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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