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Comment by dqv | Hacker News Reader

I had always thought I didn't like history. It was just so incredibly boring.

Later in life, I found out why. It's not that I didn't like history, I just don't like the sanitized version taught to me in primary/secondary school. It's like corporate public relations where they vaguely acknowledge wrongdoing, but communicate in a very weaselly way to downplay it.

The rote response I hear from the USA fandom is always some variation of "WELL THEM INDIANS DID BAD THINGS TOO" and it's like... ok? Then why obfuscate? If everyone is equally bad or whatever weird thing you're trying to say, why not just lay out all the cards and let me decide for myself how to interpret the history?

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> I had always thought I didn't like history. It was just so incredibly boring.

I had an early-midlife crisis where I considered moving to another profession. After a great deal of thought, I determined that the profession that I would find most rewarding would be as a professor of history for university students. If I could share my passion for history in such a way as to inspire one student per semester, I'd have achieved something great.

It makes me sad that history is taught in such boring terms in high school. It's endlessly interesting. I hated school far too much to realistically believe I'd earn the required accreditation, hence I remained a tech guy.

Check out "Lies My Teachers Told Me." A university professor wrote it after becoming frustrated at how much deprogramming had to be done with incoming college students. I saw it in a used book store and immediately bought it. I liked it.

Unfortunately, the American Indians did not have writing, and so the histories of the tribes is pretty murky.

For example, most of what is known about the Commanches comes from letters and diaries of white people who were in contact with them, or were enslaved by them.

See "Empire of the Summer Moon" by Gwynne.

https://www.amazon.com/Empire-Summer-Moon-Comanches-Powerful...

It's a fantastic account, and I'm amazed nobody has made an epic miniseries about it.

"Writing" is a tricky term. Indigenous groups in what's now the US had property records, laws, and symbolically represented stories that could be read by others. What they didn't have was a system of symbols that can fully encode human speech (and vice versa). The latter is the typical definition of "writing" and it's not required to have the former.

On an unrelated note, Gwynne's book is fine as a fantasy story, but it's very badly regarded from the perspective of narrative history. Hämäläinen's Comanche Empire is a much better book arguing a largely similar position. Don't take that as applying to later books by the same author, sadly.

I ordered the book, thank you!

As evidence of the paucity of historical knowledge of the Indian peoples, estimates of the pre-Columbian population vary from 10 million to 100 million.

I know about the various rock paintings with symbols, but there isn't enough of that to represent much of anything.

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