Quotes about indigenous Native Americans are brimming with paradoxes. Benjamin Franklin praised their martial skills and the political structure of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy yet labeled them “ignorant savages.” John Adams chastised the French utilization of native warriors in the French and Indian Wars while Philip Schuyler wooed Oneida warriors with false promises of equality and […]
BOOK REVIEW: His Masterly Pen: A Biography of Jefferson the Writer by Fred Kaplan (New York City, NY: HarperCollins, 2022) Thomas Jefferson was many things. Some of his best known roles were as Founding Father, president, governor, secretary of state, the only vice president who was of a different political persuasion than the sitting president, foreign […]
In the second half of the 1700s, French natural historian Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, formulated what would be dubbed the “New World degeneracy” or the “American degeneracy” theory. His work, Histoire Naturelle, Générale et Particulière, included a vast array of facts about natural history from around the world as well as the Count’s many […]
