Ari’s previous two posts inspire me to ask of our learned readership a question for each.1
1) Does the “which side are you on” rhetoric in response to industrial tragedy get the American public’s attention? Almost a hundred years ago Charles Beard, perhaps somewhat bitterly, said no:
Realizing the fact that a mere high mortality due to congestion will not seriously disturb a nation that complacently slaughters more people on its railways and in its factories and mines than any other country in the world, mathematically minded reformers are trying to reach the heart of the public through its purse by pointing out that there is a great economic loss in the death of persons of working age.
Which really works better to grab Americans’ attention? Rhetorical appeals to justice, or social scientific appeals to your wallet?
2) Let’s stipulate there is no greater historiographical swindle than the hornswoggling pretense that the Civil War derived principally from any cause other than slavery and there has never been a lower species of bamboozle than the neoconfederate heritage racket. What else goes on the list of great historiographical frauds? (Yes, New Deal denialism does. Others?)
1That’s for each post, not for each reader, wisenheimer.
The Edge of the American West 
116 comments
April 7, 2010 at 12:34 pm
docdave
To question 1: it’s always seemed effective to me, but that’s probably just the residual New Lefty in me.
To question 2: Yes, let’s so stipulate. As a Westerner/Yankee employed in a Southern state, I get the Ole Southern Lightwash thrown in my face frequently, along with the unspoken “but you just can’t understand” postscript. Enough is enough. Your #2 pick is apt–I’d tack on Holocaust denial and the work of those happy folks who think that All Those Armenians just disappeared on their own.
April 7, 2010 at 12:47 pm
GordonM
1) Yes, but slowly. The 2 arguments appeal to largely disjoint sets of people; the emotional appeal probably reaches more, but it fades faster.
2) Oh, the Founding Fathers believed (and the Constitution says) whatever I happen to believe. At least, that’s the one that really irritates me.
April 7, 2010 at 12:59 pm
rea
“Original intent” jurisprudence, which oddly wasn’t at all what the Founders intended.
April 7, 2010 at 1:04 pm
Walt
The greatest historiographical swindle was when the Devil convinced us he didn’t exist.
April 7, 2010 at 1:10 pm
kid bitzer
1) i’ll be happy to answer this question, after you pay me.
2) where do myths about the virgin continent fit in? it’s weird–the genocide waged against the amerindian peoples does not get *denied* so much as just sort of…passed over. not incorporated into the official self-image.
with slavery or the holocaust, we get outright denialism: there was no holocaust, the war was not about slavery.
with the american indians, nobody outright says “there were no native inhabitants of north america,” or “they were here, but they just up and left and we don’t know where”.
no, we get pocahontas-style acknowledgements of the truth, but then the whole country goes amnesiac somehow a minute later.
also: there’s that other weird episode where guillaume le conquerant gets off a ship everyone says, look, it’s will! wotcher, will? and will says cor blimey, lads, bloody brilliant, innit? and all of a sudden he’s english.
actually, just about all history is swindle. except for that stuff you wrote about the new deal. that’s all true.
April 7, 2010 at 1:22 pm
kid bitzer
i mean: texas. is there any part of the official history of the state of texas that is not an appalling, hornswoggling swindle?
April 7, 2010 at 1:30 pm
Tom Elrod
As a medievalist, I am frequently annoyed by claims that everyone before the Renaissance was an idiot who rolled around in their own shit all day, thought the Earth was flat, and did whatever the Pope wanted told them. There were also like 3 books, and only monks read them.
April 7, 2010 at 1:31 pm
Robin Marie
1) I think moral appeals can work, but they have to be phrased powerfully and carefully; rhetoric where people perceive that they themselves are the ones being called out for unethical behavior do not usually work, it seems to me, whereas rhetoric which communicates “as decent, good people, this conflicts with your own values and sympathy for human beings,” have a much better chance of being effective. But as someone else pointed out, they can fade quickly, so they have to be repeated endlessly and diligently.
2) I’m not sure if this counts as a historical swindle, but I’m always surprised how much I run into the “change takes time,” argument from students and then others I happen to casually know. This is particularly impressive since they are usually talking about racial equality and the Civil Rights movement, perhaps *the* example of a group of people refusing to wait around for everyone else to become enlightened and creating the conditions for change. But nonetheless I hear it a lot; this idea that social justice is a simple matter of waiting around for old people to die and allowing the generations following to slowly soften their prejudices. Of course simply looking at the 1920s destroys this narrative, but somehow the awareness of this is rather minimal.
April 7, 2010 at 2:04 pm
Vance
Does the Armenian genocide count?
My real point is that it’s great to see some action on this blog.
April 7, 2010 at 2:19 pm
Matt McKeon
Holocaust denial is the most disgusting, but its pretty small scale.
Black Confederates fighting to remain slaves is rotten, but very revealing about the people who espouse it.
April 7, 2010 at 2:28 pm
eric
where do myths about the virgin continent fit in?
I think myths are a different problem — as you point out, they survive alongside the evidence that refutes them. While the swindles I’m thinking of need to omit contrary evidence.
I am frequently annoyed by claims that everyone before the Renaissance was an idiot who rolled around in their own shit all day
A medievalist friend of mine points out that William Manchester deserves quite a bit of blame for this one’s survival into modern times.
it’s great to see some action
Hott.
April 7, 2010 at 2:35 pm
kid bitzer
“everyone before the Renaissance was an idiot who rolled around in their own shit all day”
“William Manchester deserves quite a bit of blame for this”
more than dennis the peasant?
(how many of you are able to get through a lecture on medieval european history without getting bits of the holy grail thrown at you by aspiring statler and waldorfs?)
April 7, 2010 at 2:42 pm
kid bitzer
i’ll be damned. mcconnell seems to have released a new, revised proclamation including this clause:
“In addition the Governor announced that the following language will be added to the Proclamation:
WHEREAS, it is important for all Virginians to understand that the institution of slavery led to this war and was an evil and inhumane practice that deprived people of their God-given inalienable rights and all Virginians are thankful for its permanent eradication from our borders, and the study of this time period should reflect upon and learn from this painful part of our history…”
http://www.bluevirginia.us/diary/279/bob-mcdonnell-apologizes-admits-mistake-on-confederate-history-month-proclamation
if that’s not a spoof, then it’s a pretty big deal. it should get him as much flaming from the neo-confederates as the first proclamation got him from americans. (but i doubt if any neo-con will write as good a smack-down as tnc’s).
April 7, 2010 at 3:01 pm
Vance
kb, I came over to link that too (via Dave Weigel). The revision is impressively full-throated.
April 7, 2010 at 3:05 pm
zunguzungu
For #2, I vote the “British Empire acquired in a fit of absent mindedness.”
I picture John Bull waking up one morning, mouth full of sawdust, trying to figure out what he was up to last night:
“Let’s see, was at the pub in Berlin with Bismarck, Leopold, and the boys, and someone got out the maps. What’s this? Shoot, Botswana, what am I supposed to do with that? I already have India!”
April 7, 2010 at 3:10 pm
ari
mcconnell seems to have released a new, revised proclamation
I’ve updated my post to reflect the new information.
April 7, 2010 at 3:14 pm
kid bitzer
“I’ve updated my post.”
exactly the kind of fair-minded intellectual integrity that i despise about liberals.
good god, man: kick him while he’s down! at least sneer at his flip-flopping!
and what’s even worse than this? tnc is probably going to say something magnanimous about his reversal, too. why can’t he be petty, just once? the only consolation there is that by the very fact of being big about it, tnc rubs the salt into the wounds.
April 7, 2010 at 4:03 pm
foolishmortal
Post offices around New England sometimes fly the POW-MIA flag, which is deeply stupid.
April 7, 2010 at 4:04 pm
matt w
2) Oh, the Founding Fathers believed (and the Constitution says) whatever I happen to believe. At least, that’s the one that really irritates me.
That’s a good one. Republicans love to talk about how they’re cleaving to the vision of the Founding Fathers, while erasing Jefferson from their curricula and angrily denying that Hamilton believed in a strong central government.
Someone recently asked me which Founding Fathers these people do like, and (unfortunately not my first answer) I said “Ronald Reagan and Jesus.” Am I wrong?
April 7, 2010 at 4:05 pm
matt w
Hello, open tag.
April 7, 2010 at 4:18 pm
ari
What are you talking about, weirdo?
April 7, 2010 at 4:40 pm
elizardbreath
A medievalist friend of mine points out that William Manchester deserves quite a bit of blame for this one’s survival into modern times.
Oh, man, I’m not even a medievalist, just an undergrad Medieval Studies major, and that book made me so mad. I went around for months looking for people who’d read it so I could get hostile about it.
April 7, 2010 at 4:44 pm
ac
The New Deal denialism is part of a larger ideological swindle, namely, that free markets solve all social problems. And somehow the fact of the business cycle is forgotten over and over. In any current bubble no one can remember back to the last one.
April 7, 2010 at 4:54 pm
Megan
The “which side are you on” rhetoric made me start humming the song, so I guess it got my attention.
April 7, 2010 at 5:09 pm
Erik Lund
kid bitzer: you ask: “where do myths about the virgin continent fit in? it’s weird–the genocide waged against the amerindian peoples does not get *denied* so much as just sort of…passed over. not incorporated into the official self-image.”
In answer, two points:
i) As far as we understand the history of the human immune system, the rate of death in epidemics is socially horrific, and demographically irrelevant. (The great cholera epidemics that ensued when that disease first hit Egypt in the 1800s, for example, did not kill more than 20 per thousand of population.) It follows that those Indians who were alive in America in 1491 were, more or less, the Indians alive in 1493. If their generations were cut off, it was not by disease.
ii) The extent of Old World emigration to the New World in the 1600s and 1700s has been relentlessly exaggerated. It is unlikely that it reached a total of 100,000 Britons in the whole of the 1600s, inclusive of the Caribbean, the vast majority of them male.
If, then, there were 250,000 “English” in Colonial America in 1710, who were their grandparents? People who talk about this phenomena in the context of the fall of the Roman Empire now speak of “ethnogenesis” and, less opaquely, assimilation. Historians of Spanish America speak of “Creolisation.”
North America is different. I guess that we are supposed to persuade ourselves that there were 16,000 California Indians in 1950, and a third of a million in 2010 for _demographic_ reasons.
So, yes, there’s a swindle going on here, but it’s on the principle of three-card monte. The trick isn’t that you can’t figure out which of the three cards on the table is yours. The swindle is that your card isn’t on the table.
April 7, 2010 at 5:36 pm
Urban Garlic
For question 2, there’s the obvious linkage with question 1 — the notion that labor is, and by rights ought to be, an economic commodity just like any other, and that any movement that gums up the market in the name of labor justice is an unacceptable inefficiency, one which “we” can’t afford. Why, if we have to make up a *reason* to fire an expensive high-seniority worker and outsource his job, it’ll take an extra ten minutes, and we’ll lose fifty bucks, and the Germans/Japanese/Malaysians/Chinese will eat our lunch, and then they’ll come for yours!
There’s also a whole family of frauds connected with the misapplication of science, which irritate me greatly. Years ago, as an aspiring young scientist, I studied the social history of creation “science”, and was greatly saddened to discover that it grew up among communities of workers who had had social-darwinist “scientific management” applied to their jobs and communities, and who heard from their bosses that “science” decreed that they could only ever be cogs in the great machine, and from their churches that if they believed in the Bible, they could be loved and saved by the very Son of God Himself.
Guess which one had a better reception?
April 7, 2010 at 7:08 pm
Tyler
2) Two historical myths that I can think of:
First, that the US does not have an empire, does not want one, and has never had one or wanted one. The prevalence of this myth explains why so many people were surprised when they heard, after the Haitian earthquake, that the US had once occupied Haiti. And Cuba. And Nicaragua. And parts of Mexico. And even the Philippines, which you would think people should know about.
Second, in the field of Japanese history, silly myths about the Samurai are so prevalent that every Japanese history professor has to spend time debunking them. Students have such silly preconceptions that one professor I know does not even use the word “samurai,” but uses the word “bushi” instead. Most students have never heard the word “bushi” (which means “warrior”), and so they don’t connect it with samurai stereotypes.
For the damaging consequences of silly samurai stereotypes on discourse about Japan’s history and motivations, look no further than Iris Chang’s book about Nanking.
April 7, 2010 at 7:28 pm
shadowcook
As a medievalist, I, too, can attest the power of Manchester’s very superficial and under-researched rhetoric. But I don’t think it’s all that different from some of the enduring misconceptions about the early republic people cling to.
Posing the two questions about the rhetoric of justice and self-interest evades the knotty problem of their interconnection, because most people don’t think in such binary terms. I’m reading Wood’s Empire of Liberty and discovering how old some of the public vs. private discourses surrounding the health care reform are. The overwhelming majority of people reacting to HCR are unaware of how old the elements of the polemic are. So, to pit the appeal of justice against that of self-interest is to obscure the connections between each form of rhetoric.
I think most people want to believe that self-interest coincides with justice. And that, it seems to me, has deep historical roots in this country.
April 7, 2010 at 8:01 pm
pv
For #2: Jesus appointed Peter the first Pope?
April 7, 2010 at 8:04 pm
JPool
On question one, following up on Megan, it apparently falls to me to link to this. What’s even happened to this blog?
More seriously, I have to point out that Taddy’s post contained elements of both class struggle and economic/good business appeals. While some may dismiss workerist rhetoric out of hand, I think we don’t think we get any closer to having the lives and deaths of working people taken seriously by treating them only as social costs. I think that that’s one of the many mistakes that technocratic liberalism has made over the years.
Erik Lund, I’m no expert and I can’t tell what you’re actually arguing, but your first point seems deeply and horribly mistaken. First, Egypt in no way resembles North America (shared disease environment with Europe/Africa/Asia, cowpox). Second, outside of the technical point that because there wasn’t any real contact with North America until the 1500s your 1491-1493 trick stands, I’m not understanding how you’re dismissing the widespread accounts of really massive mortality figures in those communities that caught the first epidemic wave. More generally, I take kb’s point to be not just the genocidey parts of disease, massacres and removals, but the more general point that this is conquered/stolen land and that we are a settler-colony, even if we’d like to whistle away that fact.
April 7, 2010 at 8:56 pm
Colin
Arguably connected to the virgin-continent myth is the widespread belief that the entire 3rd world is only just now emerging from timeless autochthonous tradition (hunting/gathering or sentimentalized “village life”) and encountering big bad global capital. The dominant metaphor links nature and indigeneity (see its hyper-literalization in “Avatar”) and turns all history into a single, endlessly repeated story of the innocent indigene encountering the modern.
April 8, 2010 at 2:01 am
ajay
The extent of Old World emigration to the New World in the 1600s and 1700s has been relentlessly exaggerated. It is unlikely that it reached a total of 100,000 Britons in the whole of the 1600s, inclusive of the Caribbean, the vast majority of them male.
If, then, there were 250,000 “English” in Colonial America in 1710, who were their grandparents?
You seem to be implying that the bulk of the “English” population were half- or quarter-Native American in descent – the offspring of English fathers and local mothers.
Marriage records, etc, should confirm this. Do they?
April 8, 2010 at 3:27 am
Jonathan Jarrett
Dennis the Peasant is not so bad, because he allows you to open debate about how a medieval society was run. If you’re teaching the Italian communes or other proto-democratic organisations, and let’s face it on a survey course teleology rules, Dennis is actually a good starting point. And then the incongruity of people being quite literally dirt-poor and having strong opinions on the organisation of society is actually fairly useful for teaching, say, reform Christianity or popular heresy. So I can cope with Dennis.
My pet hate for #2 would probably be the about-face that thinks that Islam wasn’t medieval in the Middle Ages but somehow is now. There is a debate to be had about whether what is basically a European category applies to Islam at all but since early Islam interacted with other states and polities that we have no problem calling medieval, it’s at least contemporary. Now, however, no such excuse. Related: medieval Islam, guardian of all knowledge and civilisation what with the benighted medievals running round naked in the dark; modern Islam, basically Stone Age and resistant to European ‘civilisation’. There is a story to tell there, indeed—where are the Balkh and Samarkand of yesteryear, etc.—but that would involve bringing the two stones together in such a way as to make a spark, and it doesn’t often happen.
April 8, 2010 at 4:14 am
Erik Lund
JPool:
the fundamental argument against the “Columbian Holocaust” is that all epidemics must exist in a range between inadequate lethality to even be recognised, and an excessive lethality at which contagion becomes impossible. This is the same dynamic that contains Ebola. It’s just too lethal to spread. Therefore, while death rates of, say 20% are perhaps conceivable, 90% is just out of the question.
Several arguments have been advanced to salvage the “Columbian Holocaust.” first, a genetic component of resistance to disease has been gestured at. Good try: very few diseases have a genetic resistance factor, and smallpox is not one of them.
Second, New World populations are supposed to be more vulnerable to disease than Old World because populations were too low for epidemic disease (demonstrably incorrect, but maybe there were fewer of them or something), or because of a lack of domestic animals (specious on a number of grounds).
The claim here is to immunological naivete. If you did not get the cold when you were a kid, you are more vunerable to smallpox as an adult, because your immune muscles are all flabby from lack of exercise.
As far as I understand the science of the immune system (and my “scientific” knowledge is limited to a biophysics class twenty years ago), this is unlikely. It appears that all possible immune responses are present in all human genomes, so that all human population reactions to a new disease will be the same. That said, the science of the immune system is not established entirely, and the history of the human immune system is beyond us for the moment
Nevertheless, the first substantive European encounter with the East Coast came in 1502, when the first paying fishing voyages to the Newfoundland returned to Bristol. I won’t trouble you with tedious details, but the scale of human contact was massive, and extended from Texas to Labrador. If the unspoiled immunological naivete of the east coast Indian population existed in 1492, it was gone long before 1607.
As for the “evidence” of widespread death, I rather think that the title of David Henige’s article on the subject, “Numbers from Nowhere,” says it all. No-one doubts that epidemics were still striking populations on both continents and killing a great deal of people. Although we should beware of teratological history, in which God’s will is helpfully pointed out by timely epidemics.
And notice that the epidemics didn’t end in 1492, or 1607. On the contrary, they conveniently wipe out Indian populations just in time for them to be replaced by “White settlers.” Thus, the great plague hits New England in the 1620s, but California in the 1840s. And, oddly enough, it has never struck the Northwest Territories, where White settlement has never started. (Again, this is the demographically-transformative epidemic, not the garden variety one that just kills a great many people.)
Ajay: Fun fact. We have marriage records for European parishes. We do not have them for New England parishes. Bradford’s _Of Plymouth Plantation_ ended up in the library of the Bishop of London, like a proper church record, because it has a partial listing of the weddings of the signers of the Mayflower Compact. A look at _New England Beginnings_, a comprehensive look through all extant vital records of Seventeenth Century Colonial New England with a view to documenting all migrants establishes that we know the names of only a fraction of the brides. Baptismal certificates are equally rare (less than half, I think, of inhabitants of Plymouth at the end of Bradford’s governorship had even been baptised), and most documented men can’t be traced back across the Atlantic, either.
Bishop Wilberforce got into a great deal of trouble by sneering that the 5000 Pilgrims had multiplied into a hundred thousand New Englanders in the course of a century, but the actual number of migrants documented by _New England Beginnings_ is 14,000 at the outside.
This is probably why there is a mixed marriage in every historical fictional work set in New England written in the 1820s that I know of, and offspring in all but one of them (so one out of four).
April 8, 2010 at 5:02 am
foolishmortal
It appears that all possible immune responses are present in all human genomes, so that all human population reactions to a new disease will be the same.
I believe the first is true, but the latter isn’t. If my understanding is correct, during development, the immune system limits itself, becoming responsive to only a subset of the pathogens it is capable of reacting to.
Why do you consider the domestication argument specious?
April 8, 2010 at 6:06 am
Walt
While I won’t argue that Manchester’s book doesn’t suck, whenever I hear medievalists defend the Middle Ages against the charge of backwardness that their defense falls well short of the mark. I sometimes wonder if they’re too close to the subject.
April 8, 2010 at 6:23 am
dana
I sometimes wonder if they’re too close to the subject.
I doubt that’s the reason for their insufficient defenses; I don’t work in the medieval period but there’s really no doubt that there was, e.g., methodical science. The early moderns, for example, are often responding (or trying to revise) Scholastic conceptions of the world, and they’re arguing against serious contenders who in some cases have better explanations for the phenomena.
As it turned out, the newer science was able to explain more in the long run, but it’s a mistake to think that the moderns represented a clean break, or that objections to them lay in mere superstition.
April 8, 2010 at 6:27 am
Urban Garlic
@Erik Lund:
New World populations are supposed to be more vulnerable to disease than Old World because populations were too low for epidemic disease (demonstrably incorrect, but maybe there were fewer of them or something), or because of a lack of domestic animals (specious on a number of grounds).
Can you clarify this? I take this to be a reference to the argument made, among other places, in Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs, and Steel”. The argument, as I understand it, is not only about the intrinsic (genomic) immune response, but exploits the fact that the human immune system has memory, and can be tuned by exposure to pathogens. This is how artificial immunization works, you deliberately expose yourself to a mild dose of some pathogen, and populate your bloodstream with suitable antibodies. If you are later exposed to a larger dose of the same pathogen, your primed immune system can contain the attack, whereas an unprimed (“naive”) immune system could not. This can be a life-or-death difference.
The domestic-animals part of the argument isn’t that the native Americans didn’t have any domestic animals, but that they didn’t have the same ones as the Europeans, and so their immune systems were not primed against the germs the Europeans brought with them, which were the result of the Europeans’ constant low-level exposure to domesticated European megafauna.
Maybe it’s my naive cognitive system, but this argument strikes me as very plausible.
I do appreciate your other points about the curious timing of the various demographically-transformative epidemics, but you seem to be taking the immune-system argument from a genetic-determinist point of view, and that part at least is not true, people’s immune systems are highly dynamic, and their resistance is well known to be strongly dependent on the individual’s pathogen-exposure history, which could differ systematically between previously-isolated populations brought into contact.
NB I am also not necessarily defending GG&S, either, obviously plausibility alone is insufficient to establish a historical cause, but I believe the “Germs” argument does pass the plausibility test.
April 8, 2010 at 6:30 am
msw
I’m de-lurking here to second that I’m not sure exactly what Erik Lund is suggesting, but that I’m fascinated and would love a clearer explanation and/or a bibliography.
April 8, 2010 at 6:44 am
JPool
Erik,
As an Africanist, I’m well familiar with David Henige. He’s built his career on a kind of high-minded skepticism (he’s also made tremendous contributions to discussions of methodology, particularly in his founding and many years as editor of History in Africa, up to his recent retirement). He’s very good at this, but there are reasons to be … skeptical of his “let’s throw up our hands” approach. In any case, advocating a position of numerical uncertainty is not the same as dismissing reports of massive mortality (as far as pre-Columbian demography, Henige criticizes both those he terms high and low counters). You still haven’t explained what your alternate explanation for those contemporary reports would be.
Anyway, you seem to be making some pretty bold claims at a pretty high degree of abstraction. I’ll leave it to others who know this historiography better than I do to respond.
April 8, 2010 at 6:49 am
Ahistoricality
Erik Lund is suggesting that the conventional view of the Columbian Exchange involving the depopulation of the Americas and repopulation with immigrants including African slaves is fundamentally incorrect.
I particularly like the bit where he argues that the fact that really deadly diseases burn themselves out is somehow evidence against the Columbian Exchange model, and then notes that every time Europeans expand, more epidemics happen among native populations, suggesting that, in fact, these incredibly deadly diseases did kill so many Native Americans that the spread was limited, until further contact with uninfected populations produced more death, etc.
April 8, 2010 at 6:59 am
Paul Orwin
While I am ridiculously ignorant on the history, I am not as ignorant about immunology, so I will speak briefly to it. The immune system is certainly not identical in all people, even at the beginning – it is a complex system organized around a large set of genes, which in turn have alleles (variants) that different in different people and populations. Like everything else (hair color, eye color, etc) there are populations that, over time, diverge from one another. The alleles that are present or absent in a population (especially something called the MHC) is related to disease susceptibility. It is thought that this is an important factor in some events relating to the “Age of Exploration”. If you want to blame someone for this, I guess you should blame Jared Diamond – although I think he properly puts germs as just one of several factors. The other part that I think is a bit naive is the idea that a new disease couldn’t wipe out a population (the 20%/90% lethality above). You are confusing incident mortality (i.e. what is the chance I’ll die when I catch this) with chance of dying from it. A disease that kills 90% of those infected is unlikely to spread for biological reasons – it debilitates before it can be passed on – as well as evolutionary reasons – a disease that kills all of its hosts won’t survive (this is kind of handwaving, but let it pass, ok?). So your overall chance of dying from it is low (because you probably won’t be exposed. A disease that kills 20% of those who get it (and this is about right for smallpox) can devastate a society very easily (H1N1 killed 1-3% of those infected in 1918-1919). It is not hard for me to imagine that for a community barely scraping by economically, a disease like this could wipe out their polity. None of this means that smallpox killed everyone in the americas, which may very well be bogus. Just thought I’d contribute a bit of science to the musings.
April 8, 2010 at 7:16 am
Paul Orwin
Also, what Urban Garlic said.
April 8, 2010 at 7:27 am
Mark Santow
As an American historian i can think of lots of examples of number 2 (historiographical swindles):
* the notion of ‘original intent’ in Constitutional interpretation
* the notion that the Founders purposely sought to create a ‘Christian Republic” (and wouldn’t instead see what passes for ‘Christian conservatism’ today as prime facie evidence of the need for franchise restriction)
* the idea that Ronald Reagan won the Cold War
* the idea that Reconstruction was a boondoggle of corruption and overreaching imposed on the common folks by delusional advocates of ‘big government’ (gee, what recent issue does that bring to mind?)
* the ‘backstabbing thesis’ as an explanation for America’s defeat in Vietnam, long a part of popular views on the war, and recently reinforced by the work of Lewis Sorley, among others
* and probably my favorite, which is to say, the one that angers me the most: the idea that policy and politics related to civil rights, racial discrimination and segregation since the 1965 Voting Rights Acts constitutes ‘reverse discrimination.’ One might broaden this more generally, into the commonly accepted idea that race is essentially a thing of the past in American life.
perhaps this isn’t a ‘historiographical swindle’ — it is, perhaps instead, the greatest example of the inability of white Americans to think historically, and take moral responsibility for that history.
* I certainly concur with the argument that the ‘Civil War wasn’t about slavery’ is a historiographical swindle of great consequence — but i also hasten to point out that one finds a variation of this swindle on the left, too. At a public showing of the film “Traces of the Trade” in New Bedford a couple of years ago, an audience member asked if there were any historians in the room who could tell them what the Civil War was about. Someone I didn’t know (a historian with the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities), raised her hand, and said it was about capitalism. I raised my hand…and it was on. I loved Howard Zinn as much as the next lefty US Historian, but surely we can use more finely honed analytical skills in the service of our ends? One can of course argue that everything is about capitalism, much as one can argue that everything is about the will of God. both are logically unfalsifiable, and thus empirically useless; both completely evade the harder questions of (individual; collective) moral choice and responsibility.
April 8, 2010 at 7:43 am
Lurker
I think Erik Lund’s and Paul Orwin’s views can be combined. Lund is, AFAIK, claiming that most Native New Englanders were intermixed with the English settlers. The epidemics could not have devastated populations by 90 % mortality. Orwin counters by noting that even much lower mortality can destroy a polity.
If we think the socioeconomic situation between the Native New Englanders and English settlers, it was, after a few years, probably rather obvious to the native population that the settlers were technologically much more advanced than the Native New Englanders. If we combine this with a collapse of the Native New English societies due to mortality, it becomes rather easy for the remaining Native New English population to integrate into the settler population. This would be especially easy for women, because settler population would have a gross gender disparity.
The Cherokee show that the adoption of a modern society was acceptable for at least some Native American nations. They had, by choice, adopted modern agriculture and modernized their society to a considerable degree. So, the material advancement provided by European mode of civilization was visible. Why couldn’t the same appeal have caused an intermingling of the Native New English and English population a century earlier?
April 8, 2010 at 8:21 am
Ahistoricality
settler population would have a gross gender disparity.
Not in New England. At least not to the extent that the Iberian territories did, which is why ‘mestizo’ is a major demographic category in southern colonies but not northern ones.
April 8, 2010 at 8:41 am
CharleyCarp
I’ve had this conversation with Mr. Lund before. I think the claim that there was massive and yet unreported intermarriage in New England has no support, and I can think of lots of places where support would be found for it, had it been taking place.
I find the conventional explanation — that immigration of low status people, and especially women, was vastly underrecorded — to be much more likely than his thesis that intermarriage was vastly underreported.
(The parish register problem has a simple explanation, at least for part of it. Bradford didn’t think there was biblical authority for clerical marriage, and imported the Dutch custom of civil marriage.)
April 8, 2010 at 8:43 am
Sir Charles
Lurker got all of mine — Reagan winning the Cold War through the miracle of Star Wars – the “Creighton Abrams was just about to win Vietnem if it wasn’t for you meddlesome kids” — and Reconstruction was a corrupt undertaking. I’d also throw in the notion that the Eighties were a golden age, an unusually prosperous era. That one bugs me quite a bit too.
I wish that the “which side are you on” rhetoric worked — it always has for me — but history suggests otherwise.
April 8, 2010 at 8:45 am
CharleyCarp
Maybe I just lack imagination, but I really don’t see either the Pequot War or King Philips War playing out as they did had there been truly significant parts of the NE white population with native wives, mothers, grandmothers.
April 8, 2010 at 8:45 am
elizardbreath
Not to be overly simplistic about this, but if there were truly massive amounts of intermarriage between English settlers and Native Americans in seventeenth century New England, wouldn’t it have shown up in a characteristic New England phenotype? More black hair and medium brown skin than you’d otherwise expect from a basically English population, and so on? This does not, as far as I know, seem to have been the case.
April 8, 2010 at 9:03 am
kid bitzer
i think you’re forgetting, lb, that most of the indigenous tribes of the northeast were nordic-looking, since they were mostly descendants of the viking colony at goose bay.
April 8, 2010 at 9:13 am
Mr Punch
I don’t think the intent of the economic argument in question 1 is what you suggest. Its real use is as a defense against the moral argument — employers aren’t being evil or exploitative, it isn’t in their interest to maintain a dangerous workplace, in fact they do all this safety stuff, but sometimes things just go wrong.
Of course this is only partly true, but it is partly true. And the charges of employer culpability are certainly exaggerated overall; for example, the annual reports on workplace deaths put out by organized labor are full of first responders killed in the line of duty, convenience store clerks shot by robbers, and drivers who died in motor vehicle accidents.
April 8, 2010 at 9:16 am
dana
New England, wouldn’t it have shown up in a characteristic New England phenotype?
Or at the very least a word for this new group of people.
A disease that kills 20% of those who get it (and this is about right for smallpox) can devastate a society very easily (H1N1 killed 1-3% of those infected in 1918-1919). It is not hard for me to imagine that for a community barely scraping by economically, a disease like this could wipe out their polity.
Right; it’s a mistake to think that the effects of smallpox had to be limited to those killed directly by the disease. Suppose that the 20% killed were otherwise healthy young adults, or the leaders who had the most contact with Europeans, etc. It doesn’t have to kill 90% to be devastating, especially with a healthy competitor group nearby.
This is probably why there is a mixed marriage in every historical fictional work set in New England written in the 1820s that I know of, and offspring in all but one of them (so one out of four).
By analogy from contemporary works of American fiction, we would conclude that crimes in the late 20 century were nearly universally solved by steely-eyed lone wolf policemen only after they had been ordered to turn in their badges. Which is to say the presence of native-European marriages in the stories doesn’t tell us much about the numbers of native-European marriages in the early colonies, and the numbers you’d need for your theory would suggest that a majority of marriages were native-European, wouldn’t it?
April 8, 2010 at 9:28 am
CharleyCarp
Last year, with Erik Lund.
April 8, 2010 at 10:04 am
Laurel
my vote for a slightly different, also bad historiographical swindle is the implicit claim that broken treaties and general thievery from Native Americans by the federal and state governments is a historical rather than contemporary matter. I don’t follow these issues all that closely, but I know of at least two proposals in the last 40 years to move a reservation in favor of a dam; the dam won in one case (somewhere in the Dakotas? I forget exactly where) and the reservation won in the other (Round Valley in northern California). Not to mention the billions of dollars missing from the BIA trust fund.
I don’t have much information about the New England settlers and intermarriage, but considering that we have many examples of confirmed widespread intermarriage between Europeans and Native Americans in the southern parts of the Americas, I’d expect Erik Lund to be able to offer an explanation for why we don’t see the same evidence of intermarriage (mestizo as a social group/phenotype, etc) in New England that we see in Mexico, Central America, and South America. Absent such explanation, I’m skeptical.
April 8, 2010 at 10:47 am
Matt Weiner
Josh Marshall objects to the view of the Constitution as a teabagger’s wish list.
April 8, 2010 at 10:52 am
eric
Yeah, Josh Marshall really should have gone ahead and talked about Shays’s rebellion and the actual impetus behind the Constitution.
April 8, 2010 at 12:20 pm
John B.
How about the argument that somehow after 911 we lost our “innocence” and that we had never been attacked before on our “homeland” bullshit.
April 8, 2010 at 1:18 pm
politicalfootball
2: All the good ones have been taken, but I’ll add that in my Ohio grade school, the Radical Republicans were, well, radical in their persecution of poor ol’ Andrew Johnson.
The South has a whole fraudulent historical narrative that has been detailed here. Add this element: The Stars and Bars is not a symbol of racism.
April 8, 2010 at 1:42 pm
chingona
2: All the good ones have been taken, but I’ll add that in my Ohio grade school, the Radical Republicans were, well, radical in their persecution of poor ol’ Andrew Johnson.
I got this in my Pennsylvania high school. In 1993. I also learned that slavery wasn’t that bad because “they would never beat the slaves so hard they couldn’t work the next day.”
April 8, 2010 at 2:37 pm
joel hanes
the dam won in one case (somewhere in the Dakotas?)
Oahe Reservoir; the Missouri was dammed (and damned) at Pierre and the pool backed up all the way to Mobridge in North Dakota, on reservation land much of the way. This lake inundating the well-watered and fertile strips in which most reservation residents got their living, the fishing and hunting spots and campgrounds of tradition. The tribes who “owned” the land objected to the project from the start, with predictable lack of effect.
If I am remembering this accurately, the picture of the US Govt. signing ceremony in _Cadillac_Desert_ is instructive — a bunch of white men in suits grinning and posing over a documet, while the Native “representative” bearing witness stands apart and weeps.
When I was in grade school, we were taught that English colonists were morally superior to Spanish colonists because “they exploited and enslaved their Indians”. The question what happened to “our Indians”, and why so few of them seem to remain, was carefully avoided.
April 8, 2010 at 4:11 pm
chingona
When I was in grade school, we were taught that English colonists were morally superior to Spanish colonists because “they exploited and enslaved their Indians”. The question what happened to “our Indians”, and why so few of them seem to remain, was carefully avoided.
I did a semester in Mexico in college, and learning that they generally view the English as savages and the Spanish as more enlightened was rather eye-opening.
April 8, 2010 at 6:19 pm
Laurel
joel hanes, that’s the story I was trying to remember, and the place I read about it. dispossession continues.
April 8, 2010 at 7:02 pm
Doctor Science
Which really works better to grab Americans’ attention? Rhetorical appeals to justice, or social scientific appeals to your wallet?
Neither. What works best — *always* — is stories. Movies, TV, fiction: that’s how you change people’s minds so it sticks. Fiction is more psychologically salient than nonfiction: that’s why Justice Scalia supports torture by citing “24”, FFS.
If you want to make Americans *aware* of what coal costs, you have to tell a story: a story that’s gripping, romantic, in fundamental ways unrealistic, but that really moves the emotions and nails them in a new place.
April 8, 2010 at 7:26 pm
Doctor Science
The theory about the disease-depopulation of the Americas was first set out in detail by William McNeill, in Plagues and Peoples.
I find Erik Lund’s arguments to be at best confusing. Virgin-soil epidemics have been observed in many previously-isolated populations. The very high death rates you see in such epidemics are due to:
1) the population not having been genetically selected for resistance to the disease. I think perhaps Mr. Lund is arguing that, if a given Native population had been through e.g. the “smallpox” screen once, then they should have been genetically resistant the next time around.
Neither natural selection nor disease work like this. It normally takes *many* generations of exposure before human populations get any kind of resistance to a particular disease: witness the fact that smallpox and measles were major killers of children in Europe for centuries without the population becoming more than slightly more resistant.
The diseases which have had significant genetic effects on human populations are ones that are slow-acting, persistent, and/or inescapably present in a certain environment. Malaria is the classic example, which selects for sickle-cell traits. Tuberculosis may have selected Jewish populations for Tays-Sachs (TB was unavoidable in cities, and Jews often *had* to raise their children there). It’s been suggested that the ABO blood-type system involves resistance to Staphylococcus or Pneumocystis bacteria, which are omnipresent.
April 8, 2010 at 7:36 pm
Doctor Science
More on virgin soil:
2. Lack of low-level immunity in the population from sporadic cases of the disease, and from maternal antibodies passed down through milk.
3. The fact that the disease is not well-adapted to *them*. Selection pressure on disease organisms is much stronger and faster than on hosts. A disease that doesn’t kill its hosts very quickly will spread and survive, so there’s a lot of pressure on those organisms to adapt to their hosts, to lower their profiles to be less virulent.
4. Collapse of social support structures. If many people in a community get sick at once, especially in a way that the community doesn’t know how to treat, even the uninfected people may die of starvation, cold, stress, or suicide.
April 8, 2010 at 7:58 pm
Doctor Science
I will also add: the conventional framing is that smallpox and measles were leading causes of Ameridian depopulation. I am starting to think maybe not, that those diseases were blamed because they were notorious killers in Europe at the time of Contact.
Measles and smallpox are very contagious and are spread only person-to-person, so it takes quite a large population of people in epidemiologically close contact to keep an epidemic going. Measles, for instance, will burn out in a population of less than 300,000 people, because there won’t be enough of a stream of susceptible victims to keep the disease going.
In Changes in the Land, IIRC, Cronon talks about how the Massachusetts Bay area was severely underpopulated when the Pilgrims arrived, due to an epidemic of a diarrheal disease that seems to have spread from European contact areas to the north. I wouldn’t be surprised if “intestinal flu” viruses and/or typhoid and similar bacterial infections turn out to be the major factors. Some of these diseases can be “carried” by apparently asymptomatic victims or can persist in the environment, and they can have very high death rates if a community doesn’t know how to treat them.
April 8, 2010 at 8:58 pm
Urk
1. this is the answer of a weasel (or a synthesist) but it seems like what works is a combination of moral and economic arguments. The AP like moral cover when they make their economic moves, they/we like “practical” foundations (or a good cost-benefit analysis) for moral decisions. Alot of the good that doesn’t get done is stuff that either costs money or can be rhetorically constructed as somewhere, somehow, down the line potentially keeping you (or perhaps someone just like you except born wealthy) from making as much money. A more sympathetic way of saying this is that, for those not likely to be in an industrial accident like that themselves (and for many likely to as well) money is the experiential dimension of ideas like necessity, pain, and relief from pain, freedom of movement & so on that resonate through the news of a large scale industrial accident. If the suffering there is abstract to you (perhaps because you’re skeptical of red diaper baby prose appeals) then understanding that it’s also in your “practical” interests encourages doing the right thing.
#2. the flipside is that practices and ideas that are (potentially) economically individually beneficial and which are then given a thick coating of moral justification make for really harmful and pernicious myths. I’m thinking here of the “free market as moral crucible” crap that’s been massive public currency for most of my adult life. and as a southerner, “heritage not hate.” As if.
April 9, 2010 at 4:43 am
Erik Lund
Notice that what I am not arguing is that there were not contact-era epidemics that caused massive mortalities and severe social dislocations. The conquistadore narratives are unambiguous, as far as I know, in identifying smallpox as a significant factor in the conquests of Mexico and Peru.
This is understandable. Smallpox was a dangerous disease that swept Europe every generation as declines in “herd immunity” allowed it to take hold in pandemic form. In the New World, where herd immunity was nonexistent, it must have been more severe still in its earliest outbreaks, and no picnic even after it became established in the ecology.
So, at one extreme, we have Mexico and Peru. We can debate the total populations of these regions without departing from the consensus that they had relatively dense populations, urban regions, domestic animals (including influenza-susceptible fowls apparently readily infected by globally-migrant wild flocks), and a history of pre-Columbian epidemic disease. We can accept catastrophic death totals of, say, 20% of the population without asking for the kind of public health figures that we actually have for, say, the Egyptian cholera epidemics (that is, a virgin soil epidemic in an ideal ecological regime).
I would like, however, to propose another extreme. We are told that the pre-Contact population of California might have been 130,000, or 750,000, or more (From the Wikipedia page!) From 1860, we have Census returns that tell us that while California’s White population rose from 320,000 to 20 million to 1950, while the Native population remained approximately steady at 16,000. From 1950 to 1990, the White population rose another 50%, more or less, while the Native population doubled, redoubled, and doubled again.
(http://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0056/twps0056.html; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_of_Native_California)
Nor should I be singling out California. I think that there may have been more Japanese holdouts on Guam in 1948 than there were Indians in Ohio in 1860 by the Census. And while the Indian population of Oklahoma did not fall in the 1840–1910 period, neither did it rise. Even as their White neighbours were having children as though Walton Mountain would never run out of room, the Indians of Oklahoma were listening to the Reverend Malthus.
I think that we can all agree that the change that took place in California between 1950 and 1990 was not a natural increase. It just reflects an increasing willingness to self-identify as “Indian” on Census returns. Too bad the census returns that I have cited here do not attempt to count the number of Okie descendants who now claim Cherokee blood, because this well-known social habitus suggests that some of the same process might have been taking place in Oklahoma in the last decades of the Nineteenth Century.
The question, and I have to leave it at that on account of having to go to work, is why we are simply refusing to accept that the same sociological process might be at work in the antebellum Ohio returns.
Okay, maybe that is not the question that anyone is asking. But, as I say, I have to go be a shipper/receiver now, and will not be able to climb down history’s ladder as far as Governor Bradford’s New England this morning.
April 9, 2010 at 6:02 am
silbey
I think that we can all agree that the change that took place in California between 1950 and 1990 was not a natural increase. It just reflects an increasing willingness to self-identify as “Indian” on Census returns
Erik, you may or may not have identified a statistical anomaly in the data. But you can’t then jump to the reason by simple assertion. I *don’t* think we can agree that the change that took place in California was not a natural increase or necessarily reflective of an increased willingness to self-identify as ‘Indian’ on Census returns. I think we need to see evidence that that’s actually the case before we can conclude anything.
Nor does that necessarily imply anything about Ohio.
Nor does that necessarily imply anything about whether the general population had Native American ancestry.
April 9, 2010 at 7:14 am
joel hanes
_Somebody_ built Cahokia
April 9, 2010 at 8:10 am
Doctor Science
Can someone boil Erik’s argument down to a single, straightforward statement of his thesis? Absent that, the Great Wall O Text factor defeats me. (hint to Erik: double-spaced between paragraphs.)
April 9, 2010 at 8:19 am
CharleyCarp
I can do it in a sentence, DS:
The Native population of what is now the United States (including, specifically, the Northeast) did not mostly die off as a result of disease and war, but rather, as in Mexico (or, for that matter, the indigenes of the British Isles) melted into the majority population through intermarriage/interbreeding.
April 9, 2010 at 8:22 am
CharleyCarp
The two central bases for this thesis are (a) disease wouldn’t have killed enough people and (b) immigration from Europe was insufficient to account for “white” population numbers.
April 9, 2010 at 8:36 am
slimlove
“I think that we can all agree that the change that took place in California between 1950 and 1990 was not a natural increase. It just reflects an increasing willingness to self-identify as “Indian” on Census returns”
While an increased willingness to admit to being Native surely figures into these Census numbers, it’s hardly the only reason. That specific date range is key to understanding the seemingly sudden increase in Native populations in California. The federal government’s termination/relocation programs began in the mid-1950s, and both San Francisco and Los Angeles were major relocation centers. If you broke it down by tribe, I wouldn’t be surprised to see that largest population growth among self-identified Natives came not from indigenous California tribes but from those who had been moved to the west coast.
April 9, 2010 at 8:37 am
Doctor Science
… o-kay. Well, I think Cronon kind of disposed of both of those, IIRC.
April 9, 2010 at 8:38 am
Doctor Science
That was my reply to CharleyCarp’s helpful summary.
April 9, 2010 at 9:20 am
Sir Charles
Forgive me for not crediting who said what, but for some reason my comments on this site never line up with my name. (WHich may be a good thing.)
But whoever said “stories work” is quite right. A compelling narrative, even if inaccurate, seems to capture people and live on –hence the inability to kill “zombie lies.”
I would also concur with the sentiment that at least for a time there was definitely a lefty school of thought that I was exposed in college in the late 1970s that viewed the Civil War as being primarily about a capitalist society asserting itself over a semi-feudal agrarian society. It never really struck me as a compelling narrative (see above) but isn’t this where Eugene Genovese ended up many years later — and on the side of the slave owners.
April 9, 2010 at 10:01 am
david
I’ve got two: we dropped the bomb to save a million U.S. lives, and we could have won Vietnam but for the dirty hippies.
April 9, 2010 at 10:32 am
JRoth
we dropped the bomb to save a million U.S. lives
In that you don’t think that was the real reason, or that you think it was simply not necessary? On the former, impressing Stalin was clearly part of the reason (as was wanting to see the thing in action), but I don’t think you can reasonably claim that it was no part of the reason – the entire US military apparatus was remobilizing for the invasion of Japan, suggesting they expected it to be necessary. On the latter, I think it’s a live debate – I don’t think you can absolutely assert that, absent the A-bomb, Japan surrenders without another shot fired (possible, sure; definite, no).
So I suppose that the orthodoxy of how it’s taught in American high schools (and at the Smithsonian) is mythical, I’m not sure it’s a real “hornswaggle” (which suggests something made up out of whole cloth).
April 9, 2010 at 11:01 am
david
My understanding of the historiography (and I am not a professor, just a graduate who studied this) is that the 1 Million figure came from an interview given by Stimson to Harpers magazine in 1947 in response to criticisms about dropping the bomb. A lot of this is discussed in detail in Hogan’s book “Hiroshima in History and Memory.”
I called the million figure a myth because, as Gar Alperowitz’s argued many years ago, the 1 million figure never showed up in any documents that reflected the decisionmaking at the time. There were estimates for the cost of the invasion, something in the tens of thousands, but 1 million lives was never in there. Hence, I call it a myth.
That said, I agree with the gist of your statement: impressing Stalin was only part of the reason for dropping the bomb, and the revisionists who argue it was the central motivation are overstating their case. I think Truman saw the bomb as a way to end the war. The US was killing tens of thousands of civilians with good ol’ conventional bombs anyway, and dropping the big one was no different. I think the conversation about whether or not dropping the bomb is not very productive, as it never really gets us anywhere; but I think we should have a clearer understanding of the reasons used by Truman at the time.
My only point in mentioning that myth was that the figure was not part of the discussions at the time, and it was used to justify the decision after the fact. I’ve always been struck at the ferocity with which Americans insist that Truman dropped the bomb because he thought it would save 1 million American lives, plus plenty of Japanese lives too. We’ll never know what the cost would have been, though the military estimates from the time indicate it was substantially less. I guess dropping the 1 million figure makes the decision more questionable in the minds of many. It doesn’t have too; I happen to think that the decision was probably right, but I don’t need to invent a justification that wasn’t there in order to arrive at that opinion.
April 9, 2010 at 12:13 pm
Zora
Erik Lund’s bizarre arguments are easily refuted by reference to the demographic collapses observed in various Pacific islands, such as the Hawaiian islands. Epidemic disease, venereal disease, and their consequences DID kill some 90% of the Hawaiian population. The process is well-documented (unlike the early history of the post-contact Americas).
Recovery from a demographic collapse of this magnitude is possible, if there’s no immigration to complicate matters. Most of the isolated Pacific island groups declined dramatically and then, being descended from disease survivors, rebounded.
In Hawai’i, as on areas of the US mainland, there were large immigrant influxes while the native population was depressed. Result: a fair bit of intermarriage. If the immigrant group is large and the surviving natives are few, few genetic traces will remain of the survivors. The intermarriage will also have the effect of weakening or even erasing the remnants of the native culture and social organization.
April 11, 2010 at 7:56 am
aflandshage
Related to the Hiroshima discussion I just stumbled over a letter Truman wrote in 1946 mentioning saving 250.000 American lives. The letter is to be found on the wonderful Letters of Note blog http://www.lettersofnote.com/2010/04/posterity-is-quite-apt-to-be-little.html
April 11, 2010 at 9:17 am
Erik Lund
Huzzah! I’m bizarre!
More importantly, I lack time. I’ve already dropped two mornings worth of writing time into aborted responses in this thread. So if anyone is reading and scratching their head as to why I’d bother arguing –at great length– into the silence of a dead thread, the short summary is that all my problems in life are everyone else’s fault but mine.
More seriously, I was asked for a bibliography. And two points out of left field, more or less, seem to demand response.
First, David Silbey takes me to task for asserting that increase in self-ascribed Indian identity in Census returns for California reflects an increase in self-ascription as “Indian” by mixed-race individuals, as opposed to the straw-man alternative I put up, of a purely demographic increase by an endogamous population. I thought about replying in detail, but it does not seem productive. as far as I know, I’m asserting the consensus explanation for a well-known phenomena hardly restricted to California, or even North America.
Second, Vera argues that the Pacific Islands represent well-documented case studies of indigenous population declines at the level necessary to vindicate what David Stannard has so charmingly dubbed “the American Holocaust.”
They don’t. To the contrary. See in particular Patrick Kirch in Kirch, ed., _The Growth and Collapse of Pacific Island Societies: Archaeological and Demographic Perspectives_ (available through Google Books).
Moving on, I asserted a position that is not, at least as far as I can read oblique and ironic early Victorians, new. Bishop Wilberforce pointed out the impossibility of the received demographic history of early New England in his _History of the Episcopalian Church in America_ (page 59 of the 1842 New York edition). So my problem so far is that I’m agreeing with Soapy Sam.
Classically, the objection to Wilberforce (not that he was addressed directly), was that the “Great Migration” to New England brought 40,000 English to America in the middle decades of the 1600s, rather than 4000. Due to the absence of records (and pace my sometime interlocuter, sometime critic, Charleycarp, this can have nothing to do with the use of civil marriage in some early plantations) we are in some doubt as to what the actual numbers are.
Records there are, however, mostly wills. Robert Charles Anderson has investigated them thoroughly and published the raw data in the most suitable place imaginable, and come to the synthetic conclusion that there were about 10,000 immigrants.
(Robert Charles Anderson, The Great Migration Begins: Immigrants to New England, 1620—1633 3 vols. (Boston: New England Genealogical Society, 1995). Anderson provides extensive methodological discussion and source review. And, apart from wishing to kick retrospective stowaways off the _Mayflower_, has no evident axe to grind.
There is another way of getting at the numbers. (Or rather, a part of Anderson’s method given a broader focus.) We do not know as much as we would like about outbound migrants, as not all Port Books survive. Allison Game thinks that she has enough to reconstruct the outflow population, and, iirc, comes to a higher aggregate figure for the century than the Center for Migration History’s handwaved 100,000.
(Alison Games, Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World [Cambridge: HUP, 1999]. I’m handwaving in citing this “Center,” too. I think I’ve got the title right, but I rest on no stronger authority than the introduction to Peter Heather’s latest, which has quite another agenda.)
In any case, what is interesting here is that Game’s breakdown for outbound migrants from London in 1634 demonstrates the validity of the received story of the origins of the South. 91% of those outbound for Virginia were male, a ratio that actually applies fairly closely for the Caribbean as well. So, as far as the colonial reproduction of Virginia society goes, it is Pocahontas or parthogenesis, and this is the reason why I focus on the supposedly family-centred migration to New England that, as old time Whigs used to put it, made New England the most purely Saxon of the old colonies. Ann Uhry Abrams [_The Pilgrims and Pocahontas: Rival Myths of American Origins_ [Boulder: Westport, 1999]) without even meaning to do so.
However, Games reports that of 1,169 (Games, 61) migrants for New England in 1634, 61% male, 40% were female. Taking age age ratio into account (11.2% 0—4, 20.7% 5—14, 30.1% 15—24, and assuming a balanced sex ratio, unattached migration to New England is at least 65% male, 35% female.
If these men married once they reached New England, as 28 of 31 in a random sample drawn from Anderson did, then they married… Well, who did they marry, exactly? Of the 46 wives I count in a brief review of my abstract of Anderson, 28 are unidentified by maiden name, parents name, and in some cases even by Christian name. Eighteen are given maiden names, almost none in the form we would expect from a Church of England or City of Leiden marriage record (maiden name and names of parents). Since the main source of data is probates, this not too surprising. All that I’m establishing here is that I am not arguing against records. I’m pointing out the absence of records, onto which we have projected our assumptions.
Now, speaking of assumptions, the baseline assumption is that the early English lived in an apartheid society until they could safely launch a genocidal ethnic cleansing of New England. Again, I think that that is a Jacksonian-era construct, as is the notion that there is not a whisper of interracial marriage in the sources. This thesis is wrong. Interracial marriages did occur, and as late as the 1820s, they took a prominent place in New England cultural memory. I’ll refer those interested in a literature review to Gordon Michael Sayre’s investigation (_The Indian Chief as Tragic Hero_ [Chapel Hill: UNCP 2005]).
Lizardbreath asks why there isn’t evidence of a New England genotype (if this means evidence that pure laine Americans have a significant share of Native American DNA, I will point out that there is such evidence), and a follow-up asks about an ethnic identifier. James Fenimore Cooper’s repeated insistence that “Yankee” is an Algonquin mispronounciation of English may or may not be trying to do this work. It is just that labels like “Presbyterian,” and “Scotch-Irish” are working harder. This would, again, be the political point. The final legacy of the era is one of Black Irish and Jackson Whites, which is why I want to argue for a racialisation of party labels in Jacksonian America. Our narrative of the foundation of New England is a way of saying that Democratic voters are more likely to be of mixed race than Whig voters.The American Holocaust thesis may have other origins as well, but it is rooted in a pre Civil War use of the race card.
April 11, 2010 at 10:54 am
silbey
First, David Silbey takes me to task for asserting that increase in self-ascribed Indian identity in Census returns for California reflects an increase in self-ascription as “Indian” by mixed-race individuals, as opposed to the straw-man alternative I put up, of a purely demographic increase by an endogamous population. I thought about replying in detail, but it does not seem productive. as far as I know, I’m asserting the consensus explanation for a well-known phenomena hardly restricted to California, or even North America.
Then you should have no problem citing sources that reflect that consensus explanation.
And again something that (may have) happened in California is not evidence for Ohio or New England.
I’m pointing out the absence of records, onto which we have projected our assumptions.
And again, the absence of evidence is not evidence. That we lack evidence for something does not prove that something else happened.
April 11, 2010 at 1:59 pm
Erik Lund
If I’m proving common wisdom, it looks like I’ll be able to quote Wikipedia and the like:
Wikipedia: how many Indians are there in Canada in 2006, and how many of them self-identify as Metis, the Canadian Census category for mixed-race individuals?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_aboriginals#Demographics
1.1 million in total, including just over a quarter of them Metis.
That’s a lot. Why so many, Toronto Star?
“Much of the urban aboriginal growth can be traced to second- and third-generation population increases of existing native enclaves.
But bigger factors include “out-marriage” of aboriginal people with non-natives, along with a spike in cultural pride, [“Dan Beavon, director of strategic research for Indian Affairs] says. People in cities have shown a greater tendency to cite native ancestry or identity from one census to the next, he explained.
http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/article/294107
Fine. But does anyone self-identify as Metis in the United States, making this vaguely relevant, Wikipedia?
Yes. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%A9tis_people_(United_States))
How many, would you say (today?)
“Today, in North America, millions of people could, and many thousands do, claim Métis heritage, as they are the product of European and Native American ancestors.[2] Many people of mixed heritage are not aware of the Métis Identity movement within the USA.”
Yes, our source (J. A. Sokolow, is not the most reliable of types, but he is, believe it or not, not the most controversial person currently calling for us to understand a modern North American nation state as a “Metis” society: http://www.johnralstonsaul.com/SUM_AFC.html
Fine, still not California. What is the cause of that rapid increase in the number of self-identified Indians in California, Wikipedia?
“The population subsequently rose substantially throughout the twentieth century. This recovery may represent both true demographic growth and changing patterns in ethnic self-description. In the twenty-first century, after more than eight generations of close interaction between Native Californians and individuals of European, Asian, African, and other Native American descent, there can be little objective basis for quantifying the Native Californian component within the state’s population….”
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_of_native_california)
Are you sure that there is hinky business going on, W?
“In 2000 the U.S. census report 729,533 people self identified as Cherokee Indian, more than twice the population of the second most populous American Indian group, the Navajo people, who numbered 298,197.[63] This figure is also more than twice the population of current estimates of all three federally recognized tribes combined.”
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokees#Membership_Controversies)
And that’s all going on in California?
No. The population of American Indians has been increasing dramatically nationally, as well, virtually doubling between 1970 and 1980.
http://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0056/twps0056.html
Is the degree of White and Black intermixture in American Indian populations something of a poisoned issue in the United States?
Yes:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_Americans_in_the_United_States#Blood_Quantum
(And that’s not even the worst part, but I didn’t want to quote at endless length from the part of the article that covers the campaign to reclassify Virginian Native Americans as “Colored.”)
On the second prong of Silbey’s question, we have the specific issue of country wives in colonial New England. (Sylvia Van Kirk on country wives in the fur trade: http://www.northwestjournal.ca/XIII2.htm)
Who, exactly, did that first generation of New Englanders marry?
I guess if you asked someone like Carter Woodson or Gary Nash, the answer would be something like the blurb for Nash’s _Secret Love_: “…mainly anonymous Americans have defied the official racial ideology …[the] guardians of the past have written that side of our history out of the record.”
Put that way, it does sound a little paranoid, but this is a species of crazy that I’m personally happy to be associated with.
April 11, 2010 at 2:04 pm
Erik Lund
Oops: missed Ohio. The census figures are of course available above, and show the expected enormous increase, beginning in 1940 (330 to 20,000, inclusive). Are they all migrants? Not according to this website, which believes that some Indians evaded expulsion and live on in their ancestral homes:
http://www.native-languages.org/ohio.htm
This is an argument that goes to resurrecting claims for reservations, with all that entails these days (here is where they might go):
http://www.500nations.com/Ohio_Tribes.asp
But that doesn’t make it untrue.
April 11, 2010 at 3:10 pm
silbey
If I’m proving common wisdom, it looks like I’ll be able to quote Wikipedia and the like:
Actually, no, I’d prefer something avowedly academic.
And that’s all going on in California?
Raising an interesting demographic puzzle is not the same thing as providing evidence for your solution to that puzzle.
On the second prong of Silbey’s question, we have the specific issue of country wives in colonial New England. (Sylvia Van Kirk on country wives in the fur trade: http://www.northwestjournal.ca/XIII2.htm)
Who, exactly, did that first generation of New Englanders marry?
Raising an interesting historical puzzle is not the same thing as providing evidence for your answer to that puzzle.
April 11, 2010 at 4:56 pm
Doctor Science
Hold on to your hats, folks, I’m going to agree with Erik Lund.
Or at least, I now see that he is a valid historical conjecture, and I will point to evidence that supports it.
Here’s his conjecture:
Now, New England literature (up through Fenimore Cooper at least) had a significant genre of captivity narratives, about the fate of White women taken captive by Red Indians.
These Captivity Narratives remind me of the “Negroes Will Rape Your Women” trope, as seem from the antebellum South through Gone With the Wind and beyond. However, the historical reality is that during that same period, rape of black women was considered a white male’s prerogative, and even a rite of passage (see: Faulkner, collected works). “Negroes Will Rape Your Women” was the opposite of reality; it was an effective threat IMHO due to a combination of psychological projection and the Golden Rule — a terrifying moral standard when what you’ve done unto others is slavery, rape, and lynching.
So Erik’s conjecture makes me wonder whether the Captivity Narratives, too, resulted from projection and the threat of the Golden Rule. It’s not enough for me to say firmly that he’s right, but I will say that there’s more evidence on his side than I at first thought.
The directions for further research that I can see involve: looking at more parish records, or diaries and letters with an eye to what they reveal about the family backgrounds of otherwise unnamed women. The other angle would be to compare mitochondrial DNA family trees and Y-chromosome family trees in “pure” old New England families — but I am not at all sure that any such still exist.
April 11, 2010 at 5:17 pm
Doctor Science
Whoops, the above post was by me. If the mods can wave a magic wand and change who it’s credited to, the owner of the computer I’m at would appreciate it …
April 13, 2010 at 8:17 pm
D Shannon
By Eric Lund: “the fundamental argument against the “Columbian Holocaust” is that all epidemics must exist in a range between inadequate lethality to even be recognised, and an excessive lethality at which contagion becomes impossible. This is the same dynamic that contains Ebola. It’s just too lethal to spread. Therefore, while death rates of, say 20% are perhaps conceivable, 90% is just out of the question.”
And: “And notice that the epidemics didn’t end in 1492, or 1607. On the contrary, they conveniently wipe out Indian populations just in time for them to be replaced by “White settlers.” Thus, the great plague hits New England in the 1620s, but California in the 1840s. And, oddly enough, it has never struck the Northwest Territories, where White settlement has never started. (Again, this is the demographically-transformative epidemic, not the garden variety one that just kills a great many people.)”
There’s some interesting information at:
http://www.heritage.nf.ca/law/flu.html
There wasn’t much White settlement in Labrador in 1918. However, about one-third of all Inuit in Labrador died in the pandemic. This figure is misleading in the sense that flu did not reach all settlements, and that the death rate was much higher in communities that it did reach.
Hebron: 86 dead out of 100 (86%)
Sillutalik: 40 dead out of 45 (89%)
Okak: 204 dead out of 263 (78%)
In a period of just two months, every adult male Inuit in Okak had died from influenza — a 100% mortality rate among that subgroup.
At Teller Mission on the Seward Peninsula, about 85% of Inuit adults died. In Nome, just 176 of the 300 natives in the area died (59%). In Wales, Alaska, a white man from Nome forced surviving men and women to marry each other, and then assigned the surviving children to the new couples. (The current population of Wales is less than the number of people who died from flu in 1918-19.)
That’s documented evidence of how just one disease, in just a couple of months, could wipe out communities — and it did so in places that Whites weren’t trying to settle. If you had several diseases introduced into an area where the local population had no resistance to them, an overall death rate of 90% wouldn’t be out of the question.
The example of cholera in Egypt isn’t the best one to refute this possibility. Cholera is rarely spread directly from one person to another. Usually, it’s spread by ingesting contaminated food or drink. (In 1854, John Snow stopped an outbreak of cholera in London merely by removing the Broad Street water pump.) Smallpox, on the other hand, can be spread by person-to-person contact or by inhalation, just like influenza. I would say that the records of influenza in 1918-19 would be more applicable than the records of cholera when judging deaths from smallpox.
April 14, 2010 at 3:15 am
Erik Lund
D. Shannon: the 1918 influenza is the paradigm example of an pandemic raging in a population with no herd immunity. We can argue about the special circumstances, but the effects were severe.
I’m not sure that the 89% lethality in Sillutalik proves, however. The link makes it clear that people were evidently moving in and out of hunting camps, and the 30% global figure for Inuit (Inuk?) mortality is telling.
In any case, there is a risk of conflating “indigenous people” with the theory of pre-contact immunological naivete. There is nothing to being “Indian” as opposed to “White” that makes one more susceptible to disease _in general_. The argument to immunological naivete requires no contact with epidemic-prone populations, and by 1918, the Labrador coast was no model of pristine pre-Columbian isolation. It was isolated from outside contact, but the same could be said of any of the Newfoundland outports. (Another place where I suspect ethnogenesis played a role in the formation of “White” populations, BTW.)
As for the Egyptian cholera, I was thinking more in terms of waterborne exposure. Egyptian communities are heavily reliant on river water.
April 14, 2010 at 3:32 am
Erik Lund
And since I’m here, anyway, Silbey:
(With apologies for the naked links. I’m getting something wrong in my attempts to embed links, and I’m not up to experimenting this morning.)
An appropriately academic source for the claim that the rise in Indian populations in American census returns since 1950 partiallly reflects more people claiming Indian identity. It’s good to see that an academic (J. Nagel) agrees with the official position of the Canadian Department of Indian Affairs as cited above…
http://books.google.ca/books?hl=en&lr=&id=4P1yTRVeBToC&oi=fnd&pg=PR11&dq=indian+identity&ots=HgUrHAnijb&sig=nhxZWxkShdZCJWa5SFg-Kac9EFE#v=onepage&q&f=false
It occurs to me that another way of getting at this would be to look at the age profiles of self-ascribed American Indian populations. For this to be natural demographic increase, half would have to be under the age of 10 in 1980. I may even see if I can test this hypothesis at home if anyone wants further boilerplating.
Here’s an easy test of assimilation in early colonial New England. What happened to the “Praying Towns?” Not surprisingly, the “genocide of 1675” thesis is incorrect. Not surprisingly, I say, in the light of the tediously well-known case of the revival of Mashpee Indian identity and subsequent litigation for the reestablishment of their reservation.
http://books.google.ca/books?id=ZE31NmBl8B8C&pg=PA178&lpg=PA178&dq=mashpee+law+and+anthropology&source=bl&ots=fSUpIFuN1l&sig=RjRYD8SkgcLN32EDPUvDjni0GzM&hl=en&ei=nKTFS-ilGIyQsgOQwNHRBA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CAYQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=mashpee%20law%20and%20anthropology&f=false
But what happened to Praying Towns that did not experience this resurgence of Indian identity. It may be sad for some regular visitors to see that the author of the thesis on which this 1990 article was based has left academia without turning it into a monograph (or even in a form where it can be cited on the Internet in full), but we can still see the summary of Harold van Lonkhuyzen’s work on the gradual decline of Indian identity in Nattick, Massachusetts.
http://www.jstor.org/pss/366370
And here is William Apess’s cynical take on what was actually happening at Mashpee at the begininng of the Nineteenth Century.
http://books.google.ca/books?id=726OCHzMx5cC&pg=PA81&dq=mashpee+reservation&lr=&cd=10#v=onepage&q=mashpee%20reservation&f=false
.
April 14, 2010 at 6:38 am
Doctor Science
Erik:
I’m not saying that I necessarily agree with your thesis in general, but I think there might be evidence to support it in the case of early colonial New England. I see, for instance, that the Mayflower voyagers were *seriously* short of women by the time their first winter was over. Are there marriages for which there could be no English woman in the first few batches of Pilgrims? Their geneologies have been documented up the ying-yang, after all.
April 14, 2010 at 12:34 pm
D Shannon
Here’s another site dealing with epidemics among the Inuit, this team in Alaska:
http://www.litsite.org/index.cfm?section=Digital-Archives&page=Industry&cat=Healthcare&viewpost=2&ContentId=2610
As you note above, “There is nothing to being “Indian” as opposed to “White” that makes one more susceptible to disease _in general_.”
Likewise, there wouldn’t be anything to being “Indian” as opposed to “Chinese” that would make one more susceptible to disease _in general_.
However, at the time of Columbus, the population of the New World and the population of the Old had been more or less isolated from each other for several thousand years. (The Vinland settlement wasn’t that much of an interaction.) If we consider 30 years to be a generation, then we get 66+ generations in 2000 years. That’s enough time for an adaptation that improves the odds of survival against a specific disease (or several related diseases) to spread through the population. People whose ancestry was from the Old World would have a survival advantage against the Old World diseases that people in the New World didn’t have. (I’m not sure why there weren’t more New World diseases, though.)
Indeed, there were diseases where “Whites” faced a greater risk of death than “Blacks.” According to
http://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/imagegallery.php?EntryID=Y002
yellow fever was one of them. In the Memphis yellow fever epidemic of 1878, over 90% of Whites who remained in the city contacted yellow fever, and 70% of them died. That means 63% of all Whites in Memphis died (I didn’t count those who fled the city as being “in Memphis”). While many Blacks in Memphis also caught the disease, only 7% of Black yellow fever patients died.
Again, we have a disease where over half of a population (in this case, Whites in Memphis) died in a few months, while another population (in this case, Blacks in Memphis) had a much lower death rate.
What this — and the Inuit data — prove is that a disease can kill a _majority_ of people in a given population that has not encountered the disease before, so large death rates from disease are not out of the question.
Also, smallpox wasn’t the only disease that the indigenous people of the Americas encountered for the first time during the 1500s. If a population encounters one disease which wipes out 50% of the people, another new disease that wipes out 40% of those remaining, and a third new disease which kills a further 70% of the population, then only _14%_ of the original population will remain; 86% will be dead.
In other words, diseases could cause massive deaths in populations not exposed to the disease before (while populations who had lived with the disease for centuries would have much lower death rates), and a large death rate is possible when several diseases are introduced to a population within a short time.
April 14, 2010 at 3:08 pm
Robert Halford
The greatest swindle in American history is the shameful covering up of the fact that Prince Madoc of Wales actually discovered America.
April 14, 2010 at 3:39 pm
Doctor Science
Robert Halford:
I’m not sure why there weren’t more New World diseases, though.
There are two theories, both of which may be true.
1. The only continent to which humans are native is sub-Saharan Africa. Per Vavilov’s Rule on centers of species diversity, humans are more genetically diverse in Africa than elsewhere, and our parasites and diseases are *much* more diverse and well-adapted to us there. Human populations in the Western Hemisphere basically had no time (20,000 years tops) to build up a set of diseases that could outweigh those coming from the New World, and especially subtropical and tropical diseases coming with African slaves (e.g. the yellow fever mentioned above, and possibly malaria).
2. A *lot* of major human diseases start as livestock diseases. Livestock are kept close together in large groups, a perfect environment for diseases to take hold. Smallpox probably comes from cowpox, measles from rinderpest (cattle plague), flu from pigs or domestic birds, while typhus and plague are basically diseases of rodents living around human habitations, which humans get incidentally to the animal epidemics (epizootics).
Humans in the New World had fewer species of domestic animals than in the Old, and it was rare for them to be kept in very large groups. So, there weren’t a bunch of nasty livestock-borne diseases for Old Worlders (European and African) to encounter in the Western Hemisphere.
April 14, 2010 at 4:39 pm
ben
It is not Halford but D Shannon who asked about the new world diseases.
April 14, 2010 at 4:54 pm
Doctor Science
ben:
Thank you for the correction. I wrote that comment while using IE, in which the comment-author alignment is BROKKED.
April 14, 2010 at 5:32 pm
silbey
An appropriately academic source for the claim that the rise in Indian populations in American census returns since 1950 partiallly reflects more people claiming Indian identity. It’s good to see that an academic (J. Nagel) agrees with the official position of the Canadian Department of Indian Affairs as cited above…
Good. You’ve established that an academic argues this. Now you need to establish that it is the “consensus explanation,” as you first asserted.
April 15, 2010 at 7:53 am
Erik Lund
Silbey:
My apologies for asserting a “consensus” without demonstrating it. I was honestly under the impression that no-one doubted the “spurious and erratic nature of the detailed race/ethnicity data” provided in Census returns. That said, I spoke in error and in haste.
(Citation from http://www.census.gov/population/www/projections/ppl47.html)
Though I was certainly not wrong. Of the first 15 articles turned up by a Google Scholar search for “Indian identity” with abstracts or available first pages, 9 explicitly discuss the question of constructing Indian identity around multiracial, mixed blood and “bicultural” self-ascription. Six ignore the issue, none deny it. I’m still puzzled how one could. The Department of the Interior used to (still does?) issue “mixed blood” and “full blood” identity cards to American status Indians.
D. Shannon: it is not in fact the case that African-Americans have a preferential immunity to Yellow Fever. On the contrary, scientific attempts to rationalise the involuntary exposure of African Americans to various tropical diseases is as far as I know, one of the more shameful chapters in the annals of medical history. the exception here is malaria, but really is an exception.
Paragraph break for emphasis: there are few scientifically established factors of genetic resistance to disease in humans. And while there is certainly no lack of research on the subject of genetic components of resistance to disease, there is no golden bullet. No population is more resistant to one disease by virtue of having encountered another. It is less vulnerable to a disease that it has already encountered, but only to the extent that herd immunity reduces the number of potential carriers, and those genetic factors of resistance that do exist.
Hence, an historic isolated human population is a priori no more vulnerable to a novel disease for which it has no herd immunity than a historic non-isolated population would be to such a disease: including polio, SARS, HIV, Ebola; arguably Yersinia pestis, cholera and typhoid fever; and, more relevantly, the every-generation global influenza epidemic. And where no genetic factor of resistance to disease is found (including smallpox, influenza and measles) there is no reason to expect the course of the epidemic to be radically different. These diseases become epidemics when herd immunity _and their own intrinsic lethality_ has fallen low enough for them to be epidemics. The circumstances are quantitatively worse for a populations with no herd immunity, but this is only because the small number of remaining immunes in the former population are not candidate carriers, unlike in the latter case. But since diseases that are too lethal burn themselves out, the upper bound of lethality cannot rise too high.
Again, a 30% mortality is a demographic catastrophe that will not do the work required of it in the received version of early North American demographic history.
Nor do epidemics come one after another. Epidemics require victims that are healthy enough to infect others, but unhealthy enough to shed pathogens. The greater part of any such population of candidate carriers are the immunologically compromised: and the young, elderly and disabled in any given population can only be killed off as rapidly as the population regenerates them. Since the immunologically compromised aren’t typically reproductively active, the regeneration is actually fairly quick, but it also follows that the long-run demographic impact of an epidemic is usually greatly overstated.
(Again, I apologise to any experts for any gross errors here. At the risk of undermining my own argument, I cannot pretend to expertise I do not have. The point here is that when technical arguments are brought to bear in historiographic questions, historians have to make the effort.)
Doctor Science: I haven’t been able to find an HTML version of longterm Plymouth Colony Governor William Bradford’s “Of Plymouth Plantation,” but here is a link to the 1852 text in Google Books.
http://books.google.ca/books?id=tYecOAN1cwwC&printsec=frontcover&dq=of+plymouth+plantation&source=bl&ots=LdRXgoiI9U&sig=jzMFLkT8joOt35f0QVLpoZO_erM&hl=en&ei=LinHS5r2IpPctgO4jOmgCw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CAkQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false
In Appendix 1, Bradford lists the signatories of the Mayflower Compact. He then goes on, beginning on p. 450, to list their subsequent history. This document does not name many wives, and I am not the first to point that out. The question is: why?
There’s a generation of scholarship yet to be written on Bradford’s rhetoric, but I am guessing that when Bradford describes this list as being written 30 years after the Compact, so very late in his life, it is being prepared for a political purpose in the 1650s, and probably addressed to Commonwealth-era England. Heck, it could be related to lobbying over the Western Design.
I take it that Bradford needs to demonstrate that God favoured the signatories, so this is about God blessing their their increase. The children that he lists, often without naming them either, are what matters. If we imagine him writing this quickly from information at hand, the gaps are easy to understand, if the data to hand never included a marriage register.
And why would it? The Governor of Leiden would have one, but it was perfectly legal in 1655, and quite common, for English subjects to marry by simple public attestation. Such “clandestine marriages” might be seen as dangerously subversive, but could simply represent the absence of a priest, as in the case of the country marriages that Sylvia Van Kirk writes about in the fur trade. (I’d say more, but apparently some dude named Lawrence Stone has written a whole book on the subject and I really should read it.)
On the other hand, one could see why Bradford might not want to emphasise that marriage was a casual affair in early Plymouth in, say, correspondence with the Protectorate. Religion, specifically ecclesiology, would be critical here, not race.
By the way, the long-sought smoking gun on “Indian-White intimate relations in early Plymouth:” http://www.histarch.uiuc.edu/plymouth/wampanoag.html
“Mary, the wyfe of Robte Mendame, of Duxburrow, for using dallyance diuers tymes wth Tinsin, an Indian” was sentenced to be whipped and to wear the scarlet letter, and Tinsin was whipped and exposed in a halter, because, after all, he’d been tempted by the lascivious woman. This one does double duty, since Tinsin’s case tends to confirm the existence of semi-assimilated “settlement Indians” living at Plymouth, already established for Boston. It is also one of only four or five recorded adultery convictions, so it is not a statistical outlier, not that that speaks to the frequency of interracial relationships.
Finally, (at least for now), Faith Harrington pleads for us to understand that Plymouth was only one of 10 English plantations on the coast of New England in the early 1620s (or 11, counting Mount Wollaston). The others being established by fishers rather than by latter-day Culdees, have had no place in the official historiography of New England. “‘Wee Took Great Store of Cod-fish’: Fishing Ships and the First Setttlements on the Coast of New England, 1600–1630.” In _American Beginnings: Exploration, Culture, and Cartography in the Land of Norumbega_, ed. Emerson W. Baker et al. 191–216. Lincoln: UNP, 1994.
April 15, 2010 at 10:25 am
D Shannon
I didn’t claim that African-Americans had more immunity against yellow fever, and the data from the 1878 Memphis epidemic doesn’t indicate any difference between the races in how likely they were to get yellow fever.
However, the data show a vast difference between the races in how likely they were to survive a case of yellow fever.
Likewise, contemporary accounts didn’t show that the Inuit around Nome were more likely than whites to catch influenza in 1918; about 50 to 60 percent of the white population in the area was sick. However, what I’ve found indicates that just 25 whites of the about 300 infected died. There wasn’t a difference between the races in immunity, but there was one in chances of survival once they got the disease.
I haven’t found much data, broken down by race, about infection and mortality rates for outbreaks of yellow fever or influenza. More information would be helpful.
As you note above, a population “is less vulnerable to a disease that it has already encountered, but only to the extent that herd immunity reduces the number of potential carriers, and those genetic factors of resistance that do exist.” I’ve been arguing that such factors of resistance to disease do exist, and that those factors would have been selected for because the disease has been endemic to that population for a large number of generations.
Herd immunity, or the lack thereof, may also play a rule in mortality. I did find an interesting paper by Svenn-Erik Mamelund:
http://www.ed.lu.se/papers/mamelund.pdf
Apparently there had been a pandemic of a related influenza virus in 1889-90. In populations that had encountered the previous pandemic, the 1918 pandemic produced a spike in the death rate among people in their late 20s and early 30s. However, people in their 40s and 50s weren’t as likely to die because they had some immunity from a previous, _very closely related_ strain. In populations that hadn’t encountered the previous pandemic, people in their 40s and 50s were as likely to die as people in their 30s.
This would help explain why a disease could have a much higher death rate in a population that encounters a disease for a first time than in one where the disease had been around for multitudes of generation.
April 15, 2010 at 1:36 pm
chingona
The Department of the Interior used to (still does?) issue “mixed blood” and “full blood” identity cards to American status Indians.
This is really tangential to the argument, but I’m pretty sure the tribes themselves determine the blood quantum necessary for tribal membership now and it varies considerably from tribe to tribe. But yes, at least for the folks I know personally, their tribal ID cards indicate their blood quantum.
April 21, 2010 at 7:11 pm
bitchphd
Very, very late to this long thread–I’ve become a very delinquent blog reader in my middle age. But fwiw, my answer to question #1 would be that rhetorical emotional appeals have more persuasive power, as far as public opinion goes, than economic arguments–even if it’s economics (as I suspect it is) that actually create the conditions under which people suddenly find rhetorical emotional appeals persuasive. My half-baked argument is based on what I know about early abolitionist arguments in England; it seems to me that at the beginning of the 18th century arguments about slavery often relied on claims that it wasn’t profitable and/or that it was dangerous (slaves cost a lot to keep/import, having a lot of slaves around poses a major risk of rebellion). Actual practice undermined those arguments, of course, but *as* arguments they weren’t terribly sentimental.
Later in the century, though, the sentimentalist/Christian arguments totally dominate, and of course public opinion was more abolitionist than it had been 100 years earlier (and slavery gets banned in 1833, right?).
April 21, 2010 at 7:53 pm
Charlieford
“rhetorical emotional appeals have more persuasive power, as far as public opinion goes, than economic arguments …. My half-baked argument …”
Chill. You’re right. You don’t even need an argument. It’s just a foundational fact. People are idiots, and will respond to rhetoric and emotion over economics every time. For most of them, that’s all they’ll respond to, anytime.
April 22, 2010 at 6:36 am
kid bitzer
of course, there’s a different sort of idiocy involved in privileging economic arguments over all other kinds.
(not that anyone here was advocating that).
April 22, 2010 at 8:11 am
Vance
Indeed, “There are idiots. Look around.” was a rhetorical opening gambit made by … an economist.
April 22, 2010 at 5:30 pm
Doctor Science
bitchphd, Charlieford:
I disagree with both of you. As I said above, what moves people *most* is stories, because that’s how we organize our thoughts. Stories don’t work because we’re “idiots”, they work because we’re *human*. Story-telling is our birthright: as Tolkien said, “we make still by the law in which we’re made.”
Abraham Lincoln wasn’t just whistlin’ Dixie when he called Harriet Beecher Stowe “the little lady who started this great war”. Neither practical nor moral appeals were as effective as the right story at changing people’s minds and hearts, together.
April 22, 2010 at 7:39 pm
Charlieford
Hmm. Let’s see.
An apocryphal quote from Lincoln + a quote from Tolkien = what exactly?
You are aware this isn’t a children’s blog, aren’t you?
April 23, 2010 at 6:15 am
kid bitzer
harsh, charlie. i can’t decide what’s more upsetting, being told that the “little lady” quote is apocryphal, or being told this is not a childrens blog. i’m just going to sob softly into my chocolate milk.
April 23, 2010 at 8:55 am
Charlieford
I have nothing against children’s blogs. Or children, for that matter. i was once one myself, and would have stayed one, probably, had it not been for forces beyond my control.
I also have nothing against stories. I make my living telling stories about dead people, after all. I think they’re very valuable.
But while the rediscovery of narrative, or story, or whatever you want to call it, was much needed after the positivist enthusiasms of mid-century has been as unbalanced as the enthusiasm for data and statistics once was, and needs reigning in.
It is manifestly not the case that stories trump every other means of conveying truth, or are the only motivators. Certainly many, many people organize their thoughts in other ways. Part of growing up is appreciating the utility of these other means, despite their lack of inherent entertainment-value.
And besides, Tolkein is much over-rated.
April 23, 2010 at 9:10 am
Charlieford
This will date me, perhaps, but I should have said, “Stories have been very good to me!”
April 23, 2010 at 5:03 pm
Doctor Science
Wow, Charley, tell me what you *really* think.
Neither The Lord of the Rings nor Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a children’s book.
The question on the table is, Which really works better to grab Americans’ attention? Rhetorical appeals to justice, or social scientific appeals to your wallet?
My point is that if you want to grab people’s attention and get them to care about an issue enough to change their behavior, stories are the way to go. I didn’t say stories are the *only* way to convey truth or to movitate people, but they are IMHO the most effective method on statistical average. “Entertainment-value” is a flip and foolish way to dismiss what people get from stories, from myths, from drama and religion.
It certainly appears that economists are at least as succeptible as idiots and children to the influence of stories. In the immortal words of John Rogers:
No matter how childish Rand’s fantasy is, it has had enormous impact on adults with great economic power.
And now you’ve got kid bitzer drinking chocolate milk, and you know how that always ends — blowing bubbles in the milk and then snorting them out his nose.
April 23, 2010 at 5:12 pm
Charlieford
I don’t deny stories are important and effective. And don’t worry, they’re not going anywhere. But there are many things you can’t think if you can only think in stories. But I don’t need to explain that to you, do I? Your apologia is far from a story: it makes arguments, cites evidence, etc. It has no drama or excitement, no heroes or villains, yet, look at me, I’m pretty persuaded! May I say, “Well done!”?
April 23, 2010 at 6:20 pm
kid bitzer
no heroes? no drama? what do you mean?
it’s got me right in the last paragraph: what could be more heroic?
and i’m blowing bubbles through my nose: what could be more dramatic?
i tell you, it’s a naso-narratological triumph. story.
April 29, 2010 at 3:17 am
kid bitzer
i just encountered another historiographical fraud on one of delong’s comment-threads. a reader writes:
“Texas has always had the right to withdraw from the Union of their volition”
apparently not aware that this never was true, and that its falsehood was amply and explicitly confirmed by texas v. white.