I suppose if you consider locking a 4 year old girl in chains for 10
months on suspicion of witchcraft a fitting template for the future
America...
Nancy
-------
I was never lost, but I was bewildered once for three days.
--Daniel Boone
On Feb 3, 2007, at 2:09 PM, Douglas Deal wrote:
> [log in to unmask] wrote:
>> the winners write history.....the north and to hear it told in
>> Mass..... New England won the conflict between 1861 and
>> 1865...they get to publish the history and then publish the text
>> books so everyone gets the PC version of New England history.
>> It's only been in the last 20 years that other regional histories
>> have come into the history story...but they still want everyone
>> on to think Plymouth was the first
>>
>>
>>
>
> But remember that Americans started writing histories of the
> country soon after independence (i.e., well before the Civil War).
> Also, a reading of histories produced from the late 1860s into the
> mid-20th century reveals that most are not especially critical or
> neglectful when it comes to describing the southern colonies and
> states and their achievements.
>
> The skirmishing over priority in the origins of the colonies (plus
> institutions) that became the US started early. For example, at the
> 1802 Forefathers' Day celebration at Plymouth, participants readily
> conceded that Virginia was home to the oldest permanent settlement.
> But the roots of America's political ideology and institutions,
> they said, were in Plymouth's free soil, not the slave South. They
> toasted "our Sister Virginia:--When she changes three-fifths of her
> Ethiopian Skin, we will respect her as the head of our /white/
> family." (from Joseph A. Conforti, /Imagining New England /[2001],
> p.182) This could be read as a complaint about slavery or about
> blacks or both (clearly it is critical of the 3/5 compromise that,
> Northerners argued, led to overrepresentation of the Southern
> slaveholding states in the H of R). At every stage, this origins
> debate has tended to reflect current themes as much as historical
> arguments....
>
> Another good book on this question is Ann Uhry Abrams, /The
> Pilgrims and Pocahontas: Rival Myths of American Origin/ (Westview
> Press, 1999).
>
>
> Doug Deal
>
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