This week, ending in July 06 2017:
Today's thread is for open discussion of:
History in the academy
Historiographical disputes, debates and rivalries
Implications of historical theory both abstractly and in application
Philosophy of history
And so on
Regular participants in the Thursday threads should just keep doing what they've been doing; newcomers should take notice that this thread is meant for open discussion only of matters like those above, not just anything you like -- we'll have a thread on Friday for that, as usual.
One of the things that really struck me in the comparative genocide course I recently took is how much of a role rewriting history plays on the justification and denial of the acts.
u/SnapShot52 covered denial of Native American genocide on Monday, and combined with the readings I'm currently doing for a section on teaching Native American history, I'm kind of amazed on just how similar our treatment of indigenous people in American history is with the treatment of Turkey towards Armenians or Serbia against the Bosniaks.
Throughout school, the principles of virgin soil and vacuum domicillium were always explained as the overall justification for encroachment, with only passive mention of forced assimilation, massacres, or the effects of manufactured warfare and enslavement on displacement and the spread of disease.
To that end my main project working for the National Park Service this summer has been working on how to better interpret the history of slavery and the slave trade in Massachusetts. Increasingly I've come back to its foundations in the Pequot War - the first African slaves were received in trade for 15 Pequot slaves in the Carribean - and can't help but recognize how horrible a job we do interpreting that side of our history.
Between recent coursework, real work, current events such as Standing Rock and Oak Flat, and the discussions taking place here it has given me quite a bit more to think about as far as the weaknesses in our site's interpretive plan as well as my own tour content.
So with that, I just wanted to say thanks to everyone spurring on these discussions.
I've been reading Revolutions in the Desert by Steven Rosen, about the origins of pastoral nomadism in the Southern Levant. One of the arguments he keeps coming back to is that the archaeology of nomads has been so neglected because it slips through the cracks between historic archaeology (which is interested in pastoral nomads and nomadic interactions with the settled world) and prehistoric archaeology (which has the methodological tools for tackling ephemeral sites. So you get historical archaeologists trapped in the assumption that you can only approach nomads through texts and ethnographic analogy, whilst prehistoric archaeologists are skipping over nomadic sites because they're too late. Quite an interesting thought.