My Associate Director on Capitol Hill was a female Bostonian, a Harvard graduate. She had been a major appointee in the Bush Administration. In her fifties she was absolutely astonished when I told her that Jamestown was established before Plymouth Rock was reached.
Lincoln declared the New England holiday of Thanksgiving a national holiday. He was never president of the South. If you asked anyone outside the South in the last generation where English America was founded, they would say it was at Plymouth Rock.
Unless you are a Southerner or a German, you have no idea what it is like to lose a war to someone who really HATES you. At the Voice of America in the 1980s I took over a series of VOA programs on American History. It had been going on for years, and there had not been a single program on history below the Mason-Dixon Line.
An NEA-sponsored series on American history told “how this country spread from a settlement in New England across the continent.”
The House of Burgesses in Virginia was first elected in 1619, over a year before the Mayflower landed. That House of Burgesses continued in a straight line to the Virginia Legislature today. But I saw a Believe It or Not in the 1950s that said that the first person elected to office in today’s America was a New Englander in the 1640s.
Not being illiterate or Northern, I chose NOT to believe it.
Anyone who does not think that war is EVERYTHING has not LOST one.
#1 by shari on 11/26/2009 - 11:18 am
It’s a good thing that not EVERYBODY believes everything,or it would be hopeless. When I went to church I kept hearing that we just needed to say YES. But, I think that in order to do that, we need to say NO. Mommy professor has been way to influential in sowing confusion.
#2 by backbaygrouch4 on 11/26/2009 - 7:31 pm
Your take on Yankeedom’s grip on History reflects academic reality. But I’m not so sure about the Thanksgiving angle. Despite having at least six ancestors at the table in Plymouth in 1621, my doubts about the New England roots of the holiday, fueled by Rush reading George Washington’s Proclamation in 1789 on the matter, led to a bit of googling. My guess would be that it derives from an English custom. The Berkeley Plantation of Virginia claims to be the first Thanksgiving site for an event on December 4, 1619 which involved c. 35 individuals. Perhaps there was a one T Whitaker there, but don’t know if the guest list is still extent. Look in the attic and see if you still have a copy.