Another spin on this:

I grew up in Texas. As we all know, Texans are really proud of Texas. Part of this is because the schools spend 3x as much time teaching “Texas history” as they do teaching US history or world history (lol).

Almost all of what is called “Texas history” is simply propaganda from the early to mid 1800s. Truth is, Texas was essentially American Mexico (nearly 100% Spanish-speaking) until we found oil there in the late 1800s. It was only ever it’s own independent country because the US was not militarily strong at the time and couldn’t afford a war with Mexico — which would have been the result of the annexation of Texas.

But as a result of this state-mandated focus on “local history”, kids who come out of Texas schools are often woefully uneducated as to even Western European history. You just learn this concentrated version of American Exceptionalism that’s mandated by the board of education and has only a tenuous relationship to the truth.

As a side note, it’s really weird to learn history in the context of a place that’s only had meaningful levels of population for the last 50 years.

I grew up in the panhandle and what you're saying is true in general. Parts of my family have been in Texas since the early 1800s.

"As a side note, it’s really weird to learn history in the context of a place that’s only had meaningful levels of population for the last 50 years."

That's an interesting side note.

I've seen clovis points that folks have dug up here that are 5K ro 10K years old... the anglos in Texas tend to think that there was literally no one here when this area has had folks living in it for millennia.

One of the thoughts I keep returning to is how little we know about the history of the peoples who were living more than 400 or so years ago.

I think about how transient even our own technology is.

Considering what traces of our own culture would be available to people 10,000 years from now, I occasionally wonder if we'd be able to detect our own culture at that time scale if we didn't know what we were looking at.

"One of the thoughts I keep returning to is how little we know about the history of the peoples who were living more than 400 or so years ago."

I'm assuming you're talking about in America pre European colonisation. In the rest of the world (especially China, Europe, India and the Middle East) we know about as much as we do about the history of people currently alive. We can read their diaries, what happened in their governments, poetry, stories etc (at least for the literate classes, but this is again true in the modern world).

"Considering what traces of our own culture would be available to people 10,000 years from now, I occasionally wonder if we'd be able to detect our own culture at that time scale if we didn't know what we were looking at."

We would be able to detect really quite a bit, though less than we would like. Anything electronic would be gone, but the fact that we had electronics would be obvious. As would the vast majority of print. Some writing (especially carving) would remain, as would some pictures in lucky circumstances. Most tellingly our cities and buildings would still be around, and you can tell a lot about a culture by the way they order their buildings, and by what stuff they had. This is all assuming we some how up and leave for 10,000 years like in Göbekli Tepe[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe

"I'm assuming you're talking about in America pre European colonisation."

Yes, and specifically the area where I am living. That "400 years" has more to do with the specific people I live around and their view that basically anyone before them lacked What-a-Burger restaurants and Shiner beer and are have more in common with deer and possums than humans.

Thanks for the thoughts and the links.

"Most tellingly our cities and buildings would still be around"

I'm sure that my fantasies about how little we actually leave behind and the reality of how obvious it would be are probably different.

Like, I feel like humans have been around for quite a while longer than we have any sort of history about, but I am probably just motivated by fantasies that there were large-scale civilizations on earth that predate our own by millennia but which are wholly lost because we don't have the material archeological record or the linguistic tools to trace the existence of specific cultures (or whatever kinds of tooling that would be necessary to demonstrate such a history).

While I don't think there is evidence for that fantasy, I also think humans are creative, interesting folks and I have a hard time wrapping my head around the idea that folks have been just chilling with oral histories for 20K+ years until they suddenly got motivated 600 years ago or so (or 2000 or wherever we might place those histories).

So thanks for tempering that fantasy with a specific counter factual example.

I’m sure there are many lost human historical cities, outposts, et al. But based on all the excavation and discovery, it doesn’t seem likely that we are missing out on some huge timeline gap of advanced human societies.

We still aren’t even sure if some written language of some of the first civilizations like the Indus Valley were languages or not since we haven’t been able to decipher them. We also have a few areas around the world where we can look for things like evidence of stable civilization and writing that were probably isolated from the rest of the world - America’s, China, and Europe, as examples. Yet all three locations so far only show writing as recent discoveries 2-4K years ago.

To me, humans not having advanced quicker doesn’t seem so far fetched. Humanoids were on two feet and making basic tools over a million years ago. Fire was controlled hundreds of thousands of years ago at the latest. Yet even with all that, we don’t have any evidence of humanoids being advanced like setting up in one location or writing text (not just drawings) down more than a couple thousand years. The modern human species I think is only a few hundred thousand years too.

Of course we could just somehow be missing tons of data. But that also wouldn’t line up with how we do see a progression of advancement from the earliest civilizations and then empires.

May I recommend

https://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Colu...

I will add that to my list of stuff to read (I've heard of it, but your post specifically has caused me to add it).

I'm interested in the folks who were living here before the largish empires that we know about (aztecs and myans and olmecs). But my history is super shoddy... I will have to rethink about how by my understandings are in that area.

Sounds like you're complaining that countries teach the history of their country. I would fully expect eg Britain to primarily teach the history that led up to current Britain, with side dishes of elsewhere's history. I would similarly expect eg China to do the same, and every other country to do likewise.

It's expected but not appreciated. I grew up learning fairy stories about the magical rainbows George Washington shat at his enemies, the evil evil British. Learning that the people entrusted to teach you something were incurious ignoramuses reading from little more than a propaganda sheet is upsetting.

Very upsetting.

Also, the delivery and form was so simplified. I feel like what we were taught in school had one of 2 forms:

1) Bite size good/bad characterizations of involved nuanced processes.

2) Objectifying factoids on the material day-to-day of shallow characterizations, like the practice of associating Native American tribes primarily by the shape of their houses.

By jumping back and forth between the two, it did accomplish a surface appearance of depth, but ignored the spectrum as a whole that makes up humanity. (1) usually skipped over relational values and (2) failed to deliver on meaning.

The few times this done a little bit less had enormous impact, like black history month, trail of tears, stories like Huck Finn. But comparatively, these leaped over massively critical nuances. Of course, we were just all-out denied anything about the French Revolution. There is no question this is why America is contending with such a problematic political arena. We are learning everything the hard way.

The things that stir the pot are what make us human and understanding them are what allow us to progress. Being denied that is uncivilized.

>> History always tells you as much about its author as it does about its subject.

I know it has been popular, but that is a dangerous line of thinking these days. It is totally fair to say that an analysis of a complex historical event will be tainted by the views of the author(s). But such pieces aren't all history. It is possible to generate bias-free history pieces. For instance, we shouldn't say that every analysis of tree rings or ice cores is bias. That makes it too easy to dismiss a valid representation historical data.

People who see bias everywhere aren't satisfied until they personally test the ice cores. They feel free to deny climate science because everyone with eyes on the cores is biased and untrustworthy. They also see bias in every record of a historical event, again proclaiming them untrustworthy. Since they didn't witness the event and all records are biased, the event either didn't happen or is permanently beyond any accurate understanding. As with ice cores, such people feel free to substitute their own version of history.

It is dangerous to see bias everywhere. Doing so allows us to selectively dismiss anything and everything. We have to agree that there is such a thing as historical truth. To do otherwise is to deny history and all the lessons it has to teach.

The difference between science and history is that science seeks to reduce the scope of its observations to remove bias particularly biases which are subconscious. The ability to do this depends a great deal on the complexity of the system. A tree trunk and pair of calipers is a pretty simple system. Once a couple people have measured the same tree and produced simillar measurements, we can be fairly confident in those measurements.

But the actions of say a parliament are a system with orders of magnitude more complexity and thus we should trust almost no one's intepretation to be unbiased. This is the cursed paradox of history. We so badly want to understand people and societies and it is almost impossible to know we have come to that understanding with any kind of certainty.

Side Rant: This is actually why I see psychology and sociology as dangerous. They often have the rigor of history and cloak themselves in the airs of science.

>> Once a couple people have measured the same tree and produced simillar measurements, we can be fairly confident in those measurements.

Really? I remember a fight about a year ago over whether or not it was hot on a particular day in DC. Half the US decided that they couldn't trust the biased weather reporting system. The perception of constant bias in all things meant we couldn't agree on a simple temperature record. A subset of these people cannot trust doctors enough to take vaccines or antibiotics. A further subset cannot even trust that the earth is round.

Bias is everywhere, but the amount of it varies. In physics, the standard for saying something is "true" is usually a 5(1 in 2 million) or 6(one in 500 million) sigma chance that the fact is not true. In the social sciences, people publish results with a 1 in 20 chance the paper's results are false (and other problems with most social science papers makes the real chance of truth even lower). It is quite useful to have a mindset that is less binary when searching for the truth. I try and calibrate my thinking to "How likely is this to be true" and be constantly updating my view of things with new evidence. Most successful truth seekers I know do the same.

> It is dangerous to see bias everywhere.

They are everywhere and even the experts are not immune to them.

I think it's better to see history as a series of cycles playing out over and over again.

From no existing government, to aristocratic, military government, to trade gaining power, to some sort of consensus government, eventually leading to democracy, to trade decline, to oppressive government, to self-destructing government.

Likewise and somewhat independent, society evolves from extreme liberal (like in some Greek city states, or the Roman empire, where you could rent a room in temple with a big bath where you could have sex. In the room above, a bull would be slaughtered so a stream of blood would drip down on your bodies. Note: this was marketed to women, not men, and came with an optional male partner, I think even the Kardashians would consider that going more than a bit too far), to absurdly conservative (pretty much all of Europe after the fall of the Roman empire, for example), back to liberal, back to extreme conservatism.

And the amazing thing is that everyone, all these movements, from the puritans to today's women empowerment warriors, from the Roman Empire to Washington to Lichtenstein's government, see themselves as the first ones ever to do X, constantly, all the time, when in reality it seems to be a cycle that rotates around in about 1.5 to 2 centuries or so. And one the one hand that's true : there's something unique about almost everything, every movement. But 99% of what such movements stand for are duplicates of their former selves. It's just that the people in them are not at all aware of any of it.

Say, society moving away from the Church was of course, according to those who did it, the first time ever this happened (not what had happened ~80 times before, almost always in times of large economic expansion). They were smarter than everyone and "reason" was going to save the world (mostly because it had a few successes). If you go back to the time of the French revolution, of course, you'd see that the same happened, and then ... the great economy faltered ... and despite all the reason in the world (note: governments "based on reason" can easily match governments based on faith in cruelty and pettiness. In fact I would say that despite the general feeling the reason "based" governments are the worse ones. And yes, by that I mean that in times of economic desperation they're worse, far worse in fact, than things like the inquisition).

But no, the generations of the 1990s and 2000s are utterly convinced they are the first ones to ever see "the church for what it is", and that they'll just make the economy perfect and everyone happy and all will be well, because science and reason will save us all.

And when listening to grandpa you realize that the 1920s were just like that ... and the 1960s. And the 1930s and 1970s-80s ? Oh well. But those were smaller cycles, sooner or later a big shift will hit us again. It's been a while.

Coming up next: nope ... science and reason do not in fact guarantee a nice economy, do not in fact save us all. There was a nice economy, for reasons independent of religion, tolerance and this period will end, just like all other periods before it and people will flee back to faith, extreme conservatism, just like they've done so many times before.

It is hard to apply terms like "liberal" and "conservative" to ancient societies, and I don't get at all how the Roman Empire cold be considered "extremely liberal". It was thoroughly militarized dictatorship and patriarchal slave society. The ritual you describe sounds like something from a TV-show, but anyway religious rituals are not "liberal". The emperor was also the high priest and religious rituals was considered necessary to preserve the state.

The Roman way of thinking was also fundamentally conservative in that they though everything had been better in the olden times.

"The olden times" makes me think you read Cicero. "The olden times" Cicero was talking about were the later days of the Roman republic perhaps 50BC or so.

Those times were extremely progressive. And many of the social accomplishments, like the right to ignore your parents religion, equality between men and women ... were fought over and achieved in those times (well, before those times, really, but that wasn't how Cicero saw things).

I would also like to point out that Roman slavery was not at all the same as Islamic slavery (which is what we think of when saying "slavery", and even then you could rightly argue that "most" islamic slavery was different. Islamic slavery after economic collapse is the model we think of as slavery. Not pleasant). Slaves, in the Roman republic, or the Roman empire, mostly went home in the evening (and all -save slaves of the justice system- had the choice to go home). They enjoyed health care. They lived in apartment blocks (yes, really), which may or may not have had plumbing (granted, plumbing was for the very rich slaves).

Incidentally there were very rich slaves, a fact even true in Islamic times. You see, most jobs aside from market trader/"CEO" were slave jobs. Doctor ? Most likely a slave. Architect ? Slave. Factory "manager" ? Slave. Very high government administrators, like the director of the Colliseum ? Slave.

Slavery did not mean you were poor, or that you were imprisoned. Not at all. With the exception of "justice" slaves (ie. convicted -rightly or otherwise- criminals). Those were the people working in the mines and on the galleys.

And in ancient Rome, as I pointed out, you could pay for more services than you can today. I don't even necessarily mean that in a bad way. Sure, you could pay for sex acts, but equally you could pay to have fine metalwork done (in fact, doctors did that quite often). Women slaves were married, and generally not to their "owners", and had high functions themselves (negotiations for building things, for instance, were often carried out by women).

Roman slaves were still slaves in that they could be raped freely by their masters (regardless of age, gender and martial status) and ones spouse and kids could be sold at will by the owner. If this made you angry and you tried to kill your master, then all slaves in the household would be killed as retaliation. Slaves did not have any kind of legal rights. Sure some of them could have high ranking jobs (and some was able to save up to buy their freedom if the owner allowed it), but the vast majority performed hard manual work on farms. I don't know what you mean by "imprisoned", but if slaves tried to run away they would be tortured and probably killed in gruesome ways like with crucifixion. There were multiple slave rebellions because it was not generally pleasant to be a slave.

I wouldn't call this "extremely progressive".

> Roman slaves were still slaves in that they could be raped freely by their masters

Nope. Only if so specified in the contract (of course, some slaves were explicitly hired for sexual services, just like today some people are hired for sexual services, from porn production to "hospitality services"). Also I do believe that rape was never covered, although sexual services might indeed be the expected "work" that the slave was contracted for, certainly.

Again, this is not really different for today. Would you say a porn actor/actress is "raped" ? Because in some ways you could say that their boss has them raped. How about people hired into brothels (and paid), who don't even know who they agree to have sex with when hired ?

> kids could be sold at will by the owner

Nope. Although there is some confusion. Kids were generally expected to help with their parents until a certain age, at which age they were free men/women. At that point, they could enter into a slavery contract (paid, was one of the conditions).

Generally there were various protections in slave contracts, against, for instance, large differences in job function. If an owner violated those, a slave could have the contract reviewed and gain his/her freedom.

It's not that different from the position of employee today. You can be "sold" in the sense that anyone can buy their way into becoming your boss (assuming your current boss agrees on the price, just like back then), and you cannot just immediately leave for just that.

> Slaves did not have any kind of legal rights.

Yes they did. The fundamental right any slave had was to ask for a review of their status, and whether the contract was upheld. Any and all slaves, even convicted slaves, had that right. There were various other rights that most slaves had, and generally the contracts specified extra rights. And, as I said, most slaves, especially in Rome, were not "fulltime" slaves. On remote farms, it was of customary for slaves to stay on the owner's property, for obvious reasons.

> some was able to save up buy their freedom if the owner allowed it

Roman slaves were always freed after a given amount of time. Granted, the state kept extending that time, but it was limited even at the very end (I believe to 10y for private owners, 20y for the state).

Even state slaves had "side jobs". For instance, most gladiators had a funny side income, and the state actually allowed and helped them with that. They would perform sexual services for any woman willing to pay for those (and apparently they commanded a very high price) on their off days. (note there were female gladiators too, even though not many, and yes they did the same. I believe one of the texts even points out that most of their customers were also female, and yes, any gladiator could refuse to do this, even though that was not a good way to make yourself popular).

Gladiator contracts are some of the known contracts, for instance. There were provisions that if you were killed (few non-convicted gladiators were, incidentally) the state would provide for your family or parents. You were allowed to have the above-mentioned side job, and you agreed to allow the Praetorian guard and 2 other military organizations to hire you if they wanted to, but you were allowed to limit your work there to, I believe 2 years or so (again, it is written that this is how they recruited officers, so essentially no-one ever left, though quite a few were killed along with the person they were protecting. BTW quite a few means a few dozen over 3 centuries).

> killed in gruesome ways like with crucifixion

Nope, although the state famously did that en masse to slaves (and some free men and women) in Spartacus' slave revolt, and on a smaller scale after that. I'm not saying that was OK, but I do hope you see that those were the state exercising punitive legal action on criminals, and not owners just doing that to their slaves for fun (like actually happened in the Ottoman empire, for example, killing/hunting slaves for fun)

> I wouldn't call this "extremely progressive".

Extremely progressive relates to what personal (non-criminal even) actions would get you banned out of polite society, or worse. In that regard, Rome was extremely progressive.

Senators in Rome were famous for just how far they went with this. Apparently in the Senate throwing a birthday party for someone else, and inviting 250+ prostitutes was, aside from the shear number of prostitutes, not a rare occurrence in the last years of the republic. Likewise having male-male, or female-female relationships, even with prostitutes was likely to improve rather than detract from your social status.

I understand that that doesn't mean doing this was free.

Let's say Trump, or Obama, or Clinton if you like, did the same. Let's say they all get together (spouses and children included), hire every prostitute on the west coast, and make a night of it, including gay and lesbian relations with prostitutes and guests, then brag about it in congress. Do you think society would understand ? Even the French, who seem to tolerate the president having a mistress, would kick out any politician, or anyone else, for that.

That's what I mean by progressive.

Honestly I think you are just making shit up at this point. Can you point to any legitimate historical source which can corroborate your claims?

Just see Wikipedia for a start: Slaves were considered property under Roman law and had no legal personhood. Unlike Roman citizens, they could be subjected to corporal punishment, sexual exploitation (prostitutes were often slaves), torture, and summary execution. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_ancient_Rome

Slaves did not usually have contracts. It was possible to sell yourself or your kids into slavery, but slaves were usually taken from conquered peoples and sold on the market. They had no say in what they would be used for. They were not automatically freed, and children of slaves became slaves. I don't know if owners would kill their slaves for fun - they were expensive property after all - but under Antonius Pius it became illegal to kill slaves without "just cause". Which means until then it was fully legal to kill your slaves for fun.

There were many ways to become slaves, and this section basically talks about what would happen if you were caught by the Roman military. In the provinces this was supposed to be very common, but not in the inner core of the empire.

As the wikipedia page explains in the early republic and before the last days of the republic most slaves were conquered slaves. However that supply dried up quite a while before the first emperor.

After that, most slaves in Rome were people that had sold themselves into slavery (or were sold by their parents) and by the time Rome was a real republic this had term limits, as well as rights, starting with the basic right to challenge their status in court. Over time, more rights were granted. Read on in the wikipedia article, it does talk about this.

> Over time, however, slaves gained increased legal protection, including the right to file complaints against their masters. Attitudes changed in part because of the influence among the educated elite of the Stoics, whose egalitarian views of humanity extended to slaves.

(this is not talking about the right to challenge their status, this is about filing complaints, eventually even against "cruel treatment" and so on)

From that same page, the "conclusion" if you will, the standing slaves had by the end of the empire.

> Several emperors began to grant more rights to slaves as the empire grew. Claudius announced that if a slave was abandoned by his master, he became free. Nero granted slaves the right to complain against their masters in a court. And under Antoninus Pius, a master who killed a slave without just cause could be tried for homicide.[71] Legal protection of slaves continued to grow as the empire expanded. It became common throughout the mid to late 2nd century CE to allow slaves to complain of cruel or unfair treatment by their owners.[72]

I am not saying Roman society was just by modern standards, it was not. I would mention though, especially in the east, but also in the west, it was far better than what was to follow. And, as the wikipedia article mentions, in Rome at least (and presumably in most large Roman cities) it was a better fate to be a slave than to be a free urban poor. To be a (voluntary - not a convicted) "public" slave came with pretty good social standing.

The section about Asclepius mentions a few of the horrible things Rome did to slaves, especially earlier in the republic.

I can’t speak for anyone else, but I’m getting sick of your walls of text that skirt the truth or outright lie, and never pay off with citations. You’re replying to someone who pretty much said the same and asked for citations, and you offered nothing. The time of put up or shut up has arrived. Life was brutal and fatal for many slaves, and you just ignored that. You compared peostitutes to slaves who were sold for sex, while ignoring that torture and summary execution were their alternatives.

Come on, stop bullshitting.

So...where do you have your information from?

Porn actress is doing it consensuay and can't be legally killed when she refuses to do porn anymore. If you kill her anyway, you go to jail.

That is spectacularly dishonest comparison.

Also, the crime of those crucified slaves was not wanting to he slaves anymore.

And no, my emplyer can not sell me. I can leave my employer whenever I decides to.

I think this is why it's so hard to transit our concepts of "liberal" and "conservative" to other places and times. Particularly in pagan societies sex wasn't on the same taboo to libertine spectrum we see it on. It had a different social dimension.

It's interesting, you guys having this discussion because it's one of the perennial topics in world history. Has humanity been on a trend towards more individual liberty and compassion over time? Does "the moral arch of the universe bend towards justice"? Or do these ideas come and go, at different times in different places with an occasional combined trend? Is it all just a boisterous sea tide, rising and falling with eddies with eddies, spirals of change atop larger spirals?

Wait, so it's 'progress' if our political leaders hire hundreds of prostitutes and get in to mass orgies?

This is the day you're waiting for, i.e. 'when it's ok to do that'?

"It's not that different from the position of employee today."

Yes, it is.

What a rich fantasy!

“Slave” was a broad and diverse category in Rome, so let’s examine some of what you ignored.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_ancient_Rome

Unskilled slaves, or those sentenced to slavery as punishment, worked on farms, in mines, and at mills. Their living conditions were brutal, and their lives short.

Slaves were considered property under Roman law and had no legal personhood. Unlike Roman citizens, they could be subjected to corporal punishment, sexual exploitation (prostitutes were often slaves), torture, and summary execution. The testimony of a slave could not be accepted in a court of law[2] unless the slave was tortured—a practice based on the belief that slaves in a position to be privy to their masters' affairs would be too virtuously loyal to reveal damaging evidence unless coerced.

Sometimes slaves stood on revolving stands, and around each slave for sale hung a type of plaque describing his or her origin, health, character, intelligence, education, and other information pertinent to purchasers. Prices varied with age and quality, with the most valuable slaves fetching high prices. Because the Romans wanted to know exactly what they were buying, slaves were presented naked.

Slaves numbering in the tens of thousands were condemned to work in the mines or quarries, where conditions were notoriously brutal.[57] Damnati in metallum ("those condemned to the mine") were convicts who lost their freedom as citizens (libertas), forfeited their property (bona) to the state, and became servi poenae, slaves as a legal penalty. Their status under the law was different from that of other slaves; they could not buy their freedom, be sold, or be set free. They were expected to live and die in the mines.[60] Imperial slaves and freedmen (the familia Caesaris) worked in mine administration and management.

Of course it’s not just slaves who could have it rough.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pater_familias

The laws of the Twelve Tables required the pater familias to ensure that "obviously deformed" infants were put to death.

The pater familias had the power to sell his children into slavery; Roman law provided, however, that if a child had been sold as a slave three times, he was no longer subject to patria potestas. The pater familias had the power to approve or reject marriages of his sons and daughters; however, an edict of Emperor Augustus provided that the pater familias could not withhold that permission lightly.

Adult filii remained under the authority of their pater and could not themselves acquire the rights of a pater familias while he lived. Legally, any property acquired by individual family members (sons, daughters or slaves) was acquired for the family estate: the pater familias held sole rights to its disposal and sole responsibility for the consequences, including personal forfeiture of rights and property through debt.

Children "emancipated" by a pater familias were effectively disinherited.

Soooo progressive...

Very good point. To this, I would add that the internet and the wide-spread use of English are reinforcing, instead of confronting, the anglo-american cultural bubble...