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Post by Dark Cloud on Dec 9, 2011 21:13:52 GMT -6
Yes, yes, welcome back, but enough about you........
How's the Apaloosa? Appolusa? Appleusa? The white horse with black spots and highlights?
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Post by clw on Feb 21, 2012 12:28:56 GMT -6
Reading a book that makes me think of you often, dc. The Name of War: King Phillips War and the Origins of American Identity by Jill Lapore. If war is, at least in part, a contest for meaning, can it ever be a fair fight when only one side has access to those perfect instruments of empire, pens, paper, and printing presses?
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Post by Dark Cloud on Feb 21, 2012 12:48:38 GMT -6
True, I don't like the cliche about the '(only) the winners write history.' Sometimes true, it's better said that those who CAN write, do, and because of all that implies they win against those who cannot. When both sides can write, it most certainly is NOT true.
But even here, even at the beginning there were people saying Metacom and Wamsutta got screwed and arguing on their behalf. Phillip came closest to whipping the Brits OUT of the New World, and he should be honored by his people and kind. Not then, and not now, is he elevated beyond athletic team captain level. He had real problems and he faced them all pretty well, given everything. He lost, is all.
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Post by clw on Feb 21, 2012 14:44:47 GMT -6
Agreed. I'm finding the whole analysis of the Puritan dilemma between piety and reality fascinating -- and that, sure enough, 40 years later Benjamin Church was beginning his revisionist writings in his "search for conscience" concerning the war. That recurring historical loop of 'fight then regret' seems always to follow when the literate conquer the illiterate.
I'll probably throw some other musing up here as I go. Great book.
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Post by montrose on Feb 22, 2012 9:29:08 GMT -6
I live 300 meters from a camp site used by Metacom, and in walking distance of the site where he was nearly killed by Church crossing the river. I have been to many sites related to the war, as part of local historical society.
Consider this: Pilgrims used Indian auxiliaries to hunt down Metacom. These auxiliaries and their families were sold into slavery at the end of the war. They were sent to the sugar islands, with full knowledge that Indians there had a 90% mortality rate.
It is an interesting war, colored by the highly biased accounts of the victors. One of the tenets I learned in grad school is that history is a created myth.
Ohhh, Philbrick wrote a book on the Pilgrims. It is interested how local historians despise the book. Mirror image of his LBH book. Both are works of historical fiction. Though I think Bernard Cornwell and George Fraser do it far better.
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Post by clw on Feb 22, 2012 11:01:01 GMT -6
Christian Indian towns in 1674 numbered around 30 with a population of over 2000. And all those "praying Indians" were sent to island incarceration where they literally starved to death. Though I knew this had been a terrible war, after finding my seventh great grandfather was rewarded for his service with a land grant I wanted to dig deeper. The detail is appalling.
And gggrandad was with Connor in 1866. It seems I come from a long line of indian fighters. Tsk, tsk.
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Post by Dark Cloud on Feb 22, 2012 13:00:50 GMT -6
When you finish that, clw, I'd like you to read - put down your pencils - The Great War and Modern Memory by Paul Fussell. Assignment is on the board. After years of recommending it, absolutely nobody here to my knowledge read it, and in bitterness and only partially because I'd think you'll like it, I'm demanding you read it.
You. Read. It.
Because it emphasizes how the cultural world at any given time affects how history is written, and why. He's a little twee, yes, but brilliant and although the book is 35 years old, it's still relevant. If you like British poetry, all the better.
Do you remember in A River Runs Through It this ending bit:
Indirectly, though, he was present in many of our conversations. Once, for instance, my father asked me a series of questions that suddenly made me wonder whether I understood even my father whom I felt closer to than any man I have ever known. “You like to tell true stories, don’t you?” he asked, and I answered, “Yes, I like to tell stories that are true.”
Then he asked, “After you have finished your true stories sometime, why don’t you make up a story and the people to go with it?
“Only then will you understand what happened and why.
“It is those we live with and love and should know who elude us.”
Hence: literature. Things to the Great War didn't change that much or that fast. There was nothing in literature or history or memory to help soldiers on any side deal with that war and those after. But they tried. They wanted, and want, to understand what happened to themselves and each other.
And why.
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Post by clw on Feb 22, 2012 16:27:05 GMT -6
Yes, dear. Kindle version 8 bucks. I'm finding this Kindle thing just way too easy. Cheaper, searchable, faster -- but I MISS COVERS!
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Post by Dark Cloud on Feb 22, 2012 20:01:56 GMT -6
There are tons of paperbacks in the used bookstore here for a couple of bucks, imagine even in Florida. But, you know, it's a segment read and Kindle might be just as enjoyable. Again, he's into literature, but I noted right off how so much of it applies to the LBH.
Is dinner ready? Let's go out. You're not wearing THAT, are you?
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Post by El Crab on Feb 22, 2012 21:57:56 GMT -6
When you finish that, clw, I'd like you to read - put down your pencils - The Great War and Modern Memory by Paul Fussell. DC: I'll take you up on that. I have that title sitting in a pile of books I had picked up to trade or resell. WWI is a conflict that interests me and it really does seem to get lost in between the ACW and WWII. Not to mention minor skirmishes that somehow get elevated into national spectacles.
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Post by wild on Mar 3, 2012 8:03:17 GMT -6
BLOODLANDS Europe Between Hitler And Stalin.By Timothy Snyder. Unputdownable.A large enough tome,over 500 pages but a great read. Someone posted here that only the Victors write history.Well half way into this and it is abundantly clear that Victors often choose to ignore history because of some unpalatable facts. .For example the most persecuted ethnic group in Europe between the wars was not the Jews but the Poles who lived within the borders of Uncle Joe's hell hole.And who was prosecuting the pograms but the NKVD one third of whose upper echlons were Jewish.
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Post by markland on Mar 3, 2012 10:46:24 GMT -6
BLOODLANDS Europe Between Hitler And Stalin.By Timothy Snyder. Unputdownable.A large enough tome,over 500 pages but a great read. Someone posted here that only the Victors write history.Well half way into this and it is abundantly clear that Victors often choose to ignore history because of some unpalatable facts. .For example the most persecuted ethnic group in Europe between the wars was not the Jews but the Poles who lived within the borders of Uncle Joe's hell hole.And who was prosecuting the pograms but the NKVD one third of whose upper echlons were Jewish. That is in my pile of must read books. I just began Robert Citino's The Wehrmacht Retreat: Fighting a Lost War, 1943. Also, by the same author, Death of the Wehrmacht: German Campaigns, 1942. That book is very good and is the logical prequel to his Retreat book. Citino is not is not as microscopically detailed as Glantz but his books are both readable and accurate. Billy
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Post by markland on Mar 3, 2012 10:59:07 GMT -6
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Post by Dark Cloud on Mar 3, 2012 14:24:27 GMT -6
I think I've read all of Fussell, and I recall that. His deconstruction of the whole "Mom" movement by Wylie in the US military - where the crew of aircraft carriers or entire regiments spelled out "Mom" on deck or field to be seen from the air - is both funny and sort of unnerving today. Wylie is funny too, but strange in his own way.
Fussell can be twee. His exwife wrote great cookbooks and unloaded on the guy, who could be an ass.
I've been advocating people read him since I've been here and before. I'm an English major, so I have interest in his poetry fixations, but I think poetry can be left behind in the trenches of Flanders. War poems after that don't resonate, and they try and the readers wishes they did but they do not.
His points about entering the mental world of a historic era is important, though. We need to remember that with no radio, no recorded music, no electricity or sound reinforcement that people with voices that were loud or that carried were automatically given more regard than today and that conversation and the turn of a phrase were both communication AND entertainment (often the only entertainment available) and it was a hard thing to shake. Churchill in WWI wrote poetic orders that caused problems.
People wrote in phrases that would stick in the mind. It's why knowledge of the Arthurian myths and Roland and all that is important because the chosen references to these books indicated the degree of intensity that the writer wished it to be received. The popular and required readings of Custer's days are reflected in his officer's accounts, I've always thought, and it distorted history as it always had. They were not lying. And it became a kind of social climbing to try and write like one's betters, which led to more problems.
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Post by clw on Mar 3, 2012 17:22:29 GMT -6
That's the third time you've used 'twee' and I still haven't figured it out. Enlighten me.
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