Day 49 (D-12) HISTORY: Navajos in WWII / A historian's point of view: The West defines American character

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciFv_ONffdw

Today is June 6, 2019.  A day to look at history: 75 years after the Invasion of Normandy, D-Day, the Normandy landings.  We can take a  moment to remember the Navajos' contribution in World War II. A code talker was a person employed by the military during the war to utilise a little-know language as a secret means of communication. The name code talkers is strongly associated with bilingual Navajo speakers specially recruited during World War II by the US Marine Corps to serve in their standard communications units in the Pacific.  Many Navajo enlisted shortly after Pearl Harbor and contributed to the war effort. "What happened to the Navajo were social conflict", Navajo code talker Albert Smith said.  "But this conflict involved Mother Earth being dominated by foreign countries.  It was our responsibility to defend her."  

Navajo has a complex grammar; it is not mutually intelligible. If there was no word in the native language to describe a military word, code talkers used descriptive words.  For example, the Navajo didn't have a word for submarine; they translated it to iron fish.
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Not World War II here, but a historian's point of view: The West defines American character.

Frederick Jackson Turner (1861-1932) was an American historian.  He wrote "The Significance of the Frontier in American History." He believed that the American frontier was very important in forming the American character.  Turner built his Frontier Thesis in 1893 around the idea that the frontier provided the core defining quality of the United States.  He said that the spirit and success of the United States is directly tied to the country's westward expansion.  According to Turner, the unique and rugged American identity was born at the juncture between the civilisation of settlement and the savagery of  wilderness.   This produced a new type of citizen -- one with the power to tame the wild and one upon whom the wild had conferred strength and individuality.

Turner's thesis quickly became popular among intellectuals. It explained why the American people and American government were so different from Europeans. 

Most American history texts present Turner's ideas. Although a historical controversy has continued for decades concerning the validity of his frontier thesis, few critics reject it entirely. He is one of the most renowned of all American historians. 

My best,
Jane

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-- core = the center
-- core defining quality = the quintessence
--tied = to tie = to be linked; to be attached to
-- rugged = having a study ("solide", "robuste") build or strong constitution
-- to tame = to domesticate
-- renowned =  famous; well-known