Discussion for article #230574
Don’t expect this to be well received. Challenging a culture’s founding myths is more or less the definition of heresy. IMO unwillingness to examine this issue and even worse in other parts of the country is behind a lot of the opposition to the common core curriculum.
14 Likes
Information like this is what conservatives live to ignore, it not suppress entirely.
No, it will not be well received. But I am curious what the Foxy News fans will offer as an alternative history. Too bad there are lots of different contemporaneous accounts of that time that can tell us the real story.
4 Likes
TIm WEed LITERALLY RaPEs TruE aMERican HIStory. HIStORY DOESN’t CHANGE beCaUSE it IS HISTOry. It’s ALReaDY HAPPEND. HistORY IS SuppoSED to MAKe us PROUd OF Our HIStorY, NOt SHAmefUL dISTortIONS froM EXtremE LIbtards WHO haTE our FREEdOMS!11!11!!one!!1!1!!!
9 Likes
*shrug*
2 Likes
But we bringed the injuns culcher and Baby Jesus!
9 Likes
Aw come on Tim, the Thanksgiving myth is small potatoes! You need to gird up your loins and go for the big fish! I’m waiting your epic take down of the greatest myth of all: CHRISTMAS! Cliches optional.
6 Likes
Let’s start small: Columbus Day. I like to call it Indigenous Displacement Day, and at least one bleeding-heart bastion in Blue Country has adopted something similar.
I’ve never met a single person who thinks the Indians got a fair shake for their good will, but then, they actually teach you these things when you grow up in the First Colony. If they do here, why not elsewhere in the States, where the history is less personal, isn’t literally under your feet?
1 Like
Disease, overwhelming numbers and superior firepower were all contributors to the genocide and displacement of Native Americans, but buried in the piece is another element often ignored, “Indian allies”. There is not a single episode of American history involving the use of force against Native Americans that didn’t include the willing efforts of one tribe or another allied with the Europeans to decimate their rivals, often with a brutality equal to the worst of the white man. The tragic and ugly elements of the history of the colonization of the Americas and this nation’s westward expansion should not be ignored, but the enslavement and extermination of others is not a singularly European failing.
6 Likes
Uh, no. Ronald Reagan and Jesus came here on a bald eagle together to write the U.S. Constitution, thus defeating communism for our troops and liberals trying to take freedoms away from their Prius and the main stream media so did ignore that when Paul Revere rang that bell from Obama’s tyranny! From there ever was that U.S. Marine did salute a bear in the woods with Jesus and telling those pointy headed professors no to socialism.
I learned that from Sarah Palin and email forwards from my Fox News watching grandpa. True story.
16 Likes
Columbus discovered the Caribbean and Central and South America. Leif Ericson discovered North America in the 11th Century. 70 Siberians actually discovered America 14,000 years ago, unless the science has since been debunked.
5 Likes
Bingo, and there were plenty of blacks in Africa willing to capture other blacks and trade them to whites. And there were good Native American tribes and bad ones, plenty of violence between them before the white settlers showed up and made their mess.
So, it appears there are good and bad people, and it has nothing to do with race, religion, gender, etc.
Duh.
2 Likes
You forgot the slavers raiding up and down what is now New England. That helped spread disease.
Tomorrow isn’t a holiday in my family.
I think the only surprising piece to me (although I should have suspected, but never thought about) was the “why” of the local indians having such a surplus of food supplies.
Generally, I suspect intelligent and reasonably educated Americans think of at least four separate historical settings touched on here: the Conquistadors and their ravaging of central-American Indian culture and numbers both intentionally and unintentionally (introducing illnesses to an unexposed populace), the pilgrim landings of 1619-20, the hatred for the Indian nations and cultures which drove the French and Indian War and “justified” much of the later westward expansion, and the rebellion against the English throne which culminated in formal declaration of such in 1776.
Connecting those isolated dots is an important piece of historians’ work, at least as important as fleshing out the full pageant at each of the settings.
It’s ironic that immigrants illegally crossing the southern border are routinely accused of bringing dread diseases with them into the US. Yet there’s not one documented case of an outbreak of any disease linked to undocumented immigrants that I know of. You have to go back four centuries to the last time there was such a link.
5 Likes
It’s always interesting that the people calling the Thanksgiving story a myth can never point to anything in the story that is inaccurate. Look at this article: it mentions events from before Plymouth (possibly, as other accounts that I’ve read indicate that the epidemic had yet to make it to the Wompanog), events from other colonies (very much conflating the second-son population of Virginia with the religious and sailor-based populations of Plymouth and Mass Bay), and events from more than a decade later involving a different tribe (unless you don’t marginalize the “allies” like the author does and realize that the Wompanog were a member of the alliance and a major rival of the Pequot).
4 Likes
I believe Amerigo Vespucci beat Columbus to South America as well.
1 Like
It should also be noted that the Wompanog were most likely one of those allies. In fact, the main item you generally see in anti-Thanksgiving articles that was actually left out of the Thanksgiving event chronology was the conspicuous talk of the neighboring groups the Wompanog had ongoing tensions with.
“the hatred for the Indian nations and cultures which drove the French and Indian War”
Umm…The French and Indian War was basically the extension of the Seven Year War between France and England, into North America. Essentially, it was a fight over who was going to get the lions share of North America, and the French lost. Various Indian tribes fought on both sides. But it was not a genocidal war of the colonists vs. Indians by any stretch of the imagination. It was British soldiers and colonists and Indians vs. French soldiers, colonists and Indians.
It was also the testing ground where many of the officers in what was to become the Continental Army got their experiences. Including one George Washington.
4 Likes