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American History
Related: About this forumThe Shocking Savagery of America's Early History
Its all a bit of a blur, isnt it? That little-remembered century1600 to 1700that began with the founding (and foundering) of the first permanent English settlement in America, the one called Jamestown, whose endemic perils portended failure for the dream of a New World. The century that saw all the disease-ridden, barely civilized successors to Jamestown slaughtering and getting slaughtered by the Original Inhabitants, hanging on by their fingernails to some fetid coastal swampland until Pocahontas saved Thanksgiving. No, thats not right, is it? I said it was a blur.
Enter Bernard Bailyn, the greatest historian of early America alive today. Now over 90 and ensconced at Harvard for more than six decades, Bailyn has recently published another one of his epoch-making grand narrative syntheses, The Barbarous Years, casting a light on the darkness, filling in the blank canvas with what hes gleaned from what seems like every last scrap of crumbling diary page, every surviving chattel slave receipt and ships passenger manifest of the living and dead, every fearful sermon about the Antichrist that survived in the blackened embers of the burned-out churches.
Bailyn has not painted a pretty picture. Little wonder he calls it The Barbarous Years and spares us no details of the terror, desperation, degradation and widespread torturedo you really know what being flayed alive means? (The skin is torn from the face and head and the prisoner is disemboweled while still alive.) And yet somehow amid the merciless massacres were elements that gave birth to the rudiments of civilizationor in Bailyns evocative phrase, the fragile integument of civilitythat would evolve 100 years later into a virtual Renaissance culture, a bustling string of self-governing, self-sufficient, defiantly expansionist colonies alive with an increasingly sophisticated and literate political and intellectual culture that would coalesce into the rationale for the birth of American independence. All the while shaping, and sometimes misshaping, the American character. Its a grand drama in which the glimmers of enlightenment barely survive the savagery, what Yeats called the blood-dimmed tide, the brutal establishment of slavery, the race wars with the original inhabitants that Bailyn is not afraid to call genocidal, the full, horrifying details of which have virtually been erased.
In truth, I didnt think anyone sat around erasing it, Bailyn tells me when I visit him in his spacious, document-stuffed study in Harvards Widener Library. Hes a wiry, remarkably fit-looking fellow, energetically jumping out of his chair to open up a file drawer and show me copies of one of his most-prized documentary finds: the handwritten British government survey records of America-bound colonists made in the 1770s, which lists the name, origin, occupation and age of the departing, one of the few islands of hard data about who the early Americans were.
Enter Bernard Bailyn, the greatest historian of early America alive today. Now over 90 and ensconced at Harvard for more than six decades, Bailyn has recently published another one of his epoch-making grand narrative syntheses, The Barbarous Years, casting a light on the darkness, filling in the blank canvas with what hes gleaned from what seems like every last scrap of crumbling diary page, every surviving chattel slave receipt and ships passenger manifest of the living and dead, every fearful sermon about the Antichrist that survived in the blackened embers of the burned-out churches.
Bailyn has not painted a pretty picture. Little wonder he calls it The Barbarous Years and spares us no details of the terror, desperation, degradation and widespread torturedo you really know what being flayed alive means? (The skin is torn from the face and head and the prisoner is disemboweled while still alive.) And yet somehow amid the merciless massacres were elements that gave birth to the rudiments of civilizationor in Bailyns evocative phrase, the fragile integument of civilitythat would evolve 100 years later into a virtual Renaissance culture, a bustling string of self-governing, self-sufficient, defiantly expansionist colonies alive with an increasingly sophisticated and literate political and intellectual culture that would coalesce into the rationale for the birth of American independence. All the while shaping, and sometimes misshaping, the American character. Its a grand drama in which the glimmers of enlightenment barely survive the savagery, what Yeats called the blood-dimmed tide, the brutal establishment of slavery, the race wars with the original inhabitants that Bailyn is not afraid to call genocidal, the full, horrifying details of which have virtually been erased.
In truth, I didnt think anyone sat around erasing it, Bailyn tells me when I visit him in his spacious, document-stuffed study in Harvards Widener Library. Hes a wiry, remarkably fit-looking fellow, energetically jumping out of his chair to open up a file drawer and show me copies of one of his most-prized documentary finds: the handwritten British government survey records of America-bound colonists made in the 1770s, which lists the name, origin, occupation and age of the departing, one of the few islands of hard data about who the early Americans were.
Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/The-Shocking-Savagery-of-Americas-Early-History-192122641.html#ixzz2Ll7lda1y
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The Shocking Savagery of America's Early History (Original Post)
RZM
Feb 2013
OP
FreedomRain
(413 posts)1. Fantastic link
Thank you.
I have read a few "capture narratives"
(Google Book search, set published before 1700.
Scary stuff, but still have no idea how much of it was propaganda, but damn fascinating.