Talk:California gold rush/Archive 4

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Archive 1 Archive 2 Archive 3 Archive 4

Please remove the far-left Marxist propaganda from the introduction.

There was no "California Genocide." Indians dying from a smallpox epidemic is not a genocide. The vast majority of historians writing about the gold rush do not refer to the California American Indians' deaths and mistreatment as a genocide. Only a tiny, fringe minority of activist scholars do, and it is highly controversial. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 114.32.84.229 (talk) 22:28, 5 July 2021 (UTC)

Yes, there was, by definition, and there is even a linked article about it. Please provide reliable sources to back your claim if you feel that the sources cited by the article are in some way erroneous. UpdateNerd (talk) 01:25, 6 July 2021 (UTC)
It's not helpful for someone looking to learn about the topic to immediately focus on a genocide in the introduction. I'm not denying that some scholars say there was, and I'm not questioning the credentials of most of the scholars who say there was a genocide, but it's not on topic and can in fact constitute a form of poisoning the well for anyone seeking to learn about that part of American history, or American history in general, given how important a topic the California Gold Rush is and how likely a student is to come across this article when learning about the history of America early on in his academic career. This may be speculation, but if one were to put a disparaging statement about American history in a critical bottleneck where it's likely to be seen, this is one of the places one would do it. Again, I'm not saying that the claims are necessarily false, just inappropriately placed. It would be like focusing on genocide in the introduction to the history of Germany, or for that matter, any other country which ever expanded to any great extent at any point in human history. -- 67.243.145.74 (talk) 17:20, 23 December 2022 (UTC)
It is absolutely helpful for the reference to the California Genocide to be in the intro paragraph, lest one think they exist in vacuums (which they don't, they are intimately intertwined). The IP address is making a political argument, not a historiographical one. Cristiano Tomás (talk) 17:53, 23 December 2022 (UTC)