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Well damn. That's pretty impressive. Makes you wonder how much has been lost to time.

Gobs. As noted, anything wooden, paper, or otherwise organic just doesn't get preserved. It's why we have tons of arrow heads but no arrows and stone cutting rocks but no stone axes.

Whole civilizations could have been in an area, with grass huts and wooden crossbeams and we wouldn't know because that stuff poofs, unlike ceramics or stone.

There're vast swaths of history that we don't know and that we really, really wish we did.

There's also some insane stuff that we DO know that we really shouldn't. Like how we used trees to get a map of the weather for the past 8000 years or so, noting a year-by-year change in parcipitation and temperature, or how we found out what kinds of plants were in an area by digging through packrat balls.

And then you get odd stuff like 6000 year old honey that you can still eat (but it doesn't taste good. Like, at all.) or mysterious high-tech stuff in areas where we have no real idea how it got there or why it didn't spread.

People are weird.

Wakshaani wrote:
It's why we have tons of arrow heads but no arrows and stone cutting rocks but no stone axes.

And even those are probably extra rare finds since most would get broken, worn down, or otherwise made unrecognizable as tools through normal use, or just being exposed to the elements.

Even simple metal tools could easily be missed if there were no additional signs to make you excavate. Its why those Viking settlements in Canada were so hard to find, even when they left behind some metalwork. The whole rest of the settlement was biodegradable.

Why are yanks so concerned/consumed by racism?

If there is a piece of media that doesn't depict things the way that they were, isn't that an accuracy issue and not a racism one?

 Ginsu33 wrote:
Why are yanks so concerned/consumed by racism?

Probably because it's so omnipresent for so much of American social history. American society quickly built a strict binary of white - black, and while skin color was a major factor of where you fell we also mixed in a lot of cultural and ethnic bigotry as well. The early Irish occupied the nebulous 'gray zone' between the two colors. Nativist rhetoric used a lot of the same stereotypes against them as was used against blacks;



Reduced to a subhuman animal, same thing that often happened to Native Americans and Africans (and as you might notice from the source of this cartoon, it wasn't just Americans who engaged in this, though it was much more direct). Same thing happened to the Chinese. If you were dark skinned you were basically screwed, but even if you had white skin you ended up in a position of having to prove your "whiteness" to established society and this pattern continued well into the 30s and 40s with later immigrant groups like the Italians, Slavs, and going through a lot of the same bigotry.

If there is a piece of media that doesn't depict things the way that they were, isn't that an accuracy issue and not a racism one?

Technically it can be both. It just so happens the history of American Racism is one of the most downplayed and under reported aspects of our society. There's other things too. Americans don't talk much about our own stab at Imperialism, and the nuances of US foreign policy are almost completely unmentioned in my experience.

Many ancient peoples were quite the seafarers. A while back I was reading a study that showed that there was quite a lot of activity along the western coast of South America, and possibly as far north as California. Native populations there have genetic markers that mean they are related to the people of Easter Island and Tahiti. These populations also share particular (and strangely unique) construction methods for fish hooks, ocean-going canoes, and jewelry. Also, their spoken words for their canoes are strangely similar.

Unless all of this was a coincidence it means people of the South Pacific were crossing the ocean over a thousand years ago.

 LordofHats wrote:
Americans don't talk much about our own stab at Imperialism

The Philippines with the concentration camps being a pretty bad time.

 MrDwhitey wrote:

 LordofHats wrote:
Americans don't talk much about our own stab at Imperialism

The Philippines with the concentration camps being a pretty bad time.

The only insurgency we've ever really truly defeated, but at the same time, the brutality necessary in doing so, shook us out of our Imperialistic drive.

Wakshaani wrote:
Yeah, there was a bit about how much gold a native was suppose to mine in a week. If it wasn't enough, you'd lose a hand. Haiti's history is quite possibly the worst in the entire chain of western colonialism, and that's saying a LOT.

It does give Belgian King Leopold's Congo Free State (1885-1908) a run for the money at least. He managed to get his hands on Congo as a personal fief, not a Belgian province, and proceeded to milk every last bit of rubber and ivory out of it by any means necessary. His personal enforcers, the Force Publique, were required to bring in a hand for every bullet spent (to prove they didn't waste ammo on hunting for food) and they or the local rulers acting as intermediaries also chopped off hands if a village didn't meet the rubber quotas. Quotas which were often absurdly high, btw - high enough that some locals would kill each other for hands to present instead. The best guesses at the death toll before Belgium took over and kicked the king are somewhere between 5 and 10 million...

 Xenomancers wrote:

squidhills wrote:
The irony is that the only actual African actors on that list (Arnold Vosloo as Imhotep and Sofia Boutella as femMummy) are also the whitest people on that list.

I'm not sure if you know this - but this is an actually racist statement - what is the state of being "the whitest" anyways?

It's a remark highlighting the fact that, in the US, very little attention is paid to the fact that not everyone in Africa is black. Most Americans, if they were to bump into Arnold Vosloo at the grocery store, would think he was from Europe because of his skin color and his funny accent. Maybe they'd think he was Australian (some Americans I've met think an Afrikaans accent sounds Australian) but most of them wouldn't consider the possibility that he was from Africa, because in the minds of most people in the US: "African" = black. Ditto for Sophia Boutella. Born in Algeria, of mixed heritage, but her skin color and French name would make most Americans think she was born in France (like maybe the south of France; she's a bit tanned and we assume anyone from the south of anywhere gets more sun than someone from the north of anywhere) and not Africa.

text removed.
reds8n

Well it *was* going well.

 MrDwhitey wrote:

 LordofHats wrote:
Americans don't talk much about our own stab at Imperialism

The Philippines with the concentration camps being a pretty bad time.

Puts a whole new meaning into our whole "spreading democracy" gag.

"But America, we're already a democracy!"

"No you're not."

"Yes we are! We declared independence, fought a revolutionary war, and made our own constitution!"

"No you didn't"

"We based the whole thing off your constitution!"

"Shut up and get in the freedom camp."

 LordofHats wrote:

 MrDwhitey wrote:

 LordofHats wrote:
Americans don't talk much about our own stab at Imperialism

The Philippines with the concentration camps being a pretty bad time.

Puts a whole new meaning into our whole "spreading democracy" gag.

"But America, we're already a democracy!"

"No you're not."

"Yes we are! We declared independence, fought a revolutionary war, and made our own constitution!"

"No you didn't"

"We based the whole thing off your constitution!"

"Shut up and get in the freedom camp."

We did the same thing to Vietnam at the end of WWII, only without the concentration camps. We just handed the whole place back to France, instead.

squidhills wrote:

 LordofHats wrote:

 MrDwhitey wrote:

 LordofHats wrote:
Americans don't talk much about our own stab at Imperialism

The Philippines with the concentration camps being a pretty bad time.

Puts a whole new meaning into our whole "spreading democracy" gag.

"But America, we're already a democracy!"

"No you're not."

"Yes we are! We declared independence, fought a revolutionary war, and made our own constitution!"

"No you didn't"

"We based the whole thing off your constitution!"

"Shut up and get in the freedom camp."

We did the same thing to Vietnam at the end of WWII, only without the concentration camps. We just handed the whole place back to France, instead.

And then when the Vietnamese kicked France out, you went back in to stop them setting up a government you didn't like and dropped chemical weapons all over their country.

Good times. Goooooood times

 A Town Called Malus wrote:

squidhills wrote:

 LordofHats wrote:

 MrDwhitey wrote:

 LordofHats wrote:
Americans don't talk much about our own stab at Imperialism

The Philippines with the concentration camps being a pretty bad time.

Puts a whole new meaning into our whole "spreading democracy" gag.

"But America, we're already a democracy!"

"No you're not."

"Yes we are! We declared independence, fought a revolutionary war, and made our own constitution!"

"No you didn't"

"We based the whole thing off your constitution!"

"Shut up and get in the freedom camp."

We did the same thing to Vietnam at the end of WWII, only without the concentration camps. We just handed the whole place back to France, instead.

And then when the Vietnamese kicked France out, you went back in to stop them setting up a government you didn't like and dropped chemical weapons all over their country.

Well that's because we liked em. You should see what we did to North Vietnam...

 curran12 wrote:

Well, not to stray too off topic, but I think a lot of the reason it is so understudied is how uncomfortable the original peopling of Australia was, given that there is evidence of humans on Australia long, long before there is any evidence of humans being able to have ocean-going craft.

Regardless of exactly when or how they got here, people tend to avoid looking too closely at pre-European-colonisation Australia because it highlights just how bad what came afterwards was.

I don't know if it's changed in recent years, but local history when I was in school tended to focus pretty much exclusively on what the British folk did, with native Australians being mentioned in passing at best. The impression given was always that the existing population, being nomadic and not tied to a specific area (which is absolute bollocks) just kind of moved over and made room when the First Fleet landed. It makes Australians uncomfortable when they find it just how horrific the events of that period actually were, and so they prefer to not think about it.

Growing up, I learnt far more about European history than I did about my own country's.

 LordofHats wrote:


Technically it can be both. It just so happens the history of American Racism is one of the most downplayed and under reported aspects of our society. There's other things too. Americans don't talk much about our own stab at Imperialism, and the nuances of US foreign policy are almost completely unmentioned in my experience.

Thank you for your response mate, They don't go over it all in school? The amount of US media I've seen since a kid did anything but downplay it... so it strikes me as odd to hear this.

 Ginsu33 wrote:

 LordofHats wrote:


Technically it can be both. It just so happens the history of American Racism is one of the most downplayed and under reported aspects of our society. There's other things too. Americans don't talk much about our own stab at Imperialism, and the nuances of US foreign policy are almost completely unmentioned in my experience.

Thank you for your response mate, They don't go over it all in school? The amount of US media I've seen since a kid did anything but downplay it... so it strikes me as odd to hear this.

That's quite probably because it's your "local" history so it speak.

 curran12 wrote:
Well, not to stray too off topic, but I think a lot of the reason it is so understudied is how uncomfortable the original peopling of Australia was, given that there is evidence of humans on Australia long, long before there is any evidence of humans being able to have ocean-going craft.

I am not a historian by any measure, but being Australian I've got direct experience in how Australians treat our history, and a few ideas as to why. There are a lot of reasons that Australian pre-colonial history is sidelined and it has nothing to do with any kind of concern about society being here long before evidence of boats. For starters, most people are happy with the assumption of a land bridge, other times you'll hear people say with pride that Australian first peoples were the first to take such long water crossings. I have no idea which is true but the greater issue is there's no political issue with either - present either claim to an Australian and they'll accept either as an interesting novelty and think no more on it.

The politics around early Australian peoples comes from the long history of ignoring the existence of indigenous culture and society in Australia prior to white settlement. You have to understand ours is a country where up until the mid-90s a foundational element of our country was terra nullius, the idea that Australia was nobody's land before white colonists arrived, therefore it was okay for colonists to start occupying it themselves. When this legal idea was overturned just two decades ago it was a highly controversial thing, and while things have mostly settled down, a lot of the untruths that were spread to allow the idea to exist in the first place haven't just gone away. There is a still a belief among a lot of Australians that prior to white settlement aboriginals were absolute primitives, just wandering the bush scavenging as they went.

Challenging that idea by informing people about aboriginal societies, such as their trade routes or farming techniques is seen as highly political, an attempt at guilt politics, even when it is done in an effort to show real history.

Don't get me wrong, academic studies are still supported and good work is done, but how and if that work is presented in the media is still very political. It's just that politics has nothing to do with 'omg how did they get here'.


EDIT - and there's probably another reason - history is still taught primarily as a narrative. These things were in place, so then this happened, then this happened, and all these things resulted because of that. We mistakenly fail to teach what I think are the most important parts of history - how people lived, how they lived and met their needs, how their societies function. We've done good work building a better understanding of those things about Australian first peoples at an academic level, but that isn't the kind of history that gets taught and spread out in to greater society.

 Ginsu33 wrote:
Why are yanks so concerned/consumed by racism?

If there is a piece of media that doesn't depict things the way that they were, isn't that an accuracy issue and not a racism one?

You have to remember that these films will go to insane levels for all kinds of detail, down to making sure costumes are made out of the right fabrics, woven in historically accurate ways, even when that doesn't show on screen at all. But then when it comes to race they suddenly lose that commitment to accuracy. Probably the best example I can think of is 1492, which put incredible work in to building the three ships Columbus used for his original journey, but then suddenly didn't care so much about the detail when it showed Columbus fighting against the enslavement and brutalising of the local population, when in reality he governed over its most brutal extremes.

The point is that technical details don't matter much, but inaccuracies that are accepted to avoid treading on old, false political narratives should be reacted against. And when it comes to ancient civilisations being filled with people who weren't very white, there's a pretty ugly set of stories that still hold sway. And one of the worst is that when modern Egypt is shown, as a troubled nation, there's no problem showing Egyptians as they really are, darker skin, arabic features. But when they show a strong, ancient Egypt, suddenly everyone gets really white.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 LordofHats wrote:
Probably because it's so omnipresent for so much of American social history.

I'm not sure that's the reason Australia and the US engage with racism so differently. Australia has a very ugly racial history as well, up to an including being real dicks to the Irish who came here.

It's more that Australia and the US are very different in how we deal with all kinds of social issues. Well, you guys hyper-deal with it, we pretty much just don't deal with it at all. Social issues are barely raised in our politics, and when they are raised they're seen as generally unwelcome. As an example we're having a special referendum* on gay marriage and almost all debate on the issue is focused around whether we should bother or just have parliament change the law. Compare to the US where gay marriage was used as a major get out the vote strategy in 2002 & 2004.



*Well, technically a 'survey', so they can do it cheaper as a mail out

 Ginsu33 wrote:


Thank you for your response mate, They don't go over it all in school? The amount of US media I've seen since a kid did anything but downplay it... so it strikes me as odd to hear this.

Oh they go over it, but its very dumbed down, and the significance of it on American society is downplayed.

 MrDwhitey wrote:

 LordofHats wrote:
Americans don't talk much about our own stab at Imperialism

The Philippines with the concentration camps being a pretty bad time.

To be fair, we learned it from you :(.

 Grey Templar wrote:

Wakshaani wrote:
It's why we have tons of arrow heads but no arrows and stone cutting rocks but no stone axes.

And even those are probably extra rare finds since most would get broken, worn down, or otherwise made unrecognizable as tools through normal use, or just being exposed to the elements.

Even simple metal tools could easily be missed if there were no additional signs to make you excavate. Its why those Viking settlements in Canada were so hard to find, even when they left behind some metalwork. The whole rest of the settlement was biodegradable.

Stone tools are actually extremely common. Just dig in any place where people lived in the Stone Age and you will find them. Arrowheads are more rare, but still very common if you search in the right places.
Also, organic materials do get preserved quite well in some circumstances, so finding those isn't nearly as rare as some people believe. Archaeologists are pretty good at reconstructing the material culture of prehistoric human civilisations. It is the non-material things such as beliefs and social structures that present the biggest challenge.


As for US history classes to be US and Western-centric, this is the same in any country in the world. There is only so much time for history classes in school between all of the mathematics and grammar, and there is a huge lot of history in the world. Covering the history of every place in the world in any kind of detail simply is not feasible. Therefore history classes have to focus on those things that are the most directly relevant to the students, which is the history of their own country and culture.

 Iron_Captain wrote:
Stone tools are actually extremely common. Just dig in any place where people lived in the Stone Age and you will find them. Arrowheads are more rare, but still very common if you search in the right places.
Also, organic materials do get preserved quite well in some circumstances, so finding those isn't nearly as rare as some people believe. Archaeologists are pretty good at reconstructing the material culture of prehistoric human civilisations. It is the non-material things such as beliefs and social structures that present the biggest challenge.

Organic materials are well preserved in some conditions, but those conditions are a lot less common than what's needed to preserve stone tools. When you add in that boats would have been a lot rarer than simple tools, then it shouldn't be too hard to believe that while we've found a lot of stone tools from hundreds of thousands of years ago, we haven't found the remains of any boats from 40 to 50,000 years ago.

Not saying there definitely were boats capable of those crossings at that time, just saying that the lack of any boats dated to that period doesn't mean we should conclude no such boats could have existed.

As for US history classes to be US and Western-centric, this is the same in any country in the world. There is only so much time for history classes in school between all of the mathematics and grammar, and there is a huge lot of history in the world. Covering the history of every place in the world in any kind of detail simply is not feasible. Therefore history classes have to focus on those things that are the most directly relevant to the students, which is the history of their own country and culture.

Australian history is probably some of the least nation-centric, largely because there's not that much of it and a lot of it is pretty dull. Consider that a highschool class in Australia can spend a couple of weeks on the Eureka Stockade, a protest that involved less than 500 people, while in the US a class might not cover the Draft Riots at all. As a result our senior highschool classes are more likely to cover things like Chinese or Russian 20th century history.

Thing is though, I'm not sure that makes our history any better. For starters it isn't a popular elective, so lots of kids stop history after year 10 (about 15), and don't do any in their last two years of highschool. This is probably in part due to learning your own history being a lot more appealing than learning someone else's. The second issue is that even though they cover the history of other countries, it is still done from an Australian POV - that's probably unavoidable, and something you simply can't take out of a telling of any history while still making it comprehensible to a highschool audience.

I've always wondered myself why the Battle of Blair Mountain, a violent strike involving 10k workers and 30k deputies, police, and national guardsmen gets no mention in a standard US history class, but we'll mention the Lattimer massacre, which was far less tragic and much smaller in scale XD

Oklahoma has the Tulsa Race Riot, multiple historic all-black towns, the Green Corn Rebellion, and many other historic events that are neglected in our Oklahoma History classes in High School. Sometimes the Tulsa Race Riot get's mentioned, but then it's usually in a "it's their fault" context.

History classes in the US are really just a relatively arbitrarily chosen list of people and events from the recent and distant past that students need to memorize in order to pass a test.

History isn't some separate entity unto itself, everything has a history. History is the origin story of whatever subject (person/place/event/thing) that you choose to examine.

"History" education should focus much less on knowing who person X was or when event Y happened and much more on learning the skills you need to find out the sequence of events that led to the existence of the subject of your interest. Learning history is learning the "why" of something and that's very important knowledge for a whole host of reasons.

Prestor Jon wrote:
History classes in the US are really just a relatively arbitrarily chosen list of people and events from the recent and distant past that students need to memorize in order to pass a test.

History isn't some separate entity unto itself, everything has a history. History is the origin story of whatever subject (person/place/event/thing) that you choose to examine.

"History" education should focus much less on knowing who person X was or when event Y happened and much more on learning the skills you need to find out the sequence of events that led to the existence of the subject of your interest. Learning history is learning the "why" of something and that's very important knowledge for a whole host of reasons.

I disagree to the extend that I think there should be both approaches.

There should be courses in World History, US History, and State History that give a basic foundation of the events, good AND bad, that are the foundation of why things are the way they are today.
And there should also be courses on how to conduct basic research to gain further knowledge than the basic history that is provided to you.

Edit:

While I disagree with the whole "education force-feeds Children liberal worldviews and alternative facts" mindset that is frequently seen when it comes to things like history curriculum selection (like: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/an-unflattering-history-lesson/2015/02/19/3be9cb0c-b878-11e4-a200-c008a01a6692_story.html?utm_term=.79314494a0f7 ), I do think that it helps to move past a "these are the only facts that matter" mindset we get with our education system and standardized testing.

I think standards are important, but setting the standard at being able to repeat a drilled set of facts and figures is a poor standard. I think it's stupid that graders of written sections are given quotas for how many A's and D's they have to give. Relative grading is the opposite of setting standards. There are just so many instances of plain bad test questions. Like so bad you seriously have the question if the people making the standardized tests should be anywhere near education. I suppose I don't particularly care about the given events covered outside of the curiosity of it all. At the end of the day though I think the great weakness of American history, along with most standard history course criteria I've encountered, is the same problem I have with blind displays of patriotism. Follow the leader and don't ask questions is not what we should be striving for in education.

While I disagree with the whole "education force-feeds Children liberal worldviews and alternative facts" mindset that is frequently seen when it comes to things like history curriculum selection (like: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/an-unflattering-history-lesson/2015/02/19/3be9cb0c-b878-11e4-a200-c008a01a6692_story.html?utm_term=.79314494a0f7 ), I do think that it helps to move past a "these are the only facts that matter" mindset we get with our education system and standardized testing.

So many witty quips I'm not allowed to make.