33 Questions About American History You're Not Supposed to Ask

[SPC]

I thought that this was a very informative book and Tom Woods explained his points very well.

[Ebowed]

What were some of the questions?

[SPC]

What were some of the questions?

They were questions along these lines:
*Did capitalism really cause the Great Depression?
*Was the Civil War really all about slavery?
*Do the historians rankings of the presidents matter?
*Did the Indians really live in harmony with nature?
*Did the Founding Fathers support immigration?
*Did Hoover really just sit back and do nothing during the Great Depression?
*Was the Wild west really that wild?
*Is states' rights really just a codeword for racism?

[Tetro Kornbluth]

What were some of the questions?

They were questions along these lines:
*Did capitalism really cause the Great Depression?
*Was the Civil War really all about slavery?
*Do the historians rankings of the presidents matter?
*Did the Indians really live in harmony with nature?
*Did the Founding Fathers support immigration?
*Did Hoover really just sit back and do nothing during the Great Depression?
*Was the Wild west really that wild?
*Is states' rights really just a codeword for racism?

Basically as I know the Author off some of his article at that Rothbardian nut house LewRockwell.com I will summarize this book without even reading it:

Capitalism = Awesome
Founding Fathers = Did nothing wrong. ever. Unless they were Federalists. In which they were Satanist. But not as big a satanist as Abe Lincoln.
Abe Lincoln was the devil incarnate
Abe Lincoln hated America
Free Market = Solution to all the world's problems
TEH CONFEDRATES = FREEDOM FIGHTERS WHO DIDN'T HARM ANYONE
Jefferson was a true freedom fighter that's why he kept Slaves
Abe Lincoln 'liberated' the south in order to enslave the southern whites.
States Rights = Awesome, almost as awesome as the Free market, and never at all abused
Abe Lincoln was evil. But not as evil as FDR
OMG BIG GOVERMENT
HAHAHAHA LEFTISTS YOU SUCK, BUT NOT AS MUCH AS FDR

[HappyWarrior]

So basically the author is a Libertarian?

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

HAHAHAHA LEFTISTS YOU SUCK, BUT NOT AS MUCH AS FDR

That statement makes no sense. It's like saying "HAHAHAHA REPUBLICANS YOU SUCK, BUT NOT AS MUCH AS GEORGE W. BUSH"

[Verily]

*Did capitalism really cause the Great Depression? Yes, sort of. Depends whether you're referring to capitalism or laissez-faire capitalism.
*Was the Civil War really all about slavery? Yes
*Do the historians rankings of the presidents matter? No
*Did the Indians really live in harmony with nature? Yes
*Did the Founding Fathers support immigration? I imagine they didn't have a hive mind.
*Did Hoover really just sit back and do nothing during the Great Depression? No
*Was the Wild west really that wild? Yes
*Is states' rights really just a codeword for racism? Yes


Some tough questions there.

[Colin]

I skimmed through this book in Barnes and Noble a few days ago and I found it horrible. It used every single overworked, overused, conservative historical cliche, which basically followed the line of reasingin that "well if the Founding Fathers thought it was horrible/great than it must be". For the chapter concerning immigration it made the obvious Benjamin Franklin quote about German immigration to Pennsylvania, which has been quoted several times though I don't remember the actual words used I believe it was something akin to the "if we keep letting these Mexicans in we'll all be speaking Spanish in 50 years" line of reasoning except with Germans involved. You'd really think that these people believe that the Founding Fathers were Olympian Gods who handed down the Constitution to their chosen people, the Americans, to govern them for all time.

The others, with a slight exception for the parts on the causes of the Great Depression and the Hoover administration, seemed to be a complete whitewash of history. A much better book than this, though written with the same sort of "goal" in mind, was Lies My Teacher Told Me which I found both very informative and very well written, even if you didn't agree with his, sometimes quite leftist almost socialist, opinion of the information presented. Personally it is a work much superior to this cliched piece of work.

[Frodo]

What were some of the questions?

*Did the Indians really live in harmony with nature?

Here are a couple of books (one of which I have just recently read) that can better answer that question:

1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

and

The Ecological Indian: Myth and History

[Colin]

What were some of the questions?

*Did the Indians really live in harmony with nature?

Here are a couple of books (one of which I have just recently read) that can better answer that question:

1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

Another very interesting book that I would highly recommend to anyone, even if you aren't really that interested in pre-Columbian civilizations and Native Americans.

[??????????]

*Did capitalism really cause the Great Depression? Yes, sort of. Depends whether you're referring to capitalism or laissez-faire capitalism.
*Was the Civil War really all about slavery? Yes
*Do the historians rankings of the presidents matter? No
*Did the Indians really live in harmony with nature? Yes
*Did the Founding Fathers support immigration? I imagine they didn't have a hive mind.
*Did Hoover really just sit back and do nothing during the Great Depression? No
*Was the Wild west really that wild? Yes
*Is states' rights really just a codeword for racism? Yes


Some tough questions there.

You still didn't answer the questions right. Obviously the Mayans are still around and thriving due to their harmony with nature!

[Alcon]

You still didn't answer the questions right. Obviously the Mayans are still around and thriving due to their harmony with nature!

There are some theories centering around the Mayan collapse related to ecological damage, but they are hardly universally-accepted. 

Obviously, anyone who thinks that aboriginal populations lived perfectly in sync with nature is oversimplifying a complex human relationship.  But pointing out one hypothesis to disprove that there was anything at all to respect about the native attitudes toward ecology is falling into the same broad-stroke trap.

[Verily]

*Did capitalism really cause the Great Depression? Yes, sort of. Depends whether you're referring to capitalism or laissez-faire capitalism.
*Was the Civil War really all about slavery? Yes
*Do the historians rankings of the presidents matter? No
*Did the Indians really live in harmony with nature? Yes
*Did the Founding Fathers support immigration? I imagine they didn't have a hive mind.
*Did Hoover really just sit back and do nothing during the Great Depression? No
*Was the Wild west really that wild? Yes
*Is states' rights really just a codeword for racism? Yes


Some tough questions there.

You still didn't answer the questions right. Obviously the Mayans are still around and thriving due to their harmony with nature!

Ah, yes, the Mayans collapsed because of all of those carbon emissions from their coal-burning power plants.

Native Americans were not "in harmony with nature" in the New Age sense (though some of their religious practices, much like those of most other non-monotheist societies, promoted some sort of harmony), but their ecological footprint was certainly not greater than the environment could handle. Some crackpot anthropologists assert otherwise, but they are no different from other revisionist historians.

[Colin]

You still didn't answer the questions right. Obviously the Mayans are still around and thriving due to their harmony with nature!

There are some theories centering around the Mayan collapse related to ecological damage, but they are hardly universally-accepted. 

Hardly universally accepted is an understatement. They are not thought to be a very important factor by most reputable authorities on the Maya. The first person who brought the theory to public attention, IIRC, was Jared Diamond, who is, in my belief, a historical amateur who shood stick to biology. I've actually read quite a few refutations of this theory by Mayan scholars, there is a very good one included in 1491 that quotes heavily from the findings of two archeologists with several decades of experience. What they said that the decline of Tikal and the surrounding city-states was from a decades long war in the Guatamalan highlands which decimated both the cities themselves and the surrounding countryside. This led to the failure of crops because of a lack of people to plant and harvest them and complete destruction of some cities by fire and the ravages of war. Most of these cities lost about the same amount of population as Paraguay did during the War of the Triple Alliance, between 65% and 75%.

They back this up with the fact that while it actually became drier up in the northern Mayan realms, in places like Chichen Itza and Tulum, than in the Southern highlands these places flourished long after the cultural capitals of the Southern highlands were ravaged and destroyed. All Late Period Mayan centres are in the drier North rather than the relatively wetter South, if ecological disaster because of atypically dry weather was the cause of the fall of Tikal and the South than why wouldn't it affect the North, which was in a much more serious drought than the South? Because they were ravaged by war and disease. I'm sure that if Mesoamericans came to Europe and burned all but four manuscripts from Western Europe they would have been puzzled by the destruction of the Romans in much the same way as we are by the Mayans. Wackos would probably say it was the aliens and UFOs fault while less eccentric people would place their bet on some ecological catastrophe when in reality it had more to do with political infighting, population pressures, social change, and religious changes than with more esoteric things like ecology.

Personally I've always hated Jared Diamond. As a biologist he is always looking to see that the natural world and the changes to the natural order are at the heart of major historical changes, in a way he is prejudiced to believe that his specialty, ecology and nature, are more important to the history of civilizaations than man's own fumbling, fighting, and forging.

[Undisguised Sockpuppet]

*Did capitalism really cause the Great Depression? Yes, sort of. Depends whether you're referring to capitalism or laissez-faire capitalism.
*Was the Civil War really all about slavery? Yes
*Do the historians rankings of the presidents matter? No
*Did the Indians really live in harmony with nature? Yes
*Did the Founding Fathers support immigration? I imagine they didn't have a hive mind.
*Did Hoover really just sit back and do nothing during the Great Depression? No
*Was the Wild west really that wild? Yes
*Is states' rights really just a codeword for racism? Yes


Some tough questions there.

[Tetro Kornbluth]

HAHAHAHA LEFTISTS YOU SUCK, BUT NOT AS MUCH AS FDR

That statement makes no sense. It's like saying "HAHAHAHA REPUBLICANS YOU SUCK, BUT NOT AS MUCH AS GEORGE W. BUSH"

Which is the point, no?

Anyway I actually don't think FDR was actually a leftist, rather he was a patriacan-plutocrat of the traditional variety who did what he did - not to redistrubted some of the wealth - but to 'save' America (Like Lincoln as a matter of fact). If FDR thought that privitization and anti-labour policies were the way to achieve that, that's what he would have done imo.

EDIT: The Native American-Indians were not really in harmony with nature - at least not in the "new ageish" sense which is a truly postmodern construction (which loves it's history in nice little simple-to-digest packages). Your average Indian tribe more resembled the ancient pre-Roman mini-kingdoms which circulated around Europe prior to The First Punic War. Of course they were more harmously towards nature than the Europeans, but that's not hard to do considering their economic capability.