Thanks!! And also sorry!

@Gussie Jives

“By that token though, anything named after Jeffery Amherst definitely needs to be renamed. That dude was a straight out smallpox-blanket white supremacist.”

Wow, Jeffery Amherst has come up on WHTM! (Testimony to the intelligence and knowledge of the commenter community here).

As to the point, though, *yes* Amherst was Anglo-supremacist to a level exceptional for even his British contemporaries. He essentially single-handedly started Pontiac’s War (so much so that one of Amherst’s modern biographers, William R. Nester, says that it pretty much ought to just be called “Amherst’s War”. Some of Amherst’s subordinates told him *repeatedly* regarding the Delawares, Shawnees, some of the Ottowas and the other Ohio Valley and Great Lakes region peoples, more or less [paraphrasing] “if you do not treat these people as allies, equals and political partners they will go to war with us. To treat them as political partners and allies means we have to pay them the price they have set for the asset that their political partnership constitutes.” That price was material goods which the British and Anglo-Americans had always paid. Amherst, though, was stuck in this mindset that they were just “lazy savages” and by no means would he reward their laziness with the “gifts” they “demanded”. So, sure enough, by mid-1763 a lot of native peoples in the region have had it with Amherst and launch attacks. The British army of that period did have plenty of commanders who were pretty effective at negotiating and maintaining alliances with Native Americans (that doesn’t mean they weren’t also Anglo-supremacist — just that they were not as inept and virulent about it as Amherst whose ineptness and virulence actually propelled them into a war that was completely unnecessary. (I’m getting a lot of this from Nester’s _”Haughty Conquerors”: Amherst and the Great Indian Uprising of 1763_ (London: Praeger, 2000). (which the Wikipedia article on Amherst doesn’t cite by the way). It was the first real examination of Amherst, or at least this phase of his career, for a long time. Your humble commenter here has also published a teensy tad-bit and given a paper or two on old Amherst — not that such insulates me or anyone from challenge (why no, in the spirit of scholarship, just the opposite in fact…historians love to argue.)

As for the whole smallpox blankets thing, some of the more recent evidence is that Henry Bouquet first advanced the idea but Amherst is guilty of approving it and he wasn’t unenthusiastic about doing so. Using biological and chemical agents (or what we would now call biological and chemical agents) wasn’t unknown in eighteenth-century warfare, even in Europe, but obviously that doesn’t make it right (or make even “conventional” war right, at any rate).

So, indeed, Amherst does not deserve commemoration.

By the way, Amherst was also responsible for directing the use of (rather heavy-handed) use of force is putting down the Gordon Riots in 1780. (Not that the motives of the rioters were all that noble, obviously, but it still shows the temper of Amherst).

And, wow, eighteenth-century British military history came up on a WHTM post! Makes the inhabitants of Pavlov’s House happy (despite our nick, that field along with nursing are indeed the specialities around here.)

Be well, everyone, and get well David!

@Pavlov

Holy hell…and we have a whole bloody town named after this jackass?!

@Jesalin and @Dalillama

Yeah, there are a bunch here. Part of that is because Seven Years’ War related toponyms in general proliferated all over the colonies in the 1760s, especially in the case of naming places after military and political figures that the Anglo-American colonists idealized (i.e., King of Prussia, PA for Frederick II; I think some of the various counties and towns named Brunswick are named after the ducky in Germany while others are actually named for Prince Ferdinand, Duke of Brunswick, the successful commander of the Allied army in Germany during the Seven Years’ War).

I think Amherst was a hero to the Anglo-Americans because first, well, he was successful militarily in the conventional part of the Seven Years’ War in North America. I will give him credit as a strategist in that he succeeded in coordinating multiple forces starting *very* far apart and converging on Montreal; he was able to modulate the pace of his own advance from Oswego down the St. Lawrence with Murray’s coming from the other direction along St. Lawrence and that third force coming up the Hudson-Lake Champlain axis of advance. Coordinating that kind of converging attack when the three starting points were so far apart was *not* easy given eighteenth-century logistics. The Anglo-American colonists also liked him because unlike SO many other British commanders he actually could work with and was willing to respect colonial legislatures and the Anglo-American colonial elite. But his policy towards the Native Americans was not only vile but simply very foolish and ill-founded. Plenty of his contemporaries provided a much better model. James Grant and Archibald Montgomery understood Cherokee politics and culture enough actually to help negotiate a peace with them during the 1759-61 Anglo-Cherokee War even though they were themselves officers commanding forces against the Cherokee. William Johnson and later Guy Johnson are both good examples too.

I think Amherst might have been remembered positively by eighteenth-century Anglo-Americans even after the Revolution for another reason — the North ministry offered Amherst command of the ground forces sent to put down the American Revolution in 1776. He refused, and only after that did they finally settle on William Howe. I’m not sure how much of Amherst’s refusal was for ideological reasons, but the Americans might have thought it was. I think I recall Amherst thinking using force on the rebellious colonists was a bad idea (and there hadn’t been clear agreement on that in the North ministry until 1775 anyway).

I judge Amherst as also having done a pretty good job militarily in arranging the defense of Great Britain against the planned Franco-Spanish invasion of 1779; in some earlier work I had an opportunity to look actually at the defensive plan and it wasn’t bad (main force up in Essex and I think (sorry, been a while) another in Kent at Coxheath that could react to a landing on the coast of Kent or Sussex; cavalry screening forces at road junctions; and a pretty ambitious plan to evacuate pretty much all livestock, horses, wheeled vehicles and grain from the coastal regions by gradually withdrawing it progressively according to a series of phase lines.

But his virulent racism and stubborn refusal to heed the advice of more culturally-aware British army officers during 1763-1764 outweighs the positive…by a lot. True, Henry Bouquet had some pretty vile ideas also, but Amherst was in charge and bears responsibility.

As a military historian, I think his career is worthy of study and there’s much to be learned from it but I don’t think people who care about equality today should find much reason to commemorate him as any kind of hero.

Thank you for reading!

Wow, eighteenth-century military history on WHTM!

Oh yeah, here’s a women’s history connection: during the invasion scare of 1779 a lot of local communities in the south of England raised money for defense by subscription. I’ve seen some of the lists of subscribers in the Amherst papers in the War Office records and there were a substantial amount of women involved. I always wanted to do more with that to see if I could find evidence on women’s leadership in that effort — women’s participation in eighteenth-century British politics is an interesting and growing field in history. (Despite proscription from nearly all every formal locus of power, many women of the middling-classes did have a material effect; e.g. shaping public opinion in newspapers, etc.)

Racism is not individual. Racism is systemic. Organizations are racist. Systems are racist, institutions are racist, hierarchies are racist. People are bigots, and the evil they do is bigotry.

Bigotry is racist (and sexist, and ableist, and ageist and etc), because bigotry supports, reaffirms and reinforces the oppression of systems, institutions, organizations, etc., and bigotry allows the continuation of that oppression.

So true.

Thank you @POM & @Virign Mary for answering my question, and anyone else whose name I missed.

Good luck, David – thanks for all you suffer through for us 🙂

ohmigod key lime icy pops

@Imaginary Petal

Whoa…..

I need to work out after just having *looked* at that….

D:

http://orig08.deviantart.net/85c4/f/2014/271/e/c/flutterbat_swoon_animation_by_fluttershythekind-d80x5y6.gif

I could go for bread OR key-lime pops.

But earlier today, I had the most exquisite culinary experience. All-you-can-eat, but not a buffet. They brought out small plates. Mumbai street food. They call it vegetarian (but it’s actually all vegan!). I don’t even really understand what all the the things that I ate were. You were served 10 items in three courses and when you got to the end, you could order more of anything. Everything was amazingly, unbelievably delicious. Colors, textures, sauces. Noodles, rice, wraps, burgers, dumplings, soup.

There were these little puffy, hollow pastry-like shells with diced chickpea/potato filling that you filled with tamarind sauce and and mint sauce and you put the whole thing in your mouth and it was an explosion of yum.

This is a very dangerous development because they are only open weekends, but they are on the way home from work and I work on weekends!! At least, in their dedication to avoiding food waste, they require reservations.

That is all, thank you for your time 🙂

@dr. ej
I can’t have wheat but sounds yummy. Maybe I can adapt it to my flour blend.

Today I made regular sandwich bread (well, my regular anyway) and pizza dough. I made a change to my usual pizza dough that makes it more elastic, which makes it easier to stretch out. Yay!

I tried to make injera the other day but it was still wet after cooking to the instructions and I was worried about eating it raw like that because the instructions just had you put flour and water together and let it sit for several days. A typical sourdough mother involves a lot of caring for your little yeast colony, feeding it regularly so it doesn’t get weak, even testing the pH levels sometimes all to ensure the yeast is healthy so you’re not growing potentially pathogenic bacteria colonies. It made me nervous so I didn’t eat it (I tried cooking several pancakes from the batter with the same results). Anyway I need to read up on that one more and maybe deviate from the traditional recipe to apply my usual sourdough techniques so I have peace of mind. 🙂

Everyone’s talking about their cooking skills and I once blew up a microwave trying to warm a wheat bag.

@SFHC

What the hell is a wheat bag? Anyways, I’d trade a few key lime ice pops for your encyclopedic memory. 🙂

Does anyone here make flatbreads?