Slaves were brought to America before the Pilgrims

[edhopper]

landed at Plymouth Rock. But we shouldn't teach the real beginnings of this country because we are too exceptional for the truth.

[Hugh_Lebowski]

1. You have to think of the children ... they're very delicate and mustn't be upset

Unless you're beating on them with corporal punishment for misbehaving, then they need to toughen up.

[edhopper]

2. Denying them healthcare

Last edited Fri Nov 26, 2021, 11:31 PM - Edit history (1)

and food should do that.

[Haggard Celine]

3. They give you the impression in school that

the Pilgrims were the first white settlers. They talk about them landing in 1620 and the first Thanksgiving with the Indians as if that was where it all began. Fundagelicals talk as if the Pilgrims were the Founding Fathers, despite the fact that they were dead long before the Revolution, and the U.S. was founded on Enlightenment ideas by liberal Deists. Lots of things get confused in American history.

[underpants]

4. and the Spanish had been here almost 100 years

St. Augustine Fl. 1565.

[Haggard Celine]

5. Yeah, they hardly even mention that at all.

They should talk about the colonizing of the Americas as one event, I think. The European invasion of the New World, whether it was by the English, French, Spanish, or Portuguese was similar in a lot of ways, and had the same basic goals. They all wanted to build colonies to produce wealth to send back to Europe. They all practiced slavery and subjugated the Indians. Of course we should teach about the history of our country in particular, but we don't talk enough about how our history is similar to the other Western Hemisphere countries. Americans are mostly ignorant about history south of the border.

[roamer65]

8. The Spanish and the other Euros brought slaves from Africa...

because the diseases they brought from Europe killed millions of Native Americans.

Very few Native Americans were left to enslave.

I have read of estimates around 55 million dead via European diseases.

They should have killed all the Euros that landed here.

[underpants]

17. 70-80% is the number I've read

The First Americans had been decimated in the decade just before the English showed up.

[appalachiablue]

10. TY, nobody knows this & it really bothers me..

[Ron Green]

14. Coronado in 1540

in what’s now New Mexico. He even made it to Kansas, but the cuisine didn’t take.

[Retrograde]

16. There is a building in Santa Fe

that has been in use since 1608, well before the Pilgrims thought about trans-Atlantic voyages. Today it's part of the state history museum, and worth a visit.

[left-of-center2012]

9. "the Pilgrims were the first white settlers"

Why aren't the Spanish considered white?

[appalachiablue]

11. I think it's cuz many people think 'Merica didn't begin

until the English settlers arrived, which is crazy. Spaniards with Africans in their ranks traveled from the Caribbean, Peru and Mexico into areas of Calif., the Southwest, Louisiana, Florida and more- decades before the Anglos arrived.

Yes, the Spanish forces were considered European and white back then and still are in Europe. King Henry VIII of England was married to Catherine of Aragon in Spain. If Queen Catherine had a son that lived, he would have become the next King of England and half 'Spanish' like their daughter, Queen 'Bloody' Mary...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_of_Aragon

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_I_of_England

[Retrograde]

15. Contempory portraits of Catherine show her as a redhead

with a light complexion - because many of her ancestors came from northern Europe (and she was related to Henry VIII). If you go to Spain you'll see a lot of fair-haired, light-skinned people, thanks in part to the Germanic tribes that invaded way back when. It was when they started interbreeding - sometime voluntarily, sometimes not - with Indigenous Americans that they started to be conceived as not quite European.

[Hortensis]

18. That is crazy and creates such a warped and wrong view of

not just "history" but of who we are as a living nation.

Not generally considered is that many Central and South Americans are white, as are a very significant portion of Hispanic Americans. Though many (most?) people of mixed heritage are proud of it these days, for centuries strong racial separation was typically maintained where Europeans arrived in numbers, so naturally, many of their descendants today are just plain white.

[Retrograde]

19. They weren't even the first English settlers

The Jamestown colony was more than 10 years older. And there was the failed Roanoke colony in what is now North Carolina in the 1580s - all the colonists disappeared, no one knows where or how.

[Tom Kitten]

6. Jamestown gets left off the hook

Not to mention the Spanish in St. Augustine.

[edhopper]

7. And of course

Columbus enslaved people from they islands.

[Grasswire2]

12. and I think it was the Puritans who killed native people..

...not the Pilgrims.

[jeffreyi]

13. "1491" is a good book.

There was a lot going on here in the w. Hemisphere when the Europeans were gaining a toehold.

[left-of-center2012]

20. I read it some years ago

One thing that stood out to me was that the average Native American was cleaner, bathed more often, than Europeans.