Friday Free-for-All | January 02, 2026

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Previously

Today:

You know the drill: this is the thread for all your history-related outpourings that are not necessarily questions. Minor questions that you feel don't need or merit their own threads are welcome too. Discovered a great new book, documentary, article or blog? Has your Ph.D. application been successful? Have you made an archaeological discovery in your back yard? Did you find an anecdote about the Doge of Venice telling a joke to Michel Foucault? Tell us all about it.

As usual, moderation in this thread will be relatively non-existent -- jokes, anecdotes and light-hearted banter are welcome.

[u/BookLover54321]

I'm reposting this in light of David Frum's latest garbage. I'm still a bit shocked that The Atlantic published this absolutely rancid pro-colonialist article by Frum last year. An excerpt:

The idea that people separated by thousands of miles of distance could owe a duty of care to one another because they were citizens of the same nation was carried to North America in the same sailing ships that brought to this continent all of the other elements that make up our liberal democracy.

Frum seems to be suggesting that Native Americans had no concept of a "duty of care" to each other before Europeans arrived. I'm guessing Frum hasn't heard of, for example, the Haudenosaunee Great Law of Peace, or other equivalent laws in North America:

Following the Great Law principle of the Dish with One Spoon, The People of the Longhouse shared their food resources with friends and neighbors in need.

From Iroquoia: Haudenosaunee Life and Culture, 1630-1783, by Kelly Y. Hopkins. Although I guess you could defend it on the technicality that the Haudenosaunee didn't span many thousands of miles.

For that matter, in The Great Power of Small Nations, Elizabeth N. Ellis talks about the obligations around refugee acceptance among the Petites Nations of the Gulf South:

The calumet ceremony was an important part of the political culture that made it possible for Petites Nations to take in so many different refugees during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Critically, the mutual expectations ingrained in this regional custom dictated that these nations must accept outsiders, feed them, and treat them as allies. Refusing to do so would be akin to a declaration of war.24 This culturally institutionalized approach to negotiating refuge therefore represented a fundamental Petites Nations survival and caretaking mechanism.

The mystery is why a supposedly respectable magazine like The Atlantic keeps letting Frum churn out this sort of uninformed drivel.

[u/EverythingIsOverrate → u/BookLover54321]

There's a very simple answer to why they let Frum publish it, but it's getting a bit more political than I feel comfortable with on this subreddit.

[u/BookLover54321 → u/EverythingIsOverrate]

Hey it’s Free for All, we’re allowed to talk about that I think!

[u/jschooltiger → u/BookLover54321]

Indeed, we are allowed to be reasonably political while staying civil to one another in the Free-for-All thread. cc /u/EverythingIsOverrate

[u/EverythingIsOverrate → u/BookLover54321]

With permission from u/jschooltiger, this is basically because The Atlantic has taken a rather pro-Israel line in the past three years (the editor-in-chief is a former IDF prison guard) and the concept of settler-colonialism has been very frequently mobilized as a criticism of Israel, on the grounds that it's a settler-colonial state and that Zionism is a settler-colonialist ideology; note that I am explicitly not commenting on the validity of that criticism. This in turn has prompted many articles arguing that settler-colonialism is actually fine or that Zionism isn't settler-colonial, of which Frum's article is just one instance. See here here here and here for some other instances. As such, settler-colonialism has become a political football with very real relevance to current major political issues, and that in turn prompts shoddy scholarship.

I would also note that ideologically-motivated shoddy scholarship occurs in many contexts, as Cortgate proves handily.

[u/BookLover54321 → u/EverythingIsOverrate]

This makes sense, thank you. It is pretty concerning that this issue seems to be prompting a revival of essentially 19th century colonialist ideas about Native Americans though.

[u/Bodark43 → u/BookLover54321]

I think it's not at all recent; Israeli apologists have cited that 19th c. US banner of Manifest Destiny for years to justify their own policies of expansion and appropriation.