We are certainly the United States of Amnesia. Great rebuttal.

Eric FLINT's The Rivers of War and The Arkansas War present an entirely credible, if counterfactual, history of the period of pre-Civil War expansion and preserving, rather than ending, the always controversial slave system.

Right you are Nathan and well said!

There have always been people who have opposed the barbarism and savagery that some Americans have demanded. Sadly, they rarely win, not becuase the majority necessarily are for the barbarism, but like in the case of the Iraq War there are so many who are silent and turn their heads the other way instead of standing up to forcefully oppose evil.

Had just a handful of Democrats in the United States Senate had the courage of their convictions and had those handful of Senators simply one what they knew was right and vote against that war we would be so much better off today it isn't even funny. Whatever might even theoretically have been gained from our naked attempt to grab Iraq's oil, it pales in comparison to the exceedingly high price we have paid already and will pay for many years to come as a result of our decision to force imperial ambition on a foreign land. Anyone with a lick of sense could see this was the case, but by a handful of votes, evil once again prevailed.

As an anthropologist and ethnohistorian speicalizing in Indians of the Southeastern US, I can state unequivocally that the displacement of the Native peoples was not inevitable, but the consequence of specific political acts. Following the French and Indian/Seven Years War, the British crown issued the Proclamation of 1763 (started by colonists establishing illegal settlements on Indian lands in violation of British treaties), prohibiting white settlement west of the crest of the Appalachian Mountains and severely limiting intercourse with the Indians by British subjects. Washington and other early leaders largely maintained these policies in an effort to keep the peace with the Indians. It is only with the ascendancy of Andrew Jackson, who largely represented the interests of southern and western land speculators, that displacement became inevitable and then only to further the interests and profits of the speculators. The discovery of gold in the Cherokee Nation in what is now northern Georgia sped up this process. Again it is primarily Southern agrarian elites who pushed these atrocities.

I have noticed several digs at Southerners on TPM recently, including this post. Well, I am not a native Southerner, but I have lived there, and I have lived elsewhere in this great country. Let me spin you my opinion. Southerners, at least today, are much nicer and gentler people than are the people who live on either coast. They are much more honest too. And, black people are treated much more equal in the South than they are in Chicago, Philadelphia or New York. You want to talk about predudice? I lived in Phoenix for awhile, and there they treat the Indians sub-human. Southerners greatest fault, is that they are probably more easily led by the bad apples. New Yawkers, in contrast, cannot be led by anyone, except maybe a Pied Piper dropping hundred dollar bills behind him.

Hey Nate, not trying to divert your theme, just pointing out that TPM's contributors are often predudiced against Southerners, and frankly, that predudice is thinly disquised, and it is hypocritical. What is the purpose of your focus upon 150 year old history? I think you are trying to dig the South of today. Let me guess. You don't like their politics?