By the way, May 2007 is also the four hundredth anniversary of the founding of English America at Jamestown.
Don’t look for it in the media.
Most people don’t realize how critical it is to the Lincoln view of history to keep people saying that America was founded by the Pilgrims in Massachusets in November of 1620.
THAT is probably a MAJOR reason for THIS year’s Cinco de Mayo media explosion.
They assume that we are so obsessed with Mexicans that we will bitch about THEM and forget about our OWN history.
They’re right.
#1 by Elizabeth on 05/06/2007 - 2:24 pm
Jamestown has been covered in national media — not fairly, in most cases. There was a cover story in TIME and a story in NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC. I read part of the story in TIME (someone else’s copy) and won’t be reading the one in NG, given what the subtitle is on the cover of NG. There have been a few other national magazine stories on it, of varying quality.
THE WASHINGTON POST has been covering Jamestown events, too.
All of the above have the usual muttering about how eevil Jamestown was, but one story — don’t remember the source but it was a usually libbie one — did say something moderately objective about how the Jamestown settlers are us and we’re the Jamestown settlers. And there was an article about Jamestown being an early “Ellis Island,” mentioning that most settlers were just trying to make new lives, much as many arrivals since on these shores.
#2 by Pain on 05/06/2007 - 4:00 pm
The Queen’s visit was mentioned in the media here, but not why she went to Jamestown.
http://www.jamestown1607.org/ begins with pictures of blacks, Asians, and Mexicans, then states that Jamestown began the “principal of diversity,” as if our English forefathers came here to genocide themselves.
Wikipedia’s anyone-can-join-in article is written to suggest that half the colonists were Polish. This is based on a stray comment that the Jamestown company hired “8 Dutchmen and Poles” from west Prussia, which had been inhabited almost exclusively by Germans (”Dutchmen”) since 2000 BC.
(West Prussia was at that time under feudal suzerainty to the Polish crown, but that doesn’t mean the Germans there were “Polish” as they would be in a propositional state. And naturally the Polish upper class of that time was exclusively Nordic, not the semi-caucasoid trolls which have since taken over Poland during Communist rule and which see themselves as Polish first and white last. Saying that one person there may have been Polish fails to suggest that all-white English Jamestowne was “diverse.”)
#3 by Papillon on 05/07/2007 - 5:19 am
This comment ties in with this article and “United NATIONS”.
I just came across something that is right down our alley in an article from a CoCC article about Cinco de Mayo: http://tinyurl.com/2elwov
“When causes for the war are discussed, the Mexicans point… [to] everyone’s favourite culprit, those evil nasty American white people.”
American white people! NOT White American people. See the shift in importance from American to White? When liberals and respectable conservatives hyphenate our identities, they always use the prefix to show which part they think is less important. White, Black, Asian, “Hispanic” … they try to delude us into thinking that we’re all the same under our skin, we all bleed red blood.
Codswallop!
I have much more in common with Bob the American white gentleman than I do with Muhammad el-Shishkabab, the transplanted Arab with Australian citizenship. It is our race that is important; the state is just a by-line.
Bob and I are FAMILY.
#4 by Back Bay Grouch on 05/07/2007 - 7:37 am
OK, another bitch from Beantown.
The Pilgrims did not settle Massachusetts in 1620.
They settled in Plymouth Plantation.
The Puritans founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony ten years later.
In 1685 various New England colonies were joined by the colonial authorities in London.
This arrangement became undone with the so-called Glorious Revolution, however, in the settlement that followed Plymouth was annexed to Massachusetts in 1691.
The ethos of the two settlements had many important differences. The commericial/intellectual elite of Boston is the core of what most people associate with Yankees. But us swamp Yankees see it otherwise. It still matters whether one’s ancestors came over on the Mayflower or the Arabella.
In the greater issues addressed in this blog this is petty, but, dammit, we care about footnotes up here.
BTW, for some time I lived on Pinckney St. on the Hill, named after a great patriot from down your way.
Back Bay Grouch
#5 by Bob on 05/07/2007 - 9:18 am
Grouch:
Am aware the Pilgrims and the Puritans were entirely different. Plymouth fought desperately to keep its independence from the Bay Colony, but was overwhelmed.
But to American history the Puritan flood that poured in after 1635 were the Puritans and the Pilgrim Fathers included the Puritans. The real Pilgrims are as obscured as Jamestown.
This makes America “The Shining City on a Hill,” a Wordist construct.