John Horse, a Black Seminole warrior who led hundreds in an escape from American bondage in 1837, re-ignited resistance to US Imperialism in 19th century Florida., a photo by Pan-African News Wire File Photos on Flickr.
The myth of Columbus
By Stephanie Adohi on November 21, 2012
Reprinted From Workers World
Based on a talk entitled “On the 520th anniversary of the landing of Columbus: What his legacy means for Indigenous Peoples today” given to a Workers World forum in New York City on Oct. 12. The speaker is a long-time member of WW and is of Cherokee, Huron, and Muskogee descent.
Sisters and brothers, comrades and friends,
Why is there a “holiday” for Columbus? On Oct. 12, 1995, WBAI-FM in New York interviewed progressive Italian-American historian, Jennifer Guglielmo, who stated that Columbus Day was promoted by backers of Italy’s fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini. Italian-American working-class socialists and anarchists fought those fascists in the streets before and during World War II. Nonetheless, Columbus Day became a federal holiday in 1937.
In 1492, Spain was able to complete the Reconquista. The royal couple, Isabella and Ferdinand, had made war to expel “the Moors,” northwestern African Muslims who had ruled much of the Iberian peninsula for almost eight centuries. The newly united Spanish crown wanted new riches, trade and colonies. The conquistadors sailed on their orders, bankrolled by the king and queen.
Christopher Columbus was apparently no Italian. His name was actually Cristóbol Colón. He was a Spanish pirate. The Spanish Queen Isabella would have executed him had she known. There is no evidence he was ever in Genoa, the city he claimed as his city of birth. He read and he wrote a lot. Of his many papers none were written in the dialect spoken in Genoa.
He landed in the Caribbean. He assessed the ready welcome of his friendly hosts. He decided to attack, kill and take power. There are stories of him cutting the arms off of Taíno men to feed to his war dogs. He wrote to the queen immediately to convince her of the idea of making them slaves. He invented the slave trade there:
“They would make good servants. … They are fit to be ordered about and made to work … [and] with fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.”
Most of the slaves Columbus sent to Spain died quickly, and after a few years, Ferdinand and Isabella sent an investigator, Bobadilla, who arrived in Santo Domingo to find men jailed, lined up for hanging as rebels. He ordered Columbus arrested. Columbus’ personal cook Espinoza put the chains on him.
Once the first reports came from Pizarro in Peru and from Cortés in Mexico about the gold and silver that could be plundered, and the slavery, a steady stream of conquistadors moved out from Spain, all bankrolled by the monarchs.
The conquistadors included Cristóbol Colón, Hernán Cortés, Francisco Pizarro, Juan de Oñate, Francisco Vásquez de Coronado, Hernando de Soto and others. From their contemporary descriptions we can characterize them as a lumpen sort of completely out-of-control mercenary force. They were motivated by arrogance, religious superiority and greed.
They used the Requerimiento, a three-paragraph announcement from the Spanish monarch and the Church in Rome. It demanded people submit to these conquistadors as representatives of the Spanish crown, or else knives and guns would be used. The Requerimiento was an excuse for murder, rape, torture and robbery on a level never before seen: enslavement of whole Indigenous nations, many or most worked to death in gold and silver mines, all in the name of the Spanish monarchs and the Catholic Church.
True legacy of the conquistadores
It’s not possible to touch on all of the crimes of all the conquistadors tonight. But it is important to know which ones are most hated still, which ones did the most damage.
Isabella wanted riches and she got wealth beyond all imagining. So did everyone with Francisco Pizarro, butcher of the Incas. Writers describe the Incas in different ways, sometimes as an empire and other times as a socialist or communist society. It is known that Incan civilization grew from ancient farming communities that held the land in common. Incans were observed distributing stored supplies from public warehouses to the sick, elderly, poor, widows, disabled and anyone in need, according to Ronald Wright in “Stolen Continents.” The ruins at Huánuco include 500 such warehouses, measuring over one million cubic feet.
The Incas were highly skilled working with gold, silver and platinum. They used much bronze. There was no source of iron available. They were the world’s finest weavers. They domesticated llamas and alpacas as pack animals, and for wool and meat. They were astute recordkeepers. They made their records using intricate woven fringes of knotted string, called quipus, and they kept their archives in storehouses.
They had advanced base-ten mathematics with zeros and place notation. They had 14,000 miles of paved roads through the Andes Mountains (often stepped for the pack animals). Cusco had a population of 50,000-100,000 and there were many smaller cities and towns.
Pizarro, described by those who knew him as ruthless and devious, tricked the Incas, who had underestimated him based on reports the invaders were lazy robbers. Pizarro and his men attacked and killed 10,000 in an hour and a half. The Incas at court were unarmed for they lacked fear of these men, but they still fought to the last, even as Pizarro’s fighters cut off their hands. Pizarro took Atahualpa, the Incan leader, hostage.
Atahualpa offered the Spanish a room full of gold and two of silver as ransom. Llamas carried gold back from stripped temples and palaces for months. The outside walls of Cusco’s main temple alone held one and a half tons of gold plates.
The entire ransom came to seven tons of gold and 13 of silver, all of it in the form of artwork and jewelry. The total value has been estimated at $280 million, based on $1,749 an ounce.
No king in Europe had ever seen or even heard of anything like this. The conquistadors melted it all down. It took a month at a quarter ton a day.
Pizarro killed Atahualpa anyway. And the Spaniards went on a rampage of plunder for more. In some buildings they found 20-foot planks of silver. They took jewels off mummies. They killed so many people and llamas that the irrigation canals and other public works fell to decay and the llamas were almost exterminated.
Spain and Portugal signed a treaty in 1494 to divide up Africa and the Western Hemisphere. This document gave Portugal part of Brazil and everything to its east.
Some $129 million in gold was shipped to Spain every year. This valuable trans-Atlantic traffic became a target for English, Dutch and French pirates. The British pirate Francis Drake captured $172 million in Spanish gold.
Spain used the gold for a series of wars against France and the Turks, and then in the war against Protestantism. By the time the Spanish Armada, a fleet of warships, was sunk by the British in 1588, the Spanish monarchs had spent the entire fortune, though their programs of colonization and missionaries continued long afterward.
The huge amounts of gold that were stolen did not just fund wars and more conquest expeditions, they changed Europe. The European bourgeoisie, still subordinate to the nobility, had its role in outfitting all of the wars. Huge quantitative change led to qualitative change in the power of the enterprising bourgeoisie and directly led to the rise of capitalism. And colonialism exploded in size and scope in utterly immense robberies of previously unknown rapaciousness.
Conquistadors in the American Southwest
Coronado, known for wandering all over the North American Southwest in search of the seven cities of gold and Quivira, attacked, occupied and burned several pueblos. Less than a third of the original pueblos still exist today. They extended all the way into the Texas Panhandle. If you ever are in Albuquerque and drive through Bernalillo, there are two ruins just west of town which are among those that Coronado personally burnt down.
Oñate, known for working thousands of people to their death in the gold and silver mines of Zacatecas, left Mexico to take over New Mexico. He is hated in New Mexico to this day. He attacked Acoma Pueblo in 1599 when it rose against the settlers.
Oñate’s men killed 800 children, women and men. Oñate ordered every man over 25 to have a foot cut off and sentenced each to 25 years slavery. Every female and male between 12 and 25 years of age got 25 years of slavery. And 60 young girls were sent to service priests in Mexico, never to return.
There were rebellions against Spain and the conquistadors. The biggest rebellion in the Andes/Peru was led by Túpac Amaru II. There are records of the Incas melting gold and pouring it down captured conquistadors’ throats.
The second biggest rebellion was in New Mexico in 1680. Some say it was the Spanish fear of snakes and dolls that led them to burn 1,000-year-old kachina dolls of the pueblos. Others say it was the beating of Popay, who did lead the pueblos in revolt. The Indigenous people burnt out the Spanish and kicked them out for 12 years.
Pedro de Alvarado worked thousands to death in Guatemala in the mines, and hanged any local leaders who tried to protect the people. He enslaved so many, the price of an Indian slave fell to 1/20th the price in Mexico.
Hernando de Soto was Pizarro’s lieutenant. He had grown up killing Indians in Panama in his teens, and killing Indians in Nicaragua in his 20s. His part of Atahualpa’s ransom made him a millionaire in gold. He wanted Florida and got the grand bankroll to do so in Spain. He paid for 600 soldiers, 200 horses, numbers of African and Mexican slaves, war dogs, and several hundred swine (these were war pigs, they actually flushed ambushes and rooted out fields).
De Soto’s expedition left Florida north to the Smokies or Blue Ridge Mountains, then across the Mississippi to Arkansas. From town to town to city they went, following the roads and paths, stealing food, burning storehouses, fields and towns, kidnapping local Indigenous people for enslavement and burning them alive if they made trouble. De Soto cut their hands off if they didn’t lead him to gold. He abducted the woman ruler of the city of Talomeco in the state of Cofitachiqui (no one today knows if it was Creek or Tsalagi) and killed her for her pearl necklace.
The de Soto party recorded events. They saw cities and towns newly abandoned because smallpox was already spreading from Spanish incursions. They were the first and last outsiders to ever see the living Mississippian culture, today called the moundbuilders. Smallpox and the other seven disease vectors living in the guts of de Soto’s unleashed war pigs gone feral, spread disease everywhere through the entire Mississippi Basin and tributary rivers system.
De Soto attacked the original city of Mabile and abducted the leader, a woman. A huge battle was fought and Mabile burnt down. The city of Mobile, Ala., is named after it.
The Mississippian culture fell directly as a result of de Soto’s pigs and diseases. The mounds that remain were actually great earthen pyramids, showing the influence of the Mayans and others. The Mississippian culture depended on corn. They had miles and miles of corn crops.
Maize corn was the first-ever selectively bred food grain in the world. Its scientific history is still being debated, as it is so very different from teosinte, its ancestor. Somehow, Indigenous gardeners had changed it from a thumb-sized nearly inedible seed pod to the many varieties of maize corn being grown in many parts of this hemisphere in 1492. Maize corn was being raised up and down the East Coast, all over the Mississippi River valley, the Southwest and more.
Some 10,000 years ago, in the Chilca Canyon of Peru, the potato was domesticated and cropped. The word used in Spanish, “papas,” is the Incan word. By 1491, thousands of varieties were in existence, with varieties developed for every altitude going down from the high peaks to the valleys. So we have agriculture developing in the Western Hemisphere in the same time frame as Mesopotamia.
The Incans preserved great masses of their papas crops by mashing and freeze drying, which gave them a food store good for ten years in case of a drought. They did all that with wooden tools too.
The stories that Native people saw and smelled these unwashed armed men and thought they were gods is disproven over and over by contradictory accounts. Incas thoroughly investigated the strange men, but made the mistake of underestimating them in their disgust for their personal behavior and filth.
In 1502, Colón accidentally encountered a large seagoing canoe the length of a galley off of Honduras. It was a Mayan crew, and they ordered the Spaniards to get out of the way. It took the conquistadors till 1511 to figure out that the Mayans were 120 miles west. At the first big battle in 1517, Fernando Hernández was crushed by the Mayans at Champotón. By 1519, they began to enslave Africans and bring them to Cuba, where subsequent Spanish excursions into this hemisphere now used some African slaves.
There is a link in all of this with the fight against the racist use of “savage” in anti-Muslim posters on Metropolitan Transit Authority public transport in New York City. This and the word “primitive” have been used endlessly without question for 520 years against the Indigenous people of the world.
The words ‘savage’ and ‘primitive’
Colonialism is savage. Capitalism is savage. Imperialism is savage. And there are other words to use in place of “primitive” in economic and political discussion — “pre-class society,” “early accumulation of capital,” “original communism” — when discussing humanity.
Imagine the continual effect on the consciousness of the use of these two words over the last 200 years. People see it in literature and accept it. People of color see it and resent it. Our youth are affected negatively and so are our social relations with people outside our communities.
The truth is that the term “hunter-gatherer” is generally wrong in the same regard. It might be accurate for that period when people around the world were surviving the Ice Ages, but not since then. It’s another way of saying “primitive.” All of humanity is adaptable and creative in learning to use the resources available in a given environment. These societies were gardening.
At some time after the last Ice Age in Asia, and later in Europe, domestication of livestock animals developed. Great varieties of plant foods were being developed in the Western Hemisphere.
In 1491, what was actually going on across Great Turtle Island (North America), and in the Land of the Condor (South America), was a whole hell of a lot of gardening, growing of crops, even in the forests. Over one half of all the food crops in the world by numbers of species and by volume and weight are Indigenous to this hemisphere, and were all domesticated by Indigenous people, from popcorn to pumpkins.
Tomatoes, squashes, beans, maize corn, berries, various nuts, potatoes, chocolate, pumpkins, pineapples, cassava, various palm oils, avocados, papaya, quinoa, amaranth, acai — too many others to name them all here — and all the chiles taken around the world by the Spaniards and mistakenly named “peppers” by Columbus himself.
What is primitive about the cultivation of so many diverse food crops?
What is primitive about the Mayan and Incan development of the concept of zero? Or of the science of astronomy developed by all the ancient peoples of the world?
Between 3200 and 2500 BCE, large-scale public buildings were erected in at least seven places on the Peruvian coast. The only other urban center then was Sumer on the Tigris-Euphrates.
And then there is the fact that across this continent, people from small villages to cities lived communally. There were 500 nations in what is now the United States alone and most of them still had a matrilineal structure. There is nothing primitive about a society which is so equal and free yet completely functional on the basis of no classes at all. Native American women today often use the term matrilineal because it does not imply any hierarchy.
There are so many highly different and complex traditions of music, storytelling, dance and theater and art forms to be found in our history as well, and some still surviving.
In Amazonia’s forests, where people today can walk and pick fruit to eat, scientists tell us these are old orchards. There were 138 crops grown in Amazonia, half of them trees, lots of palm oils, pineapples, papayas, cassava or manioc, calabash, acai and more.
There are also huge tracts of artificially built-up soil. The Amazon basin has acidic red soil, bad for growing. By an unknown process, people who lived there created two types of very dark nutritious — terra preta — soil for their crops; they used charcoal, pottery and probably animal and fish remains, which provided all the needed nutrients for plants (phosphorus, calcium, sulfur, charcoal and organic matter).
“The Amazon was being terraformed before 1492,” wrote Charles Mann in his book, “1491. ” Conservative estimates put the extent at a few thousand square miles at 0.1 to 0.3 percent of the Basin, which is about equal to the size of the cropped area the Mayans had. Others estimate up to 10 percent, which would be the size of France.
In original communism or communalism, the family is healthy and vibrant. It is called the extended family. This form provides all the support needed for the individual, for the children. Everyone knows they belong. Unrelated people are adopted in. There is no isolation of the self, no alienation from society, as seen today to the detriment of many youth. By contrast, the nuclear family is just a little piece of that extended family, cut off and lacking support.
The clash of cultures began with the invasion of the Spanish conquistadors. It continued with the later European invasions — the English and the French, the Russians on the West Coast.
Yet the cultural clash had many positive effects on the settlers, some of which enabled them to survive here. These include:
• The adoption of nearly all of our Indigenous food crops.
• The gender equality of the women was not understood or accepted by the Europeans, who had been living under feudalism for hundreds of years. The National Women’s History Project states that many early women’s rights leaders were inspired by what they call the Seneca’s “matriarchal society.”
• Ben Franklin noted the impact of the Iroquois Law of Peace on the U.S. Constitution.
• Bathing was a daily practice. The British and French are often noted as amazed as many of them had never had a bath.
• Many ideas in fashion too numerous to even go into.
The role of smallpox and communicable disease
Up until 1492, there was very little contact between the hemispheres. No one here had any immunity to all the European and Asian diseases. These are diseases that jumped species from domesticated animals or rats. Half the Aztecs, the Incas and the Mayas died before the fighting when these societies were overthrown. It was more severe than the Black Death was in Europe and it killed leaders, advisers, generals and elders.
Cortés lost the first assault on Tenochtitlán, the Aztec capital. Then smallpox spread for 60 days, leaving everyone too sick to even move. When it began to diminish, Cortés had returned.
Disease traveled out from everywhere the Spanish and later invading forces landed, and traveled to every corner of the hemisphere. It is now estimated that in 1491 some 112 million people lived in this hemisphere. The Mexican plateau alone held 25.2 million people, based on colonial records.
The diseases of smallpox, flu, measles and others killed 80 to 100 million people in 100 years. It works out to 20 percent of the world’s population at that time, which by United Nations figures was 500 million in 1600. The work done by progressive scientists in the 1950s and 1960s to achieve this realistic figure is still under attack by racists in their fields.
In 1542, Bartolomé de las Casas [friar and Spanish historian] described “a beehive of people” and “the greater part of the entire human race in these countries.” By 1562, he estimated there had been 40 million deaths due to disease. By 1600, some 20 waves of pestilence had swept the two continents. Less than one in ten survived. About 90 million died. That would be about the equivalent of a billion deaths today.
By the time the English and the French arrived in this hemisphere, the waves of smallpox epidemics had left numerous villages of the dead, which the settlers found here on the Atlantic seacoast and across the lands. Sometimes they moved into the empty villages, as the Pilgrims did.
Decimated Indigenous nations at that point faced waves of settlers anxious and mean with greed to steal the land and create wealth. The perspective of the settlers and their view of the land, the environment itself, was totally alien to the Indigenous peoples. The settlers saw it as something to be used and abused to make money, as opposed to being stewarded, cared for, to encourage the wealth of variety of resources available previously.
The Indigenous nations fought back, but fighting came long after the waves of death had shifted the balance of forces to the invaders.
In 1776, most of the fighting was not against the British. Over 100 Cherokee villages were razed to the ground and all the crops destroyed, so that the settlers could steal huge tracts of territory in Virginia and the South. The whole Cherokee nation was refuged and went into the mountains with only the shirts on their backs in the winter.
Do you know that Tecumseh and a white general are currently honored with stamps in Canada in tribute to Tecumseh’s saving Canada from a U.S. takeover?
As all of us know, Marx and Engels were very excited to read the work of Lewis Henry Morgan, who was the first to write of the matrilineal societies and the extended families, based on the Haudenosaunee. But most do not know how he met Tonawanda Seneca Ely Parker when they both worked as bookshop clerks. Morgan learned everything he knew from Parker, who later was General Ulysses Grant’s right-hand man, the military secretary who took the surrender at Appomattox in the U. S. Civil War.
In the 19th century, the U. S. declared it was “manifest destiny” to take the West. The Trail of Tears, the California Gold Rush, the Plains Wars — all these wars and atrocities lead up to the U. S. becoming imperialist when it finally took on Spain in 1898, seizing Puerto Rico, Cuba and the Philippines.
In 1891, Congress passed the Dawes Act to break up the communally owned lands of the reservations, and mandated individual ownership, in plots small enough to leave a lot of land open for the Sooners [settlers who seized “unassigned lands” in the Midwest], plots too small to be viable for communal use. Ironically, only the pueblos were protected, given legal status by the Spanish land grants. The 1898 Curtis Act dissolved tribal governments and courts.
There are many undocumented Indigenous people, including full bloods in Oklahoma, who are unable to be members of their nations now as their ancestors had refused to get on the rolls. Later, their families did not get the allotments of land.
The resistance continues
During World War I, when Eugene Debs was in jail under the Palmer Raids, the biggest rebellion against the fratricidal imperialist war this side of the Atlantic was in Oklahoma. It was called the Green Corn Rebellion. In 1917, Indigenous, Black and white farmers and workers fought and were suppressed by the National Guard.
Today, capitalist society portrays all Indigenous people as either completely exterminated — and their supposed attire free to be used as Halloween costumes — or only noted if a person fits the popular stereotype from Hollywood.
There are so many local struggles we never hear about. There are 500 nations, each with its own history.
This is still Indian land. The struggle continues. This is the significance of Day of Mourning. If you have never gone to Day of Mourning, get on the bus and come this year!
You will hear from Leonard Peltier, who sends his support from prison in Florida. You will hear about struggles across Great Turtle Island and how Indigenous people view the current U. S. wars.
We salute Osceola, leader of the Seminole nation, the Creek nation that adopted runaway slaves in Florida and who never surrendered. We look to the Green Corn Rebellion for our inspiration in the struggle. We salute the United American Indians of New England, whose slogan is: “We are not vanishing, we are not conquered, we are as strong as ever. ”
Day of Mourning
We are building for the 2012 Day of Mourning starting tonight, and this meeting will also be a fundraiser for the New York bus. I was able to get some books donated to raise money for the bus, from East Bay, California, poet John Curl, specifically, “Columbus in the Bay of Pigs,” about the nightmare for the Taíno people following the landing of the first conquistadors in what is now Cuba, based on the records kept of those expeditions.
This pamphlet was published in 1992 in the San Francisco Bay Area in support of the struggle against the Columbus holiday. Please get a copy and make a donation toward the bus for Day of Mourning.
My professor, Betty Parent, one of the first professors of Ethnic Studies in the U.S., and one of the founding faculty for San Francisco State American Indian Studies, traveled with other Alaskan Athabascan language speakers to Soviet Siberia. They found their “distant cousins” there, other Athabascan language speakers. All had materials, books, and college in their own language. We never had that here.
Since the struggle for Ethnic Studies began, more authors are also in print today representing the oppressed nations, including Indigenous authors.
We do know more now than we did 30 years ago about what happened. Also, there are many progressive scientists and social scientists, contemporaries of or following in the popular shoes of Carl Sagan and Howard Zinn, who have brought new information and resulting new analyses to public view.
For instance, the Siriono people in Bolivia, mistakenly seen as paleolithic holdouts by Allen Holmberg in “Nomads of the Longbow,” were actually the remnants of their nation, who fled a 95-percent die-off from smallpox, flu and enforced enslavement to white cattle ranchers. That was the reason they were impoverished in the forest.
We are dialectical materialists. We welcome the new information, and we make our own analyses as well. And we take it further.


Classical Drama and Society
SECTION 4: ROMAN DRAMA
Chapter 14: Roman Comedy, Part 1 (Plautus)
I. Introduction: Early Roman Literary Drama (derived from the Greeks)
The turning point in Roman drama came in 240 BCE, when a Greek-speaking slave living in Rome, Livius Andronicus, translated Homer's Odyssey into Latin. As it turned out, this was a watershed experience that inaugurated the Romans into a century-long fascination with Hellenic culture. In more ways than one, that moment in history constitutes the inception of Latin literature. But who was this Livius Andronicus and why were his adaptations of Greek literature so significant in the evolution of Roman civilization?
A freed slave, we are told, Livius Andronicus served in the house of the Livii, a noble family of Rome, from whom he took his name. As such, he probably came to Rome when he was still a child and, no doubt, grew up bilingual, putting him in an excellent position to bridge Greek and Latin civilization. Besides The Odyssey, his adaptations included several Greek tragedies, mostly from originals by Sophocles and Euripides (Ajax, Andromeda, Danae, Tereus), and also comedies adapted from unknown sources (Gladiolus, Ludius).
It's a fair question to ask why he did not write his own original works—indeed, the same could be posed for every Roman playwright whose works survive—and the answer must be that he considered it wasted effort to till a field when the world doled out free grain. In other words, why make a play when you can steal one? It was an age when copyright did not yet exist and it was considered neither illegal nor immoral, or even inadvisable, to adapt another's work.
A more compelling question concerning the originality of Roman drama revolves around why the Roman public sought out Greek drama so avidly. The answer to that riddle lies, no doubt, in the nature of Greek drama itself. The complex but coherent plots of Greek tragedy and comedy had no parallel in this age. For much the same reason, the cinema of a few nations today commands most of the world's attention and, like Greek drama in antiquity, has attracted a large viewership outside its native land.
But plays written for the amusement of Athenians did not necessarily carry over to other countries and cultures wholesale. Filled as Greek comedies were with local references and all sorts of Hellenisms, many of them proved incomprehensible, and occasionally reprehensible, to other peoples. Thus, these plays had to undergo more than translation to make them workable in other venues. They required adaptation, sometimes quite a bit, and in the process Roman playwrights re-conceived Greek drama, whether they intended to or not—odds are, they did—creating along the way some of the most effective multicultural efforts ever produced on the stage.
That Roman Comedy has survived across time to our day is really no surprise, then. It was, by definition and from the very outset, a multicultural form of drama designed to blend different social contexts, in a way the Greek originals on which it was based were not. Thus, Plautus' work has appeared on the modern Broadway stage—for instance, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, a musical adapted from his plays—where Menander's comedies for all their subtle virtues, brilliant characterization and prescient humanity never have.
An increasing demand for drama after 240 BCE opened the way for new opportunities to present drama in Rome. Livius Andronicus had premiered his work at the central Roman festival, the Ludi Romani ("the Roman games"), but soon other festivals joined the theatre fray: the ludi Plebeii ("the Plebeians' games"), the ludi Apolinares (those in honor of Apollo), the ludi Megalenses (in honor of the Asian goddess Cybele), and others. The funerals of important Romans also offered opportunities for Rome's best families to make a show of public benefaction in the form of sponsoring free entertainment for all. Thus, many doors in and around the city opened to drama, encouraging prospective playwright-adapters.
Among the first and most successful of those early Latin dramatists was Gnaeus Naevius whose career spanned several decades (ca. 235-204 BCE). A native Roman and a citizen, he adapted Greek tragedies, mostly Euripides' (Hector, Iphigenia, The Trojan Horse), and also comedies, especially Menander's (Kolax), blending with great skill Hellenic and native Italian elements to suit his audience's taste. If not the originator of Roman drama, he was, without doubt, its first major star.
Naevius is also remembered for several bold developments, for instance, having his "Greek" characters make obvious references to current Italian life, even using the stage at times as a soapbox for airing the playwright's views on contemporary politics and society. Short of a parabasis—but not by much!—these moments earned him many important enemies and later sources recall his entanglements with powerful Romans, one of which encounters is said to have landed him in jail. Unfortunately, very little of his work survives so we cannot judge any of this for ourselves, but in terms of theatre history, it is clear that Naevius played an important role in accelerating the "Romanization" of Greek drama, a path that would eventually lead Roman literature to new and original heights.
While others composed and produced comedies in this incipient phase of "literary drama"—among them the important early Roman poet Ennius—they all pale by comparison to the first truly great theatrical voice from Rome, Plautus, who is pre-eminent in many ways: he is the earliest Roman dramatist whose work survives whole; he is, in fact, the earliest Roman author in any genre who has a work preserved entire; and he is the first known professional playwright in Western Civilization. That is, he's the first theatre practitioner we know of whose next play and next meal were intimately connected, what would become an enduring tradition carried on by the likes of Shakespeare, Molière and O'Neill. His "professional" status shows in his sturdy, practicable comedy, drama which has clearly been tested and proven on the Roman stage and, from there, virtually every type of performance space imaginable. Indeed, it takes a real gift to make Plautus' comedy not work on the stage.
II. Plautus (ca. 254-184 BCE)
The full name, or so we are told, of the Roman playwright popularly known as Plautus is Titus Maccius Plautus, but there is much to make us suspect this was not his real name. For one, his own plays never refer to him by this three-word name, only parts of it: Titus Maccius, Maccus, or just Plautus. For another, this sort of tripartite name was a way of denoting Roman aristocrats, wherein each part of the name designated particular information—the first name (praenomen) was the name given a nobleman within his immediate family, the second name (nomen) denoted his gens or the larger family group he belonged to, and the third (cognomen) his clan or branch within that gens—but it is highly unlikely Plautus was born into the upper classes, at least, to judge from his dramas and what little we are told about his life. (note) Why, then, does he come down to us with such a noble-sounding name?
The names themselves are odd—there is, for instance, no known Maccius clan of the Plautus family—instead, all three appear to be jokes mocking this complex, aristocratic nomenclature. To wit, Titus is slang in Latin for "penis," Maccius can be translated as "son of Maccus (the clown of Atellan farce)" and Plautus has a number of possible associations, most likely of which is "flat-footed" referring to a type of mime actor. Thus, the name says in Roman terms, "Titus belonging to the Flatfoot clan of the Maccus family" or, expressed in modern equivalents, "Dick Bozo Tapdancer."
Thus, it seems safe to say this was not the playwright's birth-name but a stage name made up for comic purposes. And it conforms with other data ascertainable about Plautus from his drama: his taste for puns and broad comedy, his love of song and dance, his mockery of the upper classes and his strong ties to Atellan farce—he may even have been trained as a performer in that genre. Even if this humorous designation does not stem from Plautus himself, someone who knew his work intimately must have concocted it, which makes it as good as true.
What little else we are told about Plautus' life is probably later fabrication. That he was supposedly a freed slave who lost several fortunes and had to work in the mills is, no doubt, biographical detail invented out of his own comedies where slaves often win and lose large sums of money and fear the threat of being sent to labor camps. This fiction closely resembles the false information we receive about Euripides—that his home life was as troubled as that of his characters—just another tabloid tale abstracted at some later date from the playwright's drama in the absence of valid historical data.
About the only fact we can be certain of concerning Plautus as a person is that he was a highly successful, comic playwright in late third-century and early second-century Rome. And because, as noted above, Plautus is also the first Roman author belonging to any genre whose work survives entire, he is a valuable source of not just theatre history, but also the linguistic and cultural history of Rome. This sort of primogeniture, no doubt, played a large role in the later preservation of his comedy which grammarians valued for its use of peculiar and archaic Latin vocabulary, just as much as Roman audiences loved Plautus' rollicking, lively humor. In this respect as well as his earthy humor, he resembles Aristophanes more than Menander or any of the New Comedy poets whose plays he hammered into Latin.
A. Plautine Comedy
Plautus' comedies revolve mostly around daily life and average people, superficially the stuff of Greek New Comedy as opposed to the politically oriented Old Comedy of the Classical Age or the spoofs of tragedy popular in post-classical Middle Comedy. Plautus, however, generates humor in a different way from Menandrean comedy. Often extreme personality types set in outlandish situations, Plautine characters as a group recall Aristophanes' creations more than Menander's. Indeed, devious pimps, mercenary prostitutes, lustful young men, lustful old men, tortured mothers and torturing wives and, most of all, crafty slaves who delight in deception populate Plautus' plays.
This feast of broad stock types is a far cry from Menander's subtly shaded characters, and in a way, Plautus's comedy rewinds the evolutionary clock and returns Menander's characters to the caricatures from which they arose. Lest, however, this be seen as some sort of step backwards toward more "primitive" comedy, he did it all to excellent effect. Plautus's sense of comic timing, exactly how far to take a joke or run a scene, is unsurpassed in Western drama, even by Shakespeare, all of which presupposes a shrewd understanding of his audience's needs, intelligence and the reason they are sitting in the theatre at all.
As a result, Plautus' plays may not always be great art, nor do they strive at every moment to educate or improve the audience or advance the technology of theatre, but Plautus' comedies are invariably and without exception entertaining. To the extent, then, that effective comic drama entails art or education or technological advancement, Plautus can be all those things, so long as the final product works on stage and people will pay to see it. The fact is, his comedies continue to be performed with great success today—they were among the first ancient plays produced on stage in the Renaissance, the dawn of the modern age—and even such crusty curmudgeons as the Christian fathers saw worth in his drama. St. Jerome, in particular, seems to have been quite fond of Plautus, at least to judge from how often he quotes Plautine comedy, all of which attests to this playwright's astute and practical assessment of what a general viewership seeks from comic drama: wit and diversion, spiced with sage observation of human life.
Indeed, what audiences really want is a paradox, a stark enigma Plautus understood as well as anyone ever has. While many viewers announce in public that they want to learn from plays or see goodness and morality triumph, all too often what they actually pay for are flashy, vapid, sensual, amoral spectacles. At the same time, if there is nothing to be gained intellectually or esthetically from a play, their attention quickly turns to fresher, slicker, more novel nonsense and they tend not to come back a second time or send those friends of theirs who own wallets. Plautus' drama shows that he understood this conundrum quite well, and his finest talent is, no doubt, his ability to walk the fine line between fine art and a fine time.
This raises, then, a question that lies at the very heart of studies in Roman Comedy: how did Plautus create theatre so effective in such a place and time? While his cultural situation may look like a disadvantage—especially in comparison to the erudite and drama-mad society that for centuries packed the Theatre of Dionysus in Athens—there is much to say that Plautus' Rome was actually a fertile field for his art. The absence, for instance, of a commanding native tradition of theatre in late third-century Rome gave him carte blanche to create plays in a manner that suited his talent. He could follow his instincts and write with a freedom Menander never had nor even Euripides, a parrhesia ("freedom of speech") , in fact, no Greek playwright had ever had, at least not since Aeschylus' day.
Furthermore, he had an eager audience ready to explore the stage and vast dramatic wealth to draw upon. Far from a poor "niche" for theatre, when seen this way, the Roman world of Plautus' day had everything going for it. He could pull what he wanted from Atellan farce, with which he was clearly familiar, to judge from his stage-name. What's more, he could siphon off ideas at will from the great, untapped reservoir of Greek comic drama. Thus, from one perspective, his plays represent an inspired blend of native Italian drama and Hellenistic comedy, the product of lathering a bawdy slapstick tone over the well-oiled machinery of Menandrean plots. To have seen and utilized the opportunities for making effective comedy in such a situation, that is surely Plautus' finest stroke of genius.
B. The Question of Greek Originals
Another question at the heart of Plautine studies is one that has predominated scholarship for well over a century. In what way and to what extent did Plautus adapt the works of Greek New Comedy, often called "Greek originals"? That is, in adapting Menander or any Greek playwright, how—and how much—did he change the language, tone and plot of his model?
This question has long been a matter of speculation, because the loss of almost all Hellenistic drama has left theatre historians with no Greek originals by which to make comparison. While that situation has not changed much of late—even if we now have slightly better insight into the situation (see below, Bacchides)—a few things are clear about the changes he made as he re-sculpted Greek drama for the Roman theatre. For instance, Plautus' comedies are essentially "musicals" inasmuch as they have songs, discernable from the type of meter in which the text is disposed. That is, where Greek New Comedies typically quarantine lyric passages off in embolima (the musical interludes separating acts), Plautus' characters regularly burst into song—and perhaps also dance—during the course of the drama. As one scholar has noted, he turned "Menandrean Pygmalions into Roman My Fair Ladys."
Thus, Plautus romanized his Greek originals to that extent at least. An important corollary here is the question of which Greek author's work underlies which of Plautus' plays. No doubt, the methods he used in adapting Greek originals were bound in some way to—or to some extent must have varied in accordance with—the mode and style of the particular model he was adapting. In other words, a quiet Menandrean original surely called for a different method of adaptation from that required by a Middle Comedy send-up of myth or a Diphilean "knockabout" farce. That makes knowing who the original authors are central in assessing Plautus' craftsmanship and place in theatre history.
And we know who some of the authors of these "Greek originals" are. For just under half of Plautus' surviving plays, they are named in the Roman text or can be deduced from quotations outside the play, and as far as we can tell, all of them turn out to be playwrights of Greek New Comedy, none from the preceding periods of Middle or Old Comedy. (note) To be precise, Plautus based four of his plays on Menander (Aulularia, Bacchides, Cistellaria, Stichus), two on Diphilus (Casina, Rudens), and two on Philemon (Mercator, Trinummus). (note). Moreover, the different natures of these Romanized re-creations of Hellenistic drama confirm the supposition that Plautus did, indeed, have to modulate his method of adaptation to suit the varying styles of Greek comic playwrights.
All in all, the situation recalls the works of Shakespeare who also "borrowed" plots from others' work, nor are the reasons that both he and his Roman forebears did not forge entirely new works hard to understand. For one, they could—the Greek plays were there for the taking—so, following in Livius Andronicus' footsteps, Plautus opted to adapt Greek originals rather than construct his own plays from whole cloth. Moreover, the long, complex but coherent plots of New Comedy, a much more difficult thing to fabricate than is often assumed, must have been quite attractive for both playwright and audience in the day.
Some support for this notion is found in the term saturae ("medleys"; singular satura), which was used after the inception of the literary drama (ca. 240 BCE) to refer to the older, native Italian forms of entertainment, the Atellan farce and phlyax plays of the days before the invasion of Hellenic arts. The designation satura argues that the coherent but complex nature of the Greek plots struck later Romans as the major difference between Greek drama and the more episodic, indigenous Roman fare. That is, the scenes in Greek comedy were clearly "linked," while those of early Roman drama looked more like a "medley" of disjointed actions, à la Old Comedy perhaps.
All in all, why Plautus adapted Greek comedy is really not the question but how, and about that little of substance can be said as long as we do not have access to the Greek originals that lie behind Plautus' plays. In other words, we can go only so far without having more Menander to compare to the Plautus we can see for ourselves and from that assess how the Roman used his Greek prototypes. Unfortunately, however, those Hellenistic originals have for the most part been lost—that is, until recently.
To our great good luck, that situation changed for the better in the 1960's, when a Greek papyrus emerged from the sands of Egypt, badly damaged but with a hundred lines or so of Menander's Dis Exapaton ("The Double-Deceiver"), the Greek original of Plautus' Bacchides ("Two Bacchises"). While far from Menander's entire play, the Dis Exapaton fragment, as it has come to be called, still sheds new and important light on how Plautus adapted his Greek models. Indeed, for the first time in the modern age, we can survey several scenes and see what Plautus was looking at when he wrote the script of one of his plays. This allows us to measure to some extent whether or not his work was primarily Roman or Greek. And the answer to that question is . . . "Yes!"
That is, "It is and it isn't." For one, Plautus is clearly following Menander's plot—if he were not, how could we even know that a patchy, gap-ridden text torn out of the middle of a Menandrean play constitutes a piece of the Greek original on which Plautus based his Bacchides?—but the Roman is also moving very freely about within the general parameters defined by Menander's comedy. For instance, at the same time that Plautus translates some of Menander's dialogue almost verbatim and even retains the Greek name of one of Menander's characters (Lydos/Lydus), he also removes a pair of scenes which do not interest him—two rather dry, father-son tête-à-têtes typical of Menander's ethical approach to comedy—in other words, not funny scenes and, more important to Plautus' way of thinking, not even potentially funny scenes. In sum, the Roman can be a literal translator or a free adapter, as suits his mood and mode and muse.
Side-by-side analysis of comparable speeches from the plays shows well the nature of Plautus' adaptable style of adaptation. In the Greek play, a young man named Sostratos has uncovered what he thinks is a secret love affair between his girlfriend Chrysis and his best friend Moschos. In a fit of impulsive anger at their purported infidelity, he has returned to his father the money their slave Syros swindled from the old man so that Sostratos could give it to Chrysis. But the discovery of her purported liaison with Moschos has rattled Sostratos terribly and, not knowing whom to trust—or blame!—he soliloquizes:
And now I think I'll go see my fine-and-noble
Lover-girl, and happily, too, since I'm empty-handed,
So let her sweet-talk me, in hopes of getting it—"On the spot!"
That's what she's saying to herself—what I've got, the money:
(imitating Chrysis) "I know he's got it, heavens above, such a gentleman!
No one more so! He deserves me a girl like me."
She's certainly shown herself, by her profit margin,
That she's the sort I used to think she was. Poor fellow—
Moschos, I mean. I feel sorry for him. And I'm mad at him,
But he's not the one I blame for what's happened,
This reckless behavior. She is, the come-on queen
Of all time—that's her.
Here is the equivalent soliloquy delivered by Sostratos' counterpart in Plautus who renamed the character Mnesilochus. The situation in the Roman play is also slightly different. It comes at a point where Mnesilochus has not yet given the money swindled by his slave Chrysalus, the counterpart of Menander's Syros, back to his father.
It is quite unclear which of them I should believe is
Unfriendlier, my friend or my girlfriend Bacchis.
She chose him over me? Let her have him. Perfect!
Well, she did it, by god, and I'll tell you who'll pay for it, too—me! (note)
For, as any god in heaven is my witness,
There'll never be another woman that I—love as much as her.
That's right. I'll show her! She won't say she got the last laugh on me!
I'll go home right now and give her a piece of my—father's property.
Yes, that's what I'll give her. My revenge will be so complete.
I'll tell you who will end up begging—my father, that's who!
But am I really thinking in my right mind,
I who go on this way about what's going to happen here?
I'm in love, god knows, I know, who doesn't know?
But before she ever gets a feather richer
At my expense—a fiber of a feather filament!—
I'd rather go begging from beggars!
She won't laugh at me, by god, not in this life.
I've decided to give my father back the money, all of it.
So, she can coax and wheedle me empty-handed, broke,
When it makes no difference what she says,
Like talking tales to a dead man at his tomb.
In general, the Dis Exapaton fragment shows what many had long suspected, that Plautus' comedies made for livelier, more humorous and robust comic drama than their Greek models, especially Menander's. At the same time, however, the Plautine situation is less realistic than its parallel Menandrean milieu, with characters more exaggerated in their responses to the stage action and everything just generally less "logical." Clearly, making each individual moment in the play work as comedy mattered more to the Roman than the accumulation of situations carefully laid out across the smooth convolutions of a well-crafted plot, Menander's most outstanding characteristic as a playwright. All in all, this is exactly what one would expect of Plautus, a translator-cum-adapter whose principal concern is the word and the joke, and who never devised nor took pride in the superstructure of a play.
But it's important to stress that this doesn't make Plautus' efforts misguided or in any way a lesser art than Menander's, the way scholars often saw the situation a century or so ago. The two playwrights simply wrote from different outlooks on life, for different types of theatre and, most important, to a different community of viewers. Neither is intrinsically better than the other; rather, both are well-suited to their own worlds. And it is to our great fortune that both are at work in Roman Comedy, because with Menander's genius at plot and character development informing Plautus' mastery of comic timing and language, the two amount to one supreme dramatist, the Gilbert-and-Sullivan of antiquity and, without doubt, one of the best and most intriguing pair of stage collaborators never to have met!
But unlike a Rodgers and Hammerstein, if Plautus' and Menander's lives had not been separated by a century, it seems improbable they would ever have actually collaborated! With styles so different, born of worlds so far apart, it is unlikely they could have suffered each other's presence long enough to finish one scene together, much less an entire play. Yet rising above their personal differences and cultural discrepancies, their collective effort, though it comes down to us under only Plautus' name, is, in fact, a bridge between civilizations that represents the early stages of an even grander partnership, Greco-Roman culture. The multiculturalism inherent in their drama is a model for the excellence that this sort of international synergy can produce.
|Terms, Places, People and Things to Know
Livius Andronicus (240 BCE)
Dis Exapaton (Sostratos)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.


“Writing began around 3200 b.c.
“The earliest uses of writing were list-making and account-keeping.
In 450 b.c., Bacchylides wrote, "One author pilfers the best of another and calls it tradition."
In the second century b.c., Terence said, "There's nothing to say that hasn't been said before."
“Storytelling can be traced back to Hindu sacred writings, known as the Vedas, from around 1400 b.c.
Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, c. 800 b.c., are epics told in verse, not novels, but nonetheless stories.
“The aphorism is one of the earliest literary formsthe residue of complex thoughts filtered down to a single metaphor. By the second millennium b.c., in Sumer, aphorisms appeared together in anthologies, collections of sayings that were copied for noblemen, priests, and kings. These lists were then catalogued by theme: "Honesty," "Friendship," "Death." When read together, these collections of sayings could be said to make a general argument on their common themes, or at least shed some light somewhere, or maybe simply obsess about a topic until a little dent has been made in the huge idea they all pondered. "Love." Via editing and collage, the form germinated into longer, more complex, more sustained, and more sophisticated essayings. The Hebrew wisdom of Ecclesiastes is essentially a collection of aphorisms, as are Confucius's religious musings and Heraclitus's fragments. These extended aphorisms eventually crossed the border into essay: the diaries of Sei Shônagon, Anne Bradstreet's letters, Kafka's notebooks, Pound's criticism.
The earliest manuscript of the Old Testament dates to 150 b.c. Parts of the Bible incorporate "real things" into the text. The laws that have come to make up Mosaic Law, for instance, were undoubtedly real laws before they became canonical. There are bits of song and folk poetry scattered throughout the Old Testament that seem to have had a life independent of scripture. The Samson stories were probably folktales that the Judges storyteller worked into his thesis.
It is out of the madness of God, in the Old Testament, that there emerges what we, now, would recognize as the "real;" his perceived insanity is its very precondition.
“The New Testament renders, sometimes artistically and often from competing points of view, events that supposedly really happened. The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were written 40 to 110 years after the events in question.
In his preface to The History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides acknowledges that he "found it impossible to remember the exact wording of speeches. Hence I have made each orator speak as, in my opinion, he would have done in the circumstances, but keeping as close as I could to the train of thought that guided his actual speech."
“Plutarch sometimes bulleted his essays with as many as a hundred numbered sections, eschewing narrative completely and simply listing. His essay "Sayings by Spartan Women" itemizes quotations from unknown Spartan mothers, wives, daughters, and widows on a variety of topics without any transitional exposition or interpretation, or any suggestion whatsoever as to how we might read the text or even, for that matter, why.
“In antiquity, the most common Latin term for the essay was experior, meaning "to try, test, experience, prove."
The etymology of fiction is from fingere (participle fictum), meaning "to shape, fashion, form, or mold." Any verbal account is a fashioning and shaping of events.
“Ancient novels were either fantastic—Lucian's The Golden Ass tells of a man who turns into a donkey and back into a man—or implausible romantic adventures, such as Chariton's Chaereas and Callirhoe.
“St. Augustine's Confessions, written in the fourth century, tells his life through the prism of his newfound faith, reflecting on his sins, begging forgiveness from God. For centuries, the memoir was, by definition, apologia pro vita sua: prayerful entreaty and inventory of sins. (During the Renaissance, a hybrid memoir—with a more nuanced relation to the divine—emerged: Montaigne's Essays, Pascal's Pensées, Rousseau's Confessions. Memoir wasn't anymore necessarily what one should know but what one could know. With the posthumous publication in 1908 of Nietzsche's Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is, God was gone for good.)
“The Tale of Genji: an eleventh-century Japanese text about court life.
“In the thirteenth century, French troubadours wrote prose poems about thwarted love.
“In seventeenth-century France, Madeleine de Scudéry (in Artamène) and Madame de La Fayette (in La Princesse de Clèves) wrote about the romantic intrigues of aristocrats.
“Before the Industrial Revolution, culture was mostly local; niches were geographic. The economy was agrarian, which distributed populations as broadly as the land. Distance divided people, giving rise to regional accents, and the lack of rapid transportation limited the mixing of cultures and the propagation of ideas and trends. There was a reason the church was the main cultural unifier in Western Europe: it had the best distribution network and the most mass-produced item—the Bible.
“When they were published, the books that now form the canon of Western literature (the Iliad, the Bible) were understood to be true accounts of actual events. In 1572, when Montaigne set himself the task of naming the "new" brand of writing he was doing in his journals—which later became his books—he came upon the Middle French word essai, meaning "trial," "attempt," "experiment." (All of life is an experiment. I love fools' experiments; I'm always making them.) Many of the most important writers in the Renaissance—Montaigne; Francis Bacon, who imported the essay into English; John Donne, whose sermons mattered much more than his poems—were writers of nonfiction. So secure was the preference for truth that Sir Philip Sidney had to fight, in Defence of Poesie (published after his death in 1595), for the right to "lie" in literature at all.
“In his retirement, walking the streets of Bordeaux, Montaigne wore a pewter medallion inscribed with the words Que sais-je? ("What do I know?")—thereby forming and backforming a tradition: Lucretius to La Rochefoucauld to Cioran.
“Once upon a time, history concerned itself only with what it considered important: the contrivers of significant events, on the one hand, and the forces that such happenings enlisted or expressed, on the other. Historians had difficulty deciding whether history was the result of the remarkable actions of remarkable men or the significant consequences of powerful forces, of climate, custom, and economic consequence, or of social structures, diet, geography, but whatever was the boss, the boss was big, massive, all-powerful, and hogged the center of the stage; however, as machines began to replicate objects, little people began to multiply faster than wars or famines could reduce their numbers, democracy arrived to flatter the multitude and tell them they ruled, commerce flourished, sales grew, money became the risen god, numbers replaced significant individuals, the trivial assumed the throne, and history looked about for gossip, not for laws, preferring lies about secret lives to the intentions of fate. As these changes took place, especially in the eighteenth century, the novel arrived to amuse mainly ladies of the middle and upper classes and provide them a sense of importance: their manners, their concerns, their daily rounds, their aspirations, their dreams of romance. The novel feasted on the unimportant, mimicking reality. Moll Flanders and Clarissa Harlowe replaced Medea and Antigone. Instead of actual adventures, made-up ones were fashionable; instead of perilous voyages, Crusoe carried us through his days; instead of biographies of ministers and lords, we got bundles of fake letters recounting seductions and betrayals: the extraordinary drama of lied-about ordinary life. Historians soon had at hand all the devices of exploitation. Amusing anecdote, salacious gossip would now fill their pages, too. History was human, personal, full of concrete detail, and had all the suspense of a magazine serial. The techniques of fiction infected history; the materials of history were fed the novelist's greed. Nowhere was this blended better than in autobiography. The novel sprang from the letter, the diary, the report of a journey; it felt itself alive in the form of every record of private life. Subjectivity was soon everybody's subject.
The origin of the novel lies in its pretense of actuality.
Early novelists felt the need to foreground their work with a false realistic front. Defoe tried to pass off Journal of a Plague Year as an actual journal. Fielding presented Jonathan Wild as a "real" account. As the novel evolved, it left these techniques behind.
“The word novel, when it entered the languages of Europe, had the vaguest of meanings; it meant the form of writing that was formless, that had no rules, that made up its own rules as it went along.
“In the eighteenth century, Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding overthrew the aristocratic romance by writing fiction about a thief, a bed-hopper, and a hypocrite—novels featuring verisimilitude, the unfolding of individual experience over time, causality, and character development.
“As recently as the late eighteenth century, landscape paintings were commonly thought of as a species of journalism. Real art meant pictures of allegorical or biblical subjects. A landscape was a mere record or report. As such, it couldn't be judged for its imaginative vision, its capacity to create and embody a world of complex meanings; instead, it was measured on the rack of its "accuracy," its dumb fidelity to the geography on which it was based. Which was ridiculous, as Turner proved, and as nineteenth-century French painting went on to vindicate: realist painting focused on landscapes and "real" people rather than royalty.
“The novel has always been a mixed form; that's why it was called novel in the first place. A great deal of realistic documentary, some history, some topographical writing, some barely disguised autobiography have always been part of the novel, from Defoe through Flaubert and Dickens. It was Henry James (especially in his correspondence with H. G. Wells) who tried to assert that the novel, as an "art form," must be the work of the imagination alone, and who was responsible for much of the modernist purifying of the novel's mongrel tradition. I see writers like Naipaul and Sebald making a necessary postmodernist return to the roots of the novel as an essentially Creole form, in which "nonfiction" material is ordered, shaped, and imagined as "fiction." Books like these restore the novelty of the novel, with its ambiguous straddling of verifiable and imaginary facts, and restore the sense of readerly danger that one enjoys in reading Moll Flanders or Clarissa or Tom Jones or Vanity Fair—that tightrope walk along the margin between the newspaper report and the poetic vision. Some Graham Greene novel has the disclaimer, "This is a work of fiction. No person in it bears any resemblance to any actual person living or dead, etc., etc. London does not exist."
“When Thomas De Quincey wrote Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, he led his readers to believe that his addiction was behind him; he was taking opium when he wrote the book and continued to take it for the next thirty years. Edmund Gosse's Father and Son, written when Gosse was fifty-seven, recounts conversations that purportedly took place when he was eight; people who had known the Gosses protested that Edmund made up these conversations, which of course he had. Orwell's "Such, Such Were the Joys" was denounced for its inaccuracies by people who had been his classmates.
“In the early nineteenth century, modern industry and the growth of the railroad system led to a wave of urbanization and the rise of Europe's great cities. These new hubs of commerce and transportation mixed people as never before, creating a powerful engine of new culture. The industrial age brought technologies of mass production. Suddenly, the cost of duplication was lower than the cost of appropriation. It was now cheaper to print thousands of exact copies of a manuscript than to alter one by hand. Copy makers could profit more than creators, which led to the establishment of copyright, bestowing upon the creator of a work a temporary monopoly over any copies, encouraging artists and authors to create more works that could be cheaply copied. Authors and publishers, including eventually publishers of music and film, relied on cheap, mass-produced copies protected from counterfeits and pirates by a strong law based on the dominance of copies and on a public educated to respect the sanctity of a copy. This model produced, in the twentieth century, the greatest flowering of human achievement the world had ever seen. Protected physical copies enabled millions of people to earn a living directly from the sale of their art to the audience.
“In 1830, Emerson was frustrated with sermons, with their "cold, mechanical preparations for a delivery most decorous—fine things, pretty things, wise things—but no arrows, no axes, no nectar, no growling." He wanted to find what he called "a new literature." A German con artist, Johann Maelzel, visited America with a "panharmonicon," an organ without keys. He would crank its heavy silver lever three times and step off to the side, and the machine would spit out an entire orchestra's worth of sound: flutes, drums, trumpets, cymbals, trombones, a triangle, clarinets, violins. After seeing Maelzel's machine perform, Emerson called the new literature he'd been looking for "a panharmonicon. Here everything is admissible—philosophy, ethics, divinity, criticism, poetry, humor, fun, mimicry, anecdote, jokes, ventriloquism—all the breadth and versatility of the most liberal conversation, highest and lowest personal topics: all are permitted, and all may be combined into one speech."
“In the first half of the nineteenth century, which remains for many a paradise lost of the novel, certain important certainties were in circulation: in particular the confidence in a logic of things that was just and universal. All the technical elements of narrative—the systematic use of the past tense and the third person, the unconditional adoption of chronological development, linear plots, the regular trajectory of the passions, the impulse of each episode toward a conclusion, etc.—tended to impose the image of a stable, coherent, continuous, unequivocal, entirely decipherable universe. To have a name was important, all the more so for being the weapon in a hand-to-hand struggle, the hope of a success, the exercise of a domination. It was something to have a face in a universe in which personality represented both the means and the end of all exploration. The novel of characters, though, belongs entirely to the past; it describes a period: the apogee of the individual. The world's destiny has ceased, for us, to be identified with the rise or fall of certain men, of certain families. The world itself is no longer our private property, hereditary and convertible into cash. Two hundred years later, the whole system is no more than a memory; it's to that memory, to the dead system, that some seek with all their might to keep the novel fettered.
“"The author has not given his effort here the benefit of knowing whether it is history, autobiography, gazetteer, or fantasy," said the New York Globe in 1851 about Moby-Dick.
“In 1859, Darwin's Origin of Species, which sold out the first day it was published, threatened to undermine the Bible's legitimacy, to explain the unexplainable. The Dewey decimal system was invented in 1876, although adopted slowly at first. A. E. Houseman said, "The aim of science is the discovery of truth, while the aim of literature is the production of pleasure." Knowledge was exciting, but it threatened to quash imagination and mythology. In 1910, the General Convention of the Presbyterian Church adopted the Five Fundamentals, a doctrine of five principles underlying Christian faith, a list of dogmas requiring of the faithful adherence to the inerrancy and literal truth of scripture. If we must be governed by the two-dimensional world of fact/fiction, then steps must be taken to ensure that our sacred texts land on the side of fact, that scripture not end up in the fictional cul-de-sac. We must be able to believe.
“In the second half of the nineteenth century, several technologies emerged. Commercial printing technology dramatically improved, the new "wet plate" technique made photography popular, and Edison invented the phonograph. The first great wave of popular culture included newspapers, magazines, novels, printed sheet music, records, children's books. Not only did authors and artists benefit from this model but the audience did, too: for the first time, tens of millions of ordinary people were able to come in regular contact with a great work. In Mozart's day, few people heard one of his symphonies more than once; with the advent of cheap audio recordings, a barber in Java could listen to them all day long. At the end of the nineteenth century, the moving picture gave actors a way to reach a much wider audience, effectively linking people across time and space, synchronizing society. For the first time, not only did your neighbors read the same news you read in the morning, and know the same music and movies, but people across the country did, too. Broadcast media—first radio, then television—homogenized culture even more. TV defined the mainstream. The power of electromagnetic waves is that they spread in all directions, essentially for free.
“Plot itself ceased to constitute the armature of narrative. The demands of the anecdote were doubtless less constraining for Proust than for Flaubert, for Faulkner than for Proust, for Beckett than for Faulkner. To tell a story became strictly impossible. The books of Proust and Faulkner are crammed with stories, but in the former, they dissolve in order to be recomposed to the advantage of a mental architecture of time, whereas in the latter, the development of themes and their many associations overwhelms all chronology to the point of seeming to bury again in the course of the novel what the narrative has just revealed. Even in Beckett, there's no lack of events, but they're constantly in the process of contesting themselves: the same sentence may contain an observation and its immediate negation. It's now not the anecdote that's lacking—only its character of certainty, its tranquility, its innocence.
“Collage, the art of reassembling fragments of preexisting images in such a way as to form a new image, was the most important innovation in the art of the twentieth century.


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This unit will explain what a National Park is—how did it get to be one—and just where are they located, so that the children will have an historical starting point.
Many facets of education can be interwoven into a study of National Parks. The skills of inferencing, sequencing and fact-finding would be utilized in the reading of the historical accounts of the first man to explore the parks. Map skills would definitely be an outcome of the unit. Children could do location lessons—plotting the locales of various park sites, using Latitude and Longitude. Math skills also could be incorporated in the unit with lessons on mileage, sizes of park areas, and a Time Line of historical happenings. This unit would be an on-going one through the school year as each different area of the United States is introduced and studied.
There are not many books written about National Parks for children, so a great asset to teaching this unit will be Visual Aids. The beauty of the Parks needs to be seen. As Steward Udall, the former Secretary of Interior of the United States has written, “Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Park are in a special sense American Heartlands. They reveal the full majesty and beauty of our country, the scope and reach of it, the awesome forces that have shaped it . . . Amid these splendid park scapes we can fill our Lungs and our Eyes and our Hearts.”
Inner city children need to see and learn about this beautiful aspect of our country, and what better way than through videos and picture books? Reader’s Digest has made a set of 3 videos, Yellowstone, Yosemite, and The Grand Canyon, which would be a wonderful way to introduce children to the vastness and beauty of these three historical areas.
The National Park Service itself prints handbooks about the natural and historical places which they administer. This series would be a useful teaching tool, as each one has an historical perspective and is filled with drawings and photographs.
An important concept to be included in these lessons is the “idea” behind the formation of national parks—that these areas are set aside for the benefit and enjoyment of “all” people.
Reading the accounts of the beginnings of the national parks includes a wealth of reading skills, such as cause and effect, gleaning main ideas, and using deductive skills such as inferencing. Learning the past history will give the children an idea of how important the present and future of national parks is to be maintained. The knowledge that those first trappers who set eyes on the wonders of the geysers and the vastness of the wilderness could have chosen to go the “expansion and development” route of the west traveling pioneers of 1800’s is a lesson children must learn. They will see that these men devised the creative idea of “no private ownership”—that these beautiful places should be protected in their natural states for the use and enjoyment of all people and generations to come.
The Historical Record will show that later this idea was introduced by William Clagett, Congressman from Montana, in a bill which passed January 30, 1872; and on March 1st, 1872, President Ulysses S. Grant signed it, so Yellowstone National Park became the first National Park in our Nation—and first in the world!
Although there are not many books for children to read about the history of National Parks, one very good one has been published by the National Historical Society—the American History—Illustrated Series, which children would enjoy. In June, 1976, an article titled The Country Just Above Hell was written by Peggy Robbins in which she relates the history of Yellowstone from the Indians and the first writer, a fur trader and clerk for The American Fur Company, named Warren Angus Ferris, to President Theodore Roosevelt who toured Yellowstone on horseback in 1903. Her article chronicles the “life of Yellowstone” from the Indian tribes who, she informs, gave this name to Yellowstone after they heard of the white man’s religion; they surmised this must be “just above Hell”. She traces the exploration of the park through the Lewis and Clark expedition of 1806 when they first heard of “a great lake and other wonders”.
Children would be enthralled by the adventures of John Colter, the first known white man to have entered Yellowstone. A very stimulating creative writing lesson could be gleaned from this story. The children could be asked to write about the feelings they might have had if they had accompanied Colter on his expedition.
Another visitor and great yarn spinner about Yellowstone was Jim Bridger, who between 1822 and the 1840’s became the best known hunter and guide in the West. Children would enjoy reading about his travels and the fact that he was only 18 when he first began hunting and trapping. He learned to speak 11 Indian languages and traveled for 3 years in Yellowstone country before returning to St. Louis to relate his adventures. His tales about these marvelous wonders were called “too absurd to print”. An editorial branded his stories as “lies”. In 1859, he retuned to guide a small military expedition, under the command of Captain William Raynolds, to explore Yellowstone but was held back by an extremely heavy early snow.
Finally, in 1869, three Montana men—David Folsom, Charles Cook, and William Peterson—decided to explore Yellowstone themselves. This 3-man exploring party made the first successful exploration of the area. They returned safely to Montana with accounts of the beautiful places they had been. Because of these written accounts, Jim Badger’s stories were listened to a little more.
Another group explored the area in 1870—a military expedition of Washburn, Langford and Doane. They first charted and named Old Faithful. It so fascinated the members of the expedition that they camped nearby and marveled at it for an entire day. It was in this party that a Judge, Cornelius Hedges, first insisted that the Yellowstone region should not be opened to private ownership but should be “protected” in its natural state by the government so that all people could enjoy its wonders. The accounts and sketches of the members of this expedition brought forth the first known authentic map of Yellowstone Lake. These accounts stirred great interest in this unique part of America.
After learning these facts, another useful teaching device is the use of a Time Line. Children can get an idea of the time it had taken for the exploration and establishment of the parks through to the laws enacted to protect them. Because this idea of a national preserve was totally new—no one had any experience in the administration and development of such a property, in August of 1886 it came under the care of the U.S. Army and was there for 30 years.
The National Park Service was created in 1916, and then profession is took over the maintenance and care of the Parks. Before this, no real system existed for the governance of these areas; now this agency became the primary Federal entity whose aim would be to preserve these significant natural and cultural resources. Because each of the national parks has its own history, many social studies lessons could include their study.
The Yellowstone Act (1872), which had set aside two million (2,000,000) acres of public land in Wyoming and Montana from settlement, occupancy, or sale and declared them as public grounds for the benefit and enjoyment of the people, would be a good starting point for children. They could then trace the expansion of this idea that land in its “natural condition” was worth preserving and follow the growth of the National Parks system in the U.S.
Another aspect to be shown is that, along with the idea of “preserving” naturally followed the concern for “conserving”. This conservation attitude is also an important one for children to realize and to be made aware of its continuing growth as people changed their attitudes toward nature. Roderick Nash, author of Wilderness and the American Mind, points out “that wilderness was the basic ingredient of American civilization.” He adds that a large portion of the energies of early civilizations was directed at defeating the wilderness in nature and controlling it in human nature. But he contends that, as America matured, thoughts about the environment changed. Americans began to see wilderness as an asset rather than a liability. He surmised “Civilization created wilderness.” Nash reminds us that to the Indian nomadic hunter-gatherers like the Sioux, “it made no sense to distinguish wilderness from civilization.” The Pioneers obsession was to clear the land and bring light into darkness—the early pioneer did not feel at home in the wilderness. Their attitudes were represented by the many military terms they used in describing their condition of “conquering”, vanquishing, or “struggling” with Nature to convert it into a prosperous civilization.
Along with the lessons taught about the Pilgrims and the settling of America, it could be shown that the Pilgrims perceived the idea of wilderness as evil and fearsome. Yet they celebrated westward expansion as one of their great achievements and an evidence of God’s blessing that wild country should become fruitful and civilized.
The old colonial and pioneering emphasis on exploitation of the resources was giving way to an awareness of the beauty and wonder of Nature. Roderick Nash wrote in The American Invention of National Parks of four principal factors that helped bring about these changing viewpoints: “our unique experience with nature on the American continent, our democratic ideals, our vast public domain, and our affluent society.”
Fortunately, the ideas and Opinions of the Washburn-Langford-Doane Expedition of 1870, advocating that there be no private ownership of that region, won political support and were written into law. These ideals helped to support the establishment of the National Park Service which today includes the consolidation of national parks, national monuments, historical sites, national military parks, eleven national cemeteries and thirty “affiliated areas”— properties that receive technical or financial assistance according to the legislative or cooperative agreements defining their relationship with the Service. These “affiliated areas” include such places as the Boston African American National Historical Site, Massachusetts; The Mormon Pioneer Historical Trail, Illinois to Utah; and the Ice Age National Scientific Reserve in Wisconsin.
The next great scenic national parks after Yellowstone—Sequoia, General Grant and Yosemite, all in California, were not established until 1890. Then in the Forest Reserve Act of 1891, Congress separated the idea of forest conservation from the national park idea. By 1916, the National Park Service had fourteen national parks comprising 4,750,000 acres, and 159 national forests containing more than 150,000,000 acres.
As the unit progresses to the study of Yosemite, it will expose children to the man who has been called the “father” of National Parks, John Muir. He believed from his first sight of it that Yosemite was one of the most important places on Earth. This fact becomes evident while reading the book he wrote about it, The Yosemite, published by the Sierra Club, which he founded in 1892 to begin his legislative activities to save the lands with which he had fallen in love. This book, I feel, could be used with fifth graders along with teacher guidance and insights.
A Reading Social Studies lesson could instigate discussions and inferences by posing questions to the students such as: “What do you think John Muir felt when he first came to Yosemite?”; “How did these feelings help him to rise to preservative actions?”; and/or “What did you feel as you read a specific section?”. Muir’s descriptions of his adventures in the years he spent traveling the Yosemite Valley would be an exciting introduction to use with children. The essays of the Approach To The Valley are so clearly and graphically written that you feel you are entering it with him. His adventures in the snow and the earthquakes would be most interesting to young readers. Some of the essays could be excerpted and discussed with the class and used as a writing lesson to stimulate thoughts about national parks and the ideas of preservation and conservation.
Along with John Muir, an important man to consider in the history of parks is Frederick Law Olmsted, who, as David Brower contends, in the forward to The Yosemite, should be called “Grandfather of National Parks.” Olmstead had worked to establish New York’s Central Park and was named Superintendent of Sierra mining estates a year after Yosemite was set aside. He proposed the rights for landscape in the National Park idea. He felt the first requirement is to preserve the natural scenery and restrict within the narrowest limits the necessary accommodation of visitors. Olmstead’s son, Frederick Law Jr., also a noted landscape architect, agreed with his father’s visions and later helped to see them embodied in the writing of the National Park Act of 1916. This Act provided “that the national beauty and wildlife in the national parks were to be used and enjoyed by the public by such means as would leave the landscape unimpaired.” Well into the 20th century, national parks emphasized only the high, rugged, spectacular landforms of the West, and the prevailing feeling was that national parks mist begin with worthless land and remain worthless to survive.
According to Barry Macintosh Bureau Historian of the N.P.S., over the years guidelines have been set and refined for the evaluation of national parks. Currently the Park Service maintains Historical Parks should be associated with persons, events or themes of national importance; should encompass structures or features of great intrinsic or representational value; or should contain archeological resources of major scientific consequence. A natural park might be an outstanding or rare example of geologic landform or biotic area, a place of exceptional ecological or geological diversity; a site with a concentrated population of rare plant or animal species or unusually abundant fossil deposits, or an outstandingly scenic area.
Mackintosh asserts that a few places of questionable national significance have been admitted over the years, but as Congress makes the final decisions after hearing recommendations, the wonder is not that the System has fallen short of its ideals, but that it has come so close! In it are a remarkable representation of the nation’s greatest natural and historic places and recreational areas of outstanding attraction.
The reorganization of the National Park System in 1933 began with the Act of Congress, approved by President Herbert Hoover and used later by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to consolidate all national parks, monuments, cemeteries, and murials under the National Park Service administration. This had major consequences as it charted the assumption of what the National Park System should contain by adding new kinds of areas not previously considered parks or monuments. It increased the System’s holdings by adding a dozen natural areas in 10 western states and nearly 50 historical areas in 7 eastern states and the District of Columbia. These new historical areas introduced a degree of diversity that had not existed before and brought out the point that now with parks in all sections of the country, the System was truly “national”.
An important component of this unit would be field trips. Children need to visit and see first hand some of the aspects of a National Park area. One area trip could be to the New Haven Green, which has always been the center of the city. Photographs of earlier days could be shown to introduce the pupils to the early uses of the Green and to the reasons why the city fathers in the early part of the 20th century wanted to include it in their Civic Improvement Plan. A plan was commissioned by the committee from Frederick Law Olmsted, the noted Landscape Architect, who recommended that the Green be restored to its former simple rows of trees and that new walkways be formed. He also suggested adopting the policy of excluding forever all structures from the Green except a well-designed monument or music stand. This, he noted, would keep the Green a park to be enjoyed by all people in the city and would ensure that the city’s historic center would not be defaced.
A field trip that would delight children and show them the difference between a National Park site and an Historical Site would be to the Salem Maritime National Site. Here students would see the remnants of a seaport which was important during the colonial era. They could visit the Customs House and realize the importance of trade and the taxes to the settlers of the town. They could visit the bonded warehouse and learn how weights and measures were used by the sea captains, and see the way cargoes were measured and stored.
If time allowed, another Massachusetts Historical Site, the Saugus Iron Works, could also be visited. This site consists of buildings and land of the Saugus Iron Works founded in 1647. The industrial buildings are historically accurate reproductions and Rangers are there to conduct a tour. The children would enjoy the workings of the water wheels and the Blacksmith’ s demonstration of nail making. A filmstrip is shown which would be very informative to young children about the early history of the Iron Works. Both these trips would make history come alive for students.
Although the National Park System is famous for its large natural resource-based places such as the Grand Canyon, there are national park areas in almost every part of the country. These include historical sites and parks dedicated to Native American Indian culture, and military history.
These parks of wonder, beauty and historical significance certainly belong in our school systems as part of the curriculum. They should be reminders to future generations of the importance of the ideals behind their beginnings and the need for concern about their future. Children need to know somewhere wherever you travel in the United States there is a park to offer the chance to experience America’s history and the wonders of nature—and, as Robin Winks, Professor of History at Yale University, has stated, ”The National Park can aptly be called ‘the World’s Greatest University’ ”.
- 1806—Lewis & Clark Expedition
- 1807—John Colter, earliest known white trapper
- ____—Epic Journey
- 1808—Winter—called “Colter’s Hell”
- 1822—Jim Badger (3 years trapper)
- 1834—Warren Angus Ferris (American Fur Co.)
- ____wrote about Firehold Geyser Basin
- 1849—Parks placed under authority of Department of the Interior
- 1859—Capt. William Raynolds
- ____Military Expedition
- 1860’s—Folsom, Cook, and Peterson
- ____Famous Expedition
- 1864—Yosemite Valley explored
- ____—U.S. Senator John Conness
- 1864—June 30, President Lincoln signed Bill
- 1870—Washburn, Langford—Doane—expedition
- ____First charted and named “Old Faithful”
- ____Judge Cornelius Hedges —“idea” of ‘a place set apart for all’
- 1871—Congressmen William Clagett from Montana introduced National Park Act
- 1872—Passed Senate
- ____March 1, President U. S. Grant signed Yellowstone National Park Bill
- 1890—Sequoia National Park, Yosemite, and General Grant
- ____Rock Creek Park authorized (D.C.)
- 1916—August 25, President Woodrow Wilson created National Park Service in Dept. of Interior
Reading a Time Line
- 1. A Time Line can be helpful in understanding when important things happened;
- 2. A Time Line shows how one happening may lead to another;
- 3. A Time Line gives a sense of the order in which things took place.
Procedures Distribute mimeoed Time Line and mimeoed questions:
Use Tine Line to answer these questions.
- 1. What does this Time Line show?
- 2. What happened in 1806?
- 3. In what year was Capt. Raynolds Expedition?
- 4. What was important in 1872?
- 5. How many years before parks came under authority of Dept. of Interior?
- 6. What year was important for Yosemite?
Materials Mimeoed Time Line and Questions
Yosemite National Park
- 1. To acquaint student with location and beauty of Yosemite;
- 2. To foster discussion of what is a national park;
- 3. To introduce students to John Muir’s book, The Yosemite.
Procedures Introduce book to students. Have them read chapter excerpts. Discuss children’s reactions to his writings.
Have students write observations gained from readings. Show video of Yosemite.
Questions for Discussion
- 1. Who was John Muir?
- 2. Why did he go to California?
- 3. What were some of his feelings about Yosemite Valley?
- 4. Do you think having national parks is a good idea? Why?
- 1. Book The Yosemite—John Muir
- 2. Video of Yosemite National Park
- 3. Map of United States
Map Lesson on National Park Sites
Objectives Students will be able to:
- 1. Identify sites of National Parks in contiguous 48 states;
- 2. Locate Yellowstone, Grand Canyon, and Yosemite by states;
- 3. Observe numbers of parks in National Park System;
- 4. Map an imaginary trip to a park site from home in Connecticut.
Procedures Pass out mimeoed map of National Park System.
- A. Ask pupils to observe locations of various parks by name and to identify the states in which they are found.
- B. Questions to be asked:
- ____1. Can you estimate number of sites?
- ____2. Locate Petrified Forest.
- ____(Why is this included in Park System?)
- 3. Locate Yellowstone, Grand Canyon, and Yosemite.
- ____Name the states in which they are found.
- 4. Map out your own trip to a National Park.
Materials Mimeoed maps of National Park Service
The National Park System
Leopold, Aldo. A Sand County Almanac. Oxford University Press, New York, 1949.
Muir, John. The Yosemite. Sierra Club Books, San Francisco, Reprint 1914.
Nash, Roderick. Wilderness and the American Mind. 3rd Edition, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1973.
Runte, Alfred. National Parks, The American Experience. 2nd Edition, Univ. of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 1979.
Shullery, Paul. Mountain Time. S & S Books, Yellowstone, 1984.
Tejada-Flores. Yellowstone To Yosemite. Western Eye Press, Colorado, 1988.
- Booklets: KC Publications Picture Booklets
- ____American History Illustrated Series
- ____June, 1976
- ____The National Park Service
- ____Interpretive Handbooks:
- 1. Shaping The System
- ____Barry Mackintosh-U.S. Dept. of Interior 1985
- 2. The Place Where Hell Bubbled Up A History of the First National Park U.S. Dept. of Interior
- 3. History and Prehistory in National Park System History Division N.P.S. Washington, D. C. 1987
- 4. The National Parks Index: 1989 U.S. Dept. of Interior Washington, D. C. 1989
- ____Adventures in Your National Parks
- ____Books For World Explorers
- ____National Geographic Society
Videos: Readers Digest Series:
- ____Grand Canyon—55 min.
- ____Yellowstone—55 min.
- ____Yosemite—55 min.
National Park Service Films and Videos
- 1. National Parks: Our Treasured Lands (1983) 28 min.
- 2. Giant Sequoia (1979) 17 min.
- ____(Sequoia-King Canyon National Park)
- 3. STONE FOREST (1974) 17 min.
- ____(Petrified Forest National Park)
- 4. Shenandoah: The Gift (1982) 17 min.
- ____(Shenandoah National Park)
- 5. Great Sand Dunes (1980) 15 min.
- ____(Great Sand Dunes National Monument)
Contents of 1990 Volume III | Directory of Volumes | Index | Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute