Inacurate History (Was Sex, Race, America, and Disney )

[Caius Marcius]

--- In HPFGU-OTChatter at y..., pbnesbit at m... wrote:
> --- In HPFGU-OTChatter at y..., "Ebony Elizabeth Thomas" 
<ebonyink at h...> 
> wrote:
> .  
> 
> I refused to see "Pocahontas" because they got the history wrong.  

A novel which also gets the history wrong - John Barth's 1960 The Sot-
Weed Factor - is nevertheless a must-read: long before the advent of 
PC, it ruthlessly and hilariously skewers every side as an equal-
opportunity offender.  The main character is the poet Ebenezer Cooke 
(an actual historic personage!) who is commisioned to become the Poet 
Laureate of colonial Maryland. On his sojourns through Maryland, he 
comes across fragments of the diary of Sir Henry Burlingame, one of 
John Smith's top aides, who provides us with the *real* scoop of what 
went on between John and the Indian princess (not exactly Disney-
esque in Barth's rendering).

I lived in Maryland for about 10 years - I once had a very enjoyable 
week of retracing the locations of this very precisely geographic 
novel.

   - CMC

  - CMC