6 Comments
User's avatar
Peter d'Errico's avatar

Good work. A treasure for analysis in that old book, written before the dominators were embarrassed (though they were bare-assed) about their claim of a right of domination.

Expand full comment
John Kane's avatar

It’s the education that folks like you provide that must promote that organization. Our people are the first obstacle. We must overcome their “mental” assertions.

Expand full comment
Mankh's avatar

Amazing what some of those old books reveal. From some research i did for one of my books, found the following:

“[Sarah Josepha Buell Hale] was the first woman to publish

a book, Northwood, in the English language in the Americas. ... And she was also the editor of a magazine called Godey’s Lady’s Book, which was the precursor to Ladies’ Home Journal. Godey’s Lady’s Book, under her editorship, raised from a distributorship of 5,000 to close to 500,000. In the 1800s, this magazine had a humongous sphere of influence on American culture.

“... Hale wrote letters to five Presidents of the United States: Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, and Abraham Lincoln. Her initial letters failed to persuade, but the letter she wrote to Lincoln convinced him to support legislation establishing a national holiday of Thanksgiving in 1863.

“The idea of the typical Thanksgiving dinner came from her

description of a New England Thanksgiving dinner in Northwood, which involved turkey and also a lot of major meats. That became the popular picture of Thanksgiving dinner. And for years, she wrote editorials saying, ‘We need to create this national holiday.’ ...

“Congress created the national holiday using the First Thanksgiving narrative that had became popular.”[from article “The True, Indigenous History of Thanksgiving”]

&

An epigraph in Hale’s 1927 book Northwood; A Tale of New

England speaks volumes: “He who loves not his country, can love nothing.” An example of blatant nationalism.

Expand full comment
Phil Falk's avatar

Thank you, Steve, for this great article on their artifices of domination. Australia has its own remnants of this history, where settler writers framed our extinction as ‘inevitable,’ casting the seizure of our lands as part of their march of ‘civilisation.’ Here, they explicitly justified our dispossession by claiming that a ‘superior race’ had a right to the land, while insisting that Aboriginal peoples would simply ‘melt away.’ I can think of several books that capture this very essence.

Expand full comment