17 Jan
For those of you who did not pick up the printed packets, you are going to want to get started on the questions, so here is a .pdf of the packet. You need to get started on these questions as soon as possible to determine ones you need to ask me about on Tuesday.
Click here to download the .pdf: Turner Essay with questions
17 Dec
If you so choose, you will complete a project on one of these books by April 22 at 7:23 am. You may only do this extra credit project if all assignments have been turned in. This can be worth up to 3% of your final grade, depending on the effort required to read the book and the effort put into the project over the book. But if you are not going to devote effort to this, DO NOT DO IT, because there will be no “pity points” awarded. This will not be accepted late.
Many of these are also available on Kindle and/or iBooks or Nook, and are often cheaper and readily available that way.
Alan Taylor— American Colonies: The Settling of North America
Arthur M. Schlessinger— The Cycles of American History
Nathaniel Philbrick— Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War
David D. Hall— A Reforming People: Puritanism and the Transformation of Public Life in New England
Michael Klarman— From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality
Kenneth T. Jackson— Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of America
Joshua E. London— Victory in Tripoli: How America’s War with the Barbary Pirates Established the U.S. Navy and Shaped a Nation
Christopher Tomlins— Freedom Bound: Law, Labor, and Civic Identity in Colonizing English America, 1580-1865.
Gary B. Nash— History on Trial: Culture Wars and the Teaching of the Past
Fred Anderson— The War That Made America: A Short History of the French and Indian War
Daniel J. Boorstin– The Americans: The Democratic Experience
Daniel J. Boorstin– The Americans: The National Experience
Robert Middlekauff— The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789
Jon Butler— Becoming America: The Revolution before 1776
Jon Meacham— American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation
Mary Beth Norton— Founding Mothers & Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society
Joseph J. Ellis— Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation
Gordon S. Wood— The Radicalism of the American Revolution
Bernard Bailyn— The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution
Melvyn Leffler— For the Soul of Mankind: The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War
C. Vann Woodward— The Strange Career of Jim Crow
Joseph Wheelan— Mr. Adams’s Last Crusade: John Quincy Adams’s Extraordinary Post-Presidential Life in Congress
David M. Kennedy— Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945
Grant Foreman— Indian Removal: The Emigration of the Five Civilized Tribes of Indians
Daniel Rasmussen— American Uprising: The Untold Story of America’s Largest Slave Revolt
Sean Wilentz— The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln
Harry L. Watson— Liberty and Power: The Politics of Jacksonian America
Bernard De Voto— The Course of Empire
Bernard De Voto— The Year of Decision: 1846
Sylvia D. Hoffert— When Hens Crow: The Woman’s Rights Movement in Antebellum America
Steven E. Woodworth— Manifest Destinies: America’s Westward Expansion and the Road to the Civil War
Elliott West– The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, & the Rush to Colorado
Edmund S. Morgan– American Slavery, American Freedom
Bruce Levine— Half Slave and Half Free: The Roots of Civil War
Richard Hofstadter— Anti-Intellectualism in American Life
Eric Foner— The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery
Eric Foner— Reconstruction
Doris Kearns Goodwin— Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln
Drew Gilpin Faust— Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War
Daniel Walker Howe–What Hath God Wrought: the Transformation of America, 1815–1848
Robert Morgan— Lions of the West: Heroes and Villains of Westward Expansion
Ira Berlin— Remembering Slavery: African Americans Talk About Their Personal Experiences of Slavery and Emancipation
James M. McPherson— Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era
Gary W. Gallagher— The Union War
Winthrop D. Jordan–The White Man’s Burden: Historical Origins of Racism in the United States
Emory M. Thomas— The Confederate Nation: 1861-1865
Andrew F. Smith— Starving the South: How the North Won the Civil War
Harriet Beecher Stowe— Uncle Tom’s Cabin
David S. Reynolds— Mightier than the Sword: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Battle for America
Amanda Foreman— A World on Fire: Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War
John Lewis Gaddis— We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History
John Lewis Gaddis— The Cold War: A New History
19 Nov
From The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery, by Eric Foner, chapter 4.
Two days after the inauguration of James Buchanan in March 1957, the Supreme Court handed down one of the most infamous decisions in its history. During the 1830s, Dred Scott, a slave of Dr. John Emerson of Missouri, resided with his owner in Illinois, where state law prohibited slavery, and the Wisconsin territory, from which it had been barred by the Missouri Compromise. He married another slave, Harriet Scott, and in 1846, after returning to Missouri, the Scott family, by now consisting of husband, wife, and two daughters, went to court claiming that residence on free soil had made them free. In time, the case made its way to the Supreme Court. Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, supported by sic other members of the court, concluded that the Scotts must remain slaves. No black person, Taney declared, could be a citizen of the United states and thus the Scotts had no standing to sue in court. The case could have ended there. Taney, however, went on to argue that because the Constitution “distinctly and expressly affirmed” the right to property in slaves, slaveholders could bring them into federal territories. The Missouri Compromise– repealed three years earlier by the Kansas-Nebraska Act– had therefore been unconstitutional. Only once before, in the landmark case of Marbury v. Madison, which established the principle of judicial review, had the Court invalidated an act of Congress on constitutional grounds.
Much of Taney’s opinion consisted of a historical discussion purporting to demonstrate that the founding fathers had not recognized black persons as part of the American people. The framers of the Constitution, he insisted, regarded blacks, slave and free, as “beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race.. and so far inferior, that they had no rights that the white man was bound to respect.” (This statement, Thaddeus Stevens later remarked, “damned [Taney] to everlasting fame; and, I fear, everlasting fire.”) States could make free blacks citizens if they wished, but this did not require the federal government or other states to recognize them as such. No state could unilaterally “introduce a new member into the political community created by the Constitution”– a community, according to Taney, limited to white persons.
“The most important decision ever made by the Supreme Court,” as the New York Times described it, Dred Scott was the work of a chief justice who belonged to a long-established planter family in Maryland. Taney had manumitted his own slaves in the 1820s but strongly believed in black inferiority. He seems to have thought that the Supreme Court could restore sectional harmony by resolving the slavery controversy. The decision had precisely the opposite effect. As a Georgia newspaper exulted, it “covers every question regarding slavery and settles it in favor of the South.” Taney had declared unconstitutional the platform of the nation’s second largest political party. His ruling also seemed to undercut Stephen A. Douglas’s popular sovereignty doctrine, for if Congress lacked the authority to deprive slaveholders of their constitutionally guaranteed right to bring slaves into a territory, how could a territorial legislature created by Congress do so?
…The Dred Scott decision propelled to the forefront of public debate questions that would dominate politics until the outbreak of the Civil War: the founders’ intentions regarding slavery; whether slavery should be viewed as a local or national institution; and the constitutional authority of the federal government to prohibit slavery in the territories. Lincoln had already expressed his opinion on these issues and would continue to do so between 1857 and 1860. But the decision inspired him to elaborate his views on a subject about which he had previously said very little, the place of blacks in American society. Lincoln knew that this question carried an explosive political charge. Soon after the Court issued its ruling, Stephen A Douglas delivered impassioned speeches declaring that the Declaration of Independence and Constitution had been written for whites and charging that Republicans who opposed the Dred Scott decision favored “perfect and absolute equality of the races.” Lincoln believed that rhetoric of this kind had played a role in Fremont’s defeat in the presidential election of the previous November. Republicans, Lincoln wrote, had been “constantly charged with seeking an amalgamation of the white and black races; and thousands turned from us… fearing to face it themselves.” If others would not “face it,” he would.
Lincoln later called Dred Scott a “burlesque upon judicial decisions.” On June 26, 1857, two weeks after Douglas spoke in Springfield in its support, Lincoln responded in the same city. The decision, he argued, was so erroneous that it could not be viewed as having established a “settled doctrine for the country.” Nearly all Republican leaders agreed. But unlike most Republicans politicians, who preferred to attack Taney for having taken on the territorial question when he need not have done so and who devoted most of their attention to the constitutional power of Congress to bar the institution in the territories, Lincoln addressed head-on the vexatious question of black citizenship. He denied that Taney had presented a plausible account of the founders’ racial outlook. Free blacks, he pointed out, echoing Justice McLean’s dissent, had voted in several states at the time the Constitution was ratified, indicating that they were them viewed as members of the body politic. Taney, moreover, was “grossly incorrect” to imply that “the public estimate of the negro” had improved since the revolutionary era; in fact, “the change between then and now is decidedly the other way.” Lincoln conspicuously failed to mention the deteriorating situation in Illinois, whose voters and legislature within the past decade had approved measures barring free blacks from entering the state….
More information on Dred Scott from PBS here: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4p2932.html
23 Sep
This video can also be accessed at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pgc0Da5Q9M
22 Sep
This video can also be accessed at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h10eSXRFs
This is a student presentation. She did a pretty good job, and found some great pictures.
This video also discusses the role of Shays’ Rebellion on support for the Articles:
This video can also be located at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbP0JWQeXag
2 Sep
Professor John Demos of Yale University wrote this article for American Heritage magazine. This article was adapted from his book, The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story From Early America.
Our traditional picture of colonial New England is essentially a still life. Peaceful little villages. Solid, strait-laced, steadily productive people. A landscape serene, if not bountiful. A history of purposeful, and largely successful, endeavor.
And yet, as historians are learning with ever-greater clarity, this picture is seriously at odds with the facts. New England had its solidity and purposefulness, to be sure. But it also had its share of discordant change, of inner stress and turmoil, and even of deadly violence. New England was recurrently a place of war, especially during the hundred years preceding the Revolution. The French to the north in Canada and the various Indian tribes on every side made determined, altogether formidable enemies. The roster of combat was long indeed: King Philip’s War (1675–76), King William’s War (1689–97), Queen Anne’s War (1702–13), Father Rasle’s War (1724–26), King George’s War (1744–48), and the French and Indian War (1754–63). Most of these were intercolonial, even international, conflicts, in which New England joined as a very junior partner. But there were numerous other skirmishes, entirely local and so obscure as not to have earned a name. All of them exacted a cost, in time, in money, in worry—and in blood.
Much of the actual fighting was small-scale, hit-andrun, more a matter of improvisation than of formal strategy and tactics. Losses in any single encounter might be only a few, but they did add up. Occasionally the scale widened, and entire towns became targets. Lancaster and Haverhill, Massachusetts; Salmon Falls and Oyster River, New Hampshire; York and Wells, Maine: Each suffered days of wholesale attack. And Deerfield, Massachusetts—above all, Deerfield—scene of the region’s single, most notorious “massacre.”
The year is 1704, the season winter, the context another European war with a “colonial” dimension. New France (Canada) versus New England. (New York and the colonies farther south are, at least temporarily, on the sidelines.) The French and their Indian allies have already engineered a series of devastating raids along the “eastern frontier”— the Maine and New Hampshire coasts. The English have counterattacked against half a dozen Abenaki Indian villages. And now, in Montreal, the French governor is secretly planning a new thrust “over the ice” toward “a little village of about forty households,” a place misnamed in the French records “Guerrefille.” (An ironic twist just there: Deerfield becomes “War-girl.”)
Deerfield is not unready. Like other outlying towns, it has labored to protect itself: with a “stockade” (a fortified area, at its center, inside a high palisade fence), a “garrison” of hired soldiers, a “watch” to patrol the streets at night, and “scouts” to prowl the woods nearby. Indeed, many families are living inside the stockade. Conditions are crowded and uncomfortable, to say the least, but few doubt the need for special measures. The town minister, Rev. John Williams, conducts an extraordinary day of “fasting and prayer” in the local church—“possessed,” as he reportedly is, “that the town would in a little time be destroyed.”
The attack forces—French led, largely Indian in rank and file—set out in early February. Steadily they move southward, on frozen rivers and lakes, with one hard leg across the Green Mountains. They have snowshoes, sleds to carry their supplies, and dogs to pull the sleds. The lower part of their route follows the Connecticut River valley till it reaches a point near what would later become Brattleboro, Vermont. Here they will strike off into the woods to the south, leaving dogs and sleds for their return. They are barely a day’s march—twenty miles—from their objective. The rest they will cover as quickly and quietly as possible. Surprise is their most potent weapon. The people of Deerfield, though generally apprehensive, know nothing of this specific threat. On the evening of February 28, the town goes to sleep in the usual way.
Midnight. Across the river to the west the attackers are making their final preparations: loading weapons, putting on war paint, reviewing plans. The layout of Deerfield is apparently known to them from visits made in previous years by Indian hunters and traders. Presently a scout is sent “to discover the posture of the town, who observing the watch walking in the street,” returns to his comrades and “puts them to a stand.” (Our source for the details of this sequence was a contemporary historian, writing some years after the fact.) Another check, a short while later, brings a different result. The village lies “all … still and quiet”; the watch evidently has fallen asleep. It is now about four o’clock in the morning, time for the attackers to move.
Over the river, on the ice. Across a mile of meadowland, ghostly and white. Past the darkened houses at the north end of the street. Right up to the stockade. The snow has piled hugely here; the drifts make walkways to the top of the fence. A vanguard of some forty men climbs quickly over and drops down on the inside. A gate is opened to admit the rest. The watch awakens, fires a warning shot, cries, “Arm!” Too late. The attackers separate into smaller parties and “immediately set upon breaking open doors and windows.”
he townspeople come to life with a rush. Some find opportunities to escape by jumping from windows or roof lines. Several manage to flee the stockade altogether and make their way to neighboring villages. In half a dozen households the men leave families behind in order to rally outside as a counterforce. In others there is a frantic attempt to hide.
The minister’s house is a special target, singled out “in the beginning of the onset”; later John Williams will remember (and write about) his experience in detail. Roused “out of sleep … by their violent endeavors to break open doors and windows with axes and hatchets,” he leaps from bed, runs to the front door, sees “the enemy making their entrance,” awakens a pair of soldiers lodged upstairs, and returns to his bedside “for my arms.” There is hardly time, for the “enemy immediately brake into the room, I judge to the number of twenty, with painted faces and hideous acclamations.” They are “all of them Indians”; no Frenchmen in sight as yet. The minister does manage to cock his pistol and “put it to the breast of the first Indian who came up.” Fortunately—for both of them—it misfires. Thereupon Williams is “seized by 3 Indians, who disarmed me, and bound me naked, as I was in my shirt”; in this posture he will remain “for near the space of an hour.”
With their chief prize secured, the invaders turn to “rifling the house, entering in great numbers into every room.” There is killing work too: “some were so cruel and barbarous as to take and carry to the door two of my children and murder them [six-year-old John, Jr., and six-week-old Jerusha], as also a Negro woman [a family slave named Parthena].” After “insulting over me a while, holding up hatchets over my head, [and] threatening to burn all I had,” the Indians allow their captive to dress. They also permit Mrs. Williams “to dress herself and our children.”
By this time the sun is “about an hour high” (perhaps 7:00 A.M.). The sequence described by John Williams has been experienced, with some variations, in households throughout the stockade: killings (especially of infants and others considered too frail to survive the rigors of life in the wilderness); “fireing houses”; “killing cattle, hogs, sheep & sacking and wasting all that came before them.” In short, a village-size holocaust. When John Williams and his family are finally taken outside, they see “many of the houses … in flames”; later, in recalling the moment, he asks, “Who can tell what sorrows pierced our souls?”
The Williamses know they are destined “for a march … into a strange land,” as prisoners. And prisoners are being herded together—in the meetinghouse and in a home nearby—from all over town. However, one household—that of the militia leader, Sgt. Benoni Stebbins—has mounted a remarkable resistance. Its occupants are well armed and fiercely determined; moreover, the walls of this house, “being filled up with brick,” effectively repel incoming fire. The battle (as described in a subsequent report by local militia officers) continues here for more than two hours. The attackers fall back, then surge forward in an unsuccessful attempt “to fire the house.” Again they retreat—this time to the shelter of the meetinghouse—while maintaining their fusillade all the while. The defenders return bullet for bullet, “accepting of no quarter, though offered,” and “causing several of the enemy to fall,” among them “one Frenchman, a gentleman to appearance,” and “3 or 4 Indians,” including a “captain” who had helped seize John Williams.
In the meantime, some of the attackers with their captives begin to leave the stockade. Heading north, they retrace their steps toward the river. Then a stunning intervention: A band of Englishmen arrives from the villages below (where an orange glow on the horizon “gave notice … before we had news from the distressed people” themselves). “Being a little above forty in number,” they have rushed on horseback to bring relief. They stop just long enough to pick up “fifteen of Deerfield men.” And this combined force proceeds to the stockade, to deliver a surprise of its own: “when we entered at one gate, the enemy fled out the other.” Now comes a flat-out chase—pell-mell across the meadow—the erstwhile attackers put to rout. The Englishmen warm, literally, to the fight, stripping off garments as they run. (Later the same soldiers will claim reimbursement for their losses—and record details of the battle.) They inflict heavy casualties: “we saw at the time many dead bodies, and … afterwards … manifest prints in the snow, where other dead bodies were drawn to a hole in the river.”
They make, in sum, a highly successful counterattack. But one that is “pursued too far, imprudently.” For across the river the French commanders hear the tumult and swiftly regroup their own forces. The riverbank affords an excellent cover for a new stand; soon a “numerous company … [of] fresh hands” is in place there, concealed and waiting. On the Englishmen come, ignoring the orders of the officer “who had led them [and] called for a retreat.” On and on—the river is just ahead, and the captives are waiting on the other side—into the teeth of a withering “ambuscade.” Back across the meadow one more time, pursued and pursuers reversing roles. The English are hard pressed, “our breath being spent, theirs in full strength.” Their retreat is as orderly as they can make it, “facing and firing, so that those that first failed might be defended”; even so, “many were slain and others wounded.” Eventually the survivors regain the stockade and clamber inside, at which “the enemy drew off.” They will appear no more.
It is now about 9:00 A.M. A numbness settles over the village. The fires are burning down. There is blood on the snow in the street. The survivors of the “meadow fight” crouch warily behind the palisades. The townspeople who had escaped start to filter back in through the south gate. Time to look after their wounded and count their dead.
Viewed from close up, the carnage is appalling. Death—by gunshot, by hatchet, by knife, by war club—grisly beyond words. And the torn bodies on the ground are not the whole of it; when the survivors poke through the rubble, they find more. Casualty lists have entries like this: “Mary, Mercy, and Mehitable Nims [ages five, five, and seven, respectively] supposed to be burnt in the cellar.” Indeed, several cellar hideouts have turned into death-traps; in one house ten people lie “smothered” that way.
And then the wounded. One man shot through the arm. Another with a bullet in his thigh. Another with a shattered foot. Yet another who was briefly captured by the Indians, and “when I was in their hands, they cut off the forefinger of my right hand” (a traditional Indian practice with captives). A young woman wounded in the Stebbins house. A second with an ankle broken while jumping from an upper-story window.
There are, too, the lucky ones, quite a number who might have been killed or injured (or captured) but managed somehow to escape. The people who ran out in the first moments and fled the town unobserved. A young couple and their infant son whose “small house” was so small that the snow had covered it completely. A woman who lay hidden beneath an overturned tub. A boy who dived under a pile of flax. Some of this is remembered only by “tradition,” not hard evidence, but is too compelling to overlook. Here is another instance, passed through generations of the descendants of Mary Catlin: “The captives were taken to a house … and a Frenchman was brought in [wounded] and laid on the floor; he was in great distress and called for water; Mrs. Catlin fed him with water. Some one said to her, ‘How can you do that for your enemy?’ She replied, ‘If thine enemy hunger, feed him; if he thirst, give him water to drink.’ The Frenchman was taken and carried away, and the captives marched off. Some thought the kindness shown to the Frenchman was the reason of Mrs. Catlin’s being left. …” (Mary Catlin was indeed “left,” the only one of her large family not killed or captured. And this is as plausible an explanation of her survival as any.)
Thus Deerfield in the immediate aftermath: the living and the dead, the wounded and the escaped. Tradition also tells of a mass burial in the southeast corner of the town cemetery. Another “sorrowful” task for the survivors.
Soon groups of armed men begin arriving from the towns to the south. All day and through the evening they come; by midnight there are “near about 80.” Together they debate the obvious question, the only one that matters right now: Should they follow the retreating enemy in order to retake their captive “friends”? Some are for it, but eventually counterarguments prevail. They have no snowshoes, “the snow being at least 3 foot deep.” The enemy has “treble our number, if not more.” Following “in their path … we should too much expose our men.” Moreover, the captives themselves will be endangered, “Mr. Williams’s family especially, whom the enemy would kill, if we come on.”
The day after, “Connecticut men begin to come in”; by nightfall their number has swelled to fully 250. There is more debate on whether to counterattack. However, the “aforesaid objections” remain—plus one more. The weather has turned unseasonably warm, “with rain,” and the snowpack is going to slush. They “judge it impossible to travel [except] … to uttermost disadvantage.” Under the circumstances they could hardly hope “to offend the enemy or rescue our captives, which was the end we aimed at in all.” And so they “desist” once again. They give what further help they can to “the remaining inhabitants”—help with the burials and with rounding up the surviving cattle. They prepare a report for the colony leaders in Boston, including a detailed count of casualties: 48 dead, 112 taken captive. (Another 140 remain “alive at home.”) They leave a “garrison of 30 men or upwards” in the town. And the rest return to their home villages.
Meanwhile, the “march” of the captives, and their captors, is well under way: through the wilderness on to Canada. There is extreme privation and suffering on both sides. The French and Indians are carrying wounded comrades. The captives include many who are physically weak and emotionally stricken: young children, old people, pregnant women, lone survivors of otherwise shattered families. Food is short, the weather inclement, the route tortuous.
The captors, fearing a possible English pursuit, push forward as rapidly as possible. Any who cannot keep up must be killed and left by the trail “for meat to the fowls of the air and beasts of the earth.” Among the first to suffer this fate is the minister’s wife. Still convalescent following a recent pregnancy, she nearly drowns in a river crossing, after which, according to John Williams, “the cruel and bloodthirsty savage who took her, slew her with his hatchet at one stroke.” In the succeeding days another seventeen of the captives will be similarly “dispatched.”
Later in the journey the French and the Indians separate. And later still the Indians, who now hold all the captives, subdivide into small “bands.” At one critical juncture Reverend Williams is marked for execution by revenge-minded kinsmen of the “captain” killed at Deerfield; a rival chief’s intervention saves him. His five surviving children are scattered among different “masters” and, surprisingly, are “looked after with a great deal of tenderness.”
There are two additional deaths —from starvation—as the various bands move farther north, but sooner or later ninety-two captives reach Canada. Some, like John Williams, are ransomed “out of the hands of Indians” by French officials; others are taken to Indian “forts” and encampments throughout the St. Lawrence River Valley.
Almost immediately their relatives and friends in New England begin efforts to secure their release. But the process is complicated, and progress is painfully slow. Eventually some fifty-three will be returned home, with John Williams as one of the last among them. His subsequent account of his experiences, published under the imposing title The Redeemed Captive Returning to Zion, will make him famous throughout the Colonies.
His daughter Eunice will become equally famous, but for a different reason: she declines to return and spends the rest of her long life among the Indians. She forgets her English and adjusts completely to Indian ways; she marries a local “brave” and raises a family. Another fifteen or so of her fellow captives will make a similar choice, and still others stay on with the French Canadians. These are the captives unredeemed: a source of sorrow, and of outrage, for the New Englanders.
In fact, efforts to bring them back will continue for decades. “Friends” traveling back and forth quite unofficially, and full-fledged “ambassadors” sent from one royal governor to the other, seek repeatedly to force a change. In some cases there are direct—even affectionate—contacts between the parties themselves. Eunice Williams pays four separate visits to her New England relatives. Each time they greet her with great excitement and high hopes for her permanent “return,” but there is no sign that she even considers the possibility. She acknowledges the claims of her blood, but other, stronger claims draw her back to Canada. She has become an Indian in all but blood, and she prefers to remain that way. She will become the last surviving member of the entire “massacre” cohort.
The destruction of Deerfield came nearer the beginning than the end of the Anglo-French struggle for control of North America. And was barely a curtain raiser in the long, sorry drama of “white” versus “red.” But it left special, and enduring, memories. Well into the nineteenth century New England boys played a game called Deerfield Massacre, complete with mock scalpings and captive taking. A curious bond grew between Deerfield and the descendants of those same Canadian Indians who had formed the attack party, with visits back and forth on both sides. And particular “massacre” memorabilia have been carefully—almost lovingly—preserved to the present day.
Indeed, Deerfield today recalls both sides of its former frontier experience. It remains an exquisitely tranquil—and beautiful—village, its main street lined with stately old houses (twelve of them open to the public). But its most celebrated single artifact is an ancient wooden door, hacked full of hatchet holes on that bitter night in the winter of 1704.
Here is a link to a chart that shows what happened to those in Deerfield: http://www.babcock-acres.com/Misceallaneous/deerfield_captives_of_1704.htm
20 Aug
(Periodically I will include information about prominent historians to help you explore historiography, deepen your understanding of history, and help you understand key concept and interpretations of history.)
Dr. Edmund S. Morgan has taught at the University of Chicago, Brown, and Yale. His specialty is colonial and revolutionary history. He has written biographies of Benjamin Franklin and Roger Williams. The works for which he is best known for include Birth of the Republic (1956), The Puritan Dilemma (1958), American Slavery, American Freedom (1975) and Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America (1988), which won the Bancroft Prize in 1989.
His latest work is a collection of essays entitled American Heroes: Profiles of Men and Women Who Shaped Early America, which was published in 2009. He was awarded a special Pulitzer Prize in 2006 for the impact of his work on the understanding of American history.
Dr. Morgan’s work is mentioned on p. 66 in chapter 3 as well as in the bibliography for that chapter (his biography of Benjamin Franklin) as well as on p. 108 and p. 170.
Here is a link to his bio on the History News Network: http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/24049.html. This includes a personal anecdote about his study of history as well as brief quotes from his work. Good reading.
23 Feb
This video can also be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wHRuKwImAk
Professor James Horton discusses the significance of the WPA Slave Narrative project.
16 Nov
Take notes. None of these are more than 2 minutes long.
Popular Sovereignty
The Significance of the Kansas-Nebraska Act
And John Brown
The full timeline that these videos are drawn from (this is excellent) can be found here: http://www.jocolibrary.org/default.aspx?id=17586
You can also type “Jeremy Neely” into youtube to find more of these.
17 Sep
Bernard Bailyn (born 1922) is a preeminent historian who taught at Harvard University from the 1960s until the 1990s actively, although he retains emeritus status since 1993. His specialties include colonial history and the history of Atlantic seaboard. He has won the Pulitzer Prize TWICE, once in 1968 for The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (which also won the Bancroft Prize) and in 1987, for Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution. He also won the National Book Award for The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson in 1975. He taught notable historian Gordon S. Wood, among others.
Dr. Bailyn is briefly discussed on p. 66 as well as on p. 170, and has a work mentioned in the bibliography for chapter 5 on p. 108.
Here is a link to a discussion of Dr. Bailyn’s impact on the study of early American history, especially concerning the Revolutionary era: http://www.neh.gov/news/humanities/1998-03/rakove.html
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