Tea at Trianon: Native Americans...

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Wednesday, July 25, 2007

Native Americans...

...Were they REALLY environmentalists? Well, it is a bit more complicated than politically correct historians would have us believe. (Via LRC) Share

2 comments:

Anonymous said...: There were less of them around to cause the impact we have made, however, if one reads the latest discoveries surrounding the archeological findings from the Jamestown, Virginia settlement, there were more native peoples than we thought and they impacted the environment so much that they had to move to a new location because they had depleted the game and had crop failures.

In New Zealand, the Maori people totally decimated many bird species which became extinct before the whites settled the area.; July 26, 2007 at 11:40:00 PM EDT
elena maria vidal said...: It is such an interesting topic and I wish I had time to read more about it.; July 27, 2007 at 9:22:00 AM EDT