A Moral History of Indian-White Relations

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Bibliographic Data

ID2738555
AuthorsWilcomb E Washburn (corresponding author)
Year1957
Volume4
Issue1
Pages47
Publication date1957-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueEthnohistory (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0014-1801 • E-ISSN: 1527-5477
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/480636
OpenAlexW2333888029
LanguageEN
Citations received7

Many historians and ethnologists will shy at the term history, and some may even claim that there is no such thing. Others will admit the term, but assert that such a study is within the province of philosophers and theologians, not ethnohistorians. I will agree that moral histories are rare and often of questionable validity. I will also agree that a moral history of the contact of two cultures calls for wisdom and understanding not normally required of historians and ethnologists. I do not, however, exclude the subject from the field of legitimate research, and cite William E.H. Lecky's History of European Morals, from Augustus to Charlemagne as an example of what can be done.1 Recent studies by anthropologists of value assumptions in both Indian and White societies have prepared the groundwork for a moral history of Indian-White relations. Hitherto contacts between Indians and Whites have been recorded from the point of view of White values. No one can today read William Prescott's History of the Conquest of Mexico or Theodore Roosevelt's The Winning of the West without realizing how the authors' one-sided moral assumptions affected both their selection and interpretation of historical facts. It was not always so. Herodotus 47

Biology · Environmental ethics · Sociology · White (mutation) · American Constitutional Law and Politics · American History and Culture · Anthropology · Genetics · History · Philosophy

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