![]() The agricultural revolution spread until today it's nearly universal and few tribes of hunter-gatherers survive.įrom the progressivist perspective on which I was brought up, to ask "Why did almost all our hunter-gatherer ancestors adopt agriculture?" is silly. Our escape from this misery was facilitated only 10,000 years ago, when in different parts of the world people began to domesticate plants and animals. Since no food is grown and little is stored, there is (in this view) no respite from the struggle that starts anew each day to find wild foods and avoid starving. It's a life that philosophers have traditionally regarded as nasty, brutish, and short. What neo-Luddite among us would trade his life for that of a medieval peasant, a caveman, or an ape?įor most of our history we supported ourselves by hunting and gathering: we hunted wild animals and foraged for wild plants. We get our energy from oil and machines, not from our sweat. Most of us are safe from starvation and predators. We enjoy the most abundant and varied foods, the best tools and material goods, some of the longest and healthiest lives, in history. We're better off in almost every respect than people of the Middle Ages, who in turn had it easier than cavemen, who in turn were better off than apes. ![]() ![]() At first, the evidence against this revisionist interpretation will strike twentieth century Americans as irrefutable. With agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism, that curse our existence. In particular, recent discoveries suggest that the adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered. Now archaeology is demolishing another sacred belief: that human history over the past million years has been a long tale of progress. ![]() From biology we learned that we weren't specially created by God but evolved along with millions of other species. Astronomy taught us that our earth isn't the center of the universe but merely one of billions of heavenly bodies. By bringing Apess's voice before the public, Barry O'Connell has both broadened our understanding of the literary canon and extended our definition of Native American history.This book should be a part of any library of American letters."-Frederick E.To science we owe dramatic changes in our smug self-image. "A milestone in the evolution of American literary and historical scholarship. With the publication of this work, those who care about what passes for nineteenth-century American literature can never be the same."- New England Quarterly "The appearance of this volume brings to center state a writer of great importance and power, the first Native American to speak fully in his own words about the appalling racism of the early republic. always eloquent, serves a depth of analysis and a layered irony that make pressing claims on any catalog of what is finest and most significant in American literary history."- New York Times Book Review "Makes available in a superb scholarly edition not only the first published autobiography by a Native American (1829 originally), but also a range of historical, political, and personal writings. ![]()
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