They're having to do more things to amuse the tourists- these days,
you can't even be amused enough at a sporting event, they have to
have huge foam "mascots" to amuse you further- so I guess in order to
do that, they have to keep the programs centrally located. More of
the dumbing down of America.

Nancy

-------
I was never lost, but I was bewildered once for three days.

--Daniel Boone



On Jan 5, 2007, at 5:39 PM, Jurretta Heckscher wrote:

> A further comment on the Carter's Grove sale:  note that the Colonial
> Williamsburg Foundation justifies the sale as follows:
>
> '"Our decision was guided by a thorough evaluation of Carter's Grove's
> relevance to Colonial Williamsburg's interpretive focus.  Our mission
> is to tell the story of citizenship and becoming America in the 18th
> century," said Campbell [the Foundation's president and chairman].
> "This is best accomplished in the Historic Area, where we present and
> interpret Revolutionary War-era Williamsburg.  Carter's Grove, with
> its
> multiple stories to tell, does not support this strategic focus."'
>
> I find that statement unbelievable.  How is it possible "to tell the
> story of citizenship and becoming America in the 18th century," above
> all in Virginia, without incorporating the realities of the plantation
> world, including of course its basis in slavery and the still
> significantly Africanized world of the vast majority of Virginia's
> African Americans, the agricultural workers who never came near
> what is
> now the Historic Area?
>
> Campbell's words imply that four decades of transformative scholarship
> on Virginia, Virginians, the Revolution, and the evolution of American
> citizenship and American identity are being fundamentally disregarded
> in favor of a disembodied, sanitized "story" that flattens the truths
> and complexities of Virginia's and America's history.
>
> Even if the Foundation's purpose is to celebrate the nation we have
> become today--a defensible goal, in my view--how is it possible to do
> that without thoroughly integrating our knowledge of the most
> important
> facts about the nation's historical foundations in eighteenth-century
> Virginia?
>
> If anyone has been to Colonial Williamsburg recently and can reassure
> me on these points, I'd love to hear it.  Last week's article in
> the NY
> Times that Suzanne Levy noted  (thanks, Suzanne) doesn't really do
> that: for example, how would the writer have learned that
> eighteenth-century Virginia was "not just a society that owned slaves,
> but a society organized around slavery" if she hadn't happened to
> visit
> the soon-to-be inaccessible reconstructed slave quarters at, yes,
> Carter's Grove?  I'm not a Williamsburg-basher--on the contrary, a
> childhood visit to Colonial Williamsburg (and Carter's Grove) was the
> spark that led me to the study of history--but this sale and the
> justification offered for it strike me as a tragically misguided
> indication that Colonial Williamsburg may truly have lost its way.
>
> --Jurretta J. Heckscher
>
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