American History

[thanatopsy]

If I were still teaching, and if I were teaching the very bright/gifted/TAG students, this is a book I would use in class to help students ferret out the grains of truth from the unsupported conjecture. It would be a fine way to help students learn to make decision on what they read.


EXCELLENT comment.

[madupont]

thanatopsy,

We just assume that corn went to Europe with the Spaniards because of all those lovely ladies in what used to be Mexico City for instance with the floating gardens where there were vegetables and flowers (now there's an engineering feat for starters but then so were the Hanging gardens of Babylon, an idea which has taken quite a bit of my attention more recently; because the first time that I saw the set up on the roof of the building where my son used to live, I fell out of the hammock. It was just a teensy little bit of an edge garden, too close the edge for me with flowers spilling over the built lengthwise window boxes lining the roof, with a timer set for a watering system to make the concrete back yard attractive when you went up to the roof for your barbecue. Then the nytimes.com showed one in Manhattan that was the full roof space and the apartment dweller built himself a typical back porch painted bright colors of the Victorian/Edwardian period so he could just sit out there in the evening and feel the breeze and look at all the pretty flowers,and he gave quite definite directions in the accompanying article on how to and how not to engineer this thing. I began checking out all the suppliers on the costs involved and what materials are available but, it is definitely a decorative garden because it does not supply the root space for heavy duty vegetables you'd have in a kitchen-garden).

But,everything went back to Spain and Portugal, and on to Italy and Southern France, not only corn, but tomatoes,peppers and by breeding they moved on to other parts of Europe,while in the Netherlands,the glassed over hot-beds-cold-frames were developed and taken to England who made a big thing out of Green-houses, and conservatories with tropical plants.  When I found edible cactus in one corner of my yard in New Jersey and just in front of the fig-tree, I knew a sailor had lived in that Dutch farm house.   

Mel Gibson made a point in Apocalypto in the end scene as the Europeans arrive in their large  galleons, to have Mrs. Mayan, now the mother of two offspring, say to Mr. Mayan, off the cuff I recall the dialog goes something like this: "Look, Jaguar Paw, Butterflies". That is how she perceives the large sails of the vessels, pretty much in the way "junks" were describes with Menzies.  I am not sure with the actress, name was Hernandez,because I don't recall the character's name in the line-up, but she now asks her husband whether they should go greet the people now coming forward in their dinghies with flags,banners,swords, helmets, breast plates, boots, the priest in his vestments with the crucifer to match in his smaller vestments; but Jaguar Paw says the equivalent of, "Not on your life, we are going to our forest."

Now supposedly this was the Yucatan peninsula but they actually shot it in Costa Rica, so I rather think similar events happening in Puerto Rica provided Portugal as much  corn variety, similar to what friends in Wisconsin had in the bag labeled "masa" although they were from Northern Mexico transplanted to Crystal City,Texas.

Funny thing though, in China they still prefer to eat those dinky little miniature ears of corn, you find in some dishes in Chinese restaurants, force of habit because they prefer eating with chop-sticks which they refer to as faster fellows, and have not adapted corn dishes to their diet preferring wheat or rice. They grow feed-corn  because they have added dairy cows to their landscape for over fifty years.  I'm sure both the Spanish and the Portuguese saw the advantage of taking corn back home for similar reason (although) perhaps not right away but eventually.

[weezo]

Maddie,

I think rooftop gardens in NYC are somewhat common, or else we both know people in the same building/s. A friend of mine moved to a co-op in upper east side of Manhattan a few years ago, and told me there was a very lovely roof garden on his building. He also has a balcony where he does some container growing of flowers. When he first moved there, I think he was hoping to get involved with the rooftop garden a bit, but hasn't mentioned it for awhile, so perhaps the attraction wore off. When he lived in Brooklyn, he referred to his garden as the "back forty", although if was probably more like forty feet than 40 acres.

From my readings in the Jamestown Narratives, I surmise that the English called the grain of their Native neighbors "corn", not to distinguish it from wheat, rye or oats, but because it could be ground into a flour and prepared in familiar ways.

I'm not sure why chopsticks could not be used to pick up kernels of sweet corn such that the Chinese would need to use the very small ears. But, those small ears are edible through and through and perhaps they didn't fancy making a pile of corncobs in the outback.

[Bob]

ON CORN:

Corn was developed by the American Indians (Aztecs, I believe) from a grass like plant called Teosinte. It took thousands of years of breeding to get Corn to the size it is today. In its initial phase it was really tiny, much much smaller than those Chineses corn on the cobs you see in their resturaunts. Nobody really knows how the Indians did it...

As to corn in Jamestown....What we know as wheat was known as corn in England--hence, the English Corn Laws had to do with the growing of wheat. I can't recall right now why the colonists chose to call the thing growing on the cob corn, but It'll come to me if I eat some ice cream----so I'm off to get some ice cream. I'll be back later

[Bob]

I'm back--I decided to look it up and I found my answer fast---

 "Note that in British English, the term "corn" means "grain" (the kernel), and implies the primary grain crop of a country, which in England was wheat, whereas maize is the predominant North American meaning of "corn".

My ice cream is beginning to melt--goodnight!!!

[weezo]

Bob,

Hope you had a nice dollop of fresh blueberries and some chocolate syrup on that melting ice cream!

You are probably right about the corn developing with the Aztecs. As I remember from the read of Helen Roundtree, agriculture came somewhat later in Virginia than in southwest areas. Corn was a good crop, but it was suseptable to the droughts in Virginia. There has been one this year, since early July. The corn around where I live looks pretty good, with some brown leaves near the bottom, but tall and setting ears. But, when I drove to the other end of the county last week, I saw that most of the corn fields there were totally brown. On the other hand, deer have been plentiful, coming out into the fields because the woods are a bit bare because of the drought, so the Indians indigenous to this country would have been eating more deer and less corn this winter. I didn't plant corn or beans this year, but we put in some squashes. At the beginning of the drought, the set a few flowers that dropped off without making a fruit. We kept them watered through the drought, and they are just now setting flowers again. I hope they make some squash. Even with watering every other day, we've gotten but one tomato, another may be ready tomorrow, and the peppers are just now setting blooms. I hope it is a late frost this year to let the garden do its thing through the fall months.

In times like this, I think of the Indians and early settlers who could not just go to the grocery store when the garden wasn't producing.

[madupont]

weezo.

Well, that's why I was saying about the French priests...

Lot's of people pulled back from Montreal. It was much too frontier for them, considering how old France was with a somewhat milder climate. So although they lost a great many trees fairly recently in the last decade in France because of cold weather, they sometimes have unbearably hot weather as well; this summer being one of those occasions and I just received some slides yesterday from a friend who got out of town(Paris) and went to the Riviera as far as Monaco.  Looking at about three dozen photos, I finally thought about the landscape itself and then it hit me, we don't have that anymore,(I was going to say,"historically" but that too) it was just such a different culture and I guess that now we are just such a different culture in that we are homogenizing rapidly. I finally realized that what he showed me, inadvertently was, why, yes, there is one place somewhat like that, and that is our West Coast.

But back to those priests, my friend is somewhat one of them or gives the impression that he is well on the way, the religious life, clerical, suits him well. Same with the Montreal priests, they were not much on gardening anymore; once monastic orders  had been but, they came to --not the New World, but the "New France" and they came in pairs or very small groups as missionaries and were not growing enough  to feed themselves.  As usual, in other parts of the continent  and further southward, the policy was to send some military.  I had some sort of distant cousin (in time, for sure) who did not go over to marry one of them but was promised to a fisherman name Olsen, not odd at all since the Normans were descended from what some called Norsemen/Vikings. However....

When she went over in the Nova Scotian territory with that big cold bay, she was widowed in no time, had to come back to Europe while they were having small pox, caught it, had it, and survived. Not exactly Queen Elizabeth, just an ordinary French widow.  When one is there in Canada, you get a false sense of lots of food, excellent meals, eatting on the streets at cafes or just walking along, you can go visit the islands in the St Lawrence and enjoy the maple syrup and maple sugar, etc. but outside of the cities, which have their own poor populations of workers, you discover a bare countryside, with the occasional beautiful sight but people living very poorly and working hard. So that was the problem with the first arrivals, acclimatizing and that involved the agricultural aspects as well, more fishing, more hunting.

I  thought about your question of the corn in China, it took a minute to click but there is a reason you would not believe at first.  Yes, I suppose, I could pick up a kernel of corn easier than a grain of rice, but I do pretty well with that as Asians like to eat sticky rice, not too sticky but it clumps together as it cools and it is only when you put a lot of gravy on it that it swims away from you and then you have to tilt your bowl and use the chop sticks held together to push the rice into your mouth. Here's the catch --

Corn would be a seasonal food to eat fresh, then  you would have to freeze it or can it or mill it into flour to bake with it(or mush with it, as in the polenta recipes or fried corn-meal mush) but...they cook differently than we do, they use a low energy model of sustenance, or an ecological model in which they cooked with stoves that also heated the residence, in fact the first time that I ever was aware of this was in seeing films about Russian life, so that in the northern part of China, they also sit on and sleep on heated platforms running from the cooking stove and they are trying to conserve fuel because of a large population.

This has hardly worked out in the modern era of increased industrialization. They are pollutting as fast as any one but they were trying to sustain fuel. Cooking became a communal convenience; cooking for a large group of people, and in the city this amounted to your being able to come home from work and pick up food on the way home. They brought this to Princeton with them, with the physicists, and I was amazed to see this life-style in operation, where students could drop in to the grocery and pick up convenience food frozen or refrigerated to prepare where they lived, or they could pick up take out dishes from the counter restaurant on the street in front of the grocery.

So they don't do the baking that we do but they make dough and it is filled and steamed,in the North, wheat country,particularly for holidays, or it becomes a thin pancake which is folded, becoming Peking Doily, or it is cut and stacked, filled and fried as with egg roll in a wok. Left over small amounts of rice sit covered to be made into breakfast congee. The South eats rice; the further south you go, the more often the cooking is done outside in a court-yard. Rice can be saved for quite a long time, and the answer came up of course when that hub-bub about the 55 lbs of grits took place in Food Matters. Nobody here thinks of that but we normally did when we learned the Chinese were doing exactly that, storing fifty lbs of rice at a time. When cooking "old" rice, which can be very old, you add a touch of oil.  So every culture has its own  equation.

I haven't compared rice prices in many years but I am certainly not on the grapevine or the network. When buying rice in quantity, you get the lower price of the Chinese market because they distribute food on a network that has evolved over thousands of years, and of course here,hardly over 300 years if that, they hook up to the next link where ever and when ever enough consumers are in the vicinity.

[Dzimas]

Maize apparently existed in Pre-Columbian India, to interpret some of the ancient sculptures:

http://www.econ.ohio-state.edu/jhm/arch/maize.html

But maize in America dates back much further than the Aztecs.  The Anasazi were cultivating maize and beans.

[thanatopsy]

From wikipedia --- origin of maize:


''The domestication of maize is of particular interest to researchers—archaeologists, geneticists, ethnobotanists, geographers, etc. The process is thought by some to have started 7,500 to 12,000 years ago (corrected for solar variations). Recent genetic evidence suggests that maize domestication occurred 9000 years ago in central Mexico, perhaps in the highlands between Oaxaca and Jalisco.[9] The wild teosinte most similar to modern maize grows in the area of the Balsas River. Archaeological remains of early maize cobs, found at Guila Naquitz Cave in the Oaxaca Valley, date back roughly 6,250 years (corrected; 3450 BCE, uncorrected); the oldest cobs from caves near Tehuacan, Puebla, date ca. 2750 BCE. Little change occurred in cob form until ca. 1100 BCE when great changes appeared in cobs from Mexican caves: maize diversity rapidly increased and archaeological teosinte was first deposited.

Perhaps as early as 1500 BCE, maize began to spread widely and rapidly. As it was introduced to new cultures, new uses were developed and new varieties selected to better serve in those preparations. Maize was the staple food, or a major staple, of most the pre-Columbian North American, Mesoamerican, South American, and Caribbean cultures. The Mesoamerican civilization was strengthened upon the field crop of maize; through harvesting it, its religious and spiritual importance and how it impacted their diet. Maize formed the Mesoamerican people’s identity. During the 1st millennium CE (AD), maize cultivation spread from Mexico into the Southwest and a millennium later into Northeast and southeastern Canada, transforming the landscape as Native Americans cleared large forest and grassland areas for the new crop.''


Some of you undoubtedly recall our reading of Charles Mann whose conclusions generally reflected these ideas. 

BTW, Moses, who wrote the beginning of the Old Testament, lived roughly about 1500 BCE which means that maize had been invented long before he was born.

[madupont]

weezo,re:#750

I never met the guy in Manhattan; his idea was covered in The New York Times Magazine sometime about a year ago.

[madupont]

Dzimas,

How could I forget those Hungarian peppers!   Probably from Turkey, but also possibly from India  where the dried peppers continues drying in the sun after it is powdered in heaps and mounds.  Romany showed up in Hungary between the 13th. and 15th.centuries , saying that they had come from India. Indigenous people(s) (notice the plural) tend, since then until now, not to quite believe anything those  new arrivals have said or say.   

My  friend Laksmi who went to India was Austrian/Yugoslavian; and told me that her father wanted to eat goulash everyday. Interestingly, the paprika is stirred quickly in a hot but not overheated pan, before anything else is added, prepared in the usual way that  blended ground spices are stirred  quickly to avoid burning as garam masala for "curry".

[madupont]

Right, we had a couple of those heavily fraught with Germanic undertones but, off hand, I forget now just which ones threw me. They tend to repeat you know.   Of course, after that big of  a sojourn getting out of the way  of return to the Real King's religion, most of the family ended up speaking more than enough German on a regular basis like all the time --then they did French, and had to learn it over again in the next generation or so.

Nevertheless, I got the part about du Ble.

[elportenito]

bob:

"Nobody really knows how the Indians did it..." (how they developed maize)


I'll tell you a secret, I know how they did it: with intelligence.

[elportenito]

bob: And withintelligence they also developed tomatoes out of tiny little nothings, and potatoes out of some little tiny tubers which they saw growing in llama's  manure, etc. Peanuts, pumpkin, beans,etc....and jerky.

[mlewis78]

Hello.  This is Marti just checking in -- haven't been in here for a long while and then I realized that I didn't have a bookmark to the site on my home computer.  I've read the last five pages here and it appears that you are planning to discuss 1421 next?

I was away recently and am just finishing up a 2-1/2 week vacation from work.  I went to Albuquerque for the national flute convention and visited Santa Fe and Taos for a few days before that.  The particularly interesting part to me was visiting some native American pueblos.  There are 23 Indian pueblos in New Mexico and most are in northern NM.  We went to Santo Domingo Pueblo on it's annual feast day where the corn dance was the main attraction, along with many, many vendors selling their jewelry, pottery and other craftwork.

We also went to Santa Clara and Taos Pueblos.  At Taos I was surprised to find a shop of flute player Robert Mirabal.  I met his brother Patrick there and we talked about the flute convention as Robert's and Patrick's band would be performing at the convention and selling their flutes and CDs at the exhibit hall.

I started reading the Harry Potter books with book 1 (Sorcerer's Stone -- Philosopher's Stone in the original UK version.  I bought it two years ago and didn't really expect to become interested in it, but now I'm hooked and have finished the first 4 books and and have started The Order of the Phoenix, which the current H. Potter movie is based on.  I'll be back to reading non-fiction after I finish book 7.  I hope to rejoin you in a month or two.  Has there been a discussion about the Alan Taylor book American Colonies: The Settling of North America yet? 

This ranking by number of posts here is rather silly.  Leave it to Maddie to be a superhero!  Hi Maddie!
Best wishes to you all.