Posted on 10/07/2013 3:07:35 PM PDT by EveningStar
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 cracked.com ...
I'm interested in seeing what you history buffs think of this article.
This article was originally posted here on October 23, 2012.
Ping
Originally posted here last October.
I think points number 6 and points number 4 are pretty well established as fact at this point. I imagine the other ones are up for debate. To be sure, i don’t think any of the other 4 points in this case are completely, 100 % false.
Ahh, Cracked. They’re occasionally amusing, but it’s sometimes difficult to sift through the hard-left opinion masquerading as comedy. That’s when they’re not taking potshots at this place, such as “death threats to Obama are commonplace on Free Republic”.
I do not know this site and really don’t wish to risk getting cookies and virus.
#6 is disputed and there are a wide, very wide, range of estimates for the population of indigenous natives in the Americas.
#5 is partly true. To pretend that American Indians are a single class of people is like saying I’m African or European. They’re diverse and dynamic.
#4 there is a lot of speculation that this is true.
I stopped there because I don’t like Cracked.
SC is the resident professor of history.
it is a satire site
don’t believe everything you read on a satire site
I didn’t go there anyway. No wonder it did not seem right.
This article does not appear to be satire, despite the attempts at humor.
I tend to quibble with the estimated population of North America. The fact that there might be campfires all along the coast does not necessarily lend to the idea that the inner part of the continent is as densely populated. Even if they weren’t quite as hunter-gatherer as once thought, they still weren’t as well developed and agriculturally oriented as would be required for higher density populations.
:)
From the article
“...It’s the same reason every extraordinarily lucky CEO of the past 100 years has written a book about leadership. It’s always a better idea to credit hard work and intelligence than to acknowledge that you just got luckier than any group of people has ever gotten in the history of the world.”
Yeah, ok.
That must’ve been one helluva plague to not only have wiped out 90% of North America’s indigenous peoples (read those who got here first) it also wiped out the physical evidence of the greatness of their society.
Fascinating and funny.
The site claims there were once 20 to 100 million Native Americans before some unexplained "plague". I've never seen any estimate higher than 20 million. Lots of sweeping claims are made with little support for the claims.
A lot of the blather is building to the assertion that Europeans only defeated a 90% decimated population, and could never have defeated the pre-plague population.
Whatever, once Europeans began settling in the New World, they settled a few hundred here and there and were still surrounded by thousands of natives. The Powhatans were still all around Jamestown in substantial numbers, many times the population of the small Jamestown settlement.
Those writing on that site have an agenda, and it's mostly to denigrate and minimize any accomplishments of Europeans.
It was disease what ultimately killed most Indians off. Dropped them right and left.
On that site, they write of some plague that decimated the native population before the Europeans arrived. I've read of how the original Spanish explorers spread diseases (primarily smallpox) among the natives that killed many in some areas. But that's not what that site is referring to, and certainly not much later exposure to European diseases after there were many Europeans in the New World.
Like most of the assertions made on the site, the "plague" is not well explained and certainly not documented.
I can't vet the Cracked article as a whole, but please see the link in post 16.
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