So, /u/Reedstilt is a bad influence. Even though he knows I'm a book addict, he recommended a collection of essays called Beyond Germs: Native Depopulation in North America published earlier this year. I'm so glad he did.

If you've been here a while you know the Native American historians rail against the popular notion of European colonial success due soley to disease transfer and massive Native American depopulation. The theory has a long history in the discipline, and was popularized by Diamond's works, specifically Guns, Germs, and Steel, and Mann's 1491. The assumption of massive catastrophic depopulation due to disease is now ubiquitous in the popular perception of North and South American history. There is just one problem; over the past few decades a great deal of archaeological, historical, and ethnohistorical data shows the popular perception of universal catastrophic mortality due to epidemic disease is wrong.

Historians and anthropologists, each of us toiling away in our own specialized areas of research, know the popular myth doesn't completely explain what we see in our data. However, until recently Native American history fell into that grey area between archaeology and history, between prehistoric archaeology and historic archaeology. Very few scholars could jump those departmental lines to synthesize data from different fields, and even fewer were willing to fight against a grand "just so story" of disease depopulation armed only with their limited data from their limited research. As a consequence, popular myths of Native American history go unchallenged.

This brings me back to the book Beyond Germs. The book doesn't so much present new information as synthesize disparate sources, and the work of scholars in the different fields of anthropology and history, into one volume. What emerges is the nuanced view of Native American history after contact that highlights how the forces of colonialism worked in concert over the course of centuries to not only decrease Native American population size, but also prevent rapid recovery. Instead of disease alone the authors highlight the influence of structural violence poured out over centuries on Native North Americans. The Indian slave trade, total war, territory restriction, population displacement, identity erasure, destroying food resources, and limiting access to adequate nutrition all worked together to weaken host immunity, increase mortality, decrease population size, and prevent recovery.

Though I'm highly recommending the book here, this isn't an easy read. This is a collection of academic essays, and for popular history buffs this might be a bit of a slog. However, this represents the best single volume compilation, with the most up to date data and theory, on Native North American population history after contact that I've seen.

/u/400-Rabbits, feel free to blame Reedstilt if you want, but I think you'd like this book.

Edit: adding links

I have a question, with a bit of prelude. In physics, one of the top journals is called Physical Review Letters and it publishes four-to-five page articles from all topics in physics research. There is also a journal called the American Journal of Physics which is aimed at physics teachers and undergraduates, which talks about "classic" problems examined in a new light, "popular" physics, articles about physics pedagogy, etc. So if I want to learn about the latest research in physics I'll check out PRL and if I want something interesting and understandable I'll check out AJP.

So my question: what are the PRL and AJP of history research?

Bonus edit: one of the letters to the editor in AJP this month is about standards for discussing the history of physics.

About a few weeks ago, I picked up the following book from my university library: White Night (John Peer Nugent, Rawson, Wade Publishers, 1979).

As the copyright date attests, this is one of the "instant history" books that came out on Peoples Temple after the deaths in November 1978. When news of the tragedy hit newsstands on the 19th, authors scrambled to write books about Peoples Temple, Jonestown, and Jim Jones. Because the deaths were fresh in these authors' minds (as well as the reader's), these books are useful to learn about the mindset of authors and readers immediately after the tragedy.

I am currently a bit over half-way through the book, but I feel like I can write a short review about the book while I'm here.

It is very obvious that this was heavily influenced by members of the Concerned Relatives and the wider anti-cult movement. Here is a quote:

A few wished not only to forget [about Peoples Temple]; they went on to form the Human Freedom Center, which had been founded with the purpose of helping former sect members discover the courage to face life. This prospect itself can be terrifying for anyone who has relinquished individuality to pursue a principle or a person. Understanding such terror takes a special kind of experience.

There are certain types of endeavor in society from which the participants, no matter how they can try, can never withdraw. […] In drug addiction, one finds an inordinate number of former heavy users and pushers, who, once they've gotten themselves detoxified, slide right back into the drug culture on the other, or good, side. They may attempt a new life in another field, but quite often they are drawn back, in missionary fashion, to help others go straight.

Part of it is a sense of doing penance. Part of it has a humanitarian motive, to warn others of the dangers of involvement. There is no doubt that an ex-junkie can make a more effective argument against the destructive effects of addiction than doctors or other professionals who deal with drug abuse. The ex-junkie has at least been there and can talk from personal experience. Such people have the greatest credibility.

That situation has been true in the People's Temple (and cults and sects in general). [...]

- p. 96-7, White Night

Yeahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

This tone can be found throughout the text. It's very clear that the author presupposes the following things in this text:

• that Jones was a cynical, power-hungry bastard who used mind-control on Temple members
• that Jones' true motive was control of people
• that Peoples Temple was a cult, with Jones as its leader
• that Jones duped and exploited the black members (many who signed over their Social Security checks to the Temple) while promoting and abetting latent racism in Temple leadership in the name of integration and racial equality
• that members of Concerned Relatives are akin to saints
• that Representative Leo Ryan was a saint

And so on and so forth. The reader gets the impression that Jones was literally the personification of evil, through the rather polarizing narrative.

Compare the quote above with the following quote below, from Gone from the Promised Land: Jonestown in American Cultural History (John R. Hall, Transaction Books, 1987):

From what Debbie Blakey had told them [the Concerned Relatives], everyone would want to leave. And so the Concerned Relatives prepared for a mission that would help those who wanted to return. To aid the liberated cultists who no doubt would be coming back to the States, Jeannie and Al Mills set up a sort of halfway house in a rambling yellow house on Regent Street in Berkeley. Mimicking names of other groups dedicated to freeing individuals from “cults” (like Citizens' Freedom Foundation), the Millses called their organization the “Human Freedom Center.” […] Workers lived at the center, wrote funding grants to try to support it, and prepared for the anticipated influx of Jonestown defectors who would need food, shelter, and counseling to help them reintegrate into U.S. society.

- p. 255, Gone from the Promised Land

There's a pretty clear difference regarding tone between the two works. The former is polemic, and the author uses the chance to draw parallels between Peoples Temple and heavy drug addiction. The latter simply talks about the opening of the Human Freedom Center in more neutral terms.

In addition to the tone problem, White Night makes a number of assertions about events that I haven't been able to source in other books (and with later scholarship). One that sticks out is the assertion that Jones tried to cure his wife, Marceline, of lung cancer:

And though Jones constantly showed his hypochondria, it was his wife who was really sick right to the end. She had lung cancer. Once he had laid his healing hands on her and pronounced her cured but X-rays continued to show the cancer.

- p. 33, White Night

This book does not contain any footnotes or endnotes. Although there's a short bibliography at the back, I have absolutely no idea where this assertion comes from, and again, I haven't been able to find this claim repeated elsewhere. However, it does serve one purpose: to make Jones out to be EBIL.

I will be fair and acknowledge the fact that, at time of writing, Jonestown was still a news story on NBC. However, I cannot recommend anyone to read White Night if they don't have any background in the subject. The book is good for looking into Temple historiography, but it's not going to be extremely helpful with your high school history paper.

Finished What Hath God Wrought, which remained great but I got to the end and really wanted to read Howe's take on the 1850s. The more I've read about the decade, the less happy I am with McPherson's two chapters. They're not bad, but they come across as something that's very much there to get through so the bullets can start flying.

Read a novel and then started another, but after that I've got Wilentz' Rise of American Democracy lined up. No kindle edition, unfortunately. I'll probably slip Don Fehrenbacher's The South in Three Sectional Crises in before Wilentz since it's so short.

With regard to Howe, I think there's an interesting nuance around the edges of his account. Forgive me some vagueness. I'm just working around the idea myself:

Howe has the Democracy as quite happy with mob violence to achieve its (white male) popular ends. He takes this as anti-democratic, and I think he's broadly right in that. I suspect that violence is inherently authoritarian, though in saying that I probably only confess my pacifism. But it seems to me that the legal and institutional safeguards against mobbing that he extols, a sentiment I generally share, often operate the same way. Isn't there at least some affinity between the idea that laws and constitutions will safeguard liberties and the sentiment that they are best kept in the hands of aristocratic (or at least elite) stewards insulated from the democratic impulse? The mob could and often did, if I remember Pauline Maier's paper on the subject correctly, serve as an agent of the popular will. As such, wouldn't it be qualified democratization in a way similar to the democratization often credited to the Democratic party of the same era?

I wouldn't call any such affinity necessarily the equivalent of herrenvolk Democracy, and certainly not morally equivalent, but it does seem worth consideration. Maybe I'll get more of that angle from Wilentz.