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.
Just about anything can be right in theory or a right in theory. Theories tend to multiply and swarm around the available facts. In 1860 plenty of Americans, from the President, President-elect, and Attorney General on down assumed that unilateral secession at will was unconstitutional. Given the disagreement it would have been for the best had the Supreme Court ruled on the question, or had the states appealed to Congress for deacession, but the rush to form a new country was too great.
I've yet to see a substantive factual challenge to anything asserted in his book. Unfortunately the same cannot be said about all recent US history books written from a conservative perspective.
BWA=HAHAHAHAHAAHAH.
For starters, Woods says miscegination laws were put in place to protect blacks from whites, not to prevent the "pollution" of white blood by blacks. That is simply silly. He is apparently clueless as to when the first miscegination laws were even passed (try 1660s) and the CLEAR purpose was to prevent intermarriage so as to prevent the "inferior" race from bringing down the "superior" race. These laws were only passed when there were large numbers of interracial marriages showing up---clearly nothing to be worried about if whites were taking black wives, because black wives would be no more "abused" than white wives. But that wasn't what they were worried about: the Virginians were clearly obsessed by "black blood" mixing with white.
Do you recall the page number that is on?
I like it already and I haven't even read it. LOL
I would love a sit down over a beer. I agree with you completly and I accept Turner's conclusions, like all conclusions with such archeological evidence with an asterik.
I know the Brits bombed Finland.
And we pulled our ambassador from Finland sometime in 1944 when the Finns kept up their war with the USSR... but now, we didn't declare war on them... :)
I suppose there should have been a resolution added to allow the president to use harsh language.
You mean those Mayans who carved that "horse", or whatever large four-legged animal it was, didn't know what they were doing?
Or do you mean they carved that image while on peyote, and it was just some imagined animal?
As to the long-nosed Rain God, why is it the first European "archaeologist" (such as they were in the mid- 1800's) who drew the first drawings of the Mayan ruins with Chac's long curled nose, drew them clearly as elephants? (I think his name was Maudseley). A reasonable argument could be made that as one who had seen a living elephant those long curling snouts would remind him of an elephant. But why could not the same argument be made about the Mayans who carved those images? It is because the later PC Archaeologists all "knew" there were no elephants in the Americas--at least during the times the Mayans (or the much earlier Olmecs) populated Central America.
Conventional Wisdom often holds us back from the discovery of Truth that inconveniently contradicts that Conventional "Wisdom".
The Mayans wrote everything down - they wrote nothing about the horse or any large draft animal that had vanished within memory. Such a memory would have been around and have eliminated the shock of seeing Spanish mounted on horses.
Sorry, not credible.
PS: Are you a Mormon?
PS: The images of horses and elephants I am talking about are from carved stone slabs that were found in the mid to late 1800s. Most if not all were hoaxes.
Not true.
http://www.acnatsci.org/museum/leidy/paleo/equus.html
says there were remains of horses on the American continent that are pre-Columbian. Is this site not credible? I searched on "Horses in ancient america" and came up with 10 + hits, not all of which are "Mormon" related. There is ample evidence that this issue is far from settled--at least beyond the closed minds of the PC crowd.
Also how can you be sure when the carvings were made?
Can anyone be sure when anything was carved? The photo I saw of the horse was taken around 1950, and it is on a stone that is an integral part of a ruined building (the Nunnery, I think), IMHO it is not a forgery, if it were forged with the intent of making people think horses were among the Mayans, when all credible PC archaeologists know there were none, the forger would have carved a more convincing "horse". Moreover, why would anyone need to create false evidence of the existence of animals that even real science admits were on this continent, even if they don't agree on the timing? The PC crowd says elephants and horses (equus) were extinct 10,000 years ago. They easily could have missed a few isolated herds that survived for a few thousand years more until they interacted with the Olmecs between 3,200 B.C. and their (the Olmecs) subsequent demise around 200 B.C.
Perhaps the reason the Mayans associated the image of an elephant with a rain god, is because the elephants were more plentiful when the climate was wetter, but became extinct during a prolonged drought. Deifying a symbol of wetter climate would be one way a culture would try to end droughts.
Science is continually discovering some species they thought died out eons ago, finding out that small herds of horses or elephants survived a couple of thousand years longer than they thought is no big deal.
The Mayan culture had apparently developed a "tradition", for lack of a better word, that eschewed the use of draft animals, even if they had them. It appears the Mayan kings preferred being transported around by servants on couches (?). They also apparently didn't use wheeled transportation despite the presence of an extensive network of wide, paved roads. This aversion to wheels for transportation is puzzling when we discover the Mayans had wheeled toys. They must have had some cultural reason for not using the wheel for transportation. I find it dificult to believe that an ancient society that had the numeric concept of zero, plotted the orbits of multiple planets, and calculated lunar and solar calendars equal in accuracy to our own calendars, was too stupid to know about the wheel.
I am not beholden to any requirement that horses and elephants be proven to have existed among the Mayans. None of my beliefs would be shaken if it could be proven that was the case. IMHO the stone depictions of Chac the Rain God look more like an elephant than do the stone depictions the PC Arcaeologists say are jaguars look like jaguars. They admit the Mayans knew what a jaguar looked like because the jaguars are still there. They don't think the Mayans knew what an elephant looked like because the elephants are not still there. (Maybe the jaguars ate all the elephants?)
So why is there a picture of actor Tom Beringer potraying General James Longstreet on the cover of the book?
You are a Mormon?
And your proof of this assertion is.........?
You are a Mormon?
Yes, but what does that have to do with your failure to provide proof that horses were never (absolutes are so difficult to defend) domesticated before the Spanish brought theirs here?
It seems there are plenty of other opinions out there, and most are non-Mormon, that cast a doubt on your absolute statements.
All I am saying is there is uncertainty over some of these issues, and you cannot prove your argument to the satisfaction of the sceptics--Mormon and Non-Mormon. You may, and obviously do, subscribe to your absolutist position, but the rest of the world does not.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.