Carbondale?
It’s not a conflation. Peoples with no written language are by definition prehistoric (or protohistoric, depending on who knows about them).
raises hand meekly I know this is because I hardly ever get to fly anywhere, but I like the patchwork quilt effect of flying over farmland. I’m a farm girl, to realize those fields that I’m so used to on the ground look so different from so far up is awesome.
Then again, I also don’t mind driving through endless amounts of prairie, so maybe I’m just weird.
Depends. There are a couple dozen indigenous peoples who live in the Russian Federation, who (if they are educated and/or literate) mostly use Russian when writing because that’s what they were taught in school, but whose native languages do not have a written form (or only acquired a written form in the last few decades, and which may or may not have extensive publications or be taught in schools). Does that mean these peoples are prehistoric? because I think they’d take exception to that.
Of course they’re not. It doesn’t matter whose language they use to keep written records - the important thing is that they do.
I don’t know who told you this, but this is not true. Even if you look only at education and not at other measures (e.g. art, since theater was mentioned, or classic music, or avantgarde…), and if you acknowledge that english-language surveys will be skewed towards native–English places like UK and Ireland in favour of all other European nations, then Paris, Berlin, Munich, Upssala, … etc are excellent centers of learning and research and study.
Huh? Is that the American definition of history - only what’s written down? No oral history passed over the generations? Because you loose a lot of Middle-East history that way, for example. Before the Bible was written down, it was passed on orally. I thought historians in the past decades had started researching the oral history of people who, for various reasons, had previously no written records, but nevertheless knew their history. Eg. the African-Americans were prevented from learning reading and writing and thus could not write things down; the Native Americans in the US (the mezo-and south American big civilasations were obviously a different thing) had a different attitude towards writing, though they had some way of keeping records for important things, like painting on buffalo hide. Wampun belts that sealed treaties or agreements often contained the important parts in pictograms, also.
The Cherokee took quite well to writing once Sequoah had developed a syllable-alphabet for them, proving that it wasn’t lack of intelligence or anything that had prevented them from writing before. It simply hadn’t been necessary to the extent that other civilsations did.
Not that I found any of your earlier arguments as compelling as they were childishly provocative, but if you really contend that Upssala is a world city on the order of London, then I’d say you’ve shot your credibility on this topic.
Nobody said that looking at the country isn’t pretty. It’s just that there’s not much else.
Oh, the prairie has an interesting history, and the prarie tribes of Native Americans certainly also lifed for riding through the prarie, so I wouldn’t call it weird, just unusual from the average American, who prefers to sit in a McDonald and watch TV instead of looking at the landscape.
That is, as far as I recall from school, the actual definition of the word history. Everything that happened before the written language is prehistory and is a different, but no less important, topic. Historians study things that were written down; if it wasn’t, it’s studied by archaeologists or other scholars.
Is that an American-only thing?
I live in London and have visited every city you mention and many you’ve probably never heard of. I disagree totally with your position here.
Good thing I didn’t say anything like that, then. I was referring to only education when I mentioned Uppsala. But just because you haven’t heard of it, doesn’t mean its university isn’t good. What kind of ranking would you accept - Wall Street Journal, Business Week (with a European section apart from the US ranking), by the Europeans?
I don’t know if it’s the official US defintion, or simply how things are taught at US schools. You have never heard of “Oral History” then?
Wiktionary gives this definition:
So every record about the past, whether written down or told orally.
That is the definition of history (and what I was taught in school in Britain). By definition, it’s a written record of events. Oral history isn’t quite the same because it changes in the telling. That isn’t to say, of course, that written history is always accurate, just that you can read it 2,000 years later and the words are the same.
Pictograms recording events would count, I imagine.
I’m not making a value judgment here; the most important use of written records was to denote ownership, and as most Native American peoples did not entertain the concept of ownership it makes sense that they wouldn’t bother writing things down.
I was simply referring to the statement that “history doesn’t begin when white people show up,” which, though obviously true in spirit, is technically inaccurate in the case of most Native (North) Americans.
Well, for me history is simply the study of past events.
Not oral history of people without written records. Those were passed on very differently from todays stories in a society which relies on written records, and thus pays far less attention to the accuracy of oral stories.
So? You still need the complete context to understand the text. Cecil did a few columns, e.g. the Ius prima noctae is now believed by most historians to be a later satire, and not an accurate historical account. Or the story in the Bible about drunken Noah and his shame - context has been lost in the written version, and we simply don’t know how to interpret it today.
That’s only technically inaccurate for the narrow defintion of history as written record. For the general context (see my wiktionary link) of a record of past events, or the study of past events, it’s true.
I mean, you surely aren’t implying that nothing important happened just because the Native Americans didn’t build a civilsation similar enough to the white man to be recognized, that they were uncivilised? The five nations had elaborate systems. Some historians have recently suggested that the model of American democracy comes not so much directly from the Romans and Greeks, where only an elite was allowed to speak and vote, but from the Native Americans nearby, where every adult had a vote and a voice in the tribal assembly.
Funny, I thought we were talking about “flyover country,” not the quality of Swedish universities. I guess “staying on topic” is another pernicious American thang, ain’t it, Fritz?
Well shut mah mouth!
I really don’t care whether you, personally, agree or disagree in whatever fraction with me. My claim never purported to be “a fact about Teacake.” It does happen to be true that, compared to London or Paris, places like Bratislava or Tromso are the equivalents of Omaha or Minot or other location you haven’t even dreamed of not knowing about.
I think your perception of the “average American” is pretty messed up.
It isn’t what I was taught at U.S. schools.
Looking over constanze’s posts, I am starting to get the impression that the only thing there is to do in Bavaria is obsess about the United States.