I don't think this is merely repeating itself, I think it's getting really good and interesting posts. If nothing else, I think I found the book to give my sister this Xmas, and she's hard to shop for. Thanks Greg F. Last year she gave me Banvard's Folly, by her friend Paul Collins, which turned out to be one of the most entertaining books I've read in years.

   What I meant to suggest was not that unsupported or a-historical pov's were also valid, but that supportable historical accounts aren't necesarily valid in the way one may want them to be. I was thinking of Karl Popper's writing about historicism, and it's critique of how a thesis, which, if it turns up historical incidents and materials, is then considered proven or borne out, when it only shows that it's more or less fertile. One can come up with odd-ball ideas that history seems to support in this way, my own favorite invention being All history is the clash between the performer-types and the techies, and their respective cultures.

   I made up my mind that the things our guide said were not good things to say--not that this person had an agenda of evil, or meant any ill, but that it's quite loaded, and they should go into it seriously, and deliberately, not so casually and generally. I'm not against controversy in classrooms, but the remarks were pre-emptive and blunt, like when my "social-studies" teacher told us that Indians had no concept of owning land, so you couldn't say it was stolen from them. One shouldn't abuse the hard-to-hold attention of school-kids by casually tossing out half-baked notions like that.

But the thread has turned up stuff that goes beyond my question, and it's good stuff.