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Date: | Tue, 30 Jun 2009 11:49:15 -0400 |
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Concerning this interesting discussion of the denotations and connotations
of the words "plantation" and "farm" in old Virginia, here are a tangent and
then a tangent to the tangent:
THE TANGENT: Today's New York Times offers an article
(http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/30/us/30rename.html) headlined "Rhode Island
Weighs Using Shorter Official Name." It begins, "It does not appear on the
state flag or license plate. You won't see it on road maps or welcome signs.
But Rhode Island has a lightning rod of a formal name -- Rhode Island and
Providence Plantations -- that harks back to its prominent role in the slave
trade and makes some of its residents cringe." The article reports that
after "years of defending the state's name, the State Senate and House of
Representatives voted overwhelmingly last week to allow a referendum asking
voters whether to shorten it by seven syllables, to Rhode Island." The
article also reports that one of three House members who opposed the measure
charged that striking "and Providence Plantations" from the state's name
would be "like tearing down our history. They're trying to be revisionist,
and revisionism doesn't work." (Whether or not this particular bit of
revisionism proposed in Rhode Island would be unwise -- and I offer no
opinion on that -- I remain baffled at the belief that a given understanding
of the past, once received, is perfect in every way, and unchangeable, and
undiscussable.)
THE TANGENT TO THE TANGENT: It seems to me that this story shows yet again
that in America, and I don't mean just the South, we're nowhere near
finished developing our understanding of our slavery-era past. Too bad that
many of the Virginia authorities in charge of deciding Fort Monroe's
post-Army fate agree that the past is already quite well understood. That's
what they've continued to demonstrate by continuing to produce official
documents treating the Contraband freedom story not as the story of
enslavement-escaping Americans standing up for the natural law on which the
country was founded, but merely as the story of a white politician in a
general's uniform making the best of a squalid legal and military situation
grounded in the obscenity of federal slavery law ca. 1861. I should add,
however, that historians have re-entered the discussion in a formal way.
Maybe there'll soon be good things to report about the constructive
revisionism that's obviously needed concerning the story of the Union's
bastion in Confederate, slaveholding Virginia.
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