A Little History Project
"The hunger to unlearn what so many of us have been taught is pronounced" - Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, 'An Indigenous People's History of the United States"
Nazis unwelcome: here’s my post about moving this blog off of Substack soon. I might put this stinger on every post until then to try to irritate Nazi Sympathizer Hamish McKenzie. I might forget/get bored and stop. Not today though!
Here’s some information nobody asked for: I loved college.
Mostly, I loved the constative facts of my college: an internally secluded campus both by a lake and a train station. Nature, city adventures, library, gym, lecture halls, food, bars, all my friends—these things were all a 10-minute walk. And yes, I included “lecture halls” on purpose.
Most lecture classes that are those big, 100-person Indiana Jones-style sermons are boring and impersonal, but if you get the right prof, they’re incredible. Nothing’s expected of you except sitting back and absorbing the information. I could spend the rest of my life taking pass/fail lectures. It’s part of the appeal of podcasts.
I can’t do that, though. I have to take care of my kid and write to you all, my subscriber list of close personal friends. So I do things like turn my reading list into little mini-classes for myself, and then you all get to reap the pass/fail benefits! Passing being “click the email open, they track those stats” and failing being “come on, I’m not actually gonna check.”
So not that anyone asked, but I’m doing a little mini-class for the rest of January. This is less like my being your professor, and more like I’m taking a class and these are my Blackboard posts. You! You lucky-so-and-so! You get to read my Blackboard posts! I told you no one asked for this!
Speaking of things no one asked for: the United States! Let’s read about its history.
Who Wants To Read Some History!
The bare bones: I’m going to simultaneously read A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn, Four Hundred Souls edited by Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain, and An Indigenous People’s History of The United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. I’ve divided all three books in rough sevenths (seven total posts left for January, including both Wednesday blogs and Friday Links). Do they completely line up together? Eh. I’d post a full syllabus-style reading list, but frankly? I don’t think anyone’s going to follow along. If you’d like a syllabus, respond to this email and I promise to Fred Hampton that I will send you one.
Why these books? Well, I should’ve read Zinn in high school, like everyone else. I like the idea of a people’s history, a history divorced from “Great Man Do War.” History should be a story for us, and I often find myself wishing I could understand life in earlier eras. Not like, “how’d them pioneer women live without washing machines?” but more like, “it really seems like things are bad and living in the 21st century is hard, what can we learn from the past?” It’s like what I mentioned last week with Working’s discussion of life being slower in the 70s, or like Zinn saying in the first essay that the people of Spain sure didn’t get rich off colonialism and we know Indigenous people didn’t benefit from colonialism, so why’d it happen? It’s not remotely controversial to say the US is in crisis. 90 years after Hitler used the US’s playbook on Indigenous genocide for the Jewish people of Europe, Israel is using Eichmann’s playbook on the people of Palestine and Donald Trump’s got Hitler’s playbook on his nightstand. I’d like to learn something from the people who were on the opposite side of, say, the Virginia House of Burgesses.
If I can figure out why colonialism and slavery happened even though tons of people didn’t want those things, can we figure out a way to stop climate change and AI tech and a fascist takeover of the US?
Like anyone with a functioning brain, I get that US history cannot be understood without a Black and Indigenous perspective. Also, my parents got me Four Hundred Souls Christmas 2022 and the bookstore near my house had an event for Indigenous People’s History a couple months back, and it kinda seemed like the stars were aligning, you know? Plus, not sure if you read the preceding paragraph, but Black and Indigenous people aren’t exactly the ones responsible for what I think ails the world in 2024.
Lastly, I’m doing this because—and I’m sure this will be one of those things that comes as no surprise to anyone who’s spent a second with me or my writing, but I have trouble admitting—I’m something of a recovering moralist. I think studying history, specifically history as told by people explicitly not on the side of Empire, is a moral good. I think understanding the history of the land you live on is basic human decency, basic responsibility. And you cannot understand the history of the U.S. if you don’t get perspectives from Black and Indigenous writers, as well as a white writer who’s sick of other white people. Read history! Then read some poets!
Read This Week
A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn: “Columbus, the Indians, and Human Progress,” “Drawing the Color Line,” and “Persons of Mean and Vile Condition”
Four Hundred Souls edited by Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain: Part One (1619-1659), Part Two (1659-1699), and Part Three (1699-1739)
An Indigenous People’s History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz: “Introduction: This Land” and “One: Follow the Corn”
Thoughts
Where to start with the beginning? Feels like I both learned a lot and didn’t learn anything that wasn’t already lurking in assumed knowledge somewhere. Details are striking, though. You can chart the linguistic evolution of oppression: “territorial organization” becomes “Indian removal.” Slavehood status passed matrilineally, you can watch that be codified in legal documents. You can see whiteness being defined—I think maybe white people today think it’s some sort of metaphor or sociology talking point, but really, you can see whiteness as an allegedly superior yet corruptible concept being legally defined in this period. The first person publicly whipped for an interracial relationship was a white man who slept with a Black woman and had a Black son1. The white man, per the charges, was guilty of dishonoring his own body and his community.
Details are horror films, too: Zinn mentions a woman cutting the toes off an indentured servant, Herb Boyd in Four Hundred Souls talks about a man arrested for participating in a slave rebellion having every bone in his body broken with a crowbar. Make no mistake, the colonizers brought no civilization and no god when they crossed the sea.
One thing I was reminded of reading is how I’ve always thought The VVitch was a comedy. The arrogance of colonizers in the first place. Here were two continents that housed societies so in harmony with their own environment they accidentally caused a mini ice age a continent away. Did you know that Indigenous people would control-burn the undergrowth of forests so that animals would be attracted to the younger grasses?
Not that they needed to eat much meat, having cultivated a mostly vegetarian diet based on corn, beans, and squashes.
Meanwhile, Bartholomew and Aloysius come over from England, and they’re too stupid to survive a single winter. Hell, they have to go to an entirely different continent and use all manner of dehumanizing violence just because they couldn’t figure out how to work the land. Of course, colonists being driven mad by goats would be a lot funnier if it didn’t result in as much needless death and misery as the creation of the United States did.
And let’s be clear: almost no one wanted this. Rebellions were rampant—Bacon’s Rebellion was a racist whining about not being able to further expand into Indigenous territory, but it accidentally created the first coalition of Black people and poor white people. Later, Fred Hampton would go to Uptown. It wasn’t just the big, “everyone go get your guns” rebellions, though. Enslaved people engaged in work stoppages. The Quakers made the first humanitarian arguments against slavery. European people kidnapped by Indigenous people during battle would often refuse to be returned to their own communities—not once did an Indigenous person choose to remain in the colonies. The United States of America, from the outset, was a dubious idea at best. But a few planters and merchants and royals were making money, so now Europe has a cigarette addiction.
To wrap up, I will not say whether I think the US is “bad” or “good” because the answer is both. I sure like living in Chicago, for example. Can you feel the however? The colonial history of North America, and the founding of the United States, was uniformly awful, not to be celebrated, and perhaps most importantly, a massive missed opportunity. Instead of first contact between Europeans and Indigenous Americas being an exchange of knowledge and goods and culture, Europeans immediately went to destruction. Instead of Europeans and Africans working within pre-existing Indigenous frameworks and building a Cordoba-like “ornament of the world,” Europeans immediately defaulted to identity- and culture-stripping. Sure, Africans engaged in slave trade, but could they have known what they were condemning their captives to, an ocean away? I read about 1492-1739 and I mourn what was lost. I mourn the way humanity could have turned out, were it not for violence.
Some epigraphs I considered using:
From Zinn: “There may have been a kind of frustrated rage at their own ineptitude, at the Indian superiority at taking care of themselves, that made the Virginians especially ready to become masters of slaves.”
From Dunbar-Ortiz: “President Obama affirmed another key element of US national myth…[in a TV interview saying] ‘America was not born a colonial power.’ Only by erasing the existence of Indigenous nations could such a claim be made.”
From Zinn: “The country there was not ‘born free’ but born slave and free, servant and master, tenant and landlord, poor and rich. As a result, the political authorities were opposed ‘frequently, vociferously, and sometimes violently.’”
From Four Hundred Souls: “Like many participants in the Middle Passage, the individual inducements for cooperation bound them to a ruthless process that enriched the few at the expense of many.”
Sorry you got an email,
Chris
Outside of my “write out any number lower than 10” and “put periods in a.m. and p.m.” hang-ups from previous jobs, you’ll notice I’m not much of a stickler for style guides. I realize that sentence might have some readers wondering why we capitalize the B in Black but not the w in white. Style guides were updated in 2020, here’s a Columbia Journalism Review piece about the move. Alexandria Neason’s quote is a bit long to paste here, but it’s a good summation.