From the Original Draft of the Declaration of Independence

"he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it's most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people, who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. this piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian king of Great Britain, determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce; and this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms against us, and to purchase the liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on which he also obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another."

We could have been better then, and over the course of hundreds of years, we have become better. The lesson of America's past is not in how great our country has been, but in how much greater our country can still become, so long as we continue the revolution to expand the ideals of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all.

Witchcraft in the Southwest

Witchcraft in the Southwest, Marc Simmons' 1976 work on "supernaturalism" among Native American populations along the Rio Grande isn't much of a read. As an academic work, even forgiving that it is now over a quarter century out of date, it lacks theme or focus (as well as an index). And as a work of popular non-fiction, the prose is unengaging and reads more like the author listing out a series of sketchy anecdotes.

The most striking aspect of Simmons' writing is his uncritical approach to the subject. He strongly connotes Native American paganism with European witchcraft (although he does nothing interesting to explore how that was transmitted or its cultural effects), and when he describes the condemnations of Catholic missionaries and local villages fetted upon "evil" witches, there is a distinct tone of sympathy with such attitudes. You can almost read the glee whenever he describes how some witch (usually an old, lonely woman) receives "just" punishment for her curses, which almost always results in getting flogged to death or suspended from a mission rafter by her elbows. That he doesn't question why the villagers have these attitudes, how the role of witches (whose herbalism seems to harken to practical medicinal purposes couched in occult trappings) might've been marginalized in the move from paganism to Christianity, or any other meaning than that these are witches and they deserve death is both frightening and ultimately boring.

The book is too small and Simmons' treatment too facile to really do the subject justice. There are a bunch of details that suggest the richness of the subject, both to the academician and those simply curious, but Simmons never provides anything other than a simple description. An example is the following:

One night Juan Perea, a notorious male witch who died in San Mateo in 1888, sallied forth on a nocturnal ramble after depositing his eyes in a saucer on the kitchen table and borrowing those of the cat. While he was away, his hungry dog upset the table and gobbled up his eyes, leaving Juan to spend the rest of his life wearing the green eyes of the cat.

That's deliciously crazy (even moreso as it's only one of three times in the book where a witch loses their eyes and ends up with those an animal), but that's also the entirety of Perea's story in the book. Simmons does this with every anecdote: write a few sentences describing the instance and then going on to the next one, with little comment or detail. Ultimately, this is a maddeningly underwritten work by an author with a dull, conservative perspective on what could have been a much-more promising subject.

The Perfect Summer

Subtitled "England 1911, Just Before The Storm", I read this non-academic history as inspiration material for the P Division Call of Cthulhu campaign I'm in the process of brainstorming. I'd hoped it would live up to the title and provide of a portrait of Edwardian life on the brink of the cataclysm that would soon engulf the world, but what I got instead was a superficial sketch of English socialites and assorted rich folk dawdling about in the midst of an abnormally hot summer.

The 1911 summer was certainly eventful enough in England, with the passage of the Parliament Act that officially established democracy in a country that had been lurching that way in fits since the 17th century, divisive fights over Home Rule in Ireland, women's suffrage, trade unionism, and a growing crisis with Germany that solidified the Anglo-French alliance leading towards the war that would wreak Europe three years later. All of these things are touched on, but that touch is utterly inconsequential. The author, Juliet Nicolson, is more concerned with the adultery and mild scandals of the noble class, which would all be fine and good if she focused on that subject and brought some meaning out of it. Instead, Nicolson gives it all the attention of a contemporary society page, foregoing any attempt at historical context. Her apathy is the ruin of the book, which fails so utterly that the only attention she pays to "the Storm" is to end with the wartime death of a character she writes all of one paragraph on in the 294 page book. This was crap, a slog to get through, and a waste of my time.

Southern California: An Island on the Land

Carey McWilliams "interpretive history" of Southern California from the appearance of the Spanish missions to the time of its first publication (1946) reads less like a history than a series of articles. This is no surprise, as McWilliams was primarily a journalist, but this is not to say that it reads like a reheated compilation of old work, such as that of other newsman who turn to the long form. Rather, McWilliams' book reads more like the history section in a Fodor's or Lonely Planet guidebook: ruthlessly condensed, lacking in sources, but readable and, if not factually accurate, then something that sounds true.

Each section focuses on a specific topic, from race to weather to socioeconomics, and McWilliams never blatantly attempts for a narrative except a constant theme that Southern California is a much darker place than it appears in the propaganda of city boosters, tourism boards, and Hollywood. That seems rather unnecessary, considering the modern popular vision of Southern California is that of a polluted suburban hell-hole plagued by gangbangers and yuppie douchebags; but in 1946 this was probably shockingly original. It is easy to see how this book supposedly provided Robert Towne with the inspiration for Chinatown (even though the water wars get little attention in the actual pagecount).

I liked the book and sense the truth in much of what McWilliams is railing against (his point-of-view is very pro-labor and progressive, and he portrays the strike-breaking and racist mobs of yesteryear in a distinctly, and probably deserved, bad light), but the lack of sources render it less than ideal as a history. That said, some of what it has to say remains strong, even over sixty years after it was published. McWilliams' description of the hard lot of Mexicans, both immigrants and native-born Californians, as perpetual outsiders hostile to assimilation, remains as much a glaring wound as it did then, and his interpretation is sadly better layered than today's simplistic "good guy, bad guy" viewpoints. His description of Southern California as a series of busts and booms seems like it could be extrapolated to the state as a whole (at least the urban centers), and that might be as much a part of the Californian identity as the "everyone is a immigrant here" meme. And, for those so inclined, there is a whole chapter on occult weirdness that is a must-read for anyone setting a Call of Cthulhu game in Southern California during the twenties and thirties, not so much for details but for the zeitgeist of the period.

All in all, a good read. I just wish he had included some footnotes.