Rich and Strange Aeons

Why you can't teach United States History Without American Indians. Anthology of essays, aimed at college level history, about various historical topics from a more Indian perspective.

1. Borders and Borderlands. Even hunter-gatherers have a strong sense of the lands they have a right to forage in, and mobile groups like the Apache or Comanche marked their borders with cairns or forced-growth trees. There was no empty territory when the Europeans arrived, except maybe where disease had killed off all the claimants. But US history tends to describe a frontier expanding into empty or vague land, and maps reinforce this -- pre-colonial populations are perhaps marked with names -- sometimes of subsistence strategies or language families -- floating vaguely over a map, with no well-defined border or capitals marked, while maps of the post-colonial era show European colonies in bold colors, pushing into a washed out Indian or empty territory. Maps *from* the period made by Europeans, especially the French and Spanish, are much more explicit and respectful of Indian states and borders.

2. Encounter and Trade in the Early Atlantic World. We don't know much about 1500s North Atlantic America, but there was a lot of European contact and trade, first driven by the cod fishery, with fishermen buying medicine and fresh food. Then the fur trade, with furs bought with cloth and metal goods, and cloth made specifically for Indian tastes, probably driven by Indian women. 60-70% of fur trader expenditures went to buying cloth, dwarfing alcohol (5%) and firearms.

3. Rethinking the American Paradox, Bacon's Rebellion. I don't remember ever hearing about Bacon's Rebellion, but apparently historians have considered it really important, with the usual story focusing on a rebellion by lower class whites against the elites. The essay places it in the context of a long-burning war between Indian nations, and talks about the trade in Indian slaves (which I first really heard about from Charles Mann). The supply of white indentures contracted around 1660, and Virginia planters got more access to African slaves around 1700; enslaved Indians bridged the gap, though many were also exported to the West Indies. Between 1670 and 1700, 40% of slaves on the upper James river were Indians.

4. Recentering Indian Women in the American Revolution. Role of Indian women in owning land and making political decisions. George "Town Destroyer" Washington's 1779 orders to wage total war on the Iroquois, destroying houses and crops and taking women and children as hostages. An odd incident when General Sullivan ran across an old woman in an abandoned village and left her there, against orders.

5. The Empty Continent. Another map about how Indians are erased from maps.

6. The Doctrine of Discovery, Manifest Destiny, and American Indians. An essay about rather infuriating and indefensible European concepts that 'discovering' land gave them right over the land and inhabitants, with discussion of the discovery rituals Europeans would engage in to mark the territory. The later "Manifest Destiny" of US thought is largely claiming to sweep away existing European rights from discovery, as well as any surviving Indian title.

7. Indiana and the California Gold Rush. Gold was found by white and Indian laborers on Sutter's colony; Sutter made a claim to the governor backed by some local Indian chiefs; Indians workers left for gold mines themselves, leaving Sutter's colony starved of labor. White miners hunted Indians for sport. An 1850 law legalized the enslavement of California Indians.

8. Why you can't teach the history of US slavery Without American Indians. Discussion of slavery by and of Indians. The Carolinas exporting Indian slaves to fund buying African slaves (reflecting a desire to have non-local slaves who wouldn't be able to run away as easily.)

9. American Indians and the Civil War. The Dakota War in 1862 Minnesota. Lincoln signing the Homestead Act in 1862, in gross violation of US treaties with Indian nations. Corruption stealing the annuities promised to reservation Indians. Confederate soldiers treated as POWs, Dakota fighters treated as criminals guilty of capital crimes, with Lincoln authorizing the largest mass execution in US history. Kit Carson's ethnic cleansing of the Navajo. The Sand Creek Massacre.

Continued here: https://mindstalk.dreamwidth.org/496129.html

I grew up on Greco-Roman mythology... mostly not so much translated as retold. Bullfinch and all. I did read a translation of the Metamorphoses, though of course a lot of that was a retelling already.

Recently I've started reading the Argonautica, which I'm not sure I knew was a thing. It's, guess what, the tale of Jason and the Argonauts, seeking for the Golden Fleece. I've certainly read "the story", but not this work.

And I can kind of see why. As with the Iliad, or the second part of the Aeneid, a lot of it is not of timeless interest. Homer has the Catalogue of Ships, this has a catalogue of heroes and where they were born. And the places they pass, most of little meaning to me. And the shrines to one god or another than they raise along the way. And the thighbones wrapped in fat they keep offering.

OTOH something about the writing carries me along. There's a plethora of Homeric simile, for good or for ill, and I've learned that smoking beehives out for their honey is at least as old as the Hellenistic period.

As with Homer, the descriptions feel surprisingly visceral, like I can easily imagine a mental movie of what's going on. Which I could pass on when it comes to the gory fight scenes.

The Argo seems to have traveled at least twice by night, which I don't think was a common thing in the Mediterranean.

I mostly read of Rhea in cosmogony, as mother of the big six Olympians, but this work includes an altar being built to her, and her being pleased thus magically bringing forth harvest. So, active worship, then.

The heroes have diverse powers. Being really strong, of course. Flying (sons of Boreas.) Walking on water. Prophecy.

Everyone's almost half-worshipping Heracles already. "Let's make him the leader." "I refuse, Jason should be the leader." "Sir yes sir! Jason is our leader, sir!" They lose him early on, though, he's got to go back to his labors at Argos. Theseus is stuck somewhere, probably on his underworld raid. Atalanta wanted to come but Jason was afraid having one woman on board would cause too much strife.

At some point the Mysians are twirling sticks to make fire. No flint-and-steel, or bringing coals from existing fires?

I tried looking up maps of the voyage. They seem insane.

Three of the Amazons were daughters of Ares. Hippolyte, Antiope, Melanippe. No idea who the mother was... in Wikipedia, but this says the nymph Harmonia. Makes me think of Xena.

Music: Pirates of the Caribbean

***

I'm reading a questionably scanned version of R. C. Seaton's translation.

Hmm, I seem to not have good tags for this already. Did I not talk here about Homer? Distinct lack of fitting userpics, too. I'll go with Queen of the Pirates Liz.

1987 book I just finished, by Bob Connolly and Robin Anderson. It's about the contact between white Australians and highland New Guinea in the 1930s, mostly done by Australian gold prospector Michael Leahy, with Leahy's 1930s photographs (and some 1980s ones, by the book's authors.) It's main sources are Leahy's diaries and 1980s interviews of both surviving Australians and highlanders. So we get views from both sides, though most of the surviving highlanders were teens or kids at the time, naturally.

First half or so of the book is a step-by-step following of the initial expeditions, but it later pans out to further developments and reactions, closing with independence for Papua New Guinea in 1975.

Notes:

* The highlanders seem to have been extremely isolated from the coast. They can't have been entirely so, because shells filtered up as highly valuable prestige/trade/moka items, but OTOH they hadn't heard of the white men who'd been on the coast for 50 years, and on first viewing thought the whites were relatives returned from the dead. The highlanders themselves say that.

* Pretty isolated from each other, it seems, or more accurately a person's radius of experience was pretty short, hemmed in by hostiles tribes.

* Volatile mix of racism, paternalism, and humanity among the whites. Michael could readily go for a lethal show of force to "kill before we're killed" while objecting to the bloodfeud killing of the natives or gratuitous killing by his own coastal native 'gunbois'. One brother went half native, taking two native wives and never leaving; a friend from the Administration went full native, being accepted by the highlanders he lived among; Michael turned into an Angry Old White Man, disappointed at not getting wealthy and ranting to his grave against the independence movement.

* Both major Out Of Context problems and rapid adaptation by the highlanders. Took them a while to figure out if the whites were human and not spirit, but quickly taking advantage of the wealth they offered and assessing the physical danger they posed.

* Highlanders somewhat balking at independence, as they had less negative experience of colonialism than the coastal New Guineans, and feared being dominated by the coastals. A Liberian UN commissioner was really surprised at the feelings he ran into. "Development, then independence." Of course, most of the Australians had no intention of developing NG into economic independence, that's not what colonies are for.

* Examples of both benign and imperial introductions of money and trade. The early prospectors weren't that violently rapacious, though killing a fair number of people to establish "don't mess with our stuff"; they brought in lots of wealth of shells, axes, and other goods to buy food and labor with, but the workers weren't losing their own land, and had a real choice to work. Administration and the coastal colonists didn't like independent labor though, and instituted poll taxes that had to be paid in Australian money.

(The prospectors might have been worse had they ever found major gold prospects to dredge. Happily they didn't, and coffee plantations ended up the main means of wealth extraction.)

* WWII was a push toward independence. No mention of attitudes wearing off from the Japanese or the fact of their pushing out Australia, but the returning US and Australian soldiers are claimed to have been relatively egalitarian, a shocking contrast with the pre-war colonists.

* Colonialism probably really did bring down the violent death rate, here.

Michael Moorcock on writing 60K novels in three days. Granted, part of the secret is prep work. http://www.wetasphalt.com/content/how-write-book-three-days-lessons-michael-moorcock

Relatedly, Stross on why modern SF novels are longer: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/03/cmap-5-why-books-are-the-lengt.html Old constraint of magazine serialization, new one of US hardcover binding and non-linear response to pricing. We also learn that the UK uses glue (misleadingly called 'perfect') binding for everything, while the US still mostly sews its hardcovers.

A comment there leads to a Kipling poem, something of a shaggy dog pun poem.
http://allpoetry.com/The-Three-Decker

***

Unrelated humor:

Retweeted William Germano (@WmGermano):
She decided to teach postcolonial theory instead of seventeenth-century poetry.
Because, well, you know, easier Said than Donne.

So, I finally finished the Lets Play of the Fate/stay night visual novel. That sentence probably made no sense to most of my readers, so let me expand:

Visual novel (VN): a Japanese thing I'm not that knowledgeable about. It could be as simple as a novel with graphics, simple animations, and sound (music and dialog). In practice, they usually have you make choices, so it's like a multimedia Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA) novel. They're also thought of as a game -- and usually H (for hentai) or ero games, with some sexual content -- albeit ones with far more reading than playing. They also make use of running on a computer: as they're usually about relationships (as it were), you can accumulate relationship points with different characters, which affects branches later on, so it's a bit more complex than a CYOA book.

Fate/stay night: one particular VN by Kinoko Nasu. No one knows what the title means, if anything. The English translation has been described as 800,000 to a million words, twice as long as the Lord of the Rings. It has spawned an anime of the same name, which I'm told is not that good (though popular); a manga, about which I've heard nothing; a prequel light novel series called Fate/zero by Gen Urobuchi (basically canonized fanfic) which spawned an anime of its own; and most recently an anime Fate/Unlimited Blade Works based on the second 'route' of the VN, which I'll explain later. I've seen Fate/UBW (strong start, pacing lags later) and Fate/zero (just plain strong, though dark.)

I imagine that there might be some way to run the VN/game in a Windows environment on my Linux box, with the fan-made English translation files. But, that's a lot of work, and after playing the American-made Black Closet, I'm not sure "playing" this sort of game is really my thing. Happily, some heroic servant of the people made a walkthrough, aka a Lets Play, of the (fan-English) game, including all the bad endings and extras, but excluding the (allegedly bad) sex scenes. I started reading it over a month ago, on October 11th. Last night, I finished.

In addition to being long, the player had snarky comments about Nasu's "words word words", long (not that long) philosophical ramblings at times that didn't make tons of sense. So my ideas for snarky titles were Unlimited Verbiage (as above) or Unlimited Nasu Words, for a closer play on titles.

***

In addition to being longer than LotR, Fate/stay night could also be thought of as a trilogy, but in a different way. It's basically three different stories (also called 'routes') about the same characters and general events. Not three different perspectives on the same sequence of events (which could be interesting, and there is a bit of that in the prologue), but three different main sequences, branching based on early choices by the player. (I guess? I'm actually not sure if it branches solely on that; there seem to be aspects of three different related worlds, with differences that wouldn't depend on your choices. But, not sure, don't care enough to hunt it down.) Two of the routes also have two different good-ish endings each, and across all three routes there are 40 Dead Ends (you die) or Bad Ends (you otherwise fail). It's actually pretty channeled: you have to play the Fate route first, then the UBW route, then the Heaven's Feel route. Another reason I figured I might as well just read it.

So, was it good? It was engaging, at the very least: I didn't take a month to finish because I was slacking off in boredom. It does have flaws and confusing bits; never know what to attribute to the original author vs. the translator, I'd guess some of both. By the end of the UBW anime I was joking that the Holy Grail could punch holes in the plot, not just space.

It has more female roles than LotR, and strong ones. You play as Emiya Shirou (Japanese name order), a teenage boy, but interact heavily -- and not just sexually -- with various girls or women. Tohsaka Rin has been called the deuteragonist, as she plays a major role in all three routes, is the heroine (or love interest) of the second, and even gets to be the narrator in the prologue and one of the endings. (She's also an iconic character of tsundere, twintails, and zettai ryouki fashion... one of my early reactions to the UBW anime was "she's obviously tsundere, but I don't mind, because she's tsundere to *everything* and life in general, not just as a love interest.") And there's various other women, strong in combat, magic, and/or surviving a lot of crap. (And some of them do get a lot of crap to survive.)

It does pass the Bechdel test. I'm not sure it passes it often -- if two women are talking there's a good chance it'll be about Shirou, though "what an idiot" is more likely than "what a hunK" -- but it does.

Shirou's infamously sexist in some ways, like "girls shouldn't fight" despite the girls being able to fight on a completely different level than him, though someone on TV Tropes argues it's deeper than that: that he didn't want Saber fighting because she was *injured*, but (a) couldn't say that well (see: idiot) and (b) thought his life wasn't worth protecting. After barreling through the whole thing, I'm agnostic on the question, aka "I don't want to go back and re-read the first route to have an informed opinion."

The nature of the story allows it to plunder myth and legend at will. Sometimes brutally ("X was never like that!" people say, though I'm "eh, I can see it") but sometimes with research ("Y actually was described as a pretty boy").

It's inspirational: I imagine a lot of fanfic from it (though checking, not as much as I thought; it does rank higher in crossovers than on its own, which makes some sense), and have had some RPG inspirations of my own already. And I can see plundering some of the characters for future PCs. It definitely has memorable characters, of both sexes.

One cool thing for me is that at least three characters are basically Lawful Good (Saber is *officially* LG, she has a stat sheet in-universe!), with very different personalities, and none Lawful Stupid. (Shirou can be dumb but it's more your standard Shounen Stupid). I have an interest these days in how characters can be morally straight-and-narrow yet different people. (Nanoha is also good for that, and to a lesser degree Order of the Stick. Possibly superhero media in general, but that's less my thing.)

Basically, I had fun, and am glad I read it. Should you read it? I don't know if it's *that* good, objectively speaking. Would it be of interest if you hadn't seen related anime, as I had? I can't say.

I know I haven't described what it's *about*; there's a zillion other sources for that, though, so I was going for some underexploited angles, as well as "this was to my taste, if you like my taste you might too."

(Edit: one thing it's about is heroism and the sacrifices made for it. I'm not sure if it says anything deep or useful about it - -I've been more reading than thinking -- but that's definitely A Theme. Maybe even The Theme.)

The new icon is, of course, Rin, apparently giving one of her "now listen up, idiot" lectures.

So I've recently re-read two more childhood books: A Wrinkle in Time, and A Wind In The Door. Swiftly Tilting Planet is on my shelf. The printing of Wrinkle I read had forewords and afterwords about the author, especially one by a granddaughter, talking about Madeleine's enthusiasm for science. Which, sure, you can tell in the books.

Judging by the second book, though, she had less enthusiasm for getting it RIGHT.

* Madeleine says a galactic rotation is 200 billion years, off by 1000x.
* I don't have further specific examples, but billions of years or billenniums got thrown around pretty casually.
* Calvin says the number of cells in the brain and in the universe are exactly equal. More like, brains and stars in the galaxy are approximately equal.
* Someone, I think the farandola Sporos, uses parsec as a measure of time.
* Detection of screams in space... via sonic instruments, not radio ones. Also sonic instruments to find farandolae, which are unto mitochondria as mitochondria are to us. I'm not complaining about the fantastic premise of psychic farandolae, I'm just saying I don't 'sound' is really the process at work at that scale. But definitely not space...

Granted, this is the 1970s (urban crime fears!) and you'd have had to go to an encyclopedia or such to look stuff up, and it's easy to misremember billion and million. But still.

As for the books... I dunno. I think the first was stronger. Both have more buildup than climax or denouement, as it were.

I could talk about some of these in more detail at some point, but figured I'd dump for now. Also, this my first table of text and images, because I thought I'd try more images and wrapping text in HTML seems hard. Images are mostly HTML-scaled (to 150 pixels high) and larger if you 'view' them in your browser.
(Edit: I discovered the Livejournal version of this looks like shit in chromium. If you're reading this there in that, might try Firefox or the Dreamwidth link.)
( Table of text and images )
If you want a blind recommendation out of all this, I'd go with RSG, because it's good and pretty short so what do you have to lose? and FMA:B, because it's awesome. Or the original FMA manga, also awesome. I have no opinion on the first FMA anime, I just know the story diverges massively. Oh, and the opening/ending of Mahou Shojoutai, because it's only 4 minutes total, and so pretty and weird. I wish I had someone to share the rest of the series with, but I can't make it a high priority cold recommendation.

Inspired by this I thought to look at the gender balance of books I've read. As I have digital records back to 2004, and paper ones back to 1997, this is in principle doable; as my records consist of "name, author" it's not easy. But I counted the past few years by hand.

2011 books:
54 by male authors, 26 female
2012 books:
79 male, 20 female
2013 books:
75 male, 47 female
2014 books so far:
52 male, 19 female.

Conclusion: I didn't read as many books in 2011 (so what was I doing? well, I didn't even move into an apartment until April), while this could be a blow out year.

Female author percentage ranges from 20-40%. Fiction and non-fiction lumped together. Graphic novel or manga volumes generally counted individually. Some books left out because I didn't know the author, especially RPG books.

The 2014 imbalance is due in large part to binging on all the Fables related books, so that's nearly 30 graphic novels by Bill Willingham right there.

Books in queue: Sufaces and Essences (M), Morgaine cycle (4xF), My Side of the Mountain trilogy (3xF), Steles of the Sky (F), a bunch of Spanish language books of mixed or unknown (Robin) gender.

Democracy and Knowledge: Innovation and Learning in Classical Athens, Josiah Ober, 2008.

Classical Athens is famous for being a democracy, or 'democracy' given the status of slaves, women, and metics (resident non-citizens.) It's also been infamous throughout history for its grand mistakes, like trying Socrates, purging its generals, a disastrous attack on Syracuse, various atrocities, with these used to discredit democracy and 'mob rule' as if alternative forms of government never ever made mistakes.

Ober's book, 5th or so in a series of sort, argues that in fact Athens was supremely successful (militarily and economically) in a highly competitive environment for 200 years, a nigh superpower (my word) among city-states (polis in the singular, poleis plural), adapting to and recovering from multiple setbacks (conquest, loss of empire, imposition of oligarchy, plague killing 1/3 of the people, invading Syracuse) until finally squished by the Macedonian juggernaut that conquered Persia, Egypt, and everything up to the Indus. (And then by the Roman juggernaut that conquered that and everything else around. Point is, Athens didn't fail in particular, it was overwhelmed.)

And, he argues, it was so successful because of its democracy, not despite it. The costs were high: the putative cost of not having a central and expert command-and-control system, instead running things by groups of amateurs, and the explicit cost of running the democracy, as citizens were paid in the thousands for attending the Assembly, serving on juries, or acting as magistrates, along with the costs of public buildings and running a prototype welfare state. To be so pre-eminent despite such costs the benefits must have been even higher, particularly the benefits of marshaling public resources for the public good, generating and gathering knowledge for learning and innovation, legitimacy and incentives to align people to act in the public interest, and maintaining security and social stability.

(Addendum: one thing I forgot I think is worth adding: Athens ran a navy. Not just a militia of all the citizens showing up to be armed, but a standing navy with all the complexity that implies. The best navy around, imperial quality. As a strong democracy...)

( Read more... )

Just started looking at this book I picked up randomly, and it's due back today, but it looks interesting. It's the history of the US as told by non-US textbooks around the world, in various snippets. Just the introduction was interesting: non-US textbook processes being a lot more centralized than the US, and different styles of textbooks: e.g. US texts tend to be organized by political history, presidents and eras and such, while the French have more social and economic history and history of ideas. Anglophone books tend to go for long narrative, French for short summaries and lots of primary sources.

A Cuban book notes details like the sailor of Columbus who saw land being Andalucian. "Caribbean" (various small islands share a text) spend more attention on Columbus's activity in their region, including the genocide and slavery of the Indians.

Some facts I hadn't known: In the mid 1700s France supposedly had 20 million people, Britain just 6 million, the British colonies 1.5 million (so 1/4 that of Britain!), New France just 100,000. I didn't know the colonies were so big relative to the UK. Differences between British and French colonies: partly the availability of fertile land, but largely immigration policies, the French only wanted pious Catholics while the British were less committed to mercantilism (so more colonial industry and trade) and took in more people from all over Europe.