William Dean Howells, editor of the Atlantic Monthly and one of the great, insightful novelists of Victorian America, visited the great Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876. He toured the pavilion in which native American crafts were displayed. Howells' judgment: "the red man, as he appears in effigy and in photograph in this collection, is a hideous demon, whose malign traits cannot inspire any emotion softer than abhorrence."
Am I naive that I continue to be shocked by the barbarities of the past?
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