James’s Comments

James’s comments from the History is Not Boring group.

Note: James is not currently a member of this group.

I like Manuel's point about the difference between patriotism and nationalism. Another way to put it might be, as I like to think about it, that patriotism is about devotion to a set of values and the system that makes one's way of life possible - again, I look back to the oath of office to defend the Constitution - while nationalism is more of a 'my country right or wrong', arrogant, chauvinistic, blind loyalty and assumption of superiority. As a retired Marine and someone who has stayed active in local and national politics - with a strong progressive/liberal orientation based on the idea that we are all our brothers' and sisters' keepers - I am very much a patriot and not at all a nationalist. Many of history's greatest evils have been committed by nationalists, but patriots tend to be much better to have around.

Yes, the basic difference between 'creationist science' and real science is given away in the very name of it.
In real science, you start with a question, and follow the evidence to whatever answer it leads you to favor without forcing a starting agenda. Often the greatest discoveries have been total surprises and not been what their finders had theorized when they started.
In pseudoscience, you start with a question and an assumed answer, then cherry-pick the data and the analysis to fit your preplanned answer.
Religion isn't the only place it happens. Totalitarian governments generate some bizarre stuff masquerading as science, too - witness the Nazis and their 'racial science' or Stalin's USSR and their Lysenkoist approach to heredity (they insisted that acquired physical traits would become hereditary - for example, I have a bad back because I injured it several times, moving furniture, in a wreck, etc. So, according to Lysenkoist theory, any children I had after those injuries would likely be born with bad backs. Of course, my DNA has no idea my back is messed up, luckily for my descendants.)
The best protection against pseudoscience is a large number of well-informed skeptics, many ready to roll up their sleeves and start digging into it independently, as McGyver5 noted, and who test, probe, and challenge every assertion, even the ones that sound logical to them.
Once something has been checked and confirmed enough times, it becomes accepted - real scientists will remain ready to reject it after that, but only if they see very convincing evidence that it can't be true or that there is an even better answer to the question at hand.

Fear always seems to divide many people who should stand by each other and make them careless about sticking to their principles and protecting their freedoms and the rule of law. It brings out the bullies, too.
America saw the same thing during and after World War I, when people were deeply suspicious of anything German (they renamed saurkraut "liberty cabbage" - ring any bells, Freedom Fries eaters? - and some people went around kicking Dachshunds because they were German dogs (no reports of them kicking German Shepherds... kind of like the way some activists throw paint at women wearing furs but never mess with bikers dressed in leather from head to toe. But I digress.) During the last weeks of the war and just after, during the influenza pandemic that killed more people than the war had, people (and newspapers) started rumors that the flu was being deliberately spread in America by German agents, and at least one German-American was murdered based on those rumors. Kind of like the way people blamed the Black Death on Jews and killed them in Europe in the 14th century.
Then after WWI there was the Red Scare, when people lined up like sheep behind the government while it illegally rounded up thousands, and deported hundreds, of recent immigrants from Eastern Europe.
Then after WW2 there was another Red Scare, ushered in by Joseph McCarthy, with more people's lives ruined by government actions that were illegal and reprehensible. Following that we had Hoover's FBI going nuts about the anti-war and civil rights movements in the 60s, doing things like trying to blackmail Martin Luther King Jr. into suicide with threats to send his wife info on his affairs.
Just after 9/11, our government summarily locked up hundreds of Americans of middle eastern descent without evidence or due process, and ended up letting them go and never charging even one of them with any offense related to terrorism or conspiracy.
The good news is that each time so far, in the years afterward (too soon to say in the case of 9/11 and the Bush administration's blitzkrieg against civil liberties) there has been a public backlash, and the checks and balances of the legal system have been strengthened. The bad news is that when a new wave of hysteria hits, too many are ready to ignore the laws no matter what they say.

The title is misleading - instead of Forbidden Archeology, it would be more accurate to title it Debunked Pseudoarcheology. The work of the Hindu fundamentalist who wrote it, Michael Cremo, has been thoroughly checked out by a lot of expert archeologists, and it has so many holes in it, it should have been printed on cheesecloth. He cites discredited theories and finds and he ignores confirmed information when it doesn't fit his perspective. It's an exercise in twisting science to fit an agenda.

The ooparts thing is similar. So far no one has come up with a validated find of an 'oopart' that cannot be explained within the bounds of accepted archeology. For example, the 'Coso artifact' in California that was described as a mysterious electric or electronic device found in fossilized rock turned out to be an old Champion spark plug encased in hardened clay.

There are some genuine scientific mysteries around, for which no one has yet provided a solid explanation, but not in this field.

One of the most basic parts of science is that any scientific claim, to be valid, has to stand up to review and achieve a consensus among people working in the field in question. If it's in chemistry or physics, the experimental results or astronomical observations being announced have to be successfully reproduced by others.
If in the field of archeology, a claim has to pass these tests to be reasonable and plausible:
1. The field work and analysis have to be sound - i.e., the dating of the strata where things were found has to be valid and documented.
2. Other, more plausible explanations for the find or theory being put forth have to be ruled out somehow by the evidence. All explanations for something that are feasible have to be checked out. The simplest explanation that is consistent with all the data is likeliest to be right.

Keeping an open mind means being ready to change one's beliefs if presented with proof or overwhelming evidence that things aren't the way we thought they were; it doesn't mean giving up skepticism or lowering our standards. You asked how we can prove anything. The answer is, by submitting clear and convincing evidence, that can't be explained by existing understandings, to critique and review by the experts and anyone else who wants to look at it. If the idea in question is solid, their critiques, reviews, and experiments will confirm and strengthen it, as has happened with Einstein's theory of relativity over the decades.

Scientists, good ones, are always ready to have their minds changed, but only with evidence, and they probe and test and challenge their own views as strongly as they do anyone else's. Sometimes they fall short, because we're all human and scientists have egos too. But when that happens, the rest of the field will almost always pop someone's balloon in a hurry. Because scientists are so skeptical and contentious, it's hard for ideas to be accepted - that's our protection from junk ideas. The valid ideas will stand up to the pounding because their basis will be shown to be solid.

I've often thought (as others have before) that 'America the Beautiful' would be a better choice as our national anthem.
I do like the fact that when people go into the military or national office - despite what some then do in office - their oath is to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

The Genesis account of creation has God creating land and water first, then light. That is totally impossible - stars form before their planets coalesce. The people who wrote that had no way of understanding what stars and planets are or how they come into being.

And as for Adam and Eve being history - no. To be called history, something has to based on some kind of evidence beyond "because we say so." If there is no evidence, it's a legend, not history.

There are Native American cultures whose religions say that the world is balanced on the shell of a giant turtle... which sits on top of another turtle... on top of another turtle... and so on. The biblical creation story makes exactly as much sense as that one.

There is no way to reconcile trying to take the bible as literal truth with the physical reality of this universe. There are some parts of it that can be thought-provoking or inspiring taken as allegory or parable. But as literal truth (even if you could retrieve the original texts, which no one has ever found?) Just doesn't work.

It isn't open-minded to refuse to acknowledge overwhelming evidence, it's closed-minded. It's saying "I'll stay open to ideas that I like but I won't ever treat a question as answered unless it's the answer I prefer." If something walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, and lays duck eggs, and has duck DNA, it's not being open-minded to insist, "But it MIGHT not be a duck, it might be a Belgian waffle! I'm going to keep an open mind."

We've known about the various hominid lines for generations now. We've also traced human ancestry back to our prehuman roots in what is now eastern Africa, showing a step-by-step process of change - brains getting bigger, teeth changing, skeletal structure getting better adapted to walking and running upright, increasing sophistication in use of tools, and so on.

You are correct that we've had to rearrange our thoughts before, and we will again, but that happens in areas where we lack information and have tried to fill in the blanks with educated guesses and assumptions, not where we've had the physical evidence sitting in front of us. It's not as if some new evidence could come along and suddenly make all that information already accumulated disappear. Sort of like detectives trying to solve a mystery - they may have suspicions when they don't have enough evidence to know, but once they find fingerprint or DNA evidence, that evidence doesn't go away, and they can't un-know what they now know.

Being able to trace humanity back to a stretch of time of a few hundred thousand years and to part of a continent in terms of place - there is now DNA analysis showing that prehumans split off from our common ancestor with the chimps about 4 million years ago, plus or minus under half a million years, and that it happened in what is now eastern Africa - is a lot different from being able to identify two individuals and say they were the ancestors of humanity.

There is not only no evidence of two modern humans suddenly popping up and becoming the ancestors of the human race, it's hard to imagine what evidence for that idea there could be, and there's a mountain of evidence against it. If people are going to base their thinking on reason, we have to look at where the most evidence points as the likeliest direction to find what's real, and if the evidence is beyond reasonable doubt - i.e., disbelieving it requires ignoring the majority of the physical evidence on the table in front of us - then that disbelief is not reasonable doubt, it's something beyond reason and not based on evidence.

The overwhelming mass of evidence supports the view that we did evolve from a hominid ancestor we have in common with the chimpanzee - humans and chimps still share 98% of the same DNA. We ARE ape-like creatures; we are apes, actually, just a different species of ape.

The dating of fossils has been cross-checked by multiple methods - carbon-dating has been improved and refined to the point that it is very reliable, and it is combined with dating via checking the age of the layers of soil or stone in which remains are found, by checking the ages of co-located organic remains (food items, etc.) against the chemical record (levels of different chemicals in the atmosphere at different times as shown by sampling air bubbles in ice cores from the Greenland ice cap and other places), measuring the magnetic orientation of iron atoms in the surrounding soil/stone against the geological record of the Earth's magnetic field at different times, and other means.

It's true that several kinds of pre-human or protohuman hominids were around before us, some of them at the same times as each other and some of them, such as the Neadertals, overlapping with early homo sapiens. But as we find out more, it doesn't contradict earlier evidence so much as fill in more of the picture.

As for Adam and Eve, there is no evidence that such a couple actually existed, and the basic story has been found with variations in the creation legends of a lot of cultures. The Bible has been translated and retranslated and transcribed so many times that no responsible scholar is willing to sign off on any conclusive idea of what the origninal books said.

I'd have to agree with the general gist of what people are saying here - Russia lacks the resources and people to fight another giant war (for that matter, so do we), and they need us economically. However, as has also been noted, a lot of wars have started when leaders thought they'd be able to make them quick and easy and then gotten totally beyond anything those people foresaw in both scale and duration.

Russia's population has been shrinking since long before the fall of the USSR, as I understand it due mostly to the difficulty of a couple being able to make ends meet if they have children. Again, that could become a major factor here too. But that's been going on long enough that the population is already significantly aged, as well as smaller.

Putin is now saying the U.S. is responsible for this war, because we encouraged Georgia to clamp down on the South Ossetian secession (and although he isn't saying it aloud, because we encouraged Georgia to join NATO.) To me that smacks of a perpetrator justifying an assault by saying "See what you made me do?" There was something in the news, though, about Russia having pleaded with the U.S. to slow down on the NATO membership and encourage the Georgians to negotiate with the Ossetians, and about our government having stonewalled the Russians.

Bottom line, I doubt it will turn into a major war because no one involved is going to take that risk. The Ukrainians are scared too, so they could decide not to risk antagonizing the Russians by getting into NATO - if they do join, they'll probably do it abruptly and present Putin with a fait accomplis.

If I had to predict the most likely outcome in Georgia, it would a long-festering three-way guerrilla war among the Ossetians, Georgians, and Russians. Everybody will lose.

Hmm! Marian, my stepfather was named George Douglas Dickinson. He was born in 1923 in Monroe, Louisiana, grew up in New Mexico, served in both oceans in the Navy in WW2, and died in 2003. I wonder whether he was related to you via your mother? He told me that one of his ancestors had been Mad Anthony Wayne, but didn't mention anyone who actually shared the surname Dickinson.

Other than that, unless one of my children or grandchildren gets famous, my family is fated for continued obscurity...

I'll also second the recommendation for Barbara Tuchman - she was wonderful.
I'm also reading a superb book now by John M. Barry titled The Great Influenza - it's the first of his books I've read but won't be the last. This is a chronicle of the influenza pandemic of 1918-1919 that is so gripping it's hard to put down to go to sleep; every bit as good as Barbara Tuchman's best work. So far I'd rate this as possibly the best book I've read yet this year.

I shared some of 'Lies My Teacher Told Me' with my daughter when she was in junior high school, to augment what she was learning at school and make it more interesting. She went back to school and told her teacher about some of the tidbits from the book (the one we found most outrageous was the account of President Warren G. Harding's joining the KKK in a public ceremony at the White House) and the teacher called her a liar.

Two other good books along the same lines are 'Lies Across America' by the same author, and 'That's Not In My American History Book!' by Thomas Ayres.

Welcome, Joe! It's a good site - fun, and a good source of leads on good books and of trivia in general.

Great subtopic. One of the best history courses I ever got the chance to take was set up to include a focus on art and other cultural media for each period - the text had three chapters for each time period; one was about political and military events, one about technology and lifestyles, and one about the arts.
One of the things that has always been striking to me about the way art reflects culture is the art of the middle ages - the weird (to us) perspectives where some people are several times as large as others, and the portrayals of animals as being religious in the same ways as people, because the artists just assumed that religiosity permeated the rest of the world the way it did their lives.

If my side is outnumbered or otherwise at a disadvantage, I'd go with Robert E. Lee, Hannibal, or Paul Erich von Lettow-Vorbeck, who fought a brilliant campaign for Germany against the British in East Africa in WWI.
If my army is the heavyweight, I'd probably go with Sherman, Grant, or Scipio Africanus.

That sounds as if it will be good. We (my wife Jan and I) will be looking forward to it. We've both worked with adolescents and young adults from various Native cultures, and are about to start working part-time at a Job Corps program with several hundred students, a majority of them from Navajo or various Pueblo communities. We'll be doing group and individual therapy helping people (we hope, anyway) with trauma, depression, substance abuse, GLBT identity issues, and anything else they want to work on.

I've always liked the dry and ironic sense of humor that a lot of the Navajo and Hopi guys I knew in the Marine Corps (the folks in that region go into the military at a significantly higher rate than the general population.)

Will, have you read Tony Hillerman's novels, and if so what do you think of his writing, in terms of authenticity?

For me it goes back to when I was a teenager - my stepfather was fascinated by history, and he and I were very close, as well as being very similar personalities. He was particularly interested in Southwestern history, having spent his whole life except for World War II here in New Mexico, but had a pretty restless and wide-ranging intellect.
I didn't find a history class that interested me until high school, but that was when I first found teachers that treated it as the study of people rather than a specialized form of Trivial Pursuit. Our school had integrated history and English, so for example, when we studied the Civil War period, we read about the history of the war and politics, read books like Andersonville, and watched a reenactment of a battle at our school (they invited a group of Civil War reenactors to our campus, and they were thrilled to have the chance to share their interest with several dozen kids.) That day the teachers wore period clothes, even.

As an adult, I've found the study of people more fascinating than anything else, and that has included making history a hobby, loving fiction that is character-based, and making psychotherapy my second career after retiring from the Marine Corps. It's all about people. If I go back to school and take up another major, it will probably be history, sociology, or anthropology.

Another very good historical writer is Douglas C. Jones, who wrote (don't know whether he's still alive) about the Civil War and about the mid-to-late-19th-century West in general. I discovered his books back in the 80s in the library and read every one of them I could find. He includes a lot of meticulous period detail and atmosphere without being intrusive about it, and I think he does a good job of presenting people's perspectives embedded in their own cultures, although he definitely likes the underdogs - for example, he looks at Native American-western interactions a bit more through the eyes of the aboriginal characters. His depiction of the Wounded Knee massacre is heartbreaking.

I agree strongly with you, Dianne, on the importance of authors working to get things right. It is beyond jarring to be absorbed in a story and then get jolted out of one's suspension of disbelief by something anachronistic. Just as bad as when some other kind of detail is wrong or impossible. Personally, I kind of get a kick out of authors using historical figures as characters if they appear to have them doing and saying things that would be consistent with that figure's personality and life as far as we know.

Fraser's Flashman books are very good, although I don't like them as much now as I did when I was younger - when it comes to the title character's personality, the despicable weighs heavier than the funny sometimes, to the point that it can become grating.

A superb author in this regard is Caleb Carr - his books The Alienist and The Angel of Darkness, set in Victorian-era New York, are great; he did a superb job of capturing the feel of another time through little details and through people's attitudes.

Another is Jack Finney, with his novels From Time to Time and Time and Again. Not sure whether to call them historical fiction or not, since they concern a modern American traveling in time back to New York of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but again nearly all of each story is set in those past times and is loving and meticulous in the author's depiction of culture and daily life then.

From what I've read about them, it's like comparing Grant and Sherman - Washington, like Grant, had more of the steadfastness and iron determination that it took to keep going no matter what and carry his part through, also the humility to turn down the royalty-like titles and privileges some people wanted to give the presidency. Jefferson, like Sherman, was more high-strung, excitable, and intellectual, more visionary, more the type that took the basic intent of Washington/Grant, developed it, and carried it out.