I love making glue books, and collage culture in general. I try to make it to a flea market at least 5 times a year to collect old ephemra, printed matter and a book. Often, choosing the book is an excrutiating task which basically revolves around this: “Which of these books can I destroy while creating a new work of art without feeling too bad about it?” I try to remind myself that most of the books will end up in the trash if no one buys them, so I am doing no great harm. However, this relunctance continues at home, where I read and scan over the book to make sure there is nothing in it that needs to be saved.

My latest purchase was Modern Times and the Living Past, by Henry Elson. Elson was, at the time of the book’s publication (1921), a Lecturer on History at New York University. It is a history text for school kids, probably junior high or high school, and covers history from the dawn of civilization through the end of “The World War.” In scanning the book for salvagable content, I soon found myself receiving my own history lesson, though not on Alexander the Great or Mary Queen of Scots or the other condensed stories in the book. Instead, I found a lesson on the great amount of intellectual racism still present in America in 1921. And no, we’re not talking about Selma, Alabama here, so all you New York City better-than-thou’s can wake up now: racism wasn’t a deep south, redneck phenomenon. It was often packaged and waxed eloquently by the big city professors. And we all know that supporting bigotry with reasoning, oratory and persuasiveness is much scarier than being that way because that’s “how your daddy raised ya.”

Now, it is common knowledge that all cultures have ethnocentricities. The ancient Greeks believed themselves to be the chosen group, as did the Egyptians, the Persians, the Hebrews, the Chinese, the Japanese, the Assyrians, the Nubians, the Sumerians, the Mayans, the Aztecs, the Zulu,  and on and on. However, the difference between old-world ethnocentrism and the opinons of a 20th century lecturer from New York University should be quite evident.

If you read the above section, it is hard to believe Elson has even studied history. First, he claims that white civilizations have “taken the lead” and been “foremost in the world’s progress.” The “Ethiopians” are glanced over with the statement “where many have adopted the civilization of white men” to reinforce his first point. Obviously, he doesn’t really know anything about Africa here. The most laughable is the direct attack on Asian culture, where he gets more aggressive, saying “after it reached a stage that we should pronounce half-civilized, two thousand or more years ago, its growth was checked and thereafter it made little progress until very recent times.” Indeed? So nothing happened in Asia between 100 BC and modern times? I guess we must then ignore the fantastic achievements of art and poetry, the mathematics and science, the great religions and philosophies, the invention of gunpowder and printing, and the marvelous cultures and wealth that so impressed Marco Polo and other European explorers.

Then we go to the Native Americans, who are basically glanced over as were the Africans. Elson says they were still living “in the polished stone age and in the hunting and fishing stage.” I guess he never heard about Mayan calenders that were significantly more accurate than the White mens’, the continent crossing trade routes, the farming, the enormous cities full of wealth, art and architecture.