Robert C. Koehler: Civilizing the savage
We crossed the Atlantic, encountered a bunch of savages, defeated them, claimed the continent. We won! This is the history I remember learning, as satisfying and stupid as a John Wayne movie.
The myth is crumbling and cracking, its certainty now as precarious as the statue of a Confederate general. Truth flows in through the holes, e.g.:
By the late 1830s, most of the native residents had been “removed” from a big chunk of the South — a few million acres of land in Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, North Carolina and Florida —
