California Dreams

Post #3

Okay, I was done with everything, and in the middle of my preview, and my window just closed and erased everything.  This is my synopsis of what I wrote.

The first thing that I read was "Selling the Popular Myth," by Anne Butler.  The essay sucked, maybe more to me because I was expecting something totally different.  I was expecting some myths, then the truth, and how it came to be this way; instead it was myth and how it came to be that way.  She did two things that irritated me.  First, she judged motivations (convictions) instead of results (facts).  Second, she took a cheap shot at President Ronald Reagan (bless his name) for no reason.  In my original post, I developed these and showed why she sucks for including them, but this is my abbreviated version.  She listed the virtues for the archtypal western man, as embodied by Davy Crockett, then wrote "whether these virtues accurately captured Crockett's opinions and thoughts remains unimportant.  His outward actions supposedly demonstrated his inner convictions."  What? Supposedly? Why question what his supposed convictions were or judge them by anything other than his actions?  In the real world, motivations or convictions are irrelevant, only facts and effects matter.  Thomas Jefferson may have written against slavery, but he was a proponent of the system because he publicly participated in it.  (I originally wrote about the Declaration of Independence, etc).

She calls Ronald Reagan a "self-constructed media cowboy" in the middle of the story of a 20th century black bull-rider.  RR was not a "fake" cowboy, as the quote suggests. He came from a poor family (the poorest President in the past 100 years), and grew to love life on a ranch.  Why take the dig?  He never pretended to be anything he wasn't, and there is no reason to question his "realness."

I also read about Alaska and Hawaii, and decided that this was the best chapter I've read so far.  It was very straight-forward and informative.  Hawaii was brought into the greatest nation on earth by the normal means of the Flag following trade.  Eventually, the annexation became a fait accompli.  Alaska was basically seen, correctly, as a good deal for America.  We bought the land from a country that didn't actually own it, and that paid for itself simply by denying the future soviets a foothold in North America.  There were no stupid comments or anything in this essay, and it was just good history. 

I'm sorry for the shortness, but I spent about two hours writing a pretty big blog, and frustration got the better of me.

I want to do my paper on Che's last stand in Bolivia (preferably his massacreing of thousands of innocent Cubans), if it is permissable, but if not, I will detail the story of Manzanar in California.  All of my ideas got denied, so that "fallback" option should be a sure thing.

My Comments #1

Stephen's blog

Post #1

So I read the introduction to the text with no intention of using that as one of my chapters for my blog; but I was surprised with how easily it read and the author's conspicuous lack of judgement, when writing about the European takeover of the Americas.  First of all, as I said in class, this isn't exactly my favorite topic in history.  Even though I am from the west coast, and love the west coast, The American West as a whole tends to bore me to death.  I don't usually even read the introductions to books (if I don't have to), but this one caught my attention when it casually noted the deaths of millions of native people from diseases like smallpox.  For some reason that paragraph struck me as unusual in an academic history book.  Most of the time authors tend to pontificate about the horrible nature of the European intruders (or is that just me?...), but Milner stuck to the facts (ma'am) and kept it interesting.  Don't get me wrong, I like writers to make points and make their opinions known, but it should be done in a way that builds up a "case," then points out the conclusion that should be obvious to the reader (Paul Johnson is great at that).  The intro surprised me, caught my attention, and encourages further reading into a fairly intimidating book.  Hopefully, the rest of the book is as good...

Okay, so forget whatever I just said in that previous paragraph: Hope - dashed.  Apparently, the objective portrayal of the Indians vs. the Euro's was only possible in within the limited parameters of the introduction.  I just read two pages of history, reverentially summarizing a ten-centuries old Acoma Pueblo legend, ending with an unbelievable line: "Visitors... can still appreciate why the Acoma believe the place (their pueblo) to be at the center of the world."  WHAT?  I thought that we were supposed to derisively refer to such assumptions as "ethnocentric."  I know when I learned about European history in high school, their worldview (to the extent that one can be derived) was called, specifically, Eurocentric.  I mean, could you imagine an author giving us such a sympathetic synopsis of, say, Manifest Destiny?  Of course not, and rightly so.  I know that the effects of these myths are very different, but that doesn't change the fundamental problem with both: both theories link land to a race, and place desire above reason (though, admittedly, the pueblo legend is much prettier).  Much of the same patronization of the natives continues for the rest of the chapter, and I hope that the rest of the book is more... to the point.

The ideas that I put out in class for a research topic got shot down with record speed, so I came up with a couple more:

              1.  Pancho Villa and/or the Punitive Expedition

              2.  Donner Party

              3.  The Damming of Hetch Hetchy and John Muir **