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John Scalzi's Weekend Assignment #168: Historical Excisions
Weekend Assignment #168: For reasons best left unexplained, you have been allowed to excise one and only one person from the course of history. Which person would you choose to remove from history and why? That's right: Any one person you think history would be better without, you can now expunge. So who would it be -- and how do you think history would be changed with their absence? See. Told you it was one that would make you think.
This assignment comes with two rules. First, the person expunged has to be a human being; deities (and human iterations thereof) should be left out of this particular exercise, mostly because I'd like to avoid all the ranting such an excision would add. Second, try not to choose Adolf Hitler (because he's too easy) or either the current president or his predecessor (to avoid ranty political rantiness). Incidentally, picking either parent of any of these three folks just to get around this admonition is dirty pool. Other than that, pick whom you would like. This still leaves lots of potentially expungible historical figures.
Okay, I love history. And I spend a lot of time watching the History Channel. And I wanted something obscure, or at least different from the usual run of the mill responses. I remember a few months back, they had a show that had to do with the top ten moments in history that changed everything from the way life was going to what is our history now. I was quite surprised to see a program concerning the first attack of an English colony against an Indian or Native settlement. Now I think I have the correct story. So I offer this: Wickpedia article on King Philip's War. Below are excerpts from that article.
....King Philip's War was an armed conflict between Indian inhabitants of present-day southern New England and English colonists and their Indian allies from 1675–1676. Nearly one in twenty persons overall among Indians and English were wounded or killed. King Philip's war was one of the bloodiest and most costly in the history of America.
The war is named after the main leader of the Indian side, Metacomet, Metacom, or Pometacom known to the English as "King Philip".
.....The spark that ignited King Philip's War was a report from a "Praying Indian" translator and adviser to Metacom named John Sassamon. Sassamon relayed to Massachusetts Bay Colony officials the news of impending Indian attacks on widely dispersed colonial settlements. Before colonial officials could investigate the charges, John Sassamon was murdered, his body found beneath an ice-covered pond, allegedly killed by few of Phillip's Wampanoag angry at his betrayal.
On the testimony of an Indian witness, Plymouth Colony arrested three Wampanoags, convicted them (with a jury having some Indian members) of John Sassamon's murder, and hanged them on June 8, 1675 at Plymouth. Some of the Wampanoag believed that the three had been framed; that in fact, both the trial and the court's sentence were an insult to Indian sovereignty. In response, on June 20, a band of Pokanoket, possibly without Philip's approval, assaulted several isolated homesteads in Swansea. First, laying siege to the town, they then destroyed it five days later. They killed several settlers.
Officials from Plymouth and Boston were quick to respond, and on June 28 they sent an expedition that destroyed the Wampanoag town at Mount Hope (modern Bristol, Rhode Island).....
My nomination of the one person who could be taken from history for the betterment of today's society would be the individual or individuals who caused King Philip's War, whether it would be King Philip (Indian leader) and John Sassamon, Sassamon's murderers, and the three judges that tried the Natives thought to be responsible. I doubt that this would have stopped the violence between the English, Americans and the Native Americans, as someone somewhere would have started something incendiary. It's human nature. It would have been nice to delay the outcome as long as possible, though. (P.S.: I apparently have a drop or two of Native blood.)
Extra Credit: Favorite historical-themed movie. Because why not?
I love a good movie, too. At this point I'd say that maybe the best historical movie I ever saw would be Flags of Our Fathers. To go along with the Indian theme, though, I recommend the John Ford/John Wayne trio, Rio Grande, Fort Apache and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. (Okay, so I love a good John Wayne movie, too.)
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No joke... King Phillip's War started in Monponsett, when Wamsutta was kidnapped. There's a rock and everything.
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Good choice. I like your reasoning.
6/6/07 6:57 PM
Move him out of the picture and King Philip's war looks a lot brighter for the New England natives who fought with/along side Philip/Metacom.
When the heck is somebody gonna write a movie about this war? Somebody could EASILY make a trilogy of blockbusters based on Nathaniel Philbrick's "The Mayflower."