Things Noted Here and There

by Cliopatria

is up at (a)musings of a graduate student! Go ... feast ... enjoy. Thanks, Rebecca!

So, you thought that Henry Ford said:"History is bunk." Right? Well, Sharon Howard shows that even Henry Ford knew that it's more complicated and more interesting than that.

In"Native Ingenuity," Boston Globe, 4 September, Charles C. Mann, the author of 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, challenges our perception that European settlers prevailed over native Americans because of their technological superiority. [ ... ]

For a good round-up of the best reflections on Katrina and the catastrophe on the Gulf coast, see: Scott McLemee,"After the Deluge," Inside Higher Ed, 6 September.
One of the historians best prepared to comment on New Orleans and the Katrina disaster is Ari Kelman of the University of California, Davis. He is the author of A River and Its City: The Nature of Landscape in New Orleans. Here are two of his current essays:
"City of Nature: New Orleans' Blessing, New Orleans' Curse," Slate, 31 August; and
"New Orleans: Not Going Anywhere," TPMCafe, 2 September. Thanks to Caleb McDaniel for the tip.
Nicholas Lemann, dean of the School of Journalism at Columbia, is an exceptionally good journalist. His"In the Ruins," New Yorker, 12 September, is pessimistically thoughtful about New Orleans' recovery, but one sentence is spectacularly objectionable:"Every convention can always be held somewhere else." The hell it can. Look, I've been to SHA conventions in New Orleans and in Houston. It's not the same thing. An SHA convention in Houston might as well be in Boisie, Idaho, Dayton, Ohio, or Atlanta, Georgia, for that matter. There's no replacing the Big Easy.

Finally, an investigative journalist reports that Chief Justice William Rehnquist actually died six days ago. FEMA just didn't get to him until Sunday.

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Jeremy Dupertuis Bangs - 9/6/2005

Mann grandly oversimplifies in lumping all periods and cultures of North and South America together to indicate that sophisticated technology existed, although not always directed to the same ends as those for which European tools had been devised. Everyone, starting with the Spanish, knows about South American gold. But it's iron hoes imported from Europe that increased maize production when introduced to New England. I was particularly amused by Mann's statement that the colonists were "awed by Indian agriculture." There's no support for that statment, at least regarding New England colonists; and it presupposes that the colonists were unfamiliar with maize. An illustration of Indian Corn, with infomation about its yield, and even with advice to mix it with wheat when making corn bread, is found in the Herbal by Dodoens (first published in 1554). The Pilgrims brought a copy with them from Leiden, where Dodoens was professor of botany.

John H. Lederer - 9/6/2005

Several of Mann's examples leave me dubious about his grasp of his subject.

Boots are better than moccasins because moccasins constantly need to be replaced. They are only good for about a day's hard travel by foot.

Any assertion that bows are better than firearms has to confront the fact that firearms have universally replaced bows -- including the pinnacles of archery, the English longbow and the Mongol compound bow (hint: check needed training and knockdown power or momentum).

The American Indian canoe is a wonderful vehicle -- for inland waters particularly where portages are necessary. The Canadian fur trade represented its peak. It is not so good in terms of return on capital (small load for amount of skilled labor to build, limited life) when portages are not necessary, and is inadequately seaworthy for ocean voyages.

I wonder if Mann ever tried the simple step of wearing moccasins for a few days to see how quickly the lack of a sole is a problem for wear?