[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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