Home / Ruttenber, E.M. Footprints of the Red Men: Indian Geographical Names in the Valley of Hudson's River, the Valley of the Mohawk, and on the Delaware. Published in the Proceedings of the New York State Historical Association, Vol. VI. 1906. / Passage

Footprints of the Red Men: Indian Geographical Names

Ruttenber, E.M. Footprints of the Red Men: Indian Geographical Names in the Valley of Hudson's River, the Valley of the Mohawk, and on the Delaware. Published in the Proceedings of the New York State Historical Association, Vol. VI. 1906. 305 words

The Castle of Indolence seldom has any vacant rooms. The exceptionally strong will, the " monarch mind," is rare. The principle of obedience to authority is strongly developed in the race, especially among nations where the supreme power is supposed to rest upon some religious sanction, as was the case with European governments until recent rears, and as is the case with most Oriental nations to-day. We live in an age of intense specialization. A few generations

144 NEW YORK STATE HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION.

ago we heard of men of universal knowledge. Not so now. The volume of knowledge has become so vast that no man, even the wisest, can do more than to touch its skirts. In no department of study is the trend of specialization more active than in the interpretation ofhistory. In the hunt after the subtle causes that have lurked in the bosom of society and have flamed into consuming fire, from time to time, the patient historian, the student of sociology, has grouped tendencies, impulses, transitional waves of popular feeling, into generalizations. Especially is this statement true of German scholars, with whom specialization has often been reduced to infinitesmal analysis. Thus one school of writers dwells upon the economic interpretation of history. In their view, most popular upheavals have been synchronous with the poverty of the masses. It is when the people have been ground into hunger by excessive taxation and public extravagance that they have risen, like the blind giant pulling down the temple of Gaza, and swept away dynasties and royal pageantry. Such, it is said, was the mainspring of the French Revolution -- one of the most dramatic events in history. Undoubtedly the economic problem has always been, and always will be, a powerful agent in the genesis of history. Others give us the religious interpretation of history.