Stereotypes

Frederich Engels, co-author with Karl Marx of the core texts outlining the prospects of communism, offers one stereotype of American Indians:

Everything runs smoothly without soldiers, gendarmes, or police, without nobles, kings, governors, prefects or judges; without prisons, without trials. All quarrels and disputes are settled by the whole body of those concerned. . . . The household is run communistically by a number of families; the land is tribal property, only the small gardens being temporarily assigned to the households -- still, not a bit of our extensive and complicated machinery of administration is required. . . . There are no poor and needy. The communistic household and the gens know their responsibility toward the aged, the sick and the disabled in war. All are free and equal -- including the women.
Frederich Engels, The Origin of the Family (1884)

Chief Justice John Marshal of the United States Supreme Court, writing a half century earlier, offered a more negative assessment:

But the tribes of Indians inhabiting this country were fierce savages, whose occupation was war, and whose subsistence was drawn chiefly from the forest. To leave them in possession of their country was to leave the country a wilderness.
Chief Justice John Marshall, Johnson v. McIntosh (1823)

Both men were wrong.

Art of History

Historical narrative imposes order upon chaos. The historian employs deception, omission, distraction, distortion, repetition, simplification, figurative language and images, slander, generalities, card stacking, ...

World Malaria Day

I have written several posts on this blog concerning the historical impact of disease. Many diseases continue to ravage modern populations. Malaria is the most prolific killer. As average global temperatures rise, the regions hospitable to the parasites that cause malaria will grow. Much can be done to protect those in affected regions.

Read more of the following at the website for World Malaria Day.

World Malaria day--A Day to Act

25 April 2010 is a day of unified commemoration of the global effort to provide effective control of malaria around the world. This year's World Malaria Day marks a critical moment in time. The international malaria community has less than a year to meet the 2010 targets of delivering effective and affordable protection and treatment to all people at risk of malaria, as called for by the UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-Moon.

World Malaria Day represents a chance for all of us to make a difference. Whether you are a government, a company, a charity or an individual, you can roll back malaria and help generate broad gains in multiple areas of health and human development.

Who Was Fritz Kraemer? And Why We Should Care

Who Was Fritz Kraemer? And Why We Should Care

by Luke A. Nichter

Whether Vietnam, Iraq, or now Afghanistan, wars come and go, but the real battle is a philosophic one between two sects of conservatives. In The Forty Years War: The Rise and Fall of the Neocons from Nixon to Obama, authors Len Colodny and Tom Shachtman challenge readers to examine the role of a little-known Pentagon figure named Fritz G.A. Kraemer. Colodny and Shachtman argue that Kraemer was the leading intellectual behind what became known as the neo-conservative movement, witnessed by the fact that Kraemer influenced so many high-ranking conservative figures over the course of six decades.

Continue reading at History News Network.

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After the Carnage

A single train engine ran through a flock of sheep leaving a bloody mess. Then,

Presley saw again, in his imagination, the galloping monster, the terror of steel and steam, with its single eye, Cyclopean, red, shooting from horizon to horizon; but saw it now as the symbol of a vast power, huge, terrible, flinging the echo of its thunder over all the reaches of the valley, leaving blood and destruction in its path, the leviathan, with tentacles of steel clutching into the soil, the soulless Force, the iron-hearted Power, the monster, the Colossus, the Octopus.
Frank Norris, The Octopus (1901)

My recollections of reading this novel nearly twenty years ago are vague. McTeague (1899) is far more memorable. Never far from my consciousness is the scene early on when McTeague gets a billiard ball stuck in his enormous jaws, and the panic that shows in his eyes until the ball flies across the room after a hard pat on the back. Likewise, Trina's bedding with her gold remains an unforgettable image. Somehow, The Octopus carried less weight in that graduate seminar so long ago. Norris's grand novel offered a strong metaphor at the center, but a less memorable story than his story of a dentist. Did we really read the book?

In any case, another effort to get through Frank Norris's tale was stimulated last night when I began anew my reading of the classic biography of President Theodore Roosevelt.

In 1898, there had been twenty multi-million-dollar industrial trusts; now, there were one hundred and eighty-five. The proliferation evoked an image, in many minds, of a constrictive organism stretching out to every extremity of American civilization. Hence the title of Frank Norris's new antitrust novel: The Octopus.
Edmund Morris, Theodore Rex (2001)