Posted on 10/23/2012 6:57:26 AM PDT by Renfield
When it comes to the birth of America, most of us are working from a stew of elementary school history lessons, Westerns and vague Thanksgiving mythology. And while it's not surprising those sources might biff a couple details, what's shocking is how much less interesting the version we learned was. It turns out our teachers, Hollywood and whoever we got our Thanksgiving mythology from (Big Turkey?) all made America's origin story far more boring than it actually was for some very disturbing reasons. For instance ...
(Excerpt) Read more at frontiers-of-anthropology.blogspot.com ...
Ping
The Indians were so good at killing trees that a team of Stanford environmental scientists think they caused a mini ice age in Europe. When all of the tree-clearing Indians died in the plague, so many trees grew back that it had a reverse global warming effect. More carbon dioxide was sucked from the air, the Earth's atmosphere held on to less heat, and Al Gore cried a single tear of joy.
One of the best examples of how we got Native Americans all wrong is Cahokia, a massive Native American city located in modern day East St. Louis. In 1250, it was bigger than London, and featured a sophisticated society with an urban center, satellite villages and thatched-roof houses lining the central plazas. While the city was abandoned by the time white people got to it, the evidence they left behind suggests a complex economy with trade routes from the Great Lakes all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico."
‘Bout time they start talking about the pre-pilgrim plague.
Interesting read.
The profanity is annoying.
I clipped this article to Evernote to read later. Looks interesting...
A little vague on the line between fact and theory on a couple of minor points but overall a very good read. I’m sending it off to my niece who could use a little non PC history that’s actually an enjoyable read.
The vulgarity isn’t the problem. It’s the recycling of the left’s “reimagined history”. The blog post is an absurd compilation of Howard Zinn style material. Anyone who thinks that a stone-age culture would support 20-100 million Indians in North America hasn’t a clue.
Jack O’Brien and Elford Alley are both writers for Cracked.com and this looks very much like one of their lists.
In general, I find Cracked to be pretty funny and very, very unreliable.
“Amusing” would be my description.
This is a prime example of PC history. In fact, it isn’t history at all.
What’s “reimagined”? How did Monk’s mound get there? There’s compelling evidence for everything the author stated. To say that there weren’t large, very complex societies in the Americas before 1492 is just denial.
Egypt was a stone age culture when the pyramids were built.
I dont have an issue with 20 million, Cahokia, Double Ditch and many other sites have shown that stone-age cultures did congregate in very large numbers. Now to try to prove a number like 100 million is in my educated opinion, just absurd. We would need to identify another 100 sites on the scale of Cahokia to even be certain of a number like 20 million.
Fun read!
Ping.
Post-modern revisionist claptrap that deprecates the accomplishments of the early European settlers in the New World. Nothing here we haven’t heard for the last 50 years: indians good, white men bad. Columbus was a greedy usurper who enslaved the Noble Red Man. Native civilization put European culture to shame. Blah blah blah.
A yawner written by some guy who thinks swearing and sophomoric margin doodles are witty.
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