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250 years is longer than the existence of a country called Italy, let alone the Italian Republic. Just like in Italy, the history of people in your area did not
by derdi 4mo ago
250 years is longer than the existence of a country called Italy, let alone the Italian Republic. Just like in Italy, the history of people in your area did not start with the founding of your country.
- inigyou 4mo agoReally? My history class taught me that before the Europeans arrived there were only the native americans, so nothing of historical value.
- mothballed 4mo agoThe adobe structures of the American southwest, and mounds in many other areas survived, but for the most part there was not much left of historical value in terms of ruins of structures of the native americans. Europeans more often build with stones, rock, brick, etc and more regularly other more survivable building materials.
- inigyou 4mo agoYou might have missed the sarcasm
- alsetmusic 4mo ago> You might have missed the sarcasm I didn't. It's pretty frustrating how many people on the internet can't infer intent. I upvoted your clearly absurdist statement because I got it. Sadly, that's the modern internet. Enough people are incurious and bigoted so as to make absurd statements appear genuine. On an up-note: at least one person understood your snark and appreciated it for what it was.
- K0balt 4mo agoEuropeans are the descendants of the third little pig?
- dqv 4mo agoI had always thought I didn't like history. It was just so incredibly boring. Later in life, I found out why. It's not that I didn't like history, I just don't like the sanitized version taught to me in primary/secondary school. It's like corporate public relations where they vaguely acknowledge wrongdoing, but communicate in a very weaselly way to downplay it. The rote response I hear from the USA fandom is always some variation of "WELL THEM INDIANS DID BAD THINGS TOO" and it's like... ok? Then why obfuscate? If everyone is equally bad or whatever weird thing you're trying to say, why not just lay out all the cards and let me decide for myself how to interpret the history?
- WalterBright 4mo agoUnfortunately, the American Indians did not have writing, and so the histories of the tribes is pretty murky. For example, most of what is known about the Commanches comes from letters and diaries of white people who were in contact with them, or were enslaved by them. See "Empire of the Summer Moon" by Gwynne. https://www.amazon.com/Empire-Summer-Moon-Comanches-Powerful/dp/1416591060/ https://www.amazon.com/Empire-Summer-Moon-Comanches-Powerful... It's a fantastic account, and I'm amazed nobody has made an epic miniseries about it.
- AlotOfReading 4mo ago"Writing" is a tricky term. Indigenous groups in what's now the US had property records, laws, and symbolically represented stories that could be read by others. What they didn't have was a system of symbols that can fully encode human speech (and vice versa). The latter is the typical definition of "writing" and it's not required to have the former. On an unrelated note, Gwynne's book is fine as a fantasy story, but it's very badly regarded from the perspective of narrative history. Hämäläinen's Comanche Empire is a much better book arguing a largely similar position. Don't take that as applying to later books by the same author, sadly.
- WalterBright 4mo agoI ordered the book, thank you! As evidence of the paucity of historical knowledge of the Indian peoples, estimates of the pre-Columbian population vary from 10 million to 100 million. I know about the various rock paintings with symbols, but there isn't enough of that to represent much of anything.