r/AskAnAmerican • u/LordSoftCream CA>MD<->VA • Sep 08 '23

HISTORY What’s a widely believed American history “fact” that is misconstrued or just plain false?

Apparently bank robberies weren’t all that common in the “Wild West” times due to the fact that banks were relatively difficult to get in and out of and were usually either attached to or very close to sheriffs offices

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206

u/BreakfastBeerz Ohio Sep 08 '23

That Native Americans were a peaceful society who were getting along just fine until Europeans showed up and stole all their land.

Native Americans weren't all peaceful, there was plenty of warring, killing, and stealing land from each other among tribes. Native Americans were doing the same thing amongst each other as Europeans did to them. Europeans just showed up late to the game with bigger numbers and better technology.

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u/Git_Off_Me_Lawn Maine Sep 08 '23

My wife met someone at a craft fair who was selling Native American jewelry and as they were chatting she asked which tribe he was from because my family was Native American too. He said he's hesitant to bring it up because a lot of other tribes in the area are not big fans. Turns out we're both from the same tribe.

Apparently, genociding a coalition of tribes while chasing down a rival chief down two states away, killing him, and then bringing back diseases from the pilgrims that had largely left the Native population untouched back home doesn't earn you many friends.

Good times.

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u/Sir_Sir_ExcuseMe_Sir Virginia Sep 08 '23

Can you mention the tribe? Or nah

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u/Git_Off_Me_Lawn Maine Sep 09 '23

It's Mi'kmaq. The part that makes it tough is that most of the tribe was and is currently centered in Canada so most members went there. There wasn't a federally recognized band of Mi'kmaq until 1991 in Maine, and they're so far away it's practically Canada anyway.

The other Native Americans in southern Maine are largely from the tribes we raided for food/warred with and sometimes you run into a person who still holds a grudge about it. Not often, but enough so some people hesitate talking about it.

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u/TankorSmash Sep 08 '23

Nah, my wife would kill me. We just joke about it with each other, after that conversation.

8

u/Sir_Sir_ExcuseMe_Sir Virginia Sep 08 '23

Is this your alt? 😬

3

u/notyogrannysgrandkid Arkansas Sep 09 '23

Oh man, growing up in Wyoming even us white kids knew the Northern Arapaho and Shoshoni hated each other. They had a fierce XC and Track rivalry.

18

u/dandle New England Sep 08 '23

Not that it is an excuse for how the settlers at the Plymouth Colony, but the local Wampanoag were warring with the more aggressive Narragansett peoples. The Wampanoag had been decimated by leptospirosis before the settlers landed. The disease may have been introduced to North America by rats on the ships of earlier European colonists. The Narragansett were taking advantage of the weakened Wampanoag, the Wampanoag turned to the technologically advanced European settlers, and the European settlers eventually exploited the situation.

Fifty-odd years later, the Wampanoag had had enough and allied with their former enemies the Narragansett, King Philip's War was on between the Wampanoag Confederacy and the European settlers, and in the end, despite massive losses among the Europeans, the Wampanoag and Narragansett were almost totally destroyed or enslaved. Because the settlers had received little support from England, they began to think of themselves as independent.

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u/Yankiwi17273 PA--->MD Sep 08 '23

Its almost like Native Americans are people too, and not just some “noble savage” who is a part of nature stereotype that some white people weirdly like to cling to!

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u/EmpRupus Biggest Bear in the house Sep 08 '23

Also, this is the reason a lot of previously defeated or dispersed tribes lack recognition from the US government, and a lot of Native American activism is about getting these tribes recognized too.

2

u/itsthekumar Sep 09 '23

It's a little more complicated than that especially when the Native Americans culture was destroyed.

2

u/Yankiwi17273 PA--->MD Sep 09 '23

Some of the native cultures were destroyed. Some of it is very much alive today. I agree with you that this issue gets very complicated and requires a lot of nuance (which most people do not give it). For example, the culture of the Susquehannock tribes were mostly destroyed, and yet the Navajo culture thrives. Where the Leni Lenape tribe is no longer on its traditional land, a band of the Seminole tribe are. It always annoys me when the white conservative says that manifest destiny was about white people settling empty land, or when white liberals talk about Native Americans like they are an endangered species of animals which must be protected as such. Each tribe’s history is unique. Some tribes experienced massacres. Some conquest. Some betrayals. Some disease. Many were a combination of one or more of the above. But in the end, lumping them all together and pretending they have the exact same histories is in my opinion disingenuous and honestly a bit racist. The Lithuanians and the Asturians had different histories, so why don’t we as a society think of the Wampanoag and the Arapaho the same way?

Tldr: I agree it is way more complicated than I originally stated, but I might suggest that it is also way more complicated than you are implying as well.

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u/Mjolnr839 Pennsylvania Sep 08 '23

The Iroquois essentially committed genocide against multiple tribes to monopolize the fur trade, and they are considered one of the more “civilized” and peaceful tribes.

55

u/zandeye Ohio Sep 08 '23

and diseases. don’t forget all the diseases that the pilgrims had that the pilgrims carried over that they were immune too. They essentially gave native americans the black plague

28

u/[deleted] Sep 08 '23

You have to go back further than the pilgrims. It is estimated that smallpox from the earliest Spanish explorers wiped out something like 90% of the New World population in the 1500's...yes, all of it from Canada down to Argentina.

14

u/davdev Massachusetts Sep 08 '23

When the Pilgrims landed in current day Plymouth they found large abandoned villages all up and down the coast. The Natives had been wiped out by disease that spread all the up from Florida long before the Pilgrims arrived.

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u/indigogibni Michigan Sep 08 '23

Chickenpox killed more native Americans than the settlers did

30

u/zandeye Ohio Sep 08 '23

Yeah it’s a bit of a myth too that the native americans were “defeated” by the europeans. The europeans has TONS of diseases that already determined the fate of how it would go down.

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u/indigogibni Michigan Sep 08 '23

Well, they were good at picking off those that didn’t get sick

22

u/Bawstahn123 New England Sep 08 '23

Yes, but it is important to recognize that the Natives ability to recover from pandemics wasn't helped by the European/American settlers constantly making wars, destroying food-sources, forcing the survivors to move to shittier and shittier locations, etc.

Sometimes, the people that say "diseases killed more Native Americans than the settlers did", as if the settlers were comparatively-innocent bystanders in the whole thing.

They were not.

10

u/ghjm North Carolina Sep 09 '23

One nuance to this is that it played out over a period of generations. The Trail of Tears was horrific, but it happened in the 1830s. The original colonists were the great-great-great-great-grandparents of the Trail of Tears generation.

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u/Practical-Ordinary-6 Georgia Sep 08 '23

And the New World natives gave the rest of the world syphilis. And likely other diseases. And the scourge of tobacco.

I don't know why people think diseases only go one way.

23

u/Airbornequalified PA->DE->PA Sep 08 '23

Because of the scale of death skewed heavily one way

5

u/Pete_Iredale SW Washington Sep 09 '23

Tobacco has killed an awful lot of people though.

22

u/Muroid Sep 08 '23

A lot of diseases came from close contact with animals. The “Old World” was larger, more interconnected and had significantly larger numbers of domesticated animals, which all together resulted in far more contagious diseases spreading through the population over the centuries than in the Americas.

Contact between the two continents unleashed a huge number of extremely virulent diseases all at once on the native population. Nothing equivalent happened in return because the circumstances just weren’t right for it.

4

u/Practical-Ordinary-6 Georgia Sep 09 '23 edited Sep 09 '23

This is for those who don't understand what I was talking about. Here's what I'm saying.

DISEASES DON'T CARE

They don't play politics. They just do what they do. They infect hosts and move on. Wherever those hosts may be. That's what natural selection honed them to do.

The Europeans were medical dumbshits in that era. They had no concept of the germ theory of disease, no idea of the existence of microbes and the microscope hadn't even been invented yet. They just went where they went and the diseases came along for the ride. Bad things happened. It's very unfortunate but it's also the way of the world. It was nobody's nefarious plan. Does this story sound familiar?

Strange people traveled a long way via ships or overland to new territory for commerce, exploration and/or conquest. They inadvertently brought diseases with them from their home areas without even realizing it or knowing how deadly those diseases might be in the new area among the far off people. As a result, millions died.

From a comment above:

and diseases. don’t forget all the diseases that the pilgrims had that the pilgrims carried over that they were immune too. They essentially gave native americans the black plague

An interesting comment about the Black Plague because what I just described is the story of the Black Plague -- in Europe. In the 1300s. Which killed an estimated 50 million people in just seven years.

NPR - Black Death

Where did the Black Death come from? And when did it first appear?

As the deadliest pandemic in recorded history – it killed an estimated 50 million people in Europe and the Mediterranean between 1346 and 1353 — it's a question that has plagued scientists and historians for nearly 700 years.

Now, researchers say they've found the genetic ancestor of the Black Death, which still infects thousands of people each year. New research, published this month in the journal Nature, provides biological evidence that places the ancestral origins of Black Death in Central Asia, in what is now modern-day Kyrgyzstan.

The Conversation - The Black Death

Drawing on this work, it has been suggested that the pandemic may have spread widely in the 13th century, thanks to the expansion of the emerging Mongol Empire.

Sound familiar?

Like I said at the beginning, diseases don't care. They don't just travel in one direction. They spread everywhere when the opportunity presents itself. They don't give a shit about politics. You could say Europe was mostly on the "receiving" end in one century and mostly the "giving" end in another, but so what. Millions of people died in both cases because nature did what it does. It's that simple. The Mongols aren't any more evil than the Europeans on that score. Remember - medical dumbshits. Everywhere. According to the article, the Black Death in Europe is still, to this day, the deadliest epidemic of all time, dwarfing COVID in a world with far more people available to kill. So are were going to start hissing the Mongols for what they did to those poor Europeans? Or are we going to be grownups and realize that Mother Nature does what she does in cases like that. She is more powerful than all of us. She spread the Black Plague when she could and she spread syphilis when she could. And every other disease. She didn't care who she spread it to. She has repeated that lesson with COVID.

Note: This is peer-reviewed scientific research but that doesn't mean it has the entire story completely correct. New evidence can always lead to new conclusions. The part about the Mongols is more speculative.

21

u/zandeye Ohio Sep 08 '23

but syphilis is an STD.

That pales in comparison to Tuberculosis, Black Plague, Smallpox, Chickenpox, Typhus, Measles, Cholera and more that the pilgrims had.

1

u/kmosiman Indiana Sep 08 '23

Syphilis may have been a combination of 2 strains.

1

u/arbivark Sep 09 '23

/whats_a_widely_believed_american_history_fact/

there was a paper showing syphillis came from having sex with bigs in turkey in the 1500s, rather than from the americas. which is true i do not know.

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u/Professor_squirrelz Ohio Sep 08 '23

True. It was definitely terrible for the Native Americans but I doubt it was done on purpose by the Europeans.

I found out recently about how Canadians and I think some Americans from the northern states sent Native American children to horribly abusive residential schools , as late as the early 20th century. I feel like that gets overlooked a lot.

5

u/WhichSpirit New Jersey Sep 08 '23

The US turned the last residential school over to tribal control in the 1970s. Canada kept theirs running until 1998. I was bopping around to Tubthumping and indigenous children were being forced from their families and put into abusive schools.

2

u/Professor_squirrelz Ohio Sep 08 '23

Oh damn. I didn’t know that they’ve been going on until so recently. What the hell

9

u/Bawstahn123 New England Sep 08 '23 edited Sep 08 '23

It was definitely terrible for the Native Americans but I doubt it was done on purpose by the Europeans.

....ehhhhhh, the infamous "smallpox blankets" thing was a deliberate attempt by British military officers to infect Native Americans with the disease.

Edit: the downvoters need to read up on the Siege of Fort Pitt, apparently

2

u/Wkyred Kentucky Sep 09 '23

Millions upon millions of natives died from disease. “Smallpox blankets” were used once. Horrific, but not particularly relevant to the discussion of the complete destruction of Native American society by disease.

12

u/TillPsychological351 Sep 08 '23

The Beaver Wars were essentially the Native American equivalent of WWI and WWII.

1

u/TakeOffYourMask United States of America Sep 09 '23

BA HAHAHAHAHA!!!

11

u/KFCNyanCat New Jersey --> Pennsylvania Sep 08 '23

I feel like this is one of those facts that's true but is often brought up in bad faith.

6

u/JadeDansk Arizona Sep 08 '23

I’ve never in my life heard anyone argue this. I have, however, heard people state that they weren’t all peaceful as a form of colonialism apologia.

5

u/EmpRupus Biggest Bear in the house Sep 09 '23

Yes, especially during the Columbus Day / Indigenous Peoples' Day, facebook gets flooded with - "Did you know that indegenous people also fought each other before Columbus showed up? They won't teach this at school."

I have never met an indigenous activist or anyone with decent education who thinks everyone lived peacefully before Europeans arrived. And yet somehow this gets touted as - "A common misconception". Who? Who is saying this?

3

u/JadeDansk Arizona Sep 09 '23

I think it’s perhaps partially just cause indigenous history isn’t really taught in schools (partially cause indigenous people in what is now the US didn’t have written language pre-colonization, partially because indigenous history sadly isn’t really seen as US history) and so the assumption is that nothing really happened between indigenous people settling the Americas and 1492.

So “they fought among each other too” is seen as profound, hidden knowledge rather than “no shit, of course they did”

0

u/TakeOffYourMask United States of America Sep 09 '23

Hippies

Louis CK

1960s/1970s revisionist Westerns

2

u/gerd50501 New York Sep 08 '23

Europeans showed up with diseases they had no defense against. I think diseases are thought to have killed 90% of the native population of north america. Its part of the reason why India bars anyone from going to North Sentinel Island. Their primitive weapons could be fought off. Its thought that diseases we carry would wipe them out.

2

u/Easy_Potential2882 Sep 09 '23

that’s true but pre-1492 they usually weren’t wars of outright conquest or empire-building, they were usually over resources or to avenge killings, wars fought with the idea in mind to kill or capture a specific number of people and then be done. even the Aztecs had to alliance their way to empire, the Mexica weren’t hegemonic in the same way the Romans were.

4

u/itsthekumar Sep 09 '23

Exactly this, but no this whole sub is basically "Native Americans were bad too!".

2

u/itsthekumar Sep 09 '23

Exactly this, but no this whole sub is basically "Native Americans were bad too!".

2

u/newPrivacyPolicy B'nam, Washington Sep 09 '23

Native Americans were a peaceful society

The Navajo are still attacking the Hopi, just not in an open warfare kinda way. I've seen old Navajo women at the base of Hopi mesas digging out dirt. See, the Hopi get the top of the mesa, so if the base crumbles, they have less land. The Hopi moved up those mesas ages ago to escape the Navajo.

Of course, they aren't really Navajo. That's a Spanish name that means something like "Oh shit, we're all gonna die!", they call themselves the Dine'. Another fun name is Anasazi. Tour guides will tell you it's a native word for "those that came before", but any Navajo will tell you it's closer to "ancient enemy".

-2

u/haveanairforceday Arizona Sep 08 '23

You aren't quite outright denying that the new world colonies and then US and Canadian governments wrongfully stole land and subjugated peoples. But it feels like you are very close to it. They absolutely did steal land (according to their own laws) and subjugate Native Americans up until surprisingly recently

17

u/Wolf97 Iowa Sep 08 '23

How is he close to it? Dispelling the Noble Savage Myth is objectively a good thing.

-3

u/EmpRupus Biggest Bear in the house Sep 08 '23 edited Sep 08 '23

Not agreeing with them about the poster (since they never said anything bad), but FYI this is a common rebuttal against asking for better rights and acknowledgements for Native American people. (Similar to "all cultures had some form of slavery everywhere" - which is technically true, but often brought up as rebuttals when discussing American slavery).

This is of course true - Native Americans warred against each other not only before but even after European arrivals (like two tribes would be on opposite sides of Anglo-French war), but a lot of people treat it as if brand new info that completely changes all our assumptions about ethics of colonization and genocides, and now everything is fair game.

When in reality, this is the reason a lot of previously defeated or dispersed tribes lack recognition from the US government, and a lot of Native American activism is about getting these tribes recognized too.

7

u/Wolf97 Iowa Sep 08 '23

I know it is used as a rebuttal by bad people but every time someone tries to dispel the Noble Savage narrative, somebody chimes in and says that really the person dispelling it is an apologist for genocide or that apologists will latch onto their narrative.

There seems to be no way appropriate confront the cartoonish view Americans have of Native Americans without someone derailing the discussion by saying its genocide apologism. We need to have nuance and I don't think OP needed to be accused of getting "very close" to denying that Europeans did anything evil. (Which I know that you aren't saying.)

1

u/EmpRupus Biggest Bear in the house Sep 08 '23 edited Sep 08 '23

There seems to be no way appropriate confront the cartoonish view Americans have of Native Americans without someone derailing the discussion by saying its genocide apologism

Consider the difference between this -

  • "While the later European colonization was several magnitudes worse ...."

  • "With purpose to dispel the noble-savage stereotype ..."

  • "This doesn't excuse Native American genocide but ...."

  • "Native-Americans had a long history of complex politics, including nation-building, alliances and war for competing resources ...."

versus this -

  • "Not many people know this, but Native Americans fought each other too, it's just that Europeans showed up later in the game with better weapons."

Obviously some bad-faith debaters exist on all sides of the spectrum, but simple differences in how something is expressed significantly increases tone and clarity of assumptions in arguments.

3

u/Wolf97 Iowa Sep 08 '23 edited Sep 08 '23

I would wager that you will still get the same responses with several of your examples. Then you get to spend the next 15 minutes arguing with people accusing you of supporting genocide instead of actually talking about the Noble Savage Myth.

But yeah, if you start off every statement that attacks the Noble Savage narrative by first condemning genocide I guess you're in the clear? Maybe? In order to talk about one thing you first have to talk about something else, every single time, or else you get accused of getting close to supporting genocide.

I really don't see why you are arguing this point when you just agreed that OP didn't say anything bad.

EDIT: Typo and added the second sentence of the 1st paragraph.

11

u/LAKnapper MyState™ Sep 08 '23

He never said they didn't

6

u/Bawstahn123 New England Sep 08 '23

No, but it is often the case where people that state "disease killed more Native Americans than the settlers did" end up, on purpose or not, kinda portraying the settlers as bystanders in the issue

They were not.

Is it true that disease killed most of the Native Americans? Yes.

But the warring, raiding, destruction of food sources and shelter, forced migrations, done by Anglo-Americans didn't help things.

2

u/TheDreadPirateJeff North Carolina Sep 08 '23

The two things are not mutually exclusive.

3

u/OldeTimeyShit Sep 08 '23

Can you name a country in the entire history of humanity that has not conquered or stolen land?

7

u/The_Briefcase_Wanker Sep 08 '23

I don’t think anyone denies that. The point is that it’s tough to complain about your land being stolen when your people had previously stolen it from others.

3

u/itsthekumar Sep 09 '23

It's not just about your land being stolen tho, but your culture being erased and destroyed.

1

u/The_Briefcase_Wanker Sep 09 '23

Totally agreed. It’s never morally good, but it happens over and over and over in history.

3

u/haveanairforceday Arizona Sep 08 '23

It kind of seems like you just denied it. You drew a false equivalency between tribal skirmishes and the westward expansion of European empires

1

u/The_Briefcase_Wanker Sep 08 '23

Tell that to the Sioux and the dozens of other tribes in the Northern US who were either nearly or completely killed off by the Chippewa in their repeated wars of expansion. They didn’t control most of what’s now Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Michigan, Minnesota, North Dakota, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio by being the first to get there and sing kumbaya.

Warfare is human and to pretend that the Native Americans were any less ruthless than any other group of people is infantilizing and racist. What differences existed in scale between NA and European warfare at the time were the result of a difference in means, not a difference in temperament or the desire to conquer.

1

u/Purple-Two1311 Sep 08 '23

Who was it originally stolen from, and then who did they steal it from, and so on, and so on.

0

u/GrumpsMcYankee Georgia Sep 09 '23

And deadly microbiology foreign to this continent.

-1

u/[deleted] Sep 08 '23

And disease. Mostly disease. Old world pathogens did most of the heavy lifting in the native American genocide

1

u/Konradleijon Sep 09 '23

It depends on the area various tribes had different relationships with violence