6 Ridiculous Lies You Believe About the Founding of America Read more: http://www.cracked.com/artic

[LiberalArkie]

http://www.cracked.com/article_19864_6-ridiculous-lies-you-believe-about-founding-america.html

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When it comes to the birth of America, most of us are working from a stew of elementary school history lessons, Westerns and vague Thanksgiving mythology. And while it's not surprising those sources might biff a couple details, what's shocking is how much less interesting the version we learned was. It turns out our teachers, Hollywood and whoever we got our Thanksgiving mythology from (Big Turkey?) all made America's origin story far more boring than it actually was for some very disturbing reasons. For instance ...

#6. The Indians Weren't Defeated by White Settlers


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The Myth:

Our history books don't really go into a ton of detail about how the Indians became an endangered species. Some warring, some smallpox blankets and ... death by broken heart?



When American Indians show up in movies made by conscientious white people like Oliver Stone, they usually lament having their land taken from them. The implication is that Native Americans died off like a species of tree-burrowing owl that couldn't hack it once their natural habitat was paved over.

But if we had to put the whole Cowboys and Indians battle in a Hollywood log line, we'd say the Indians put up a good fight, but were no match for the white man's superior technology. As surely as scissors cuts paper and rock smashes scissors, gun beats arrow. That's just how it works.



Read more: http://www.cracked.com/article_19864_6-ridiculous-lies-you-believe-about-founding-america.html#ixzz39WjYEGKE

[spinbaby]

1. Thanks

That was a good read.

[GeorgeGist]

2. Thanks but ...

I'll get my American history from Howard Zinn.

[hunter]

5. Howard Zinn, still very relevant, is no longer with us.

"Guns, Germs, and Steel," by Jared Diamond is a modern historical interpretation.

Most of human history is biology. The most accurate histories are ecological.

The political, economic, and other non-biological rationalizations of history are frequently bogus.

This Cracked interpretation of North American history isn't bad as an introduction to this ecological perspective. Culturally and intellectually post-Columbus European immigrants to the Americas were truly ill-equipped. It was simply the bad luck of Native Americans to be intolerant of "Old World" European, Asian, and African diseases. All other history of the Americas is incidental to that.

Five hundred years from now someone will come up with stories "explaining" the catastrophe of fossil fuel use and mass extinction event. But the truth will be that humans are biologically incapable of controlling certain impulses. We're just not that intelligent.

We will struggle to maintain this fossil fueled heavily industrialized consumer society making more and more insane sacrifices to non-existent deities until the bloody end. It seems to be our nature.

[reflection]

8. my favorite book.

I recommend it often.

[NuclearDem]

9. Terrific book.

Mandatory reading back in my high school World History class.

Collapse is also good, though it does have its problems.

[daleanime]

11. Added to my 'long' reading list....

Thanks

[progressoid]

3. While the bit of that article that I read

appears to be accurate, albeit hyperbolic, I generally don't take history lessons from Cracked.com

[Nuclear Unicorn]

4. I'm amazed at how many take their news from Comedy Central. nt

[leftyohiolib]

12. didnt national inquirer break the edwards story?

[Qutzupalotl]

17. And Weekly World News broke the story of Batboy.

[ProfessorPlum]

16. Many of the arguments from the Cracked article are pulled from James Loewen's Book

"Lies My Teacher Told Me", which is a great and in many places eye-opening and important read, but also, I fear, a bit hyperbolic.

[jtuck004]

6. Good article. Nice to see it get a wider audience than people who may heard these

ideas before from more stuffy venues.

[yallerdawg]

7. History is written by the winners.

You can bet everything we consider to be historical is propaganda.

Truth is in the eye of the beholder.

Facts may be inarguable, but our interpretation of how the facts come together to present a story - history - is where the spin do begin.

[NuclearDem]

10. Oh damn you!

One does not simply read one article on Cracked.

[1StrongBlackMan]

13. Can I correct this correction of history? ...

Myth #4: Columbus Didn't Discover America: Vikings vs. Indians

Here, the author indicates (correctly) that Columbus did not "discover" America; but indicates that the Vikings did. The author seems to ignore/not know of the evidence of Africans having visited the Americas more than 500 years before the Vikings.

https://www.mtholyoke.edu/offices/comm/csj/960216/mcmen.html

http://www.unl.edu/rhames/courses/current/vansertima.pdf (citation to research that requires a JSTOR.org account)

http://www.nairaland.com/1212037/africans-discovered-america-thousands-years

[tclambert]

15. Three guys showed up in my front yard planting flags, each one arguing they "discovered" my land.

I had to turn the hose on them. Crazy "discoverers."

I suppose one day space aliens will land on Earth, claim they discovered the planet, and file a deed of ownership with the Galactic authorities. And when human beings say, "Hey! we're standing right here. Can't you see we already live here?" they will say, "Oh, yeah, you guys. Uh, . . . here, have some free blankets."



(I will admit, I've never seen those Olmec sculptures before. And they do raise questions. Some look very Afican, though a few look a little Chinese to me.)

[tclambert]

14. I heard long ago that the guns the Pilgrims had didn't match bows and arrows.

Muzzle-loading blunderbusses couldn't come close to the rate of fire, range, or accuracy of bows and arrows. When you get to the 1800s, with repeating rifles and six-shooters, yeah, those could outperform bows and arrows. And cannons made a difference. But I don't think the Pilgrims had any cannons.