Does the book talk at all about the Seminole Wars?
When i was in high school i did not care about learning much of anything. And American history was like going from grade to grade learning the same damn thing about the founders over and over and…so that did not help.
But a few years later when i first read about the Olmec, probably a readers digest or something, i was like what this is interesting? After that i had to try and learn about all the different tribes people like the Mayans the Mound Builders the Iroquois Confederacy.
Even read some of the dark stuff which for sure helped me out of any ideas of Americas goodness. Lets rip the kids from their parents and beat their language out of them. Yeah…
Currently reading What Hath God Wrought, the Oxford US history of 1815-1948. Andrew Jackson was a real bastard to the natives, who always had some minority support in Congress. When it came to territorial expansion the natives almost always got screwed, even when the Supreme Court occasionally ruled in their favor.
It’s an excellent series if people want to delve into US history.
1 Like
Has the US ever finally decided this kind of thing is wrong? You wanna try to find a time up to the present when any administration wasn’t at least supporting military attacks on indigenous people in North and South America?
You know who most of the 200k people killed in the 80s in Guatemala were and which side we supported? (I know you know Suzzer)
Mayans…and now we put them in cages for trying to escape the hell we helped create in the Northern Triangle.
1491 and companion book 1493 by the same author as guns, germs, and steel.
The overall hypotheses of these three books really hammer home the point that Europeans had no advantage in intellect, they only succeeded due to resources.
That said, the other civilized cultures of the world were pretty brutal as well. Not to mean whataboutism, just that life has pretty much always sucked when it comes to the “other”. What European/American culture excelled in was doing and justifying bad things (Religion/slavery) when doing the good thing conflicts with our perceived economic self interest.
Peace is a relatively new concept. It’s just a race between whether our maturation as a species happens before we wipe ourselves out. My money is on the microbes (I’m a microbiologist). On deck: Covid-19.
1 Like
Yeah the Aztecs literally believed the ground needed blood to produce food. That led to some extreme nastiness.
Otoh history books don’t spend much time on the boring peaceful periods. This may be made up, but I’ve heard there’s a Chinese blessing “may you live in uninteresting times.”
The book does a good job of explaining how the Indians’ concepts of justice came into conflict with the settlers. In their minds if you kill some of ours, we kill some of yours, then we’re good and we can talk about peace. Of course that didn’t work out.
1 Like
I think the big difference was the capitalist and non-capitalist concept of property. And of course the Spaniards with no money or property didn’t fair particularly well either. Most of the European peons who came with the Spanish or French just died from yellow fever.
Hey guys victor is super duper left. Like really left. Uber left. He wants you to know that he is as left as they come. Lefty left of the lefters. Leftieter than Bernie left. He is mr left.
Ok buddy I just saved you your next 50 content free posts insulting someone to demonstrate how super galactically left you are. For real. He is left. Believe him.
But what if he went so far left that he circled the globe and is now right? headexplode.gif
1 Like
I’m listening to Undaunted Courage in my car - mainly to try to get less sucky at expository writing, but also because it’s a great story. I feel a little better informed now about the dark side of it - after reading the book in the OP - and I’m also happy Ambrose doesn’t sugar coat how badly we treated the Indians ultimately.
Lewis seemed to actually have an unbounded optimism that they could broker a peace among all the Indian tribes and bring them into the fold of a great commerce empire with the United States. Apparently Jefferson thought of the Indians as noble savages, who could with time be brought into civilized life. He never once said the same or showed any interest in African tribal customs or history. Seems obvious it was mandatory for them to think of African as something subhuman, to justify slavery.
Anyway what brought me back to the present was Ambrose dryly noting that the Arikara went from 30k strong and a dominant force in the northern plains - to 6000 and just hanging on - from two smallpox outbreaks over a few years. I try to just imagine the horror of something like that, and can’t.
Imagine if instead of the Europeans killing 90% of indigenous Americans with all these horrible diseases, it was the other way around. That could be an interesting book.