Most everybody's has been, for a long time.

6 Ridiculous Lies You Believe About the Founding of America

These are the facts:
#6. The Indians Weren't Defeated by White Settlers
#5. Native Culture Wasn't Primitive
#4. Columbus Didn't Discover America: Vikings vs. Indians
#3. Everything You Know About Columbus Is a Calculated Lie
#2. White Settlers Did Not Carve America Out of the Untamed Wilderness
#1. How Indians Influenced Modern America

#6. The Indians Weren't Defeated by White Settlers

#5. Native Culture Wasn't Primitive

#4. Columbus Didn't Discover America: Vikings vs. Indians

#3. Everything You Know About Columbus Is a Calculated Lie

#2. White Settlers Did Not Carve America Out of the Untamed Wilderness

#1. How Indians Influenced Modern America

I'm not sure that I get it. Are those six points "ridiculous lies" or "facts?"

It's at Cracked.com, a humor site.

Well, I still don't get the point. For example, "#6. The Indians Weren't Defeated by White Settlers." It is true that in what became the U.S. there were "Indian wars" and far more importantly, many incidents of killing of Indians by settlers. But what defeated the Indians was the rich collection of diseases that was imported from Europe. The New England coast was once lined with pre-moldboard agricultural settlements and was heavily populated. The Indians died from our measles, small pox, and other diseases that had been nurtured in the dense, animal-rich settlements of Europe. Further south, they died from malaria.

So is #6 intended to be understood to be false or true? What is it that is "borked" about our history books? Do they contain facts that the Texas board responsible for shaping most of our K-12 textbooks would prefer not be facts?

It reads to me like it could be a listing of facts that we have learned about the people who were here before us that some of us would prefer not be facts. E.g., the Indians did not have primitive civilizations, especially not in central and south America. They had very sophisticated civilizations in many regards, from architecture to agriculture. Their knowledge of human interactions with their environments was probably superior to what many people know today. But it is easier to justify the European conquest if we consider the Indians to have been savages.

The book 1491 is the best work I've read on Pre-Columbian North and South America.

Me too. I came away from it realizing that not only had I known so little of Pre-Columbian North and South America that it was embarrassing, but also what I thought that I knew was severely flawed. Here I live in Connecticut, and I had no idea that the New England coast had been lined with native villages. I suspect few in Connecticut know that, as a matter of fact.

Mann's 1491 and 1493 are both based on intensive research as well as some personal observations. The last third of each book is basically devoted to documentation. The books are not full of footnotes as would be a scholarly text, but with the back of the book and the text, you too can read Mann's original sources. Crosby's Columbian Exchange was the inspiration for both books; it is a readable scholarly work. The only book of that nature that I recall having read with such pleasure was Walter Prescott Webb's The Great Plains: A Study in Institutions and Environment, which may have been the spark of my interest in the environment. Webb was killed in an automobile accident outside Austin while I was a student there and had been an abiding presence on campus even though (I think) he was retired. (The other presence was J. Frank Dobie, one of whose contributions was the declaration that the University of Texas Tower would be more appropriate for the Texas landscape if it were turned on its side.)

Friday, some friends and I are going to the Mashantucket Pequot Museum at Foxwoods -- not for the casino! Then we are darting over to see Bill Maher on stage at Mohegan Sun. I am told that I shall find the Museum to be humorous rather than a serious museum. In comparison to Vancouver, that will surely be true, but there is so much for me to learn about these almost-vanished people. I've participated in a bit of a movement to get a curriculum going here on the indigenous population of New England, mostly by grumpily asking various administrators why we didn't have one. I think that, in general, most Americans (including Latinos and African-Americans, not just whites) know far too little about the peoples whose land we took in our Manifest Destiny.

I did take the time to post links to sources supporting the Cracked list.

Based on my own experience, it's a myth that USian's are uniformly indoctrinated in these myths.

But I did have a slightly unusual upbringing, and I've only ever actually had ONE school class in "American History" -- in 11th grade in Westchester County, New York. I don't remember much of that course, except a really good unit on how good original historical research is conducted, the value of primary sources, and some tips on how to apply skepticism to sensational claims. It was also during that year that my mother helped curate an exhibit of Northwest Coast Indian Art -- I soaked it up. The complexity of their civilization and the beauty of the artifacts was a revelation.

Four years of my schooling took place in Great Britain, and I learned far more about "the pink bits" (Australia, New Zealand, India, etc.) than about that ungrateful-colony-that-shall-not-be-named. I was also hazed as a "Yank."

By far the largest complement of my education on the European westward movement came from two sources: my home and its books, discussions, and travels; and in particular the year (12th grade) that I spent in Mexico. Under one of the best English teachers I ever had, I read a bunch of contrarian and borderline counterculture literature including Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee and Black Elk Speaks. We read Little Big Man, and a play about Buffalo Bill whose title I've forgotten. We read Blue Highways, which opened our eyes to some matters of prejudice and segregation in the 60s as seen by a Native American. And all this while steeped in Mexican culture, which far more than most places in the US wears its native culture on its sleeve -- sometimes shamefully, as the gulf between rich and poor is monumental, and sometimes with extraordinary pride. In Mexico one is hyper-aware of the broader brush strokes of history, and the fact of civilizations that long predated European conquest. It's under your feet all the time -- literally: it is said that construction excavation in Mexico City takes much much longer than at other places, because they have to call in state archaeologists every other day to catalog their finds.

For my final project in one of those classes I taught myself how to do Navajo sand painting, brought a large frame of earth into class, and did a demonstration using my own ground pigments from ingredients discovered in nature. Of course I made clear that to the Navajo this was supposed to be a genuine and reverential exercise, that I was essentially profaning; but that we would ask the gods forgiveness, try to use it as an avenue to gain respect, and destroy it afterwards. Good times.

I did not know there was a 1493, but it will be on my Kindle in a few minutes.

Tollie, you're a treasure. I've said it before, five people couldn't do what you do here. The day you found PJ was a GOOD day of my life!