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Sydin posted:I learned about the American Revolution three times in school. Elementary was yeah pretty much the same: Colonists (although back then all the books and teachers called them "pilgrims") were pure and good, evil Britains taxed them too much, so the colonists dumped some tea in the harbor, the founding fathers came down from on high to create the greatest country on earth, and we kicked the poo poo out of the red coats. I don't even remember if we touched on the French bailing us out or not. Also zero mention of Native Americans outside of sharing turkey on Thanksgiving. Except that for some reason in elementary school I knew it was all BS. Not sure where that influence came from.
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# ? Nov 9, 2021 19:06 |
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# ? May 25, 2024 23:11 |
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Wicked Them Beats posted:I went to public school here and my education on the American Revolution was some people got mad about tea and ???, and then the shot heard round the world. Then some more stuff happened and we won our freedom! Now let's spend some time building Mission San Juan Batista out of milk cartons.
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# ? Nov 9, 2021 20:14 |
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Arsenic Lupin posted:Mercifully, the whole build-a-mission thing is no longer mandated by the state education rules. Craft shops everywhere mourn, parents everywhere rejoice. oh thank god
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# ? Nov 9, 2021 20:27 |
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RIP my sugar cube and paper mache mission San Luis Obispo. Also for weirdo private/charter schools some guy I know from high school has kids going to John Adam's Academy and it sounds like an ultra right wing school for 5 year olds based on the description.
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# ? Nov 9, 2021 20:31 |
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lol, the mission building. I remember I was one of maybe two people who actually largely built it on my own, standing out in a sea of meticulously parent-crafted models. This was of course because the assignment was explicit that you weren't supposed to get any help from your parents outside of actually getting the materials. So naturally I got one of the worse grades on the assignment because mine looked like poo poo by comparison. Kinda wild to think back and realize how much elementary and middle school history was at best super lazy and at worst outright brainwashing, even in "progressive" California. I don't really think I was presented anything resembling a critical look at American history until 11th grade, and that was only because I'd switched schools to a middle college and the history teacher there was pretty openly progressive. I remember he walked us through the full '08 ballot including the props, allowing the class to discuss and debate all of them, except Prop 8 where he just went "we're not debating this because it's just hateful and vile and I can't even pretend to play devil's advocate for the yes side to moderate a debate on it."
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# ? Nov 9, 2021 20:44 |
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Arsenic Lupin posted:Mercifully, the whole build-a-mission thing is no longer mandated by the state education rules. Craft shops everywhere mourn, parents everywhere rejoice. that poo poo is state mandated? i didn't go to school here but i must have had to make like a dozen shoebox dioramas in k-12 and i loving hated it
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# ? Nov 9, 2021 20:49 |
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I wound up building one school project because I had a child in hysterical tears who had absolutely no idea how to build their string-propelled vehicle project due the next day. Even after copious hints. The missions? Your problem, kids. e: Huh. Turns out that there was a state mandate to study the missions, but the assignment of building model missions was just passed on from generation to generation. And some schools are still doing it, scream. Arsenic Lupin fucked around with this message at 20:59 on Nov 9, 2021 |
# ? Nov 9, 2021 20:56 |
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Sydin posted:lol, the mission building. I remember I was one of maybe two people who actually largely built it on my own, standing out in a sea of meticulously parent-crafted models. This was of course because the assignment was explicit that you weren't supposed to get any help from your parents outside of actually getting the materials. So naturally I got one of the worse grades on the assignment because mine looked like poo poo by comparison. Lol same, my parents helped me source materials around the house or they'd bring home cardboard from work, but I had to build it myself. I brought in my extreme amateur effort and most everyone else had built model kits, plus the one kid whose model was expertly crafted with actual stucco. Thankfully my teacher just checked off if you did it or not and didn't grade on build quality.
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# ? Nov 9, 2021 21:08 |
Proust Malone posted:I’ve been reading over the course of many years a previous series also called “A Peoples History of the United States” but this was a long series of books done for the bicentennial. Much less labor history than Zinn but pretty even handed in the handling of the revolution in terms of interest groups. I came away from the revolution thinking “are we the baddies” especially when it came to lord dunsmore in Virginia offering emancipation to any enslaved person who joined the army to fight against rebelling owners. Same thing with american juries acquitting everyone in the same manner of all white juries in the Jim crow south. For all the complexities, contradictions and hypocrisy in the American Revolution, there is no historical ambiguity that it was a progressive event and that the British Empire was on the wrong side. Some historians are trying to revise it so brutal slavers like Lord Dunmore are suddenly progressive and it's a bit absurd. "WSWS posted:As governor, Dunmore had refused to sign a bill closing the slave trade to Virginia. But confronted with the threat of rebellion, Dunmore saw the need for a tactical initiative. He wrote to Lord Dartmouth on March 1, 1775 that he hoped freeing the colonists’ slaves would “reduce the refractory people of this Colony to obedience.” [9] He acted in November 1775, issuing a proclamation that applied only to adult male slaves belonging to owners who actively opposed the crown. The “divide and conquer” maneuver was a well-practiced ruse of the British to crush dissent....
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# ? Nov 9, 2021 21:10 |
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I like to support my local mission as a local piece of whatever history California can claim to have. But I harbor no illusions about them. I have no doubt that its institutions have a checkered history.
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# ? Nov 9, 2021 21:37 |
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Canasta_Nasty posted:For all the complexities, contradictions and hypocrisy in the American Revolution, there is no historical ambiguity that it was a progressive event and that the British Empire was on the wrong side. Some historians are trying to revise it so brutal slavers like Lord Dunmore are suddenly progressive and it's a bit absurd. slavers gonna enslave, for sure
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# ? Nov 9, 2021 21:41 |
sb hermit posted:I like to support my local mission as a local piece of whatever history California can claim to have. But I harbor no illusions about them. I have no doubt that its institutions have a checkered history. Missions should be preserved like Nazi work-camps, since that's what they were. They should absolutely not be places where people get married and celebrate mass and where schoolchildren get taken around to admire the architecture and hear about all the hardworking priests and their loyal Indian parishioners.
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# ? Nov 9, 2021 22:08 |
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It's cool to keep seeing stuff like civil war armories etc in Northern California and go 'oh what were these for' and then it turns out some of the big mines and logging operations were basically native death camps lol.
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# ? Nov 9, 2021 23:12 |
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Yeah they're absolutely still doing missions models, my son had to build one last spring, then submit pictures since class was still remote. One of his classmates built his in Minecraft and I absolutely cursed myself for not thinking of it first.
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# ? Nov 10, 2021 00:29 |
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enslaving native americans and working them to death, in minecraft
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# ? Nov 10, 2021 01:22 |
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As a non-native, is there a good source to read up about those missions? My public education was over in florida during the period when they were doing a test run of what would become NCLB. The local history lots of talk about conquistadors, but almost had no mention of natives. Except for when a dude from the Seminole tribe gave a speech about their history and how they never signed a peace treaty and hid in the swamps to avoid being slaughtered or forced onto the trail of tears. The two things I can remember making as class projects were some dinosaurs out of wire, and some plankton out of aluminum foil.
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# ? Nov 10, 2021 01:53 |
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all I remember in elementary school was "smog days."
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# ? Nov 10, 2021 16:43 |
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I recently learned what happened to the Native Americans who lived in Mendocino County. Hoo boy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Round_Valley_Settler_Massacres_of_1856%E2%80%931859
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# ? Nov 10, 2021 21:37 |
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Vox Nihili posted:I recently learned what happened to the Native Americans who lived in Mendocino County. Jesus.
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# ? Nov 10, 2021 22:01 |
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There's a reason there's literally like a few thousand natives in California.
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# ? Nov 10, 2021 22:04 |
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California has the largest population of native people in the US, over 700,000. Despite the government's best efforts obviously. Raise your hand if you belong to race/culture who are told "I didn't think there were any of you around anymore" on a regular basis lol. Nope, still here. jetz0r posted:As a non-native, is there a good source to read up about those missions? If you're interested enough to read a whole book check out A Cross of Thorns: The Enslavement of California's Indians by the Spanish Missions pandy fackler fucked around with this message at 03:06 on Nov 11, 2021 |
# ? Nov 11, 2021 02:48 |
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pandy fackler posted:California has the largest population of native people in the US, over 700,000. Despite the government's best efforts obviously. I didn't mean it literally, so sorry if I came off like that. But also I live in a place with a bunch of old native settlement sites and a lot of mysterious civil war structures, and, supposedly, a literal death camp, so it's hard not to run around yelling at everyone who doesn't know it, I guess.
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# ? Nov 11, 2021 03:46 |
jetz0r posted:As a non-native, is there a good source to read up about those missions? This isn't exactly what you're asking because it focuses on the massacres flowing from the gold rush but I recently finished An American Genocide. It's a bit dry but it leaves no wiggle room for genocide deniers. It's 100% clear that local, state and federal officials consciously sought to exterminate the indigenous population. A lot of this gets swept under the rug as unintentional, just some greedy locals carrying out massacres that the government didn't stop or that the collapse of indigenous societies was tragic but inevitable with no one really responsible. But nope, it was textbook, conscious genocide. Canasta_Nasty fucked around with this message at 05:46 on Nov 11, 2021 |
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# ? Nov 11, 2021 04:11 |
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Larry Parrish posted:I didn't mean it literally, so sorry if I came off like that. But also I live in a place with a bunch of old native settlement sites and a lot of mysterious civil war structures, and, supposedly, a literal death camp, so it's hard not to run around yelling at everyone who doesn't know it, I guess. No worries dude. It's stated literally often enough that I just wanted to be clear. There's an old military fort in my neighborhood that gets treated as some kind of quaint picnic spot of historical interest and it's hard not to be the bummer of the group saying "you know that's like our Auschwitz right" whenever people want to go hang out there. California is built out of bones.
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# ? Nov 11, 2021 05:34 |
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pandy fackler posted:California has the largest population of native people in the US, over 700,000. Of 39,538,223.
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# ? Nov 11, 2021 07:36 |
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Kenning posted:Missions should be preserved like Nazi work-camps, since that's what they were. They should absolutely not be places where people get married and celebrate mass and where schoolchildren get taken around to admire the architecture and hear about all the hardworking priests and their loyal Indian parishioners. Like with the statues of Junipero Sierra, I know some older Latino folks are really into them as symbols of the region’s Latino and Catholic history/heritage. I personally don’t really give a poo poo either way, no real dog in that fight. But the contours of the debate over what they symbolically represent to people are a little more complicated than with things like confederate monuments , where it's lost cause types defending them and you know exactly why. pandy fackler posted:If you're interested enough to read a whole book check out A Cross of Thorns: The Enslavement of California's Indians by the Spanish Missions It also deals with the practice of debt peonage, which was a huge deal in CA and other parts of the southwest. Congress actually had to send the army into the region to end the practice after the civil war. In remote areas of the southwest this poo poo continued until the 1960s
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# ? Nov 11, 2021 09:48 |
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I listen to a lot of olde radio stuff on Sirius XM and the story of how the Pueblo missions were founded was.... well it wasn't hard to read between the lines of 1940s racist rear end whitewashed retellings.
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# ? Nov 11, 2021 14:47 |
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I'd feel better about the Missions still being around if the signage in places like the Santa Barbara Mission recontextualized language like "the missionaries taught the neophytes important skills like agriculture". Because of course the Chumash were absolute disasters before the Spanish arrived and saved them. But I guess the Church isn't big on humility, ironically.
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# ? Nov 11, 2021 17:07 |
My grandma's funeral service was at the San Diego Mission. One of the informational signs described a plaque as "a monument to the Indian neophytes who died in the construction of the Mission and its farms" or something like that (emphasis mine). One of the most upsetting uses of the passive voice I've encountered.
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# ? Nov 11, 2021 20:47 |
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Kenning posted:My grandma's funeral service was at the San Diego Mission. One of the informational signs described a plaque as "a monument to the Indian neophytes who died in the construction of the Mission and its farms" or something like that (emphasis mine). One of the most upsetting uses of the passive voice I've encountered. Actually that's active voice, they're the ones doing the dying. I suppose what you mean is that it elides who caused their death.
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# ? Nov 12, 2021 12:44 |
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Magic Underwear posted:Actually that's active voice, they're the ones doing the dying. I suppose what you mean is that it elides who caused their death. That is not active voice. Active voice would be "The Indian neophytes died in the construction of the mission and its farms." Active voice and accurate reporting would be "White people worked the Indians who constructed this mission to death and tortured them." I know California's school system isn't great these days, but c'mon. e: actually, I think I might be mistaken? I also went to a California school Cup Runneth Over fucked around with this message at 19:39 on Nov 12, 2021 |
# ? Nov 12, 2021 18:32 |
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Just watched a virtual tour of Mission San Diego. They let me know that before meeting the settlers the natives were nomadic and ate acorns. No mention of what happened after they entered the mission, but the audio did tell me that the statue of St. Francis was surrounded by birds to represent the Franciscan's devotion to "all of god's creatures," so probably nothing bad happened. "Please tour our death camps, they're actually quite nice and full of lovely gardens" -tourism board of every city with a mission in it
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# ? Nov 12, 2021 18:46 |
Magic Underwear posted:Actually that's active voice, they're the ones doing the dying. I suppose what you mean is that it elides who caused their death. Yeah, I guess being clear about passive/active voice vs. transitive/intransitive verbs is pretty important when discussing genocidal propaganda.
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# ? Nov 12, 2021 19:27 |
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You know, thinking about this: the fact that German concentration camps are rightly regarded as sites of horror and murder probably has more to do than we’d like to admit with the fact that they’re ugly, utilitarian buildings. There are plenty of structures where horrific things happened, some of which were built specifically to facilitate those things, that essentially are remembered mainly as that pretty old building, all over the world.
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# ? Nov 13, 2021 00:11 |
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Fill Baptismal posted:There are plenty of structures where horrific things happened, some of which were built specifically to facilitate those things, that essentially are remembered mainly as that pretty old building, all over the world.
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# ? Nov 13, 2021 00:56 |
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Yeah but even in 100 years I don't think people are going to be getting Dachau weddings the way that they do with, say, plantations.
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# ? Nov 13, 2021 02:01 |
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Yeah, I think the bigger factor there is that Germany recognizes the atrocities of the Nazis as such while the US tries very hard to downplay all the slavery and genocide.
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# ? Nov 13, 2021 02:18 |
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Even when people admit that colonization was achieved through genocide, nobody ever goes further and says colonization was a mistake. Merely the means.
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# ? Nov 13, 2021 02:53 |
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Necessary evils so we could manifest our destiny and spread freedom, you see
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# ? Nov 13, 2021 02:58 |
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# ? May 25, 2024 23:11 |
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Or it could be that people don't have weddings at Dachau because it is a bunch of industrial buildings with barbed wire and ten foot concrete fences in the middle of a muddy field? Compared to missions which are generally architecturally beautiful churches in picturesque countryside. Also it's been centuries since the atrocities committed at the missions but it's been about 80 years since world war 2. I could see something like the Eagles Nest becoming a popular wedding venue in a couple hundred years when people see it more as a historical chalet tucked in the mountains rather than Hitler's personal mountain retreat. Seph fucked around with this message at 04:01 on Nov 13, 2021 |
# ? Nov 13, 2021 03:47 |