Why is it that many contemporary male thinkers, especially men of color, repudiate the imperialist legacy of Columbus but affirm dimensions of that legacy by their refusal to repudiate patriarchy?
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Because there is very little honor left in American life, there is a certain built-in tendency to destroy masculinity in American men.
Men do not learn much from the lessons of history and that is the most important of all the lessons of history.
Gender and race got very entwined in the 19th century, as abolition broke out, and then women wanted the right to speak about it.
Most historians and other writers of what we now consider 'primary sources' simply didn't think about women and their contribution to society. They took it for granted, except when that contribution or its lack directly affected men.
Women know what men have long forgotten. The ultimate economic and spiritual unit of any civilization is still the family.
Both European and American historians have done away with any conceptual limits on what in the past needs and deserves investigating. The result, among other things, has been a flood of works on gender history, black history, and ethnic history of all kinds.
For centuries, the question of men needing to comprehend women simply didn't arise. Men were valued according to how they measured up to the manly virtues.
English history is all about men liking their fathers, and American history is all about men hating their fathers and trying to burn down everything they ever did.
That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.
It is not history which uses men as a means of achieving - as if it were an individual person - its own ends. History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends.