Posted on 03/02/2005 10:33:03 AM PST by Destro
February 06, 2005
History, but not as America knows it
Sarah Baxter, New York
EVERYTHING (well almost everything) you know about American history is wrong. With these provocative words, a book that turns conventional wisdom about the history of the United States on its head has caught the imagination of the country’s conservatives. According to The Politically Incorrect Guide to the History of America, a surprise bestseller, early settlers treated native Americans — whom it calls Indians — with respect, buying rather than stealing their land.
President Abraham Lincoln, who emancipated the slaves, was opposed to racial intermarriage and did not launch the civil war to free black people, the book says.
So it goes on: rather than saving the country from the Great Depression, President Franklin D Roosevelt deepened the economic misery of the 1930s; Senator Joseph McCarthy was right — there were reds under the beds; and President John F Kennedy’s politics were no better than his tomcat morals.
The book has climbed into the top 10 of the New York Times bestseller list thanks to enthusiastic word of mouth and favourable plugs on right-wing talk shows. The liberal New York Times is appalled. “It is tempting to dismiss the book as fringe scholarship, not worth worrying about, but the numbers say otherwise,” the paper commented.
For its author, Thomas E Woods, an Ivy League- educated historian who teaches at a community college in New York, the sales are sweet vindication of a message he believes his colleagues do not want to hear. “It’s a much more serious message than the title suggests, based on some of the most recent scholarship,” he said.
Politically correct teaching in schools has long been a gripe of the right. Noreen McCann, 45, home-schools her six children in St Louis, Missouri, rather than expose them to left-wing thinking.
“I think Christopher Columbus was a good person for discovering America and I teach my children that he wanted to become wealthy and spread the Catholic faith to America,” she said. “I tell them, ‘Your daddy also wants to help people through charity and make money for himself and his family’.”
The Indians, McCann added, were granted too much uncritical reverence in schools. “Modern textbooks whitewash the Indians by saying they lived in harmony with nature and treated it with respect. They used to herd 100 buffalo at a time over cliffs and slaughtered them a herd a time.”
The alleged dominance of the left in teaching positions at universities is another touchstone issue. There was a national furore last week after Ward Churchill, a lecturer in “ethnic studies” at the University of Colorado and an expert on native American history, was invited to lecture at Hamilton College in upstate New York.
The student newspaper revealed that he had written an essay after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 applauding the “gallant sacrifices” of the suicide “combat teams”.
After a fierce row, including questions about whether the long-haired lecturer was falsely passing himself off as a native American, Churchill was forced to resign his chairmanship of the ethnic studies department and the university has launched an inquiry into whether he should be fired.
But a detailed look at some of the more unorthodox views in Woods’s guide are giving pause even to rabid rightwingers. It turns out that the 32-year-old writer from Massachusetts, the cradle of American liberalism, is a defender of the right of Southern states to secede from the union.
Woods is a founder member of the League of the South, a group which argues that “white Southerners” should not have to “give control over their civilisation and its institutions to another race, whether it be native blacks or Hispanic immigrants”.
John Kienker of the Claremont Institute, a right-of-centre history think tank, agreed with Woods that there was a problem with politically correct teaching in schools. “The American founding fathers are presented as terrible racists and wealthy men who oppressed the poor.”
He claimed, however, that Woods’s view of the past was no less distorted. “If you follow his book, you will learn that Lincoln was a tyrant and the real heroes of America were the Southern Confederates.”
Woods admits to sharing some common ground with the left. His book deliberately stops at the year 2000, when George W Bush was elected president. Although his account of American history has won praise from cheerleaders of Bush, he is politically aligned to the isolationist wing of the conservative movement, championed by Pat Buchanan, the populist former presidential candidate.
“If anybody has misled us into a war, it is Bush,” he said.
Scumbags who attack Lincoln through vicious lies deserve to be torn down or at least revealed as the idiots they are.
Alleged?!?!?!?!
2b,
I read the first couple chapters of a recent book about the Deerfield raid. They go into some detail about the trade relations and feuds between the tribes in the northeast.
White traders and settlers didn't show those tribes how to conduct political intrigue, wage war, or have business acumen. They already had those attributes, and were used to the settlers' advantage.
An example is motivation for the Civil War. The baby Republican Party was founded on abolition and opposition to polygamy. That was what we now call the "base". The professional courthouse ex-Whig politicians were not abolitionist. Lincoln was a politician and did and said what politicians do.
He told the base what they wanted to hear. He told the ex-Whigs, who dominated Congress and the Northern legislatures what they wanted to hear. Historians are stupid if they take one politicially expedient comment of Lincoln and try to ascribe a "position" to it other than "political expediency". Lincoln lacked the "moral compass" of Bush and was more like LBJ.
As for the civil war, it should be noted that even before the formal actions of Lincoln and Congress, the Republican "base" was mobilizing themselves into militia. There were many (what would now be called fundamentalist) churches where every able bodied man (and boy) in the church volunteered for the militia with the motivation that is was the calling of God to reverse the sin of slavery. There were many Quakers, Mennonites and Amish who felt so strongly about abolition that they switched to the Free Methodist or Nazarene or Baptist church solely for that reason.
It was only after the abolitionist volunteers suffered such a heavy casualty rate (those ex-pacifists made lousy soldiers) and the ranks were decimated that Lincoln later imposed the draft and compulsory service on the Catholics and non-abolitionists who did not have a dog in that fight.
No "vicious lie" has been told about Lincoln except for those who practice his idolatry. Woods told the truth about Lincoln and it is the same truth that troubles you and the Claremont Institute so much.
What wiped out the mound builders and other tribes was probably small pox or measles or other communicable diseases which spread like wild fire with first contact with Europeans elsewhere but wiped them all out before Europeans prosaically arrived in those regions.
And you missed the President's reasons for asking Congress to declare it against Iraq.
Last war Congress declared was against Japan and Germany. There was no decleration of war against Iraq - instead Congress authorized the president to use force if the President felt that Iraq did not comply with the UN resolutions on WMD inspections.
PS: Did Congress declare war against Italy? Bulgaria and the other axis power alliess as well?
I agree with the basic thrust of your post, but just have a few questions.
By Anazasi, do you mean the Chaco Great House builders, people on the Colorado Plateau after Chaco living in Mesa Verde and that region, or later Rio Grande pueblos just before Coronado? It's a bit of a pulp journalism term (from the Navajo no less) that kind of glosses over the differences between these time periods. Maybe I'm being too academic considering my background. People like to say the Anazasi disappeared, but really they probably just moved, changed their settlement patterns (no more great houses), and became more insular. Probably as a result of internecine warfare coupled with local environmental degradation and climate fluctuations.
King Philip's War was brutal, as was the earlier Pequot War that preceded it. In both cases, different Indian tribes sided with either the Indians or the Colonists. I've worked on sites for both these early clashes between colonists and Indians. Some very interesting uses of european trade goods and modification to suit the Indians sense of what was important.
The French and Indian War was against mostly the French and their Huron allies. For the most part the Iroquis tribes were on the side of the Brits/Colonists, mostly because they were fighting their old enemies (the Huron). I don't know as much about this or later conflicts though, so I can't really say which side committed more atrocities. I would guess they are about equal.
>>cannibalism (Navajo, Anasazi).
I've seen and studied some of these remains. Some pretty grisly stuff though they all pre-date the Navajo from what I understand.
Turkeys too in the Southwest. Turkey feather blankets have been found in some dry caves.
America did not have the beasts of burden beyond the limited to a specific region llamas and the dog that would have allowed domestication on the scale seen in Europe. In areas where there was potential to domesticate, Indians proved that they were very capable, like when the horse was introduced by Europeans. Within a generation, if one did not know better it would seeme Plain's Indians were horse riders and breeders 'par excellance' since the dawn of time.
Were Indians brutal in the wars mentioned? Yes, but so were the Europeans - those examples should not be used to measure who was right or wrong in terms of historical analysis.
Modern textbooks whitewash the Indians by saying they lived in harmony with nature and each other and treated it with respect
>>2banana's characterizations were not in accordance with scholarship on the subject - especially regarding on how native people's died out and on the domestication of animals.
Most Indians died because they had no contact with the diseases Europeans brought over. But that doesn't mean that the natives got along peacefully with each other and lived in a utopia the way my grade school teachers made it out.
You are right that there were no beasts of burden comparable to oxen or draft horses in the Americas, though dogs and travoises were used to great effect by natives all over the Americas. The Plains Indians really did adapt well to horses and were better horseman than just about any cavalry in the world at the time--possibly the best since the Mongols actually from what I understand. They just didn't get along with each other all that well, so you had Plains Indians raiding other tribes.
The history of the Americas is replete with Europeans capitalizing on this type of intra-tribal hostility to divide and conquer. Central Mexico, Peru, New England and the Plains.
Thanks - dare I ask Finland?
That is one theory, though the Aztecs were much later than these instances of cannibalism. There isn't a whole lot of evidence of contact with Central Mexico and the US SW other than a few bells and tropical feathers, and some Arizona/New Mexico turquoise in central mexico.
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