At the end of last semester, I actually said I’d be away from the blog for a week or two, due to lack of time. I’m not at that stage yet, but it may be quickly approaching.

Like last semester, I’ve got to write a term paper. 8-10 pages long, on anything I want, as long as it ties in with the American Revolution. Compared to the last term paper I had to do, which was about the American South, I figured doing one about the Revolution would be a piece of cake; I mean, it’s the Revolution, there should be plenty of articles about it!

Sort of.

There are indeed masses of articles about the period. However, I’m having a really hard time finding 3 good articles about the same thing. I’ve gone through hundreds of search results in research databases, probably having spent 8 or 9 hours on it at this point, and I’ve just not come up with anything solid. The first topic I wanted to tackle was how the American Revolution was received in European countries, and how the Revolution influenced conditions there (besides the obvious “It helped lead to the French Revolution!”). This ended up being a total flop. While I was able to find some books on Spain’s involvement, they didn’t lead me to any usable articles; I simply didn’t find anything at all in the research databases on the topic.

The next topic I chose, which I’m still fighting with, is espionage during the war. I’d prefer to focus in on one facet of it, such as military intelligence or political espionage, but again, I’ve not found enough on either of those to prop a paper on. I’ve found one excellent article on the development of the British military intelligence; one article about Britain intercepting letters from the colonies and creating extracts to see what colonial opinion was (not very suitable for what I’m trying to do); and one article that, while I thought it was going to be excellent, is ultimately, I think, not going to work. It had no abstract, but was entitled British Secret Service and the French-American Alliance. Well, hey, the title sounded great… Unfortunately, when I received it through interlibrary loan, I discovered that it’s an examination of a few people in London who were double agents. The extreme focus on these people, rather than a wider view, is not going to work, I’m afraid.

I’m at a standstill right now. I’ve one more article on the way via interlibrary loan which I hope will give me enough overall to work with. I’ve a long list of other articles I can request through interlibrary loan, but I’d really prefer to see if the one that’s (supposedly!) on the way will allow me to get to writing or not. The paper is due on the 2nd, so I’m running out of time, and ILLs take time. Furthermore, I have to pay for every article I get through interlibrary loan, and if I start requesting things willy nilly, I’ll soon have $50+ in my paper, which I’m not exactly keen on doing (at all). The articles are only $.10 per page, but those dimes add up quickly.

I’m meeting with the professor of the class Friday to essentially show him the articles I have and say “help!” Hopefully he can help me get things going. This is driving me nuts, as those of you who follow me on Twitter have probably noticed.

When I saw it, I assumed that it was just a fictional addition that the developers had added. It seemed like a silly “addition” to make to a World War II game, since there were so many real vehicles that the developers could have chosen from. Except, it wasn’t a fictional addition.

After finishing the mission I was on, I googled “mine flail.” The mine flail attachment really did exist (Wikipedia article, with lots of good info both on war versions and modern uses), and it really did look like something out of a horror movie:

Doesn’t that just look like something you’d expect to see in a Hellraiser movie?

I was unable to find a video of a Sherman Crab tank in action, but I did find this video of an Aardvark. It’s obviously not a tank, but the flail system is similar to the one used on the Sherman tanks.

Throughout the Americas, diseases introduced with Europeans spread from tribe to tribe far in advance of the Europeans themselves, killing an estimated 95 percent of the Pre-Columbian Native American population.

95 percent? That seems awfully high. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a footnote pointing to where the author got this number. I checked in the back of the book in the further reading section, but all I saw for this particular chapter were references to the different Spanish narratives that the author used.

However, all is not lost: Wikipedia came to the rescue. On this page about the population history of American indigenous peoples, there’s this bit:

Many European immigrants who arrived after the epidemics had already killed massive numbers of American natives assumed that the natives had always been few in number. The scope of the epidemics over the years was enormous, killing millions of people—in excess of 90% of the population in the hardest hit areas—and creating “the greatest human catastrophe in history, far exceeding even the disaster of the Black Death of medieval Europe.”

For this bit of information, the Wikipedia article cites a book by Noble David Cook, Born to Die: Disease and New World Conquest, 1492–1650. I did a search on my local library’s website, and (not very surprisingly), they don’t have it. It is, however, available through the OhioLINK system. I’m probably going to request it just to check out his information source.

Does anyone else have any information on this? Even 90% seems awfully high, but I know little about the population levels of Pre-Columbian America.

I don’t really know if this bantering-via-letters goes on in newspapers anymore. Where I’m at in the world, there’s really only 1 decent local newspaper, and truth be told, I don’t really read it much. I suppose the Letter to the Editor section could be seen in a similar light as the abolitionist / anti-abolitionist letters being published in The Philanthropist. However, I’ve never really seen an instance where someone responds to a Letter to the Editor with another letter sent in to the editor. Then again, considering how bloody easy it is (and free, too) to get your own blog now, I suppose most people would just skip the middle man altogether.

Quick question to provide some more food for thought: how would the anti-slavery movement progressed if they’d had the internet and blogs back then?

*In the book, it was quite often John Rankin, seeing as he was one of the main focuses of the book

I thought it might be helpful (or at any rate, interesting) to go back and reread my notes from the first history course, before beginning the second one. My brain hopped to, “That’s a great idea, except.. oh wait, you threw those notes away when you were going through your stuff at the end of that quarter!”

Talk about a senseless move. I have no idea why I threw my notes away. It was on par with basically throwing away my money and time for that course. Sure, my academic record still shows that I took it (and got an A in the course, no less), but the fact is, it’s been a while since I took it, and I’ve forgotten most of what I’d learned.

And since I wasn’t being mindful of what I was doing, I now no longer have the notes to refer to.

Technorati Tags: neworleans, new_orleans, katrina

One of the classes I took was about the history of America, from 1828 to 1900. I found it to be an extremely interesting class. I had had the professor in question before, when I took his class which covered from the founding of America to 1828. The same ‘interestingness’ that thrived in his first class was also in his second.

Basically, what I find so interesting about his courses, is that he gives a true picture of the history – not a patriotic version. Throughout my public school ‘career,’ I was given the patriotic version. All of the good guys were drummed up, and all of the horrible events throughout American history were kind of swept under the proverbial rug.

I recall from middle school that the settlement of the Trans-Mississippi West was essentially, “American settlers went out west for gold. They helped Indians onto reservations so that the Indian culture would be preserved.”

Now, certainly, I don’t expect a middle school class to cover nearly the amount of detail that a university course does. However, the version I was given wasn’t just less detailed. It was totally wrong. Killing off millions of buffalo (60 million between 1870 and 1900) to help bring about the demise of the Native Americans was not ‘helping them.’ Forcing Native American children into schools ran by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, where they were forced to dress like Americans and to speak English, was not helping them. Setting up treaties and annuity payments with different tribes, only to turn around and break the treaties when American railroad companies and gold prospertors wanted in, was not helping them.

I think it’s interesting to note that, at least in classes I had in public school, the Native American question was mostly glossed over. However, reams of content was devoted to slavery. Is this because African Americans make up a sizeable portion of the American population now, and Native Americans don’t?

I don’t really get why the public school system teaches this extremely altered, patriotic version (unless they’re just going for patriotism points with the kids). Every country has their bad spots in history. I just think it’d be better if the bad spots were taught along with the good spots. Kind of like how Germany now forces Nazi Germany history into their kids’ heads. It’s a decent way to insure that the atrocities don’t happen again.

Then again, if Nazi Germany had won the war, I wonder – what would their public school system be teaching?
Technorati Tags: indians, nativeamericans, imperialism