Early Americanist cultural historian myself, so ignorance pleaded, but even I keep muttering about 17th century Jesuits' relative respect for Native cultures in New France, and, as one who grew up in postwar Britain, the Marshall Plan. Could part of the problem be that powers-that-be prefer to get their history from anointed court historians, Tim, rather than from a range of academics? I remember a historian at the Air-War College warning, as war on Iraq was under consideration, that there was no precedent for successfully imposing democracy from the outside. Nobody seems to have listened.
It's a cycle. The court suddenly wakes up and says "We need to know things about the frontiers" and then when it hears what it doesn't want to hear, it sulkily says "take them away! bring me my favored jesters!" The U.S. had plenty of intelligence and historical insight coming in about Vietnam between 1961-64 and then it decided "we do not want to hear this, banish the information". Hell, the New York Times itself was one of the court advisors that banished the news that the emperor did not want to hear from about 2002-2006--Keller refused to publish what he deemed unpatriotically unsupportive of the crusade to bring liberal democracy to Iraq and Afghanistan.
Early Americanist cultural historian myself, so ignorance pleaded, but even I keep muttering about 17th century Jesuits' relative respect for Native cultures in New France, and, as one who grew up in postwar Britain, the Marshall Plan. Could part of the problem be that powers-that-be prefer to get their history from anointed court historians, Tim, rather than from a range of academics? I remember a historian at the Air-War College warning, as war on Iraq was under consideration, that there was no precedent for successfully imposing democracy from the outside. Nobody seems to have listened.
It's a cycle. The court suddenly wakes up and says "We need to know things about the frontiers" and then when it hears what it doesn't want to hear, it sulkily says "take them away! bring me my favored jesters!" The U.S. had plenty of intelligence and historical insight coming in about Vietnam between 1961-64 and then it decided "we do not want to hear this, banish the information". Hell, the New York Times itself was one of the court advisors that banished the news that the emperor did not want to hear from about 2002-2006--Keller refused to publish what he deemed unpatriotically unsupportive of the crusade to bring liberal democracy to Iraq and Afghanistan.