Which Part Of American History Books Would You Love To Blot Out?

[marino760]

I echo the sentiments about the horrible treatment of the Native Americans. I read a book many years ago in high school entitled "Bury my heart at Wounded Knee". For those that aren't familiar with it, it's a history of how the natives were treated from the time of Columbus to the early 20th century through the eyes of American Indians. Chapter after chapter told through their perspective including the Trail of Tears, Chief Joseph, Custer's last stand and all the rest. It opened my eyes. I had no idea the US Supreme Court ruled that Jacksons forced migration of the natives to Oklahoma was declared unconstitutional and he and his army did it anyway. No one stopped him.

[marino760]

Originally Posted by Larry Caldwell

Columbus and the Spaniards/Portugese get a bad rap. True, they enslaved the native population, but slavery ended and the natives survived. You might notice that most of the New World south of the US border has brown skin. The English just exterminated the natives. Once we gained our independence from England, we really got rolling. Does the phrase, "Manifest Destiny" ring a bell?

One must keep in mind that the goals of the Spanish and Portuguese in the new world were very different than than that of the English.
The goal of the Spanish was to conquer and send back as much wealth to Spain in the form of gold, silver and precious gems as possible to enrich the Spanish crown. Thus that being their goal, the vast majority of the people sent to the New World were soldiers, not women and children. Their numbers were limited but enough to do what they wanted to. The soldiers had offspring with the native women, but there weren't enough Spanish soldiers to genetically make the populations south of the border look European rather than native for the large part.
The English on the other hand sent entire families including many women and children to the New World in their quest to colonize this new land. These families did not intermix with the Natives as far as many of them having offspring with them. As the native populations died out and were exterminated in the English territories, there wasn't much opportunity to interbreed, therefore the areas of the US and Canada for the most part does not have the genetically mixed populations of people with brown skin color like you see from Mexico going south.

I just thought this is an interesting piece of history that not many people even think about.

[marino760]

I totally agree that initially, England's and Spain's objectives were they same but that quickly changed when England did not find vast amounts of gold and natives in great wealthy cities. Instead what England found proved to be more valuable in the long run and that was an unlimited supply of virgin forests filled with timber. England at that point had already depleted it's forests and needed to find new sources for timber in order to maintain themselves as a world class naval power. It takes a great deal of wood to build ships and England was running out of it.
The vast forests of North America was there gold but in a different form and they colonized the new world accordingly. Of course they would plunder the gold from the Spaniards whenever they could but that was a little bit of icing on the cake for them.

[Spodi90]

I'll go liberal here and **** off the conservatives... *liberally states* the trail of tears, the gilded age, Vietnam, GWOT (how its ran, not its purpose), the NSA under both W and Obama, and the future history of America examples: TPP, dying middle class, no consistent grand strategy. We're headed in the wrong direction, see conservatives, I compromised.