Plasticity

I accidently tabbed around and posted this when it was nothing but a title. For a moment I almost left it like that just to see what people would post as comments to a simple title of 'plasticity'.

Anyways, back to the original subject I had in mind...

History and how plastic it is, especially American history it seems. I have a silly number of books, a fair number of which are non-fiction reference books I've picked up over the years. The largest number of those being random volumes of history textbooks or the occasional odd-ball encyclopedia volume that catches my eye.

It is pretty amazing how wildly they vary when depicting historical events, especially in regards to the American Civil War. Looking at history textbooks from before the 1970s and you find people like John Brown (of 'Harpers Ferry' fame) being depicted as insane or criminally dangerous (and that it possibly ran in his family) simply because he supported abolition (which before the civil rights movement may have been considered a sign of insanity...).

An old copy of "The American Pageant" from the early 80s talks about Columbus's crew being mutinous and unruly because they feared they were about to sail off the edge of the world, when by 1491 even the Catholic Church had admitted the world was round. The copy I have from when I was in school had corrected that fact at least, but it goes to show how long silly notions like that stayed in print.

Not sure where this train of thought is going. It started with me being grumpy because I couldn't remember much about 'The Great War' (aka. World War 1) and the sequence of events that began it. Something I had been working on which was originally contemporary suddenly fit much better in with the bits of history I could remember from that time, now the story is going oddly split-screen and multi-generational in my head.

I can also blame the cold medicine for that I think. Bit under the weather for the last two days. Being sick always really and truly fucks with my head and results in really disturbing dreams. Well, disturbing in different ways at least then the ones I have when I am not sick. More 'Giger meets Walt Disney' and less 'Twilight Zone' I suppose.