6 Ridiculous Lies You Believe About the Founding of America
http://www.cracked.com/article_19864_6-ridiculous-lies-you-believe-about-founding-america.html
This was quite interesting to me and significantly contrary to what we were all taught in school. Not that I am amazed that school teaches crap, rather the opposite, I am often amazed when schools teach relevant, meaningful and insightful content. My interests in history tend to be scientific/technological and as such I know more about early Chinese and Middle East civilization, largely, I think, because there are better written records from those eras. Anyway, because what I read did jive with some of the historical information I am aware of regarding early civilizations in America, I thought my reader(s) might find it interesting. I will outline each of the myths here simply because I figure a lot of reader(s) won’t be able to read the site from work computers…
#6. The Indians Weren’t Defeated by White Settlers
Actually, it seems quite clear that early explorers inadvertently brought highly communicable diseases like smallpox with them and given that the population in the Americas had no resistance, it seems the plague wiped out huge swaths of the population, perhaps as high as 90% in some areas. As a consequence, almost certainly the local organizations of the natives were in total disarray when the ‘pilgrims’ landed and as a consequence there was no organized resistance to their ‘invasion’.
#5. Native Culture Wasn’t Primitive
Just like the Egyptians, the native American cultures were able to accomplish amazing works. Unlike the Egyptians, the works the natives produced were not protected by deserts and decayed much more quickly. Also, there seems to be a substantial cultural bias against the native’s achievements and little effort (until fairly recently) has been made to preserve or investigate the remnants. Though it appears that the cultures were all ‘stone age’ (meaning they hadn’t any significant use of metals such as copper, bronze or steel), one should be quite cautious in considering that as wildly primitive. For much of the modern European / Middle East / Chinese history metals were used sparingly and generally only as extended ‘wear points’. Even when steel became comparatively inexpensive to produce (I think between 1,000 AD and 1,500 AD) it was still so expensive that very few people made extensive use of it. It wasn’t until the industrial revolution happened (mid 1,800s) that steel started to become ubiquitous like it is today. My point is you can achieve a very high culture with stone-age tools, you are not in any way limited to primitive hunter-gatherer societies with very low population densities.
#4. Columbus Didn’t Discover America: Vikings vs. Indians
This is finally becoming mainstream. The Vikings not only had successfully navigated their way across the Atlantic, but had well established colonies and regular trade. Greenland used to be green! Greenland used to have extensive Viking colonies on it (why this is never discussed by global warming people is a conundrum to me). They were ‘lost’ when the climate turned cold around 500 years ago and Greenland became the ice covered continent we are all familiar with today. The very northern part of Canada was also settled by the Vikings, though what evidence I have read about says it wasn’t so extensive (meaning hundreds of people vs thousands on Greenland). This is the first that I have read of evidence that the Viking colonists regularly sailed down the East Coast. It makes sense that a healthy population of natives would routinely push back the Vikings. Even though the Vikings had some steel at the time (as well as bronze), as I mentioned before, it wasn’t in armor it was in the pointy ‘wear bits’ of the weapons. As such, their weapons were not materially different from stone axes, stone-tipped spears or stone-tipped arrows. If the local population was robust and experienced with warfare (I have read quite a bit (though mostly post-European settlement) that the native tribes pretty much were in constant conflict) I don’t see the Vikings as having much of an advantage. I suspect that if the population was as low as the early European settlers make out that the Vikings would have rapidly colonized at least North America and we would all be speaking something besides English.
#3. Everything You Know About Columbus Is a Calculated Lie
This is the first I have heard that supposedly Columbus died a penniless pauper. My understanding was he made a pretty nice chunk of change for his efforts, though my understanding was he died frustrated because his goal was to find trade routes to Asia, not discover a new continent.
#2. White Settlers Did Not Carve America Out of the Untamed Wilderness
If, as I am now seeing as likely, the first European settlers arrived shortly (my impression is about a generation, or around 25 years) after a plague (or series of plagues) wiped out most native Americans, then I would expect that the land would have been relatively easy to clear and farm. I was brought up on the idea that from the sand on the East Coast beach to the Mississippi river that the forest was an unbroken vista of hardwoods 4-6 feet in diameter. I am sure that there were plenty of locations where that was true, but I am starting to doubt that was generally true. With the stone tools available I doubt that the natives were capable of the whole-sale deforestation that the Europeans were, but by the same token it is fairly trivial to ‘girdle‘ a tree and once an area is cleared it is trivial to keep it clear (unless, of course, 90% of your population died horrible deaths).
#1. How Indians Influenced Modern America
I got no opinions/insights in this, early US history isn’t something that fascinates me that much, though I do know that a lot of what we commonly learn about our history is heavily skewed (the US, for instance, had a pretty steady policy of making treaties with the natives then immediately reneging on them, sending in the troops to commit heinous massacres of innocent women, children and elderly (and the occasional fighting-age male who was careless enough to be without weapons to defend himself). I know that trappers in the Midwest and Rockies knew that certain tribes could be easily negotiated with and certain tribes would immediately try to kill them, so clearly there was a very wide range of cultures within the native populations. I find the mention of ‘defections’ of early settlers to native populations interesting. Perhaps the walled forts with their pointy-topped posts were to keep the settlers _in_ rather than the natives _out_. If true, that puts a real different spin on things, eh?
I am sorely tempted to dive into some research on this topic, but I suspect I won’t make time for that in the near term. I already have too many projects on my plate. It is very interesting, though, and I know that many of these areas are subject to archeological flux (recently I was exposed to some plausible arguments that North America was initially settled by people arriving from the general area of modern France by way of boats across the Atlantic, as opposed to walking across the Bering land bridge on the West). The world was a very different place when the ocean was 300 feet lower than today (as it would be very different if the ice cap in Antarctica melted and the ocean rose 300 feet; no more Florida!) and since people tend to initially settle on the coast at the mouths of rivers, nearly all such archeological evidence would be most inconvenient to investigate.
So, anyone have any insights for or against?
