You Never Know...

...what you're gonna find when you clean house. In anticipation that I may be in for a new computer sometime later this year, I've been going through some old, old bookmarks, that were in a folder called, surprise, surprise, Old Bookmarks. I've been deleting dead ones and deciding which ones I may eventually transfer to my active, current bookmarks, and which ones I will just pitch with my old computer. In the process I came across this one (I don't remember bookmarking this, at all) about the infamous smallpox infested blanket. Anyway, it's a keeper:

Indians and smallpox

Far and away, the best comment in the entire thread is this one:

"And here is what bothers me so much about modern "scholarship." At what point did history become ethics? Why should we subvert the elusive search for facts to moralist concerns? So what if they are on or off the hook? If you want to be a preacher, go preach. If you want to save theworld, go into politics. If you want to invent a world free of evil, take prozac. It was said in Ecclesiasties and it still is true today, people suck. They did then, all ofthem. THey do now, all of us. History is the history of self-interested, competing, aggressive, selfish, murderous humans. At what point did it become a morality play? -Dave WIlliams, George mason Univ."

Right on, good sir!! That is what the study of history is about. Getting your lame brain into the mindset that prevailed in the distant past; understanding what people of a by-gone era could have known and not known; judging them by the standards that prevailed in their time, not according to standards and knowledge that exists today. And the smallpox blanket thingy is one of the most pernicious and long lived examples of how not to do the craft of history,