Assumptions

This message came in an email titled "New from an author you love."

Since you've bought something by Larry Schweikart in the past, we thought you might enjoy this new release: Seven Events That Made America America: And Proved That the Founding Fathers Were Right All Along, available June 1, 2010. Get it at a Borders store near you, or pre-order it now at Borders.com and enjoy it in no time!

It might be worth noting that Schweikart's writing interests me principally because it offers a study in shoddy scholarship, logical and factual errors, distortions, propaganda, ...

Howard Zinn's work offers numerous gaps, omissions, and exaggerations to serve his political ideology. But egregious factual errors and gross misrepresentations of source material are rare. I purchased Schweikart's A Patriot's History of the United States (co-written with Michael Allen) from Borders a few years ago. When I browse in my local store, I look at other works by Schweikart and then re-shelve them and buy something else (or leave without making a purchase).

A Patriot's History of the United States clearly aims to counter Zinn's A People's History of the United States, but the real model adversary for Schweikart is Ward Churchill. Schweikart even says so, "I hope Ward Churchill is on TV every night. Every time he talks we sell another hundred books" (Patriot's History, xiii).

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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