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I started to read this online a while ago, but stopped because gently caress reading things off a website on a PC monitor. However I just got this for my birthday, so I'm going to jump in and finish it off. One thing I remember is looking up Las Casas, the preacher mentioned in the opening chapter and finding him quite interesting. When he arrived in the USA he was shocked at the treatment of the natives. Although it took him a while to develop a complete understanding of the tragedy of slavery, at one point he advocated using black slaves instead of Native Americans before later rejecting all slavery as immoral, he seems to have been a pretty cool dude. I've found one of his books online at Gutenberg, which has the catchy title of A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies Or, a faithful NARRATIVE OF THE Horrid and Unexampled Massacres, Butcheries, and all manner of Cruelties, that Hell and Malice could invent, committed by the Popish Spanish Party on the inhabitants of West-India, TOGETHER With the Devastations of several Kingdoms in America by Fire and Sword, for the space of Forty and Two Years, from the time of its first Discovery by them. The short excerpt I found of History of the Indies (here: https://www2.stetson.edu/secure/history/hy10430/lascasashistory.html) was even more horrifying than the quotes Zinn uses in the first chapter in People's History.
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Jun 17, 2014 18:41
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inktvis posted:That's a little misleading. De las Casas wasn't operating in the area of what would later be the US; more Central America and the Caribbean. It makes it clear in The People's History that he wasn't involved with the mainland USA, with the first chapter talking more widely about the initial colonisation and subjugation of indigenous people across the Americas in general. Really you have to, it's a key element of the history of the USA and you can't write a history, even an ideological one, without mentioning it or other pre-USA information like it's history as a British colony. I think the main goal behind this focus is to target the legend of Columbus, a figure who still is respected by many people of the USA but was far more so 35 years ago when criticism of him was far less mainstream. As for the title, that's disappointing and means his balls are merely large rather than the giant size I thought they were.
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Jun 17, 2014 23:05
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