(Part 2) 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 products ranked 21-40. You can also go back to the previous section.
>they just want to see the system crumble.
I'm not ready to shoot it out in the streets though. I wanna hang out with my friends and eat good food. I don't know if they are imagining something better than what exists now, but it ain't gonna happen. It's downhill from here if they crumble the system. Change needs to happen. But fascism seems to be their end goal.
I really think this has nearly everything to do with Obama being president. My buddy read this book https://www.amazon.com/White-Rage-Unspoken-Racial-Divide/dp/1632864126
And talked about how every time blacks make a little gain in this country. There is a huge counter reaction to it.
It's called white rage. And the funny thing is that when he was reading it. Some SJW noticed the title and was super aggressive towards him. Thinking he was a racist. The left needs to chill with the safe space bs and get back in the real world. Extremes on both sides. Yuck.
Just thinking out loud.
Because they maintained some form of independence and were capable of defending their lands pretty well (the Pyreness create a nice natural barrier). The Celts and Iberians didn't affect Basque life much. The Romans, who did eventually conquer the Basques, didn't develop/Romanize it too well, being more interested on the Mediterranean coast. After the fall of the Romans and the rise of the Franks and Visigoths, the state of Vasconia (Gascony) was more or less consolidated (602), alternating between absolute independence or a client state of the Franks.
With the eventual absorption of Gascony into French politics (~1053), we then see the rise of the Kingdom of Pamplona/Navarre (824), which existed as an independent entity until 1512, when it was absorbed into the greater Spanish crown. It's important to note that Basque regions that were annexed usually asked that their new lords allow them to govern themselves according to their own laws and traditions. These vows, taken by the lord, were done in public/holy places, leaving the Basques to enjoy a greater amount of autonomy.
Shown so far is a history of independence and self-rule from pre-history to the early 16th century. Unfortunately, I don't have much on the history between then and the rise of nationalism. However, if France wasn't able to consolidate French entirely until the late 19th century, and we are to believe that only ~50% of people in France could speak any French in 1789 and only 25% spoke it as their native language in 1871, this raises issues with the idea of a centralized state capable of enforcing its language, specially on semi-autonomous region or ethnic minorities in the peripheries.
This brings us into the modern era. The Basques sided with the losers during the Spanish Civil War. Under Francisco Franco, who took power, speaking Basque was banned in Spain, and the region saw greater immigration from the poorer parts of the country, both of which severely damaged the amount of Basque being spoken.
EDIT: Seeing as this was well received, I'd like to introduce you all to Sancho the Great. He was the Basque king of Pamplona from 1004 to 1035, and before his death untied all of Christian northern Spain, from Galicia, through Leon and Castile, to Navarre and Aragon. His descendants would continue to rule those kingdoms after him. He also greatly improved the roads from Leon to Gascony, leading to increased trade coming in from mainland Europe and the greater popularization of the holy site at Santiago.
So, say what you want of the Basques as a minority group, but I have to side with Mark Kurlansky's biased views of the Basques in that Spanish customs and Iberian Catholicism would not exist as they are without the Basques, among other things.
Basque fishermen were fishing and whaling off New England and Canada from around 1500 up through the early 18thC. In his excellent book "Cod", Mark Kurlansky mentions a Mayflower log entry noting the presence of Basque fishing ships off Plymouth Rock. Yet, their story is rarely told. (For more on that check out Kurlanky's book "The Basque History of the World"
Speaking of Plymouth Rock, none of the original Plymouth Pilgrims made any mention of the rock at all. It was first mentioned in 1715 and wasn't named until 1741; 121 years after the 1620 Mayflower landing.
Here is a relevant TED Talk by Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute, an organization that focuses on energy efficiency and sustainability.
I particularly like his parable: The booming whale oil market of the mid-19th century disappeared virtually overnight as coal energy began to compete in the market. That's why we still have whales today. The story could be analogous in many familiar ways.
__
Another relevant bit comes from anthropologist Marvin Harris, in his 1977 book Cannibals and Kings: Origins of Culture (pp. 266-271):
> Capitalism, then, is a system that is committed to an unbounded increase in the production in the name of an unbounded increase in profits. Production, however, cannot be increased in an unbounded way. Freed from the restraints of despots and paupers, capitalist entrepreneurs still have to confront the restraints of nature. The profitability of production cannot expand indefinitely. Any increase in the quantity of soil, water, minerals, or plants put into a particular production process per unit of time constitutes intensification. It has been the burden of this book to show that intensification inevitably leads to declining efficiencies. That declining efficiencies have adverse effects upon the average standard of living cannot be doubted.
> What must be made clear is that environmental depletions also lead to declining profits. The relationship is not easily understood because, according to the laws of supply and demand, scarcities lead to higher prices. Higher prices, however, tend to lower consumption per capita (the market symptom of declining living standards). Profits can be sustained temporarily if the drop in per capita consumption is compensated for by an expansion in total sales based on population growth or the conquest of international markets. But sooner or later the curve of rising prices caused by environmental depletions will begin to rise faster than the curve of rising consumption and the rate of profit must begin to fall.
> The classic entrepreneurial response to a fall in the rate of profit is exactly the same as under any mode of production that has been overintensified. To compensate for environmental depletions and declining efficiencies (which manifest themselves as falling rates of profit), the entrepreneur seeks to lower the cost of production by introducing labor-saving machines. Although these machines require more capital and hence usually have higher start-up costs, they result in lowering the unit cost of production.
> Thus a system that is committed to perpetual intensification can survive only if it is equally committed to perpetual technological change. Its ability to maintain living standards depends on the outcome of a race between technological advance and the relentless deterioration of the conditions of production. Under the present circumstances, technology is about to lose that race.
Chapter 15: The Industrial Bubble
> All rapidly intensifying systems of production, whether they be socialist, capitalist, hydraulic, neolithic, or paleolithic, face a common dilemma. The increment in energy invested per unit time in production will inevitably overburden the self-renewing, self-cleansing, self-generating capacities of the ecosystem. Regardless of which mode of production is involved, there is only one means of avoiding the catastrophic consequences of declining efficiencies: to shift to more efficient technologies. For the past 500 years Western scientific technology has been competing against the most rapidly and relentlessly intensifying system of production in the history of our species.
> Thanks to science and engineering, the average standard of living in the industrial nations is higher than at any time in the past. This fact, more than any other, bolsters our faith that progress is inevitable—a faith, incidentally, shared as much by the Comintern as by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. What I want to emphasize here is that the rise in living standards began only 150 years ago, while the race between rapid technological change and intensification has been going on for 500 years. During most of the post-feudal epoch, living standards hovered close to pauperdom and frequently fell to unprecedented depths despite the introduction of an unbroken series of ingenious labor-saving machines.
A good portion of French emigration to North America was mainly for the fur trade and exploration, especially in the 16th and 17th centuries. However, French settlements usually lacked women, or at least French women. In the reign of Louis XIV, the French did decide to send over more women to encourage settlement, called the Daughters of the King. Often only French males make the trek across the Atlantic. So assimilation (though, I'm not sure if I would use that, since it seemed more like a cultural exchange) would be kind of vital if you wanted to not only survive but create some sort of settlement for trade. French traders learned the local languages and customs, as well as techniques to survive the harsh winters. This meant that the French, almost naturally out of need, had a more amicable relationship with the local Algonquians and Huron in the area. It created ties with local chiefs, especially since woman had a stronger social role in Algonquian society. I guess you can compare it to royal marriage and creating alliances between the families. It helped with strengthening trade, as the marriages would give French traders permission to use the Indian lands.
As for the British, they didn't really have assimilation in mind when they were colonizing North America. They did have trade in mind, just as much as the French, but they also intended for nearly full-scale settlement. This is speaking generally though, since there were multiple settlements and charters and not all of them held the same goals. Most often, the British usually tried to keep the natives out, except for the contacts made through trade. However, since they tended to push out the natives from their lands, the only people that really held contact with the natives were mainly the European traders or, often reluctantly, government officials.
Not everything was completely negative though, there are some more notable exceptions. William Penn founded his colony, Pennsylvania, with tolerance in mind. Aside from religious tolerance, the colony also had a history of holding an amicable relationship with natives, quite unlike most of the other colonies. That's not to say there weren't tenuous times during the history of the colony. Whenever the Indian Wars sprung up, a lot of the settlers, especially the Scots-Irish on the frontier, tended to be a little wary and distrustful of their native neighbors. In New York, William Johnson, acted as an Indian agent for the crown, later a Superintendent of Indian Affairs of North America during the French and Indian War, and helped bridge a gap between Iroquois and Briton. Johnson held the rank of major general for a time during the war and led Iroquois and New York militia into battle. He wasn't the only one either, Pennsylvania and Virginia troops also fought alongside native allies, like the Cherokee. Granted, the relations fell apart after the end of the war, but this still kind of shows that it wasn't always as one sided.
I highly recommend Daniel Richter's Facing East from Indian Country, as well as James Merrell's Into the American Woods, Richard White's The Middle Ground, and Matthew Ward's Breaking the Backcountry. These books are where I got the material from, as well as the colonial records from PA and NY. I could probably give you a longer book list, but I think that covers everything. I wrote my undergrand honors thesis on the topic of the French and Indian War, pertaining to mainly the strained relationship with the Indians and frontier settlers in Pennsylvania, so if there's anything else I can add, please ask.
They want him to plead guilty to a felony drug charge? What in the fuck?! If your brother-in-law hasn't already done so, he needs to talk to a lawyer. They are very clearly trying to railroad him into a decision that is detrimental to his future and it seems likely they'll keep the pressure on him until he either has proper legal representation or pleads guilty to a felony drug charge that he is not guilty of. In John Pfaff's book, "Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration and How to Achieve Real Reform" he states that "Nearly 95 percent of the cases that prosecutors decide to prosecute end up with the defendant pleading guilty".
Hate him or love him, you should check out this video from John Oliver, who talks about prosecutors and the insane game they play with people's liberty and rights.
If one wants a deeper understanding of Peter Kropotkin's ideas, I recommend taking a look at the book Kropotkin: The Politics of Community by the anthropologist Brian Morris (If anyone here has a PDF of Morris' book please share it on libcom.org):
Kropotkin: The Politics of Community: https://www.amazon.com/Kropotkin-Politics-Community-Brian-Morris/dp/1591021588
If you want a book that uses Kropotkin's work for sociological analysis Living at the Edges of Capitalism: Adventures in Exile and Mutual Aid by Andrej Grubacic and Denis O'Hearn, that book gives a very good idea what "mutual aid" actually means:
https://www.amazon.com/Living-Edges-Capitalism-Adventures-Mutual/dp/0520287304/
As for anarchist thinkesr who are close to Kropotkin, I recommend taking a look at:
Stop being a pussy, step outside your echo chamber and learn something
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West by Dee Brown
I dare you
I think that more so has to do with the origin of the criticism--UMass is a heterodox school, Harvard is one of the premier economics schools in the world by prestige (if you can trust rankings, #2, but that's bubba meisa).
Additionally, the finding in the R&R paper was extremely politically convenient at a time when some, including well respected thinkers like Stiglitz, Krugman, Akerloff, Schiller, Summers, were calling for a return to a more a fiscal-based anti-crisis policy.
Had their paper not come out, some other talking head would have been found to justify the austerity claim (not that the R&R paper even really does justify austerity--the issue is long term average debt, balanced over the business cycle, not its static measurement at any given moment), which occurs regularly.
Also, the more intense your prestige, the less likely you are to publicly fess up. You see this in other disciplines. Chomsky, who, by any metric, is an incredibly intelligent man, who changes the conclusions of his theories regularly, will, nonetheless, never own up to their being issues in generativism generally & the minimalist program, specifically.
It really may be a Harvard & MIT disease. Steven Pinker was savaged by Taleb's statistical analysis, not to mention substantial rebuttals from anthropology, sociology, poli sci & economics which disputed his claims (notably everyone from Douglas P Fry to James Scott to Jared Diamond to John Gray disputes it, despite their lack of agreement on anything else)--but he only ever doubles down. Ditto for Pinker & other talking heads on the issues of adaptationism in evolution and genocentrism & other issues in biology generally. Larry Summers (who, academically within econ actually has some integrity) famously gave a talk about differences between men & women's career outcomes--he cited someone for his claim who was literally in the audience at the talk and during the Q&A said he mis-interpreted the data. He recast himself as a martyr for free speech later, even as this was impertinent to the subject at hand.
One thing I haven't seen yet in the comments here is that although disease caused mass death, it is also reductionist to say the mass deaths of American indigenous were solely war or solely disease. The two work hand-in-hand and the conditions created by colonization and forced migration later on exacerbated the effects of disease and prevented recovery. Source
> He claims that the native Americans did not actually live in harmony with nature
This is just a really stupid 'rebuttal' because no historian claims this. The myth is also racist noble savage stereotypes that attempt to portray indigenous people as uniquely environmentally sound. It is not even unique because the original European settlers also wondered at how the Americas were an unspoiled Eden and the Indians were too innocent and stupid to cultivate the land.
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown was very informative, basically a well-documented account of the interactions and conflicts between western expansionists and the Native Americans they encountered in the latter half of the 19th century.
http://www.amazon.com/Bury-My-Heart-Wounded-Knee/dp/0805066691
If anyone is interested in these sorts of wagons, a guy took one down the original Oregon Trail a few years ago and wrote a bestselling book on it. Tl;Dr: mules>oxen.
It's rather highly debated.
Source: https://www.amazon.com/Numbers-Nowhere-American-Contact-Population/dp/080613044X
It pales in comparison to the systematic reduction and genocide practiced on Native Americans by the US Army and government.
I don't buy the 'noble savage' trope that is trotted out all the time but to compare internecine and tribal warfare with wholesale one-sided slaughter and theft that was perpetrated on Native Americans is a bit disingenuous.
"Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee" is a good primer on what the Native Americans in the West faced. It made me both furious and sick to my stomach in turn.
My father gave it to me when I was a kid in the late 1970s and I didn't really pay attention to it. I reread it about two months ago and took it all in. It's fucking horrifying.
If anyone has the time/interested... Thomas King's book called "The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America" addresses this assimilation technique (and many others). What is great about this book is that it not only looks at Native American/Canadian assimilation but rather it encompasses a wide range of topics from the arrival of Christopher Columbus, the portrayal of Native American culture in media, legal status versus band/tribe identity issues etc. It is very interesting and extremely eye opening.
However, just a warning! He can be quite sarcastic and blunt throughout the book which can throw the reader off but honestly I think it's mostly a rhetoric technique.
Anyways! TL;DR read Thomas King's book! https://www.amazon.com/Inconvenient-Indian-Curious-Account-America/dp/0816689768/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1493837986&sr=8-1&keywords=inconvenient+indian
laughs in several decades of narrative-countering research
chuckles once more before clearing throat
If you enjoyed Origins and especially the Duat scenes, you might enjoy reading more about it. Eric Hornung’s The Ancient Egyptian Books of the Afterlife is a good starting point. The Egyptian Book of the Dead is also very good. It has photos of the papyrus with the translation in English. (Amazon links for convenience, try to find them at a library of course.)
Nefertiti’s afterlife is the most true to the Egyptian conception of the Elysian Fields. It perfectly captures what Egyptologists find captivating about this stuff. If it grabs you on a visceral level, you might be an Egyptologist at heart. Feel free to ask me for new or different sources.
I highly recommend reading Facing East From Indian Country. It's a historical account of what the various tribes experienced as the Europeans arrived. It also addresses that "apocalyptic" mentality and how the European Christian missions or unifying Native American leaders served as a grounding presence in a time of very rapid societal, environmental, and economic collapse.
First Nations is definitely the preferred term in Canada, but Indian isn't necessarily derogatory for many people. A good source on this is The Inconvenient Indian by Thomas King. He uses the term throughout because he thinks any collective noun referring to Indians as a group is somewhat insufficient because it doesn't take into account distinct tribal identities. So he uses the tribe name, i.e. "Mohawk", whenever possible, and Indian when he's speaking generally.
I highly recommend the book, it's super informative and very funny.
Actually the academic consensus is that such a figure is misrepresentation at best; from an academic book on the subject:
>There is no question that European colonization introduced smallpox, measles, and other infectious diseases to the Americas, causing considerable harm and death to indigenous peoples. But though these diseases were devastating, their impact has been widely exaggerated. Warfare, enslavement, land expropriation, removals, erasure of identity, and other factors undermined Native populations. These factors worked in a deadly cabal with germs to cause epidemics, exacerbate mortality, and curtail population recovery.
https://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Germs-Depopulation-America-Archaeology/dp/081653554X
A quick reddit post on the topic: https://www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/2bqvto/slavery_smallpox_and_virgins_the_us_southeast_as/
> Thanks for the link about the Solutrean Hypothesis. It's not very convincing, but it's interesting to speculate about alternate histories.
It's an interesting hypotesis but has almost no basis. It is fundamented on some similarities between Solutrean and Clovis lithic assemblages. It particularly relies on a specific flaking thechnique called overshot flaking which is present in both Solutrean and Clovis and almost nowhere else. It is a very weak connection because while it is a very rare technique, it is perfecly possible that it developed independently. On the other hand, it has two strong flaws: one is that there is a gap of 4.000 years between one culture and the other, and the other is that genetic evidence points towards East Asia as the most probable origin of the American first settlers.
The theory itself has almost no basis, but the scientific debate is interesting. And the book written by its two main supporters (Bruce Bradley and Dennis Stanford) is one of the best books about Clovis culture and Clovis lithic technology ever written: Across Atlantic Ice: The Origin of America's Clovis Culture
I'm currently reading a book, "Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States" by James C. Scott, which might interest you.
He looks at early state formation, and how we only ever hear about what happened from inside the state, and never from those who lived outside it.
So he examines what it meant to live both inside and outside a state, how long it took for states to develop, what limited them, and where everybody else was while that happened, along with a different take on what's meant by 'collapse.'
Oh shit, so I meant to add these as well, but they're the physical books which explains my forgetfulness. Apologies if not everything seems to relate but my original goal was "how did we get from slavery to where African-Americans are today as still-oppressed people?", which obviously the reason is "because white people have historically shown serious inferiority complexes n' mental issues and have been all-around assholes to everyone else" but truly history is tied into everything so, uh, yeah:
Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-1782
Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present
Infections and Inequalities: The Modern Plagues
If you want to go even more in depth about how much we didn't kill any indians, read Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee.. it reads like Zinn, but focuses on nothing but US treatment of native americans...
http://www.amazon.com/Bury-My-Heart-Wounded-Knee/dp/0805066691
"Cadillac Desert" by Marc Reisner is a great read if you really are into the history of water rights in the west and the Colorado River Compact.
It's full of lying, cheating, cronyism, bribery, etc.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B001RTKIUA
A million times yes! It is considered the seminal work on the destruction of the Native Americans, even after 50 years. It's written in a very approachable read but still highly academic. It's not a dry read by nature of the material, but it does have spells here and there of explaining what is occurring within the tribes themselves. Be warned, it gets much more graphic than this excerpt at times.
The description of Wounded Knee is only a small part of one chapter: each chapter details the relations between the American government and a single Native American tribe, so as to describe the different experiences of each tribe with the government. It covers the time span between 1860s-1890s.
It's free on Amazon Prime if you have that, and most libraries carry it. I won't link the PDF because I'm guessing there would be copyright issues, but you can easily find it with a Google search.
I think we can both (we can all?) agree that disease played a large if not leading role in the initial depopulation of the continents. The Black Death wiped out 30-60% of Europe's population, so epidemics decimating populations is nothing new or out of this world (and is also why we should guard our DNA and genetic materials the best we can hah - or should we share it to jumpstart scientific research? Tough call).
But this statement "But no, the state wasn't founded upon intentional and targeted extermination" is not one I am yet prepared to accept and is precisely the type of disavowing of agency in my statement that you took issue with (unless your definition of founded is narrowed to "fundamental root causes that enabled future human actions and non-human events to achieve a certain outcome").
This sort of viewpoint also ignores Native perspectives and disavows their agency, which also risks a reductionist and less clear view of history.
Hawaiians, by one estimate, have recently reached pre-contact population levels (300,000). That means it took them two centuries to rebound from initial depopulation, including Hawaiians who identify as multiracial. Let's lazily and arbitrarily take this as a benchmark.
Why then haven't North America reached pre-contact levels (300, 400 years?), taking the low estimate? (10 million vs. about 7 million, U.S. Canada combined).
Let's isolate the Haudenosaunee and take an American estimate of 10,000 at its "peak", which I'm going to guesstimate is 1730s-1770s, before Revolutionary War and after the Sixth Nation, Tuscarora, joined the Five Nations. By 1910, a little before 200 years, it had only recovered to 7,000 (the population has since jumped to 125,000 across United States and Canada) (complication: different 200-year period time frames).
Let's also look around the world, as you have, and notice that the Maori take up about 15% of Aotearoa's population (complication: slightly later contact), and their population has actually come to increase way past pre-contact levels. I'm a little confused by how you use "densely settled agricultural based societies" in your overall argument, but the Maori were not particularly dense (and hunted a bird to extinction), so I will just let you add that to your datapoints. They have been in contact for roughly the same time, although the era of intense colonization started later in the mid to late 18th Century.
Portugal had colonized and occupied Angola since 1575. Yet today's Angola is not majority Portuguese, despite frequent famines and outbreaks of disease. Same with South Africa, where disease often wiped out entire Khoisan bands. Most likely Khoisan and other African populations have not fully recovered, but the many indigenous languages of South Africa remain prominent. Clearly the colonial venture in Africa, despite sharing similar problems of disease, were not as wildly successful as in Northern America.
All these examples are ignoring the fact that not a small number of Natives knew how diseases spread, and thus quarantined themselves and were able to avoid catastrophic fates. Yet, these efforts were often impeded by the actions of the United States, which either forced contact or engaged in other imperial actions, disrupting Native life and reducing their chances at survival.
The only area of the world in which disease was likely the sole and overwhelmingly prominent reason for extermination beyond any dispute is the Caribbean. Everywhere else suggests varying levels of human agency (levels of Native resistance and intensity of Western imperialism), with the United States appearing facially to be of a particularly brutal nature.
This is a very complex question still being debated by people much more qualified than the two of us. So for the time being, I hesitate to attribute it overwhelmingly to any one factor ("actual answers") and will continue to place a significant burden on the United States to reflect on its intentional imperial actions, which often worked in concert with significant epidemics to decimate not only Native bodies but Native cultures, Native religions, and Native languages.
https://www.amazon.ca/Locked-Causes-Incarceration-Achieve-Reform/dp/0465096913
The U.S. should really stop electing its district attorneys.
The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey is a great book about traveling the Oregon Trail via covered wagon in the modern era.
Not verified with the mods but I have a degree in History from UBC and have taken several local/regional histories.
The Canadian/British government was brutal in their own way to aboriginal populations, as mentioned the residential school issue has had an amazingly profound impact on first nations culture, community, and history.. it essentially destroyed their civilization down to the family unit.
This included institutionalized sterilization - the government would pay the operators of the schools to do so either through surgery or radiation - intentionally housing students with other sick and contagious (TB, etc) students, your usual gambit of molestation, physical and mental abuse, beatings etc for using their own language, no real "education" to speak of, forced labor... all of this to school age children.
The result has, in general, resulted in huge poverty, huge over representation in the prison population, mental health, addiction, and suicide stats, etc.
That being said we have recently started to negotiate some treatys in good faith (for now) with bands/nations.
A couple of sources to check out... This documentary is quite popular though the creator is a problematic historian in some respects and some people take issue with him:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88k2imkGIFA
Again, hes not an ideal source but for someone just trying to get an idea of what went on, the primary source interviews with people who lived it are hard to hear.
If your interested this is a great read on the topic from a very respected first nations academic: http://www.amazon.com/The-Inconvenient-Indian-Curious-Account/dp/0816689768/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1377665377&sr=8-1&keywords=the+inconvenient+indian His writing style is very laid back and funny, mixed with some very interesting ideas. Does a good job at giving one first nation man's perspective on the treatment of the various groups since contact. He admits his bias, but he also does a good job not coming off as purely nutty as Kevin Annet.
All that negative aside, there are many nations who are doing amazingly well and healing themselves. There is still a lot of healing to be done though.
Unfortunately your entire ideology is based on a factual misunderstanding of American history and the purpose of the American revolution which was not to "fight off tyranny" but a coalition of slave owners seeking to expand the slave territories in opposition to limits imposed by European politics and British fear of American slave power, early industrial and merchant capitalists seeking to increase American economic protectionism, and white settlers who wanted to steal the land and wealth of the native Americans. Of course these groups conflicted at various times, leading to the mercantilist character of the Articles of Confederation clashing with the yeoman settler rebellions (Shay's rebellion being the most famous) which led to the American constitution becoming less democratic.
Obviously democratic here refers to white people, native americans and slaves were the prize of the American revolution which is why the majority of natives and blacks supported the British until the Continental army promised blacks freedom if they fought (which was a lie) while America used the war as an excuse to wipe out the remnants of the Iroquois confederacy (which was far more democratic than the American constitution).
Thus, even by the standards of the time, the founding fathers were more tyrannical than the British they were fighting, let alone the standards of today which presume blacks and natives are human beings. Thomas Jefferson understood this perfectly well and opposed the elitists like Hamilton, Washington and Adams who not only opposed democracy but opposed British parliamentary republicanism.
It's not entirely your fault you don't know your own history, the version of American history taught in schools is simply propaganda with no relation to reality. But you need to do a lot of work before you even begin to think about having 'informed' political opinions. There are countless books to choose from, here are a few which I personally enjoy or have heard good things about:
http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674735347
https://www.amazon.com/Half-Has-Never-Been-Told/dp/046500296X
https://www.amazon.com/Forced-Founders-Revolution-Published-Williamsburg/dp/0807847844/ref=pd_sim_14_11?ie=UTF8&dpID=51cov1ob19L&dpSrc=sims&preST=_AC_UL160_SR106%2C160_&psc=1&refRID=ZBQ3M98VY4DG35H71GXS
I may be presuming too much of your abilities, in which case Zinn's A People's History of the United States is a perfectly acceptable work for laymen written in a popular style.
So doing it to Pakistanis is OK? You honestly don't have a problem with that? Here's your source
I'm not sure you understand American history. There has never been an instance of black power expanding in America that hasn't been met with a white power blowback. Donald is your white power blowback. This book will help you understand that.
Being Hindu won't protect you. Being Sikh won't protect you. You're not in the in group, no matter what you want want to believe.
If you're unwilling to stop Trump, even if it means bringing yourself to vote for someone you despise ... well then maybe our community deserves the reaming we're going to get.
> Stefan also goes on to make other points, like how holding women to a lower standard is condescending towards them.
In college I read this The Name of War. This is perhaps the earliest account of the difference between what was expected of men and women in the colonies when things went real bad. If captured by natives the men were expected to kill themselves to do in battle while women were never expected to be in charge of themselves at any starting point. So some women were able to survive a death penalty after a grueling court battle and the men were not so lucky as they were held to a higher standard.
Unrelated, except in a tangential way, if you want to read some absurd shit that we've done in the past with regards to moving water from one place to another there's a book about water and the politics surrounding it called Cadillac Desert. It's a little dated in that it was written in 1986. But the facts that it covers are still true.
He does make some projections that haven't either yet come true or we've missed that particular bullet. I'd like to think that maybe some of it was due to what he wrote.
The point of my reply in regards to your post was the enormous, expensive effort we had to make to get water from one place to another using expensive pumping technologies to "lift" water over places that we probably shouldn't have. But we did.
There were many take-aways from this book. Many. Seriously, read it if you want to have an insight into how truly fucked our water policies were. And are. Growing rice in the semi-arid desert of California? Rice paddies in California? Second largest rice producing state in the US. Arkansas, California, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, and Texas.
What do those states, besides CA have in common? Lots of water. Even in Texas the rice is grown south of Houston in what is essentially wetlands.
CA? Semi-arid desert. Yeah, they say that some of the soils are great for rice. Clayey, so it holds water nicely. But there's no fucking water there unless you divert it.
The thing that I think aggravated me most, and in part I understand the short-term thinking. Kind of. But, no.
We took some of the most fertile land in the world, which was in and around the Tennessee Valley and put it underwater. This was for flood control and some hydro-electric. I think, but I don't honestly recall, that it was part of the WPA.
At the same time we were taking what is literally semi-arid desert in California, and diverting huge amounts of water by hook, and definitely by crook (see Mulholland), to turn it into huge farmlands that still exist today.
A recap. We drowned some of the best, fertile land. Then we took land that wasn't suited for it and turned it into a major crop center.
Ingenious? Well, the work put into it was. But we're reaping what we've sown, so to speak.
Truly, I can't recommend this book highly enough. The politics will make you sick or angry, or both. But it is a fascinating journey of how we got from there to here.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B001RTKIUA/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
My guess is that, and I say this tongue in cheek, that the only way we're going to unfuck ourselves over water is to invade Canada and then build giant pipelines to get "our" water. Water is the next oil. And Canada has an abundance of water. Don't think some government or corporation hasn't already thought of this. Fuck. Now I sound like I need to adjust my tinfoil hat.
Read about what Nestle is doing? Yeah, we'll go to war with a candy company so that Las Vegas and Phoenix, neither of which should even exist, can continue to have a resource that is unnatural, given their location and populations.
Do I know what I am talking about? I don't know. Honestly, all I can say is I've read a bunch of books and articles about water, water usage, water rights, water politics.
If you don't think water is going to be a major problem in the next 20 years, I think you're living in a tree. It's an issue now. But, please, do educate yourselves on this. Me? I'm dead and gone by then. I'm not sure why I even care. I just don't seem to be able to stop. Caring, that is. Who the fuck wants to think of a dystopian world existing, even after I'm dead and gone? I don't. Not that I'll be thinking or caring. I'd just rather not have to get on Elon's big ships to Mars because we've no other choice. / s
Mark Kurlansky (author of Salt: A World History) wrote a fascinating book about Basque history and culture. I definitely recommend it:
The Basque History of the World: The Story of a Nation
Professor here. I'm actually teaching a class I put together from scratch this summer on Indian/Anglo relationships in the colonial and early republic eras. I've published a little on Indians but at the turn of the 18th century, which might be too early for you.
Anyway, I'm not at home now, but if you're really interested in a giant list of books (I don't think anyone can get "comprehensive"), then just PM me and I'll look at my shelves when I'm at home.
edit: The five books I'm assigning for the class, if you're interested are:
http://www.amazon.com/New-Worlds-All-Europeans-Remaking/dp/080185959X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1301062905&sr=1-1
http://www.amazon.com/Name-War-Philips-American-Identity/dp/0375702628/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1301062952&sr=1-3
http://www.amazon.com/Indians-Settlers-Frontier-Exchange-Economy/dp/080784358X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1301062975&sr=1-1
http://www.amazon.com/Spirited-Resistance-1745-1815-University-Historical/dp/0801846099/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1301062994&sr=1-1
http://www.amazon.com/Parading-through-History-1805-1935-American/dp/0521485223/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1301063005&sr=1-1
This is actually a made-up number, I'm afraid.
It has absolutely no basis whatsoever in reality.
The worst epidemic in the Americas were the cocoliztli epidemics in what is now Mexico. One of the leading candidates for it is a native hemorrhagic fever carried by a local vector, most likely the vesper mouse, based on its reported symptoms.
Other populations did not see the same level of decline as the areas struck by cocoliztli.
Probably a lot of readers of /r/water have read Cadillac Desert.
I own a copy of, and have made two false starts reading, The King Of California as recommend by the anonymous author of the blog On The Public Record.
I highly recommend A Great Aridness, a worthy heir to Cadillac Desert.
Also on my to-read list is Rising Tide. I would like to find a book that does for the Great Lakes what Marc Reisner did for water in the American West with his book Cadillac Desert.
A few things I've read this year that have little to do with water:
EDIT: Oh, and Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt
Potato does a great job of exploring the socioeconomic effects of the potato on various populations in the world.
Cannibals and Kings is more on the anthropology side, but there is a least one really good chapter that discusses reasons why certain cultures developed religious dietary restrictions.
A History of White Castle is an interesting read about the conditions that brought about the rise of the fast food industry in the US.
I recommend Against the Grain: A deep history of the earliest states. By James C. Scott. You'll learn what archaeologists know about these questions, how they figure it out, what the evidence is, and so on. Here's the link to the Amazon listing.
/u/brigantus provides a very good answer in this thread that corresponds pretty closely to this book. As far as I know, there is no competing theory, although the experts still debate some of the details.
The tomato is a new world vegetable.
All of the usual foods you think of as Italian weren't Italian until post-Columbus exchange.
Source:the Basque people were the first importers of tomatos, tobacco, etc. etc. etc.
Look you seem to have good intentions but you're completely immersed in the neoclassical economics bullshit.
So, I recommend taking at this particular book:
The Dismal Science: How Thinking Like an Economist Undermines Community by Harvard Economics Professor Stephen A. Marglin, who is also a reformed/ former neoclassical economist.
Philip Mirowski's book Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science, his book More Heat than Light: Economics as Social Physics, Physics as Nature's Economics and his latest The Knowledge We Have Lost in Information: The History of Information in Modern Economics deal with a lot of the bullshit coming from economics.
You can find a more anti-capitalist critique in [The Beginning of History: Value Struggles and Global Capital](http://www.lamarre-mediaken.com/Site/COMS_630_files/Beginning%20of%20History.pdf
) (I included a PDF to it).
As for books on what communism might look like:
https://www.amazon.com/Living-Edges-Capitalism-Adventures-Mutual/dp/0520287304
https://www.amazon.com/World-Gift-Jacques-T-Godbout/dp/0773517510
https://www.amazon.com/Anthropology-Economy-Sharing-Thomas-Widlok/dp/1138945552
The economic mechanism that Thomas Widlok talks about in his book is very to what Peter Kropotkin calls "mutual aid" and David Graeber calls "everyday communism".
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee is a good one.
Caffentzis book critiques John Locke, not Adam Smith, if you want a book on Adam Smith there's The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation by Michael Perelman, which is very good.
If you're looking for books on societies that are (trying to) live completely outside capitalism I recommend taking a look at the book Living at the Edges of Capitalism: Adventures in Exile and Mutual Aid by Denis O'Hearn and Andrej Grubacic.
It takes a bit of effort and previous knowledge to completely understand it, but it's a pretty good book, you can find it here: https://www.amazon.com/Living-Edges-Capitalism-Adventures-Mutual/dp/0520287304
The Beginning of History: Value Struggles and Global Capital by Massimo De Angelis also adresses the misconception you seem to be bringing up (that capitalism is a totalizing system), Massimo De Angelis comes out of the same grand tradition as famous Italian autonomists like Negri, Lazzarato, Virno, etc, but where the latter all seem to have sunk into a common obsession with the notion of "real subsumption", that there is nothing and noplace outside of capitalism, De Angelis argues exactly the opposite. In fact, he insists that it would be better not even to talk about "capitalism" as a total system (as opposed to as an ideology - as an ideology it obviously does exist), but rather, to talk about capital, and capitalists, and capitalist value practices (using money to make more money), but that these capitalist value practices are never the only game in town. There are always other ones. True, the capitalist ones are dominant at the moment, but there is a continual struggle going on, where on the one hand, the market sets everyone against each other, sets the livelihood of people in Africa against those in Germany, of one city, town, enterprise, community, occupation against another, so that even every invention or discovery that was originally intended to eliminate scarcity and improve people's lives ultimately gets diverted to the purpose of creating new forms of scarcity and keeping people in desperate competition against each other. In reaction, those motivated by other values (solidarity, community, ecology, beauty, security, tradition...) are constantly creating new forms of commons, of shared and collectively managed resources, and political forces aligned with capitalism are always attempting to break them up and appropriate them with new enclosures. Thus, what Marx called "primitive accumulation" has never ended. At the same time, the capitalists are always trying to create "commons" of their own, what they like to call "externalities", fobbing off the costs of production onto other people, communities, or nature. Much of the political struggle of the last twenty or thirty years, De Angelis explains, can be understood precisely as battles over the creation and enclosure of different sorts of commons, and behind it all, lie battles over the nature of value itself.
I'd say the ancient more related to nature is more or less nonsense. Its no real different from today, people get confused I think with scale meaning different. They fought and changes nature, we fight and change nature and it strikes back pretty often.
In the American Indian case they were closer to native in their stories mostly due to a massive population decline that made older myths that Europeans also have in their own way more relevant due to the fact that the land itself returned to nature with the lack of people. Before small pox America, depending on which historical narrative you believe was full of developed or developing societies, with large cities. By the time we went west it was empty and 'wild' for a variety of reasons. I would recommend pox americana for future readings. It is a decent window into what I'm talking about even if its a couple, well, a few years after first contact. Had to read that for grad school history, american medical history, really interesting stuff. Mercury... it cures everything.
https://www.amazon.com/Pox-Americana-Smallpox-Epidemic-1775-82/dp/080907821X
I think personally what you imagine is not real ever in the history of man, nature is constantly try to kill you, which is why we have society... which over time brought us to cell phones and mom calling all the time to see if I'm still alive.
Enforce scarcity? could you explain that one please, I'm generally curious.
If anyone is interested about the history of the Oregon Trail, as well as how much of it has been preserved today, I highly recommend checking out The Oregon Trail by Rinker Buck. It is a fascinating read and I learned a lot more about the trail than I had known before.
I don't want to be adversarial, but the following statement could use some documentation: "Some estimates put the count at 118 million natives killed by direct involvement (from obvious negligence(seeing that their presence is killing people off via disease, but continuing to invade their territory) to deliberate extermination (trail of tears, etc), which is substantially more than the combined genocides that have at least minimum recorded numbers throughhout history perpatrated by all other groups/countries."
I'm interested in where you learned that the US perpetrated the greatest genocide in history because there are many scholars who estimate that the entire population of the Americas was below 118 million prior to contact with Europeans. This scholar, for example, documents the attempts to develop an accurate measure of Native American populations, and how many writers and historians have used unreliable methods for calculating population density.
So, without being smug or dismissive, I just really want to know what your sources are? Thanks!
I enjoy Jamestown history a lot. I'd like to read... whatever this is. Can you give us a link or something, OP?
In the meantime, I highly recommend [Love and Hate in Jamestown: John Smith, Pocahontas, and the Start of a New Nation](http://www.Love.com/ and Hate in Jamestown: John Smith, Pocahontas, and the Start of a New Nation https://www.amazon.com/dp/1400031729/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_AuI4AbMSDZ92Q). It's more personal and intimate than a lot of other Jamestown histories I've read.
James Loewen's Lies My Teachers Told Me does a good job treating the subject (as well as tackling several other myths in American history). I'd recommend giving that a read.
General histories of the United States from a Native perspective are a good place to look. Something like this, which I haven't personally read, looks promising.
This also looks interesting, but again, I haven't personally read it yet.
Beyond that, there's not a whole lot written on the war, although I do have a few fairly brief articles that I've found that challenge the typical patriotic account of the war:
http://www.pbs.org/wned/war-of-1812/essays/native-nations-perspective/
http://www.earlyamerica.com/early-america-review/volume-4/federalist-opposition-to-the-war-of-1812/
http://www.warmuseum.ca/war-of-1812/explore-history/the-native-american-war/
http://www.wiltonbulletin.com/799/war-of-1812-holds-ke-to-native-americans-qbanishmentq/
Not a native writing in any sense, but Dan Richter's Facing East From Indian Country is a great read. He melds traditional story telling with an imaginative use of other sources to create a sense of what it was like to be an Indian as the first groups of colonizers arrived.
Great book. Finalist for the Pulitzer. Definitely worth your time.
I personally, don't. And don't have much for you, I'm not deep into it.
But I asked a lawyer friend of mine who teaches a course on this subject and she came back with a couple items. She teaches with these texts:
https://www.amazon.com/American-Corrections-Todd-R-Clear/dp/133755765X
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Jim_Crow
And referred me to this syllabus:
https://www.aaihs.org/prison-abolition-syllabus-2-0/
I'm sure you and I both were hoping for something more succinct.
I was reading the New Jim Crow wikipedia page and among its critics is this guy, Plaff, who while contending TNJC's focus on the drug war makes a point you've brought up before: That non-violent drug offenders are not the majority of prisoners. His book https://www.amazon.com/Locked-Causes-Incarceration-Achieve-Reform/dp/0465096913 focuses on the shift in the 80's towards mandatory minimums and prosecutor behavior. The ever ratcheting prison term lengths since that time have left American prisoners with long sentences compared to other countries and I doubt that acts as a deterrent. I've heard the argument made that violence towards arresting police may be increased in the USA because the arrestee has so much to lose compared to other systems.
Would maybe start with an overview on underworld texts
Amduat and Amduat explained
Pyramid Texts
Book of the Dead (very large pages with full color plates of the Ani papyrus + translations)
Coffin Texts
Book of Gates and Book of Gates explained
Some of these may be available for PDF download elsewhere, if you search by ISBN.
Restricting voting to property owners is cited as an attempt to have only those vote that have a demonstrated interest in improving society. The thought is that if you have investments in the community, then you have a greater interest in protecting those investments and will be a informed, dutiful citizen as a result.
Woody Holton in Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia (The University of North Carolina Press, 1999), p. 218 briefly dives into enfranchisement in his analysis of revolutionary-era Virginia, and he argues that this was more of an excuse concocted by the gentry class than anything else. While George Mason voiced his concern about the influx of what he referred to as "ignorant or obscure" men winning elections and gaining seats on the legislature, he had very little reason to fear that the gentry class was going to be pushed out of power. Holton notes that the steps toward democracy in the state's 1776 constitution were relatively limited. The aristocratic-controlled legislature chose the Governor, the county Justices served life terms with vacancies being filled by their peers, and they even continued some vestigial traditions from the colonial period with the Governor appointing new Justices directly based on the recommendations of those currently sitting Justices. He concludes that limited voting rights simply came from the Virginia gentry's attempt to stay in firm control of the political system.
In this section, Holton cites Robert Beeman, The Old Dominion and the New Nation, 1788-1801 (Lexington, Ky., 1972) p. 33, 35. I wasn't able to find a digital copy online, but here is a review of the book that you might be able to access to determine if it will be helpful for you.
This is not an issue that was soon resolved in Virginia. This debate played out when forming their 1830 Constitution, when they were one of the few states in the nation to have such limited suffrage. I imagine that constitutional convention would be ripe for research on this topic.
Colonial Williamsburg Journal has a nice summary of the era's voting rights that may give you some ideas as well.
Be wary of using Google in searching this topic as this has recently become a re-politicized issue. Always confirm that your sources are good.
Last of the Mohicans is so freaking good, just had to put that out there. And its actually pretty educational too, I never understood siege warfare of that period until I watched that film.
Black Robe is a little-known Canadian gem. A Jesuit missionary sets out on a hopeless quest into French Canada trying to find his predecessor's mission. It's not a battle movie (aside from a few brief scenes), its more exploration, culture clash, love (lots of sex, yay Canadian films), and other themes. You could easily make an interesting campaign based on the journey in the book.
There's also the Patriot with Mel Gibson. It's campy but solid acting and perfect for inspiring RPG-sized adventures (small unit ambushes). Pretty much non-stop action.
You might also want to read up on King Phillip's War. It was a war between various New England colonials and certain Native American tribes. Per capita the bloodiest war in "American" history. It was a lot of nasty back-and-forth raids and really a very chaotic and confusing small-scale conflict that is also the right "size" for RPG scale adventures. Jill LePore's book The Name of War is the go-to read for this: http://www.amazon.com/The-Name-War-American-Identity/dp/0375702628
Have you read Locked In ?
It's basically a critique of Michelle Alexander's book on the causes of mass incarceration.
I haven't read it, but I've seen a couple of essays about it in liberal and libertarian circles. I don't really know if the critique is valid or not.
see here some links if you are interested:
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2017/02/09/everything-you-think-you-know-about-mass-incarceration-is-wrong
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/04/10/how-we-misunderstand-mass-incarceration
Sorry, I forgot to respond to this! I tried to pick out books that are fairly accessible & not loaded with anthropological jargon or the like.
Sorry for so many suggestions, but I thought I would give a bunch so that you can see what might appeal to you based on your own interests. All the above books are important because they help change our understandings of Native American and American history. Natives are not passive subjects in the books but are active in shaping their own lives.
You forget Basque fishermen. Here you go.
For starters: Wikipedia - Paleolithic Diet
I was really into anthropology a few years ago. Among other things I recall reading was that when humans first started eating grains 10,000 years ago, the average human lost a foot in height due to the lack of nutrients in neolitihic (grain-based) diets as compared to the paleolithic diet which their bodies had evolved to eat. This unhealthy diet, combined with sedentary living conditions (animal and human domestication) also led to either the introduction of - or massive increases of - almost every form of disease, including influenza, cancer, asthma, allergies, and heart disease, which continue to rise to this day.
Books I would recommend on the topic:
The Forest People by Colin Turnbull (study of a hunter-gatherer pygmy tribe, almost utopian)
The Mountain People by Colin Turnbull (study of an african tribe recently forced to adopt agriculture, truly horrific to read)
Cannibals and Kings: Origins of Cultures by Marvin Harris
Twilight of the Machines by John Zerzan
My Name is Chellis and I'm in Recovery from Western Civilization by Chellis Glendinning
>it isn't a utopia as you say.
I didn't say it was a utopia. I said:
>Where you could casually throw out a net a couple times a day and immediately catch fish. Or spend a couple hours in the bushes gathering up enough nuts and berries for the next 3 days. Because it was that abundant. We assume that hunter-gatherers worked terribly hard just to subsist, but a lot of the time it was pretty chill.
Which is true.
Are you sure YOU can read?
As /u/danachos says, the horribleness of the hunter-gatherer way of life is a myth created to justify taking their lands and destroying their culture.
I've been studying this, as a layperson, for going on 30 years. I'm not going to link to every book I've read and every documentary I've watched. The info is there - look it up for yourself.
I'm currently reading a new book that updates a lot of these ideas based on more recent discoveries.
https://www.amazon.com/Against-Grain-History-Earliest-States/dp/0300182910
The upshot is that, then as now, HGs were not in a great hurry to abandon their way of life because it worked pretty well for them.
I've also been fortunate enough to spend some time with indigenous Australians and learn a bit about their ways. They had a great life! They certainly were not waiting until some other group showed up to teach them another way. And their life really was exactly how I described: Coastal people could catch fish and seafood easily, literally just paddle out for 20 minutes, spear something or scoop it out - boom, lunch sorted. In some areas they can still do this.
I read Across Atlantic Ice when it was released. While their theory is interesting, it's still far from being accepted.
Edit: Here's a video presenting some of the interesting DNA evidence.
I had these text books:
one, two, three, four
And I loved this book Cadillac Desert ; there's a lot more .....
Take a look at:
You want something on cognitive science?
I recommend you take a look at David Graeber and David Wengrow's Farewell to the childhood of man: ritual, seasonality, and the origins of inequality.
Well...I don't what else.
The neuroscientist Jean-Didier Vincent is related to and is a fan of the anarchist Elisée Réclus, so maybe you could read his book The Custom-Made Brain: Cerebral Plasticity, Regeneration, and Enhancement. Agustín Fuentes'(who's kind of a lefty) book The Creative Spark: How Imagination Made Humans Exceptional, maybe.
You can start by reading the books at the bottom and these annotated articles:
black codes
redlining https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining
institutional racism
US Criminal Justice System
Racial Inequality
health disparities
carol anderson- white rage
Ta-Nahesi Coates -- Between the world and me
US Restrictive Covenants
There are volumes of studies, books and articles on the subject.
Your opinion is on the wrong side of history.
Love and Hate in Jamestown. I read it a few years ago for a US History course that I did not want to be taking, but I'm glad this was part of the curriculum. Fascinating account of some fascinating people, and more than a few complete knobs.
Also, on the second page of the prologue, the author makes a very good point which really opened my eyes to a key point about our land: "... America was a corporation before it was a country." Jamestown (all of Virginia, in fact) was pretty much a purely commercial enterprise. How little has changed.
Check out http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0375702628
Have a look at either of these books and see if it changes your mind:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1491:_New_Revelations_of_the_Americas_Before_Columbus
https://www.amazon.com/Inconvenient-Indian-Curious-Account-America/dp/0816689768
They had a very rich, very diverse culture, including full scale urban civilizations, architecture, art, some novel forms of government, etc. People that hate native american culture are generally fairly ignorant of it.
>No, you aren't. You are desperate to blame your bogeyman and don't want to speak to the people in question.
I speak to these people every single day.
>Look, I appreciate this is a ballache to deal with. I had the same problem when we voted to leave the European Union over here. We've had to come to terms and unpick the stupid, myriad but ultimately not racist reasons people chose to Leave.
It's not the same thing.
>Like it or not, that's what you have to do now. You can't just blame it on fucking white supremacy for gods sake. You are NEVER going to get people voting for you if that's the line you take! You can't shame people anymore. It doesn't work! They don't identify as white supremacists. If they don't, your line of attack has no effect because they know themselves better who they are than you do!
I'm not trying to get anyone to vote for anything. I am observing that I believe a substantial percentage of the American public would accept authoritarianism at this point in history. I believe that the willingness to accept authoritarianism is linked to our long and deep history of white supremacy that infuses everything here: economics, politics, real estate, education. Everything. In short, the white population that has enjoyed a privileged position in society is resentful when it has to compete for crumbs with people of color. This is true, whether or not the people themselves deny being racist. It is a sense of entitlement that the "jobs" are "our jobs" to be taken by "them" who are not qualified but get the job due to laws created to ensure equal access to opportunity.
It is the sense that schools are filling up with undesirables so we need more choice, more options to flee the public education (such as private school vouchers).
It's the sense that led real estate agents to redline certain neighborhoods, keeping our residential areas segregated.
>They don't identify as white supremacists.
My argument isn't what they identify themselves as. My argument is that living in the United States is living in a society in which the environment is white supremacist. It's an environment in which white privilege was built on the back of black chattel slavery. It is a legacy that persists. To understand this better, you might want to read these books:
The New Jim Crow
Dog Whistle Politics
White Rage
Without that, it's somewhat pretentious to lecture an American on American society when you don't live in and weren't raised in America. Don't you think? (ETA: In fact, you really don't know anything about me, do you?)
>If they don't, your line of attack has no effect because they know themselves better who they are than you do!
I'm not attacking anything. I am not trying convince them of anything. I am making observations about American society. Very few people are openly racist or even admit to themselves that they are racist. Yet racism is rampant. How often have you heard, "I'm not racist, but..." You might as well tattoo "racist" on your forehead when you say that.
His Two Cheers for Anarchism: Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, Dignity, and Meaningful Work is an excellent book as well, just making my way through Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States , I think it's up there with Seeing as his best work in my opinion.
Probably "Against Elections", which made a surprisingly compelling case against representative democracy (as we practice it).
More recently, "Locked In", which I thought did a good job of debunking many of the commonly-held beliefs about the causes of mass incarceration.
I read a book recently about a guy who recreated the journey. It’s pretty crazy. Link
Well, vaccines have technically been around for a few hundred years at least to my knowledge. The first successful smallpox vaccination, for example, was developed by Edward Jenner in 1796. And there was a sort of DIY inoculation method developed hundreds of years earlier in China that had an incredibly low mortality rate.
This Wikipedia page has a lot more information, but if you're really interested in learning more about smallpox, you've got to read Pox Americana by Elizabeth A. Fenn.
Maybe Erik Hornung's "The Ancient Egyptian Books of the Afterlife" could help?
http://www.amazon.com/The-Ancient-Egyptian-Books-Afterlife/dp/0801485150
It's got a chapter on the Amduat (Eg. Imy Duat, I think? lit, "The Things of the Underworld"), and a chapter on the Book of Gates. From what I understand, they're kind of similar, in that the Book of Gates follows the progress of a soul through the underworld after death, where the Amduat follows the journey of Ra through the underworld each night, dividing the journey into twelve hours, each hour being a different district of the underworld. It actually looks like a pretty comprehensive overview from the ToC shown on Amazon.
Plus, as a special bonus, you get the Litany of Re, the Book of the Heavenly Cow, and the Book of Traversing Eternity. Fun reading!
I have actual books for those claims, not links, though there is something on Google books about studies of pre-agriculture people on Cyprus that had some good information.
As for data, according to one book I just grabbed off my shelf, 30,000 years ago average male height was 177 centimeters, average male life expectancy was 33.3 years. Jump forward to 1900 and average male height was only just reaching 175 centimeters, after being much lower for thousands of years, and average male life expectancy was 32.5 years.
Unfortunately the numbers for male height in recent times are from 1960 and the life expectancy is from 1900. The modern life expectancy number comes from Metropolitan Life Insurance Company while the older figures come from studies done by J. Lawrence Angel. Studies of modern hunter-gather societies by Nancy Howell seem to bear out those figures.
Those figures were quoted on pages 19 and 20 of Cannibals and Kings.
Page 22 mentions that infanticide could have accounted for 50% of infant mortality both in pre-agriculture people and modern hunter-gatherers. The common methods for infanticide are strangulation, drowning, bashing them against a rock (probably pretty common if you can find enough evidence for it in the fossil record), exposure, and neglect. Neglect was most common and there the infant generally died from malnutrition and sickness after it had been weakened.
What have you read that is inconsistent? The book I quoted there was just the one I happened to have at hand, I've read a number of others, and probably have quite a few on my shelf, that come to the same conclusions.
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The actual papers cited are "Paleoecology, Paleodemographgy and Health" by Angel, "The population of the Dobe Area !Kung" by Howell, and "Some Predictions for the Pleistocene Based on Equilibrium Systems Among Recent Hunter-Gatherers" by Birdsell. I don't see a cite for the modern numbers unfortunately.
Tales from the Heart: True Stories from My Childhood by Maryse Condé. Some lovely stories about growing up in Guadeloupe and Paris that resonated with me because my parents had very similar upbringings.
Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader by Anne Fadiman. A book of short essays about the joys of reading. When I'm feeling world-weary and have lost all sense of why I read, this book restores it.
I'm not sure if this one counts as a "hidden gem" but I read Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee recently and it hurt so much. It's an account of the destruction of the American Indian tribes during the time period 1860-1890, and I think necessary to truly understand American history.
Nature's Metropolis by Bill Cronon - fascinating story about how Chicago developed into the urban powerhouse it is today
The Name of War by Jill Lepore - a history of King Philip's War of the 17th century, a profoundly bloody conflict between colonists + Indians
This Republic of Suffering, by Drew Gilpin Faust - history of death and suffering in the Civil War (LOVE this book)
The Circus Age, by Janet Davis - a political and cultural history of the circus during the 19th century
Segregating Sound by Karl Hagstrom Miller - how pop music developed from racial categorization
Cadillac Desert (Marc Reisner): https://www.amazon.com/dp/B001RTKIUA/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
Available on FindLaw (http://lp.findlaw.com/):
Hadacheck v. Sebastian, 239 U.S. 394 (1915)
Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty Co., 272 U.S. 365 (1926)
Berman v. Parker, 348 U.S. 26, 75 S. Ct. 98 (1954)
City of Eastlake v. Forest City Enterprises, Inc., 426 U.S. 668 (1976)
St. Bartholomew's Church v. City of New York, 914 F.2d 348 (2nd Cir. 1990)
Pennsylvania Coal Co. V. Mahon, 260 U.S. 393 (1922)
Penn Central Transportation Co. v. City of New York, 438 U.S. 104 (1978)
Loretto v. Teleprompter Manhattan CATV Corp., 458 U.S. 419 (1982)
San Diego Gas & Electric v. City of San Diego, 450 U.S. 621 (1981)
First English Evangelical Lutheran Church of Glendale v. County of Los Angeles, 107 S. Ct. 2378 (1987)
Nollan v. California Coastal Com'n., 107 S. Ct. 3141 (1987)
Lucas v. South Carolina Coastal Council, 112 S. Ct. 2886 (1992)
Dolan v. City of Tigard, 114 S. Ct. 2309 (1994)
Lingle v. Chevron, 544 U.S. 528 (2005)
Kelo v. City of New London, 545 U.S. 469, 125 S. Ct. 2655 (2005)
It's neither necessary nor desirable.
James C. Scott has a good critique of this kind of stuff in Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed , are you familiar with it?
It mainly focuses mainly on agricultural societies, so it doesn' directly address capitalism, although it has this nugget in the Preface:
“…as I make clear in examining scientific farming, industrial agriculture, and capitalist markets in general, large-scale capitalism is just as much an agency of homogenization, uniformity, grids, and heroic simplification as the state is, with the difference being that, for capitalists, simplification must pay. A market necessarily reduces quality to quantity via the price mechanism and promotes standardization; in markets, money talks, not people.
…Put bluntly, my bill of particulars against a certain kind of state is by no means a case for politically unfettered market coordination as urged by Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. As we shall see, the conclusions that can be drawn from the failures of modern projects of social engineering are as applicable to market-driven standardization as they are to bureaucratic homogeneity.”
If you want a follow-up to that, that addresses capitalism, and the exitsing attempts to go beyond it, I recommend Living at the Edges of Capitalism: Adventures in Exile and Mutual Aid by Andrej Grubačić and Denis O'Hearn.
Since you're to be against bureaucracy, Graeber's The Utopia of Rules is a good critique of bureaucracy: https://libcom.org/files/David_Graeber-The_Utopia_of_Rules_On_Technology_St.pdf
There's also this one on "democracy": https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-there-never-was-a-west
Graeber has another book where he treats this stuff in more detail, it's his first book "Toward an anthropological theory of value: The false coin of our own dreams".
You can find here: https://monoskop.org/images/3/36/Graeber_David_Toward_an_Anthropological_Theory_of_Value.pdf
Or here: https://libcom.org/library/toward-anthropological-theory-value-false-coin-our-own-dreams/
There's also some stuff in his "Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion and Desire", which you can find here:
https://monoskop.org/images/c/c9/Graeber_David_Possibilities_Essays_on_Hierarchy_Rebellion_and_Desire_2007.pdf
You can find all of his books here: https://monoskop.org/David_Graeber
If you like Polanyi, you're going to like this one:
https://www.academia.edu/23497370/Capitalism_mutual_aid_and_material_life_Understanding_exilic_spaces
https://www.amazon.com/Living-Edges-Capitalism-Adventures-Mutual/dp/0520287304
I've had this book recommended to me, which was shockingly published by a cultural institute at my university. Though I have not read it I do trust the person it was recommended by.
https://www.amazon.com/Forced-Founders-Revolution-Published-Williamsburg/dp/0807847844/ref=pd_sim_14_11?ie=UTF8&dpID=51cov1ob19L&dpSrc=sims&preST=AC_UL160_SR106%2C160&psc=1&refRID=ZBQ3M98VY4DG35H71GXS
If you want to talk about "production for use":
Look David Graeber's "human economies", you can find some of it in this essay: Turning Modes of Production Inside Out, or, Why Capitalism is a Transformation of Slavery.
Or Peter Linebaugh's Stop, thief!: The commons, enclosures, and resistance.
For a critique of high-modernist bullshit like "planning" and "market" I recommend:
Seeing like a state - James C. Scott.
This new book continues a lot themes that Scott started:
Living at the Edges of Capitalism: Adventures in Exile and Mutual Aid by Andrej Grubacic and Denis O'Hearn.
"Planning" and "planning boards" has nothing to do with original "socialism", the concept of planning was created by social democrats in Vienna (like Kautsky, other assholes) who called themselves "marxists" but were big believers in neoclassical economics and they were big believers in managerial capitalism they wanted to get rid of "markets" by transforming the state into a big corporation.
These supersized countries need to support themselves with taxes. Traditionally these taxes were not money but grain; wheat, rice corn. These grains are easily seized by the collectors sent out by the kingdom as they have very set ripening seasons. Sorghum in the tropics can be harvested any time. (read 'Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States'). This made it difficult for tax collectors to support large kindoms, as the farmers could vary their ripening times, making collecting forays less productive than in India, Europe, East Asia and the Americas.
For the real story, I highly recommend this book.
TL;DR Pocahontas was like nine at the time, and Smith thought she was a nice kid, but that's pretty much as far as it went.
Love and Hate in Jamestown was a pretty good read. I was part of a US History course I had in undergrad, so I remember parts of it haha.
1491 and 1492, when it comes to demographics, are
science-fiction-fantasy books.My previous reply was actually somewhat referencing a book which is about the issue, namely:
http://www.amazon.com/Numbers-Nowhere-American-Contact-Population/dp/080613044X
I am sorry, demography is my kink and i hate it being politicized or done badly.
No, I did not know what that site was until I looked at it. THEN I looked around. Because I like to think for myself.
Native people do not equal 'magic people'.
You 'wipe your ass' with Treaties, eh? (Did you know the Geneva Convention is a treaty? Will you wipe your ass with that one as well?) Good to see you're dropping the reasonable person disguise. Tell me how First Nations are rewriting history. They don't deserve "free things", they deserve to have Canada honour its treaties. Like any nation does. Just a quick aside, does 'free things' include health care? Or education? Or housing? Because Canada does guarantee all citizens these rights.
My job = archaeologist.
White people were not here before First Nations. Not even close. I imagine you're thinking of the Atlantic Crossing theory, which (if you read the book "Across Atlantic Ice") does not suggest a white-first arrival, but the possibility of a connection between the Clovis people and cultures on the spanish coast approximately 10-12,000 years ago. BTW, this book is where this theory comes from. It's an interesting theory and there are some strong correlations between the morphology of Clovis points and the morphology of the Solutrean peoples of the same time. This does not prove white supremacy or a white-first arrival in North America any more than your disdain for Treaties proves their worthlessness. You conflate cause with correlation.
Recently Kenniwick Man, your poster boy for white-first America, underwent some more DNA sequencing and the most recent results show him to be First Nations. (Final results pending.) But I bet you didn't read about that, did you? And even if he was proven to be as white as you want to be, it wouldn't change the fact that there is evidence of earlier occupations in North America. There are suggestions that South America was populated earlier, but those sites are controversial and are still undergoing investigations.
And I bet you didn't read about the pre-clovis sites, did you? Maybe cherry-picking the interwebs isn't the best way to gather up ammunition for an argument. Because I read the net as well, and as my job requires me to research these things I have some experience with these topics.
I really assumed that would be Cadillac Desert.
dude.. read a book. actually, read any book.
On the other hand, thanks for the heads up on the tourist trap
https://www.amazon.com/At-Dark-End-Street-Resistance/dp/0307389243
https://www.amazon.com/Name-War-Philips-American-Identity/dp/0375702628/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1483269332&sr=1-3&keywords=king+phillip%27s+war
https://www.amazon.com/Americas-Gates-Immigration-Exclusion-1882-1943/dp/0807854484/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1483269354&sr=1-1&keywords=At+america%27s+gates
https://www.amazon.com/We-Sell-Drugs-American-Crossroads/dp/0520280784/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1483269378&sr=1-1&keywords=We+sell+drugs
https://www.amazon.com/New-Jim-Crow-Incarceration-Colorblindness/dp/1595586431/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1483269450&sr=8-1&keywords=new+jim+crow
https://www.amazon.com/Lavender-Scare-Persecution-Lesbians-Government/dp/0226401901/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1483269475&sr=8-1&keywords=lavender+scare
https://www.amazon.com/Refried-Elvis-Rise-Mexican-Counterculture/dp/0520215141
https://www.amazon.com/Fighting-Their-Own-Battles-Americans/dp/1469618958
https://www.amazon.com/Radical-Sisters-Second-Wave-Liberation-Washington/dp/0252077547/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1483269640&sr=1-1&keywords=radical+sisters
That'll get you started
Someone send the author of this very poor article a copy of Cannibals and Kings. No one has ever switched to farming so they would have more free time. Humans switched from hunting & gathering to farming because of population pressure: they ran out of land and didn't want to starve. H&G societies seem to have more free time than any other form of economic organization.
The Ancient Egyptian Books of the Afterlife by Erik Hornung.
Look for the Battle of Gwynn Island. There's not that much online that's in the public domain I can see. I remember reading about it more in a book I read for a college class called Pox Americana and also in some personal research I did into the history of Matthews County, Virginia (for unrelated reasons but it did come up in said research.)
http://www.virginiaplaces.org/military/gwynnbattle.html
Acknowledged. This is an interesting book.
http://www.amazon.com/Cannibals-Kings-Cultures-Marvin-Harris/dp/067972849X
https://www.amazon.com/Across-Atlantic-Ice-Americas-Culture/dp/0520275780