clans had always only had three divisions ('Turtle, Turkey, and Wolf) when, in fact, they had over thirty on the eve of European contact."
It's the same story across the country - by the time Euros first saw most native societies, they'd been dramatically changed by European diseases and tools of war. This is a great book on that subject.
Great book.
Check out the book "1491" - https://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Columbus/dp/1400032059
It's easy to forget that until the recent discovery of the Americas by the taught colonial history of today, we had no records or knowledge of the whole of human history carrying out simultaneously on the other side of the world.
Book is surprisingly engagingly written considering what most would call a stuffy subject. It basically proports that the Americas were tremendously evolved/advanced, and that western history as we know it has no understanding of how much human history lived and died on the other half of the globe.
It covers trade, culture, science, history, and ecological engineering of the Americas before Colombus.
The part about MASSIVE percentages of the amazon rainforest being completely eco-engineered into steppe-drainage environments blows my mind.
Always worth plugging that the book 1491 by Charles Mann is a really good anthropological study of the pre-columbia Americas.
The trend is that crops that could not grow in certain latitudes due to colder climates can now tolerate the slightly warmer temperatures. A good example of this is french grapes that traditionally could not grow in England can now do so.
So we can reasonably expect any plant that used to only grow in, say, Southern California or Texas to now tolerate Oregon and Iowa. In the future, this may move even further north.
I should also mention that the same effect is occurring in the southern hemisphere, so weather patterns typical in the northern parts of Argentina are shifting south toward the higher latitudes.
Another thing to keep in mind is that the recent IPCC report stated that we have already experienced 1 full degree of warming since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Somewhere between 2030 and 2050 we will gain another half degree of warming. There's a chance that we might be able to hold it there if we go 100% carbon neutral by 2050, but otherwise the world will continue to warm to 2C by 2100.
My point is that the "5*C world" will not happen in our lifetimes. That's not to say we shouldn't care about the future, but rather we can't make a reasonable prediction about what the world will be 500 years from now.
Coming back to your question, where will agriculture be possible with 2 degree of warming? I believe that agriculture will continue to be possible in most places, as long as we do not exhaust the soil of nutrients or ruin it with poor irrigation practices. The crops we plant might change though - corn uses a tremendous amount of nutrients despite only producing a couple of cobs. A more calorie/nutrient dense crop might be beans, rice, etc. but that's depends on politics and economics more than anything else. There's a reason why Iowa is known for it's endless fields of corn instead of wheat or lettuce.
Likewise, modern Americans eats an enormous amount of meat without really paying for the environmental cost of it. I'm not advocating for veganism, but having a hulking chunk of steak every night isn't sustainable across billions of people.
I recommend you read a couple of books about sustainable agriculture - it's a fascinating subject and it may answer a lot of your questions. Some of my favorites include:
You should read 1491.
It happened before he arrived. The N. American indigenous population was around 100 million before the epidemic that killed them all. There were major highway systems that stretched from Canada to S. America, and they lived relatively modern lives. Not exactly Roman Empire lives, but still not exactly what is portrayed. The idea of Native American civilization being small, independent, always warring tribes comes from what Europeans saw after whatever it was killed them off (I can't quite remember what exactly it was that killed them). A city of a few hundred natives being decimated to just 10-20 people, fighting for leftover resources from a neighboring town that was left in similar ruins...
This all happened very shortly before Europeans made their mark. Columbus does get a bad rap, but people forget he was either lost or stuck on a sandbar for much of his time in the New World. While he sat on the sandbar, wondering if he would ever make it home, many other people came to the Continental N. America to do their own damage. Columbus gets all of the flack because he was first.
But the Natives were all but gone by then anyway. Check out the book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus. Also, check out this thumbnail history of Columbus's travels to the Americas: Columbus in the Americas. That book is written by a Native American. You'd expect it to be incredibly critical of Columbus, but he paints him differently: as a sad failure who couldn't really do anything right. You almost feel sorry for the guy. You know that cousin who is always fucking up majorly and can't get his shit together to save his life? That's Columbus.
Undaunted Courage is one of my favorites. It's about the journey of Lewis and Clarke, but it also explores Lewis' interactions with Thomas Jefferson and provides examples of how life was back in their day. There's some crazy shit that happened on that expedition that your high school history class wouldn't dare to cover.
1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus is another good one. It's about the New World before Europeans had touched it. It also goes into the conquest and some would say destruction of the old way of life. It's written in a novel format so it's a very easy read.
I was an english major and to be honest, Ernest Hemingway was very difficult for me to get into. The Prince is short but you need to be in the right mindset. Meditations is very useful but it can be repetitive. If I were you I would focus on books that have a sense of adventure to them, then mix philosophy into that.
http://www.amazon.com/1491-Second-Edition-Revelations-Americas/dp/1400032059
And this is why everyone should read 1491.
Gonna hijack this comment to recommend a book on this very subject: 1491 New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
1491
To read what American life was like during the pre-Colombian era is utterly amazing.
1491 is a good place to start.
You can pull a lot of info from 1491 especially the sections about South America, where the cultures were isolated for millenia before contact with Europeans. I keep going back to this book, would definitely recommend.
http://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Columbus/dp/1400032059
This book, I can't think of where without it in front of me atm :(
There are some really interesting things about the Amazon in it, I highly recommend it.
Technological differences had little to nothing to do with the downfall of Meso-American societies. The biggest factor was the introduction of new disease that Native Americans had zero immunity to. People like to site the Plague and say it was so bad. Europe lost 25% of it's population tops, which no doubt will fuck your shit up. However, Native American populations dropped 25-50% on average and up to 90-100% of some groups. Small pox, measles, scarlet fever, typhoid, typhus, influenza, whooping cough, tuberculosis, cholera, diphtheria, chicken pox, and venereal diseases are just a few of the introduced illnesses. [Read this] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_disease_and_epidemics)
It pisses me off that people have absolutely no fucking idea how much of our modern world wouldn't be here if it was for the technologies developed by Native Americans. Not to mention most of the vegetables that are the staple crops around the world. Imagine Italian food without the tomato, Indian food with no chilies, Ireland with no potato.
And to answer the OP and NDT, the Mayans had fled their cities a good 200-300 years before the Spanish ever showed up. They must have had a clue those disease ridden fuckers were coming.
[Indian Givers] (http://www.amazon.com/Indian-Givers-Indians-Americas-Transformed/dp/0449904962), 1491
For maps, it’s a little tricky.
Most of the folks living in the Americas were tribal people; they didn’t exactly have countries or defined borders. Closest you’re probably going to get is a distribution of language families.
North America
South America
Within these Language Families there were sometimes multiple tribes & bands
Here’s a link to a listing of many of the tribes, broken up by area. Don’t know how complete it is for all areas, but the listings cover a lot of the tribes.
http://www.native-languages.org/culture-areas.htm
There are quick summaries for each of the tribes & links to more info.
As far as info on large civilizations, technology & Cultures, A good general overview is 1491 by Charles C. Mann. He does a pretty good job of coving several areas, & how the locals organized their societies & impacted the land they lived on. It’s a really broad overview, covering all of the Americas. To get more details, you’re going to have to focus in on a specific region or people.
A couple of books you may find interesting:
http://www.amazon.com/1421-Year-China-Discovered-America/dp/0061564893/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1239643357&sr=8-1
http://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Columbus/dp/1400032059/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1239643315&sr=1-3
The second is quite a bit more academic than the first. The first having been written by a retired British Naval officer and the second by a researcher/academic writer.
Most of what I mentioned above comes from the book 1491 by Charles C. Mann.
Of course not everybody was happy ... but when you speak of populations you can only speak of the bulk of the population. Certainly there were ne'er do wells, skeptics, rebels, criminals, chronic down-and-outers, murderers, thieves, con-men, etc... Clearly there was a class system, and clearly some people were "more equal" than others. But the archaeological evidence largely supports a well ordered, content and well-provided-for civilization.
> Regardless, my point was that those masonry projects, however complex or mind boggling were the products of humans, math, simple machines and time.
I don't think anybody would argue any different. The biggest thing you need to produce these great works in ancient times was lots of manpower ... I was just pointing out how the Incas managed to have access to so many willing hands.
1491?
http://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Columbus/dp/1400032059
Based on those interests, he might like 1491 or maybe Guns, Germs and Steel, I mean, not to be quick to judge, but my stereotypical image of someone that likes gardening and southern shit would probably be turned off by YA fantasy/action fare and would probably be willing to tackle a harder book that is more close to his interests. AskHistorians has a monster book list but I'm not really familiar with which of those listed are accessible.
Over the last few years books like 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus seem to have made a pretty decent case for something not far from that.
Somewhat related .... I'm actually reading a book right now http://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Columbus/dp/1400032059
in the book, it actually explains that the native americans' weapons were superior to that of the europeans, and muskets back then were essentially "Noise Makers." it as very easy for the South americans to pick off people with bows.
In addition, the native americans were much taller, muscular and athletic than the europeans, who the indians described as short stout and smelly, most of them never having bathed in their lives. In contrast, the indians lived much healthier and cleanlier lives than the conquistadors.
Have you read http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1400032059?pc_redir=1406609836&robot_redir=1 ?
The bits in it about the amazon totally blew me away.
I'm not 100% sure on this, but I do remember from history classes in college that the Native Americans would raze down the trees for their agriculture. There's a book on this that I read years ago which goes into much more detail on how they shaped the land. After most of them died (remember, something like 90% of them were killed, many before European colonization was in full swing), the forests starting coming back. It's hard for us now to fathom what New England look like before European settlement, since so much of their history is now lost.
If you're looking for some more in depth reading on the subject, I suggest Guns, Germs and Steel or 1491.
A great read about Cahokia and other relatively recent (and still controversial) findings: 1491
Amazon and local libraries have free ebooks, buddy.
New ones, too. Just read 1491 for free through the Seattle Public Library.
http://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Columbus/dp/140004006X
I have yet to read it, but the book 1491 was written to explore such questions. Anyone who had read it, please comment on its content.
Popular "argument"???
I meant this book which seems (to my mind anyway) to contain more than simply an "argument"... more like a paradigm shifting change in the way the Pre-Columbian civilizations existed.
To my mind when Europeans jokingly assert that America doesn't really have a "history" -- I believe they are quite frankly, "full of it", because a lot of the "history" of Europe is either large gaping holes (how little we REALLY know of Carthage, or of the Phoenician, Celtic or Germanic histories), or reconstructed "faux" history, with only a superficial "glossy coating" regarding wars and certain ruling family histories.
A very large part of the "American" attitude, psyche, and even "philosophy" of individualism if you will, seems to have been adopted by the immigrants from the native tribes. (Especially if one goes digging into the writings of people like Franklin, Cadwallader Colden, etc.)
And founded an empire which was - for nearly 700 years - the foremost champion of religious tolerance, technological advancement and social diversity. Compare to Christopher Columbus, who wanted to found a theocratic empire based on slavery (and New Spain was far, far worse than anything Mohammed inflicted), so he could use New World gold to feed the endless war against the Muslim world. Also, the man responsible for one of the greatest losses of human life and biodiversity the world has ever seen.
That said, I've really got no truck with Columbus, as he was a product of his immensely barbaric times.
Damn straight. Reference here.
Cool deal. Good to come across someone who read a lot of history. Try reading 1491 by Charles C Mann Here
It is a very good read.
No, I meant 1491 (Good look, though. It has been a while since 2nd grade), and I don't know where you got a judgement from me on how colonialism affected Africa in the long run. The fact that Europeans were able to colonize Africa because of overwhelming 'might' is my point.
edit: also, I knew using the word primitive would make me catch flak, which is why I tried to soften it with focused definition, but I'll use your phrase from now on. It sounds nicer, anyways.
Island at the Center of the World.
https://www.amazon.com/Island-Center-World-Manhattan-Forgotten/dp/1400078679
Second what /u/arjalon said, plus keep in mind that 99.999% of woodworkers aren't bowyers. Some guys might be able to make you something that looks like a bow, but it'd likely snap the first time you drew it.
If you're interested in making one yourself, the library should have(or be able to get) The Bowyer's Bible, the authoritative work on the subject.
To add to that list:
For something philosophical/religious:
If they're fascinated by the construction of traditional bows and arrows:
Bowyers bible, https://www.amazon.com/Traditional-Bowyers-Bible-1/dp/1585740853
And there are a ton of youtube videos about this. Read through the general steps in the book and get more insight into what you dont understand by watching videos on you tube. Thats usually my strategy. Good luck
I would love to take a class in this. I developed an interest in bow making at the same time I got interested in archery. I bought The Traditional Bowyer's Bible before I even bought my first bow.
I am in the middle of making a red oak bow but it's too hot now to sit outside getting covered in sweat and sawdust.
What state is this located?
Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, Revised and Updated Edition
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1595583262/ref=cm_sw_r_an_am_ap_am_us?ie=UTF8
I don't know if this is specifically the book they're talking about, but Lies My Teacher Told Me is similar.
Excellent reference: https://www.amazon.com/1491-Second-Revelations-Americas-Columbus-ebook/dp/B000JMKVE4/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1503783789&sr=8-1&keywords=1491
Cool. This book is pretty good: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000JMKVE4/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
I originally read about it here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000JMKVE4/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
On terra preta specifically: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta
Other links: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/pristine-untouched-amazonian-rainforest-was-actually-shaped-humans-180962378/
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0122njp
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/3350474/Amazon-rainforest-was-giant-garden-city.html
The enviornmental effects were minor relative to the columbian exchange.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/03/1491/302445/
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000JMKVE4/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
The Native Americans has massively intervened and changed the natural environment. Then, basically, the vast bulk of them died, long before the english colonies got past the Mississippi. Their dying led to the collapse of their created ecosystem, which was simulateously feeling the effects of a massive invasion of plants and animals from Europe/Asia/Africa. This collapse led to a chaotic realignment of species in north and south america, and a fundamental change in ecosystems.
Spanish conquistadors defeating the Incas in the siege of Cuzco in 1537. 180 Spanish conquistadors (and several thousand Indian auxiliaries) vs 100,000 to 200,000 Inca warriors. The Incas had stone age and bronze weapons, while the Spanish had steel weapons, horses, cannons, and early muskets. The Incas essentially could not defeat the Spanish heavy calvary, and the Incas lost the battle.
http://military.wikia.com/wiki/Siege_of_Cuzco
There is also a really good book called the "Last Days of the Incas" by Kim MacQuarrie that includes this battle and several other Inca battles.
https://www.amazon.com/Last-Days-Incas-Kim-MacQuarrie/dp/0743260503
I would highly recommend checking out this book, if you can get it from a library or something Collapse
He talks about the collapse of all sorts of different cultures, societies...right now I'm reading about the decline of the Vikings, but there was a chapter before on ancient Polynesian cultures living on the Mangareva, Henderson, and Pitcairn islands. There was also a chapter on the Mayans. He covers things very well in detail, and all the different factors that contributed to their eventual collapse.
There were political economies in the iron ages. Kings didn't starve during famine but peasants did. If there were better social protections (such as good grain storage and distribution) peasants would not starve. The story of Joseph telling the pharaoh to save grain is an example of how famine could be alleviated in earlier times.
The academic literature on the history of disasters is very weak, but a few sources to back up my statements are:
Collapse: https://www.amazon.com/Collapse-Societies-Choose-Succeed-Revised/dp/0143117009
and Greg Bankoff's work on disaster history: http://www2.hull.ac.uk/fass/history/our_staff/greg_bankoff.aspx
There's one other book on the history of disaster but I'm blanking on it.
Greg's article 'there's no such thing as natural disasters' is much more eloquent than any explanation I can give: http://hir.harvard.edu/article/?a=2694
okay... read Jared Diamond's Collapse
it should keep you busy for a while.
it is racist through and through.
"A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within" from there it gets worse.
and "One of the great mysteries of the Maya is why their civilization "collapsed" around A.D. 900, when many of the great ceremonial cities, such as Tikal, were simply abandoned. The current thinking is that collapse had many fathers: drought, deforestation, disease, overpopulation, warfare, social disruption. And Gibson's movie includes a little riff on them all, and indeed the film begins with a quote from historian Will Durant about the Romans: "A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within."
But Gibson sets his film not during the era of Maya collapse in A.D. 900, but at the time of European contact in the early 1500s, when the first Spanish expeditions arrived on Maya shores. What wiped out the Maya in the 1500s was not internal rot, it was the Spanish, who brought European disease and fought for decades to pacify the Maya.
"Every society is violent," says Demarest. "And the Maya were no more cruel than any other, especially if you look at their entire history. What if you told the story of our history and didn't mention Pascal or Mozart or science or medicine and just focused on MTV and mass genocide?""1
and
"The Spanish arrive as if to save the Maya from themselves. After enduring two hours of horrific violence, in the last minutes of the film, we witness the miraculous rescue of the film's hero Jaguar Paw from his stalkers by the appearance of Spanish galleons off the coast. This short, final scene shows dour Spaniards approaching the mainland in boats bearing Christian crosses across still water. After forcing his audience to endure two hours of horrific violence, Gibson uses this placid scene allow the movie-goer a sigh of relief in the hopes that these European Civilizers have arrived to make order out of the Maya mayhem. By ending his film there, Gibson ignores the far greater genocide to befall the Maya. In fact, within a hundred years of conquest, the Spanish were responsible for killing between 90 and 95 percent of the Maya population through disease, warfare, starvation, and enslavement."2
i am not going to get into it other than a few more comments. it seems every time i share my opinion in the matter i get blue arrowed to death.
edit: also, he showed the natives as having plagues. plagues and disease came with the europeans. this is a good read on the subject.
I certainly agree with that, as I read books like Cataclysm and Fingerprints of the Gods and am convinced that the scriptures have been criminally misinterpreted. However, stimulating or helping people to hang on to the retarded previous notions is not productive at all.
Why downvote me for talking about someone else's book?
It's just a book and I'm only saying that this article supports his theory.
I can't even say if I believe Mr. Hancock, but I did find his ideas interesting. Here are some links if you'd like to inform yourself more about what you are attacking:
http://www.amazon.com/Fingerprints-Gods-Graham-Hancock/dp/0517887290
http://www.grahamhancock.com/library/fotg/default.htm
I think you are mistaken. It does a very representative of Southern Pride. I would go as far as to say today that it also has little to do with slavery and more of associating with an imagined community based on a southern-white culture.
A very good read that I recommend:
Confederates in the Attic(http://www.amazon.com/Confederates-Attic-Dispatches-Unfinished-Civil/dp/067975833X)
Good stuff, if highly speculative. I suggest anyone interested in this sort of thing also read 1491 about life in the Americas before Columbus. Very insightful.
https://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Columbus/dp/140004006X
https://www.amazon.com/Guns-Germs-Steel-Fates-Societies/dp/0393317552
I'm fairly well-reasoned, educated, and informed. OTOH I'm not particularly interested in "gaining points" or whatever; it's not of interest to me whether a discussion here "goes in my favor."
What we know -- or think we know -- about pre-Columbian civilization in the Americas is fragmentary and changing fast. By the same token, what Mormon folk-belief has held (e.g., that the BoM civilizations covered the North and South American continents) is also fragmented and changing fast. The BoM people are now thought to have been one (relatively small) group out of many (this isn't a change in doctrine, but something of a clarification of older folk-belief and tradition).
If you haven't read the book 1491, I highly recommend it. It has nothing to do with the BoM or LDS belief at all, but it does give a much different (and well-grounded) view of civilization in the Americas prior to the main presence of Europeans here.
I highly suggest you educate yourself before you talk.
​
https://www.amazon.com/Peoples-History-United-States/dp/0060838655
https://www.amazon.com/1491-Second-Revelations-Americas-Columbus-ebook/dp/B000JMKVE4
https://www.amazon.com/Florentine-Codex-Conquest-General-History/dp/1607811677
Are you looking for Fiction?
A favorite non-fiction of mine is Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong
I've read extensively about it.
Here you go boss https://www.amazon.com/Fingerprints-Gods-Graham-Hancock/dp/0517887290
*Sorry for the long winded comment, I just feel strongly about this subject and hate when people clump these groups together as one voice.
> Plus comparing Hong Kong protesters waving the US flag, which is generally seen by people as a symbol of freedom, to people waving literal Nazi flags is fucking insane?
I’m gonna start here, because it’s not. To the Chinese, the American flag means something entirely different. We can argue about what they think it means, but its probably not entirely a good feeling. A symbol has different meaning to everyone. There isn’t a single definition for symbols. If there was, the Nazi flag wouldn’t be flown at fucking all. Simple as that. If symbols always meant the same thing these things would be simple.
> Quick question, if you're at a rally for a civil war monument and aren't a Nazi wouldn't you think "hey there are lots of Nazis here, maybe I should leave so I won't be caught up in this Nazi stuff".
Ok but how about this story, from a book called Confederates in the Attic by Tony Horwitz.
A young man named Michael Westerman was shot and killed back in the 90’s. He had the confederate flag flying on his red truck. His girlfriend said he just liked the look of it because it made his truck look sharp. Some less biased sources said he was just a trouble rouser. Others would call him a white supremacist. Whatever the case, he was a young man acting stupid.
Why was he killed? He still had the flag waving on Martin Luther Kings birthday. A group of black young men were of the same age and didn’t like this. Maybe they were provoked by the use of the N word, maybe not. Tony’s book does make it clear though that this young Michael Westernan dies and his assailant ends up in prison for quite a while. Hate crime.
White nationalist groups took it upon themselves to politicize this death and use it for recruiting purposes. They even showed up at the funeral. The takeaway I got from the story is how pushy these groups are. You may not want them there, but once they show up you can’t just get them to leave. They are too aggressive. What should the family have done in that situation?
> if I was put in a situation where something I believed in was being co-opted by literal Nazis, or literally anyone who's ideals were dangerous and harmful, I'd rethink my participation in said situation
> they were willing to surround themselves with those people to get their point across.
Now that last example was just a side point, and I want to finish with what I really was trying to say. This was the point I was making earlier. If you are willing to surround yourself with the wrong kinds of people, does this make you of the same kind?
This is going to be opinion based but I don’t think so. When the KKK shows up at your sons funeral, I don’t believe that means you support the KKK. Even if you hold some of their beliefs that doesn’t mean you agree with all of them.
Personally I believe that as with all things racism comes in degrees. Profiling is often a racist act. One time I was walking at night and I crossed the street because I saw three black men wearing clothes that seemed more gang related walking on the same side of the street as me. That was profiling on my part. It was racist and I feel that it was wrong. I remember wondering after it happened if I would have done the same thing if they were white.
The KKK on the other hand will kick you out of their group for sleeping with someone who is black. They want to bring back segregation. They believe that your race determines your quality as a person. That’s an entirely different degree of racism.
So just to reiterate my argument, symbols have different meaning to everyone, these groups are difficult to get rid of, and being in their presence doesn’t mean you entirely agree with them.
What’s this all boil down to? Being at that rally doesn’t make you the devil. It’s entirely possible that someone at that rally is there because they feel they are being oppressed. They see the flag and think “well they have the right to protest so who am I to stop them”. And believes they are an extreme group who is taking things too far.
Think this is so unrealistic? This happened at the French protests too. People showed up and burned cars. They gave the protest a bad name. And so what? Because people you don’t entirely agree with are doing bad shit you should just stop your protest altogether? Nazi and KKK groups will show up at literally anything that resembles their groups beliefs and make it their own. So if they should stop protesting then you are telling people with right leaning ideals they don’t have the right to protest.
>Yes because for 60 years they've been living under US protection
You believe everything you where told in school don't you?
if you are interested in pre-columbian archeology, and you haven't read it already, i cannot recommend this book enough: http://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Columbus/dp/1400032059
Read books if you're interested in history. Don't buy talking points of proven frauds like Ward Churchill the fake Indian and plagiarist.
Here is a good book that dispels your noble save Dances With Wolves illusions about what happened here before the arrival of Europeans: 1491
Give us a break with your p.c. revisionism. I'm part Native American. Not a big enough part to get hundreds of thousands of dollars every year for nothing--look into how tribes have made out with Indian gaming in places like my state, California. Also, your wrong when you claim there was a massive genocide to make room for the U.S.A. because as it so happens this was a sparsely populate landmass when various groups were arriving. Maybe you think that a few hundred thousand savage and violent illiterates should forever have been allowed to call the whole place their own, but that's not how it works.
Profoundly lacking what? Everything I stated was true. I didn't claim anything that you said never happened, but collective land owning never happened. Read a fucking book. You can start with this one: https://www.amazon.com/Lies-My-Teacher-Told-Everything/dp/0743296281/
I too believed some of the lies my teacher told me.
It's not simply urban versus rural. Black and white thinking, nice try. https://www.amazon.com/American-Nations-History-Regional-Cultures/dp/0143122029
I am only answering further because I looked at your artwork and it is nice, and it seems you did not pursue the anthropology thing further, which is a good thing. So there's the possibility you're not completely aligned with the US anthropology cult, with its known problems, prejudices and motivations.
I am glad you pointed out various Maya are still around, this is important to educate people on. After all, if they weren't around any more, who would the US have to finance the assassination of in central america through ongoing genocidal schemes?
Your follow up statement that "I'm led to believe that their view of the downfall would be as varied as the countries across which they are spread" does suggest that you have in fact talked to Maya people, and are aware that there was no "collapse" at all, and are aware there is no single Mayan people, and are aware that the ongoing changes in various Maya cultures in history, like the histories of most cultures, aren't particularly sudden or mysterious. These were the main issues with your previous post.
Maya peoples know their history, have maintained their oral and written records, and there is no huge mystery of their history.
There is only the american anthropologists and archaeologists who continue to claim that there is a mystery here or there, while they ignore actual history kept by non-white and non-american peoples. (I qualify this with 'white' because the non-white american anthropologists I know do not have this belief, nor do the non-american white anthropologists.) These are bizarre claims and are among the many reasons that american anthropologists are regarded with skepticism and ridicule by much of the rest of the world anthropological communities.
Worthwhile reading to decolonize the minds of those who have been through US or similarly minded anthro programs.
Weaponizing Anthropology: Social Science in Service of the Militarized State
From Racism to Genocide: Anthropology in the Third Reich
Darkness in El Dorado
Custer Died for Your Sins
Indians and Anthropologists
Read all these. Then proceed.
Maybe it's time to try something else? Beware the white liberal.
>A note from the author:
>All of the information in this essay came from A People's History of the United States, by Howard Zinn, and Lies My Teacher Told Me, by James W. Lowewen, both of which uses primary sources such eyewitness accounts, journal entries, and letters from Christopher Columbus himself.
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I could have told you this shit, and I wouldn't have asked for any advertising revenue in return. But because I didn't dig up a cutesy font, you guys would never read it.
yeah, i've probably read more anti-mormon literature than most anti-mormons (or exmormon atheists or whatever term doesn't offend you.) and it's late, and i should go to bed - and we shouldn't go the rounds. you've got your own religion now, and you're sticking to it. ;-)
but instead of rehashing all the apologetics, let me suggest one of my favorite books is 1491. what we think we know about ancient america is pretty shallow. there is a lot more to be discovered and theories are always changing.
oh, and while i can explain the existence of green eggs and ham - you obviously you can't explain the existence of the book of mormon. 500 pages in 75 days, no punctuation, no corrections, from a farm boy - and chiasmus? yeah, that's a tough nut for you guys to crack. g'night.
>Grab any US school history book, you can't miss it
Except when you can. Like, almost always.