Things To Be Thankful For
Because Providence and Pat Purcell have been so good to the Boston Herald, I still have a job where I will working the holiday. No worries, there’s holiday pay and mounds of food being delivered, compliments of the boss, whose undying efforts have ensured that Boston remains a two-newspaper town for now and that I am able to continue toiling on in the best job I’ve ever loved.
Limited holiday time with family means this is it for the holiday post. Here’s an update on Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War by Nathaniel Philbrick, which is this week’s read before passing out after work in the middle of the night.
This book rocks. A must-read, friends reported. Fifty-five pages in, Philbrick’s delivering the dirt on the manuvering of sachems Massasoit and Epenow, and wannabe sachem Squanto, plus the counterproductive misdeeds of assorted pre-Pilgrim English opportunists, such as Thomas Hunt, who PO’d his commander, Capt. John Smith, by seizing Indians as slaves and setting back relations significantly.
Also, a great discussion of the Mayflower Compact, as well as the religious/political education of William Bradford, the Leiden experience, and the finagling with investors to get the story on the road. Judging by the table of contents, it looks like the early settlement’s travails and the Thanksgiving part come on quick, in the next 50 pages or so. Then there’s the war bit.
Redux of this week’s early American settlement and conflict post, plus a quick TG roundup:
My fellow New Englanders at Maggie’s Farm go deep with George Washington’s Thanksgiving Day message, 1789, plus a big TG linkfest.
Sissy Willis examines the utopianism.
My fellow New Englander at A Piece of Work in Progress weigh in with a very poignant and deep thankfulness plus a shout out to the troops.
Speaking of which, here’s J.D. Johannes with a Tikritgiving.
Speaking of which, here’s a Carnival of the Turkeys from Cassandra, half of whose Thanksgiving is being celebrated in Afghanistan.
HotAir gets its Norman Rockwell on.
Ditto Powerline, which digs into the Rockwell for things to be thankful for. Freedom of speech.
Uh oh … apparently belief in American values is a no-go if you want to be a teacher. Protein Wisdom.
Off topic but fun: White House State Dinner gatecrashers via, who else, Gateway, who also has th other holiday news of the Oprah-Obama White House Christmas special. Sounds treacly.
The Anchoress is cat-blogging the holiday, plus offering up Irish veggie recipes. Hey, I thought that’s what all our people left the Auld Sod to get away from.
Don Surber dishes up the Turkey of the Year. It’s a case of just desserts … sort of a petard flambé. Michelle has a Turkey of the Year smorgasbord.
Legal Insurrection thanks global warming … for upstate New York’s Finger Lakes! (Speaking of all that, Watt’s Up has a steaming casserole of warmal faking. NZ’s own CRU scandal? If you’re thankful for the new freedom of speech on that issue, tuck into a rasher of it at Memeorandum.)
Reynolds with Guinness-basted turkey from Singapore, where according to local custom it probably should be followed up with a good chundering Hash House run and more beer.
A roundup of TG opeds at RealClearPolitics.
Back to Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War. Documenting the variously warm/cold relations and mutual opportunism between the English Puritans, Massasoit and the local Wampanoags and other regional tribes, the book promises to reach a climax with King Philip’s War of 1675. A generally little known but critical war in the development of English America, seen as having forged a distinct American identity, in which New England’s population of about 70,000 suffered 10 percent killed (1 in 65 of about 52,000 colonists, 3 out of every 20 of the area’s 20,000 Indian population at that time, according to one estimate,* with Indian assaults on about half of New England’s ninety existing towns). From my town, which had a population of approximately 400 at that time, there were at least 8 men killed, which would have been a devastating loss and burden to a small farming and fishing community. Their names start the list thatis read every Memorial Day down at Veterans Park.
So I was a little disappointed, living 10 miles down the road from Plymouth, to see that my town appears exactly once in the index, with a simple reference to the fact of its founding, and that most of the surrounding towns don’t appear in the index at all. That’s odd, because from what I’ve read, a key triggering event in King Philip’s War, the suspected poisoning of Metacomet’s uncle Wamsutta during negotiations to avert war, was thought to have occurred here. I had hoped, in the period between 1620 and 1675, the 358 pages might accommodate more on the area’s settlement and development, the movement of people up the Indian trails that became the winding roads I drive every day, and the development of fishing camps, shipyards and farming communities that produced these houses from the 1600s I drive past daily, whose inhabitants saw that war and all the others that followed. The marsh-backed beaches I take my kids to would have been the summer digs of the Wampanoag, these woods now full of deer, turkeys, coyotes, foxes and squirrels again would have been their winter larder, though these are different woods, new growth within the last century over the stone-lined cellar holes and stone walls of clear-cut 18th- and 19th-century farms.
Back to Philbrick’s Mayflower, between the first years of Plymouth and King Philip’s War, the kind of detail I’m looking for probably would have required 900 pages. OK, we’ll see.
More on this continent’s European settlement, what preceded it, and what sprung from it, if you’re in a mood this Thanksgiving. Nothing quaint and Pilgrimmy about it. It’s war, politics, scheming, debate and debunkment. What do you expect? There are humans involved. We’ll kick off with a 10,000-year-old controversy. Who got here first:
Ancient Encounters: Kennewick Man and the First Americans James C. Chatter. It’s the politically awkward discovery of human remains that pre-date the Indian settlement of North America, in fact pre-date the emergence of the Mongoloid race, and belong to a member of a primeval Eurasian race from which both the English settlers and the Wampanoags theoretically are descended, that exists today in the genes of the Ainu, Polynesians and Aboriginals.
1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus Charles C. Mann. via Amazon:
1491 is not so much the story of a year, as of what that year stands for: the long-debated (and often-dismissed) question of what human civilization in the Americas was like before the Europeans crashed the party.
Cahokia: Ancient America’s Great City on the Mississippi Timothy R. Pauketat. Heard an interview on this recently, sounded really good.
Author and anthropologist Pauketat (Chiefdoms and Other Archaeological Delusions) locates a civilizational “big bang” in the Mississippi River valley of 1050 CE, where “social life, political organization, religious belief, art, and culture were radically transformed” by a highly ambitious group of American Indians and their capital city, Cahokia, located east of what is now St. Louis.
Warpaths: Invasions of North America Ian Kenneth Steele.
Steele rejects the current tendency to portray Native Americans as confused, doomed victims who were inevitably overwhelmed by a more aggressive and technologically advanced culture. Rather, the indigenous peoples of the eastern woodlands were themselves often quite aggressive. They were diverse and politically sophisticated and frequently gave as good as they got in conflicts with Europeans. Many tribes became experts at playing the French and English off against each other. Steele pays full tribute to the cultural strengths of those tribes without sentimentalizing them, and he avoids demonizing Europeans.
The Times of Their Lives: Life, Love, and Death in Plymouth Colony James Deetz and Patricia Scott Deetz
Rejecting both the sacred myth of the Pilgrim fathers and the revisionist view of the rigidly repressed Puritans, the Deetzes present a radically different picture of the settlers who populated Plymouth Colony. … the detailed accounts of superstitions, sexual indiscretions, and criminal proceedings offer an especially fresh perspective on daily life in seventeenth-century America. Neither saints nor villains, the Plymouth colonists were very much a product of their unique social, political, and cultural environment.
* King Philip’s War: The History and Legacy of America’s Forgotten Conflict Eric B. Schultz and Michael J. Tougias, Wikipedia’s source of the population and death figures above. I’m going to need to get this one:
This work about the brutal 18th-century war between Indian tribes (led by a daring and skilled chief known as King Philip) is divided into three quite different parts. The first part provides a relatively concise chronological retelling of the war. The second part, organized geographically and the heart of the volume, takes readers through New England to various sites associated with the conflict. Frequent references to present-day localities make it possible to use these pages as a sort of historical guidebook. The third part offers three contemporary narratives reflecting the significance of the war on the people of the era. Useful maps assist the reader throughout.
The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity Jill Lepore
Rather than providing a battle-by-battle description, Lepore (history, Boston Univ.) presents the war through the diaries, books, articles, and dramas written about it. Her major theme is that wars and their histories cannot be separated.
Did somebody say they could be?
Flintlock and Tomahawk: New England in King Philip’s War Douglas Edward Leach
“Marked by scrupulous and wide-ranging research, it is not only good history but good narrative as well.” —Robert J. Taylor, American Historical Review. This classic account of King Philip’s War, first published in 1958, offers a bird’s-eye view of the conflict, from the Wampanoag sachem’s rise to his ultimate defeat … The author weighs all the factors contributing to the Native Americans’ defeat and surveys the effects of the war on the lives of both Indians and colonists in the years to come. With insight, balance, and compassion, Leach portrays the tragedy of the war and points toward the future of the nascent American republic.
One last, to complete the circle that started with prehistoric settlement, culture and civilization. Here’s one on the Brits. Where they came from, where they went, and what they took there. If you’re an American, even if not of English origin, this one is about you and the world you live in:
Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America David Hackett Fischer
Families of zealous, literate Puritan yeomen and artisans from urbanized East Anglia established a religious community in Massachusetts (1629-40); royalist cavaliers headed by Sir William Berkeley and young, male indentured servants from the south and west of England built a highly stratified agrarian way of life in Virginia (1640-70); egalitarian Quakers of modest social standing from the North Midlands resettled in the Delaware Valley and promoted a social pluralism (1675-1715); and, in by far the largest migration (1717-75), poor borderland families of English, Scots, and Irish fled a violent environment to seek a better life in a similarly uncertain American backcountry. These four cultures, reflected in regional patterns of language, architecture, literacy, dress, sport, social structure, religious beliefs, and familial ways, persisted in the American settlements.
My fellow New Englander, Dan Collins of POWIP, adds:
Young Goodman Brown Nathaniel Hawthorne. Collins remarks, ”A wonderful reconstruction of the Puritan mentality in the United States and its particular neuroses is Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown.” The idea of bewilderment in those primeval forests is something that we can hardly appreciate these days, the very real fears that were heightened by the biblical lens through which all of that strangeness never contemplated in the Bible would have been viewed.”
Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World Mark Kurlansky. Good one, Dan. Having married into a local tribe that has spent centuries pulling cod and whale out of these waters, I can get onboard with that one.
Moving a little ahead of our narrative, but on topic with the complex relationships between Europeans and Indians, reader Joe D. likes:
Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766 Fred Anderson. Sounds pretty good. Amazon review:
… Demonstrating that independence was not inevitable or even at first desired by the colonists, he shows how removal of the threat from France was essential before Americans could develop their own concepts of democratic government and defy their imperial British protectors. Of great interest is the importance of Native Americans in the conflict … In a fast-paced narrative, Anderson moves with confidence and ease from the forests of Ohio and battlefields along the St. Lawrence to London’s House of Commons and the palaces of Europe … The book’s usefulness and clarity are enhanced by a hundred landscapes, portraits, maps, and charts taken from contemporary sources. Crucible of War is political and military history at its best …
Here’s reader Heidegger’s find, noted in comments. Good title:
Dead Certainties: Unwarranted Speculations Simon Schama. Here’s a review via Amazon:
This book can be read on at least two levels. First, there are the two intriguing stories told by talented writer and noted historian Schama [author of Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution] – one about the triumph and death of James Wolfe at Quebec in 1759, the second an exploration of the murder of the Boston Brahmin George Parkman in 1849. But Schama is after bigger game, and his target is the gap between a “lived event and its subsequent narration.” In the chasm separating the two lies the ambiguity that obscures a more complete rendering of the past. This experiment in writing history attempts to close the gap through imagination–jumbling chronology to force the reader into more active participation in the story, and adding other voices to the usual historical narration …
OK. That’s different.
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Posted by Jules Crittenden at 1:19 pm Comments (2) on Wednesday, November 25, 2009
2 Responses to “Things To Be Thankful For”
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November 25th, 2009 at 3:00 pm
Happy Thanksgiving, Jules.
Here’s a link you might find interesting when you get back to blogging. Has to do with Obama’s cabinet.
November 25th, 2009 at 6:10 pm
Happy Thanksgiving, Jules.