[andyfox]

First, I just made a very sarcastic post in a somewhat mean-spirited manner to your "C English Student" post in the other thread. I kind of felt you asked for it, but my apologies for my churlishness. We should just debate the issues.

No doubt the pendulum has swung the other direction since the 1960s, not just in Indian/White history, but in many other areas of historical inquiry. I still think the resulting works are more accurarate, in general, than history was before. The dean of American historians, not so long ago, talked of the contest of cultures in the New World of one between an advanced, civilized culture, and a backward, savage one. He did not need to mention which was which for us to know what he meant. Our professional historians were, up until the 1960s, triumphalists to a man. He also talked, in the wake of the anticolonial movements of the 1950s and 1960s of "backward peoples getting enlarged notions of nationalism and turning ferociously on Europeans who have attempted to civilize them."

That is the kind of history up with which we should not put.

I'm always uneasy when comparisons with Nazis or Hitler are made glibly.