Good words, Nancy.
I should make one correction to my post below: Mary Livermore's
sojourn in Virginia was at the beginning of the 1840s, not "in the late
1840s," as I mistakenly wrote.
You can see some of the pages of Livermore's book online courtesy of
Google Books at:
http://tinyurl.com/2rnlvx
Best wishes--
--Jurretta
On Mar 3, 2007, at 1:14 PM, Sunshine49 wrote:
> I was thinking the same thing, how beneficial these discussions have
> been about white/ black/ native relations and situations, and how
> extremely complex they are, once you scratch the surface. So much we
> don't know about the other; so much we think we do know! I feel we've
> learned a lot and cleared away some old misconceptions, or at least
> agreed to disagree, something that, sadly, will never happen in the
> larger culture, driven by the media as it is and the sound bites and
> snappy headlines; no one will ever bother to look at the deeper
> issues, the bigger picture, and come to any greater understanding. We
> will continue to bicker, misunderstand and misjudge, as we have for so
> long.
>
> Nancy
>
>
> On Mar 3, 2007, at 12:52 PM, Jurretta Heckscher wrote:
>
>> Bravo, Kevin. May I say that this discussion has been impressive and
>> heartening both for the humane erudition and for the respectful
>> pedagogy it has elicited from so many on this list, professional
>> historians and informed non-professionals alike. We have had the
>> equivalent of a graduate seminar in historiography co-led by a
>> particularly wise and skilled group of professors. I've been too
>> busy to participate much, but every time I began to think I just had
>> to add something, I'd see that someone else had said it already, and
>> far better than I could have.
>>
>> The first and perhaps most important lesson I learned from my own
>> mentor in the scholarship of slavery, James O. Horton, was never to
>> forget or underestimate slavery's enormous human complexity. It's a
>> lesson I hope we've all had reinforced on this thread.
>>
>> As I head out of town for several days, let me add just one more
>> filament of evidence. It comes from the autobiography of Mary A.
>> Livermore, a New England woman who lived for several years in the
>> late 1840s on a wealthy Mecklenburg County, Va., plantation as a
>> teacher for the plantation owner's children (and later distinguished
>> herself as a journalist, suffragist, and lecturer). . . . .
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