The chapter on Wyatt Earp references Knights of the Green Cloth by Robert K. DeArment. There is no citation at the beginning or end of the chapter. Instead, the book is mentioned in the second paragraph and about a third of the text is a long quoted section of the book.
In the JFK chapter, the book begins by noting that JFK was the youngest president elected, before noting that Teddy Roosevelt was the youngest president, but was not elected. This feels like unnecessary trivia inserted to make the author seem more knowledgeable, which does not contribute to building a narrative…
One paragraph discusses 1961. The next chapter begins “In the next year, 1962” to help those who can figure out what comes after 1961.
The chapter refers to a concept that “is known as the threat of future bets”. In No Limit Hold Em: Theory & Practice, this concept is called “the hammer of future betting”. I couldn’t find “the threat of future bets” in a quick skim of the most relevant chapters of The Theory of Poker and it does not appear in the index of that book.
It hasn’t been a topic of great interest to me. I know enough of the basics to catch the most egregious errors, but I’d still have to look things up. I can tell you that Porfirio Diaz was president for a long time, that election fraud against Madero led to the Mexican Revolution, ending his time in office, but I couldn’t tell you much else about them.
The idea of getting paid to fact-check feels a bit weird. I’d consider it, but I have no idea what appropriate value is.
Suzzer, if you can read in Spanish, then I highly recommend La Revolucioncita Mexicana by Rius (anything written by him is great) and Breve Historia de Una Derecha Muy Chueca, basically a summary of how many right wing politicians have fucked over Mexico over the years. They’re both easy reads and a great jumping off point for Mexican history. Spoiler alert: they both hate Porfirio.
Thanks. I am always interested to learn more about that stuff. As I’m sure you know, reading Spanish is much easier than understanding spoken Spanish.
I don’t plan to go into colonial or post-colonial Mexican politics too much in the book. Mostly my major theme is that as Americans we learned basically nothing about Mesoamerica in school. I am banking that people will be interested in that. But obviously you can’t talk about Mexico w/o mentioning Cortes.
What I really want is someone who has deep knowledge on the indigenous Americans in Baja. Unfortunately there weren’t a whole lot of them to begin with, and almost all of them died when the Spanish showed up and tried to convert them to Christianity.
The Jesuits (then the Franciscans and Dominicans) built missions from the Southern tip of Baja to north of San Francisco. As far as I can tell, they accomplished nothing except giving us a ton of place names. All the Catholic Mexicans currently living in Baja came over from the Mexico mainland. All the Catholic Mexicans and any converted indigenous people living in US state of California were immediately marginalized after the US took over.
So the only story we get is the Jesuit missionary version - which of course meshes perfectly with souls who need saving. IE - they were all literally naked, had no culture, couldn’t even build shelters for themselves, and on the brink of starvation except for once a year when the pitahaya cactus produced fruit. Then they would gorge themselves until they got fat. When the fruit fermented they would have drunken orgies when even familial bonds were ignored.
You will read this version in pretty much any book you can find. I wasn’t buying it before reading 1491, and definitely not after. There were a bunch of New World cultures that anthropologists in the 19th and early part of the 20th century were super primitive. Turns out they just lost 90% of their populace to smallpox, which would make any culture super primitive.
I’d like to see a bunch of Orange Country Karens trying to rebuild society after 90% of their neighborhood died.
Covid makes all this New World smallpox disaster stuff a little bit less abstract than it used to be.
One of the most fascinating things I’ve learned in all this is that there are estimates of something like 300k native americans living in California before the Spanish arrived - possibly more people than the rest of the entire continental US. Yet there is this persistent myth that California was basically empty and under-utilized when the noble Westerners showed up. Smallpox cleared the way. Same with the Incas. And I’d bet the Cochimi in Baja.
I’m guessing you are more likely to get someone who has some knowledge of the topic and knows who to read to get the depth you want.
I feel like the story you could be telling is how your travels led you to realize a gap in your education and that part of the narrative is your personal journey in trying to fill in that gap. I think you said before that you had problems figuring out how to integrate the history into your book. Showing the difficulty you encountered in trying to find a non-Jesuit version of history is one way to do that.
I went here. I saw this. I needed to know more, but what I found was from an obviously-biased colonial perspective. I dug deeper for knowledge and found more. Now that I know what I know, here’s how I look back on those experiences with a new eye. Maybe, you even revisit the same places and see things you didn’t see before.
That structure would feel very natural by letting the reader experience the acquisition of knowledge in the same order that you did, learning alongside you.
Also, it was fun watching you edit your post in real time.
Am sure you realise this so not trying to undermine your point or book, as it sounds great. Just adding that even if pre-Columbian history in the Americas hadn’t been literally wiped out, it wouldn’t have been taught anyway. The pre-colonial history of India exists, but growing up in the UK then the impression you get is still of primitive people who needed civilisation. Indeed, that’s still the common perception of empire in general.
But the real story that we aren’t taught in school is a lot more interesting. There are credible estimates that more people were living in the Americas in 1000AD, than in the entire rest of the world. At the very least it’s clear there were many times more people in the Americas than Europe. W/o smallpox to plow the field for them, the colonization of the Americas would have been a completely different story.
I think I actually have a pretty good basis for everything except Baja. There’s been a ton of study on Mesoamerica, and it’s always being updated. But no one seems that interested in the human history of Baja.
But the wild thing is there were people there in neolithic time creating one of the top 5 most prolific cave art sites in the world.
But by the time the Spanish arrived, no one knew who created them. The best theory now seems to be it was the ancestors of the Cochimi. But the Cochimi who were left when the Spanish showed up were adamant that it wasn’t their ancestors. They supposedly thought it was a race of giants - due to some of the paintings being on 30’ high cave ceilings.
The section on Emperor Julian once against cites a listverse article by Larry Jimenez, whose name is again misspelled. Jimenez is not listed in the index, which Mason paid an indexing service to compile.
While technically not incorrect, “Alamanni” instead of “Alemanni” seems to be a less-favored variant spelling.
The sources section for the chapter on Pope Joan suggests that this chapter is the work of Antonio Carrasco.
Here are the sources cited, one of which is not like the other.
Alain Boureau: La papisa Juana: la mujer que fue papa. Madrid : Edaf, 1989.
Antonio Lillo: La “Papisa Juana” de Roidis y la de Casti: Notas sobre la polémica en torno a las fuentes de la obra de Roidis. En estudios romanicos, ISSN 0210-4911, No. 16-17, 2, 2007-2008, pags, 603-620.
Wikipedia
I know nothing about Arabic transliteration, but the lack of apostrophes makes me feel like the chapter on al-Mutamid does not use the formatting of names that a modern scholar of Middle Eastern history would use.
Having already referred to “Alfonso VI of León” (with accent) as the “Christian King of Leon” (without accent) in the same paragraph, the book parenthetically reminds us of his religion in noting that “Al-Mutamid allied himself with (the Christian King) Alfonso VI”.
The sources section against cites some books/article plus “Wikipedia”.
The discussion of the early travels of Christopher Columbus leads to the observation: “This makes us think that he knew the Atlantic currents and the circulation of the trade winds”. This insertion of the first-person plural is jarring and makes it seem like this is a new observation by the authors.
Filipa Moniz Perestrelo is spelled as “Felipa Monis de Perestrello”.
The authors unleash their inner Palin: “This made Columbus fear that his project would be abandoned indefinitively”.
The article on John Burgoyne credits an article on “encyclopedia,com”. Yes, that is a comma in the URL. Note that while the title of this article refers to Native Americans, Mason prefers to use “American Indian” in his text.
The encyclopedia.com article does not mention raping women or kidnapping children. These seem to have been inserted by Mason, but I can’t tell what his source is. Does he subscribe to the myth that non-white men seek to rape white women? Most rape accounts during the American Revolution seem to be focused on British soldiers and Hessian mercenaries doing the raping.
The Cherokee chapter cites “Remembering the Time Andrew Jackson Decided to Ignore the Supreme Court In the Name of Georgia’s Right to Cherokee Land” from sustainatlanta.com, but incorrectly lists the title as “Remember the Time…”
I’m not sure if Mason knows that Andrew Jackson was not president in the winter of 1838.
From the Davy Crockett chapter: “…his being featured in movies and popular TV shows also added to his mystic.”
If the Leveson inquiry was meant to be an investigation into media ethics, Robert Jay’s cross-examinations have occasionally seemed more like a masterclass in the use of elegant and occasionally arcane vocabulary. Points have been “pellucidly clear”. Arguments have been “nugatory”. The “propinquity” of politicians and media has been under scrutiny.
Thursday’s English lesson, however – delivered in one of the inquiry’s more surreal exchanges – concerned the infelicitousness of language used by News Corp lobbyist Fred Michel. Probing Jeremy Hunt on Michel’s claim that the culture secretary was seeking “impactful remedies”, he asked Hunt whether “impactful” was “an adjective which would naturally fall from your lips”. No, said Hunt. “Is it a word?” wondered Lord Justice Leveson. Jay’s response was withering: “Not one I would use, it’s fair to say.”
