A Call for Symposium: Jamestown 2007

Paul Noonan - 5/6/2007

At Plymouth you have a family-based society of hard working humble folks who seek freedom to worship God in a way their sociey doesn't tolerate. They persevere in the face of great hardships.

At Jamestown there are also great hardships, but there you also have an initially non-family based society (the original settlers were all men and for well over a decade the colony was a mostly male frontier society). Their religious sentiments were conventional; their motivations in coming to the New World had to do with economic opportunity (initially a delusional search for precious metals; later the growth of tobacco, an agricultural product with no nutritive value and - as we much later found out - actually deleterious to health). The early settlers were mostly "gentlemen" who at one point had to be threatened with having their rations witheld in order to get them to do a decent day's work.

I submit that both the Jamestown and the Plymouth experiences can tell you a lot about the emerging American character, but which one do you think elementary school teachers and politicians making patriotic speechs are going to dwell on? After all, no one apparantly ever had to tell Miles Standish to do a decent day's work or he wouldn't get any dinner.

Jonathan Dresner - 5/5/2007

this to the reading list. I'm not an early Americanist, so I can't evaluate most of his claims, but the indictment of history both professional, public and popular is pretty severe.

Actually, the chart might be fodder for a whole other symposium.

Ben W. Brumfield - 5/4/2007

...was Frank Owsley's explanation in "The Irrepressible Conflict" (I'll Take My Stand pp. 62-64):

Hence, for thirty years after the Civil war the intellectual life of the South was as sterile as its own rocky uplands and sandy barrens. The rising generations read Northern literature, shot through with the New England tradition. Northern textbooks were used in Southern schools; Northern histories, despite the frantic protests of local patriotic organizations, were almost universally taught in Southern high schools and colleges, — books that were built around the Northern legend and either completely ignored the South or insisted upon the unrighteousness of most of its history and its philosophy of life. One would judge from the average history text and from the recitations conducted by the Northern schoolma'am that the Puritans and Pilgrim fathers were the ancestors of every self-respecting American. Southern children spoke of "our Puritan fathers." No child ever heard of the Southern Puritan fathers — the great horde of Scotch-Irish Presbyterians and German Lutherans and other strict and puritanical peoples who had pushed to the Mississippi River and far North of the Ohio before the New England population had got a hundred miles west of Boston.