You learn things chasing ancestors..things that aren’t in the history books, nor quite spelled out in anthropology texts.
American kids hear a lot of Pilgrims seeking religous freedom in the Colonies, and not a great deal about the English Civil War, phase 1 and phase 2, which were about the same time. The two groups, the Pilgrims and the dispossessed landholders, hated each other, both settled in the colonies, and there was no great amount of trust. Ultimately the politics of the US reflected the Whigs and the Tories of England, but took some really strange turns based on US geography and economics, and who originally settled where.
History students hear a lot about emigration and seeking opportunities, but not very much about the reasons…like the Black Death, the several really apocalyptic city fires, national depression, and another really curious item: families. Families and associated families moved together. One couple from a village goes, the widowed father goes, then a cousin joins the party, with his wife, and her father and mother; and pretty soon another cousin—the number of people you run across who share the same heredity in a given area-of-origin is quite amazing. And if you think about the psychology of it all, the notion of one person or a couple deciding to throw it all up and move to the ends of the earth would be pretty remarkable. The fact is political pressure, economic pressure, and a horrific death rate from annual bouts of plague and such were pretty strong inducement, but when people went, they didn’t go alone. Families weren’t willing to be separated by what was, in effect, a voyage halfway to Mars, with incredibly cramped conditions on the ships, some of my relatives dying of things like smallpox, aboard ship, and then landing on a muddy, swampy (or rocky) coast, depending on whether you came in at, say, Isle of Wight, VA, or Plymouth, MA. It was pretty scary stuff, and probably (knowing real estate deals)Â wasn’t as advertised once they got there. Just some odd observations, and a suggestion our history books aren’t observing the first rule of good storytelling: put yourself in that position and ask what you’d do.
For me there’s always been a kind of disconnect, and was even when I was a kid. Hmmn, we’re supposed to believe these persecuted people who immediately set about burning their neighbors at the stake could afford boat fare and were all here because they wanted religious freedom. Seemed kind of divorced, to me, from all rational human behavior—I mean, I couldn’t see why here was better than there. They were still burning witches. And none of that togetherness with the tribes quite rang true with that behavior, either. People who burned witches for thinking a little different from them were going to get along with native people who really viewed things differently from them?
 So why were they really here? Hmm.
Again I say…hmmn. Interesting to find there was a lot more to it.
And both the Plymouth and the southern contingents ended up owing a substantial debt to the bankers in London. The debt level of the southern plantation owners had to have influenced their attitudes to the idea of revolution, when by class and heritage they ought to have been rather more inclined towards supporting the Crown.
One can bet it did.
I’m vague on where I read this, I know it wasn’t in a regular history book (history IS written by the victors or the rulers) but wasn’t the preferred method of executing by hanging a suspected witch rather than burning at the stake? All that work to gather firewood, plus replace the stake after each successive burning in the town square, when you could just toss a reusable rope over a tree branch, or attach it to a gibbet and hang witches to your hearts’ content. (Ever wonder where Vincent Fournier got his stage name of “Alice Cooper”?)
One also wonders at the attitude of Parliament, as I would bet that many members of the House of Commons were also landowners, or landlords, or maybe they were those selfsame London bankers, and just like Earth tried to do with the Company Wars, they tried to steer the colonies in the direction the Crown (or in this case, Parliament) wanted them to go. With communications taking weeks, if not months, and subject to the vagaries of wind and wave, by the time a new regulation came from England, it was obsolete.
Perhaps the solution would have been something like Ursula K. LeGuin’s “ansible”.
Something that didn’t hang together for me, in American history, was that whole business about Hessians during the Revolution. Who/what were Hessians? Why were they fighting for the British? It never did make sense until years later, when I was reading English history, with that whole hand-over to the Hanoverians, German George, and all that, that it suddenly made sense.
Which didn’t stop me being able to barf up the correct answers on the tests, it’s just that comprehension was zero.
Big Picture.
Sounds like you have the beginnings of a new SF series dealing with a colonization of a distant planet.
Tom
My sister-in-law has one of the Salem witches on her (Heinz-57) tree. I’ve got a dead Quaker as some kind of connection – not a relative [boots genealogy file], but the ancestor of some in-laws.
William Penn was a late arrival in Pennsylvania. The Dutch and the Swedes had been there long enough to have grandchildren and great-grandchildren being born there. But school history books won’t tell you that.
I can’t claim to be as studied concerning history as most here, but I totally agree that I don’t believe there were hugs and kisses all around between the Native Americans and the colonists. Seriously, look at how Native Americans (and every freaking other ethnic group at one time or another) were treated!! The truth of human history, even as recent as the beginning of America, is hard to peg, mostly because history is written by people. People are chancy creatures, not much to be trusted at times. It’s a great bit of detective work to get the truth.
The other very annoying thing, is that history morphs according to the general social climate — this is not a new thing and not something exclusive to us. Most of our views of the Pilgrims with the buckle shoes, dark sober clothing and stanch religious views etc is due to the Victorian romantic notion of what was proper — the Pilgrims were amazingly prone to lawsuits and pretty rowdy behavior. But the recent changes really irked me, even though I didn’t experience them first-hand. A co-worker was really tweaked over his son’s high school US History textbook a couple of years back — which had a grand total of two — count them 2 — references to George Washington. One was a passing statement about being the first president and the second was a sidebar section lamenting the horrid depravity of this man who owned slaves. Overall, this doesn’t bode well in my view.
It’s what you call ‘revisionist history.’ Or the attempt to use history as a ‘morality play,’ instead of understanding what really went on. An example is the Hollywood portrayal of the Romans as Nazis, in one case actually putting on Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in Nazi-style uniforms. And one publicly-exposed producer of Discovery Roman material and I have butted heads personally, because he doesn’t bother to get his facts straight…or has an agenda in which facts and cultural accuracy don’t matter.
On the other hand the recent History Channel piece on Washington was very interesting, portraying a young man of great ambition and less background, who found himself in interesting times. George Washington as a spymaster and master of disinformation is an interesting picture—and possibly casts an informative light on how he did manage to succeed against by-the-book regulation-trained opposition. I don’t know if they’re accurate: I don’t have personal knowledge of that period, but it’s an intriguing notion.
From the random department of ‘things they don’t tell us about the Romans’:
http://www.archaeology.org/0811/abstracts/gladiator.html
The revolutionary period has plenty of interesting stuff to get into. I’m convinved that without the rivalry between North and South you wouldn’t have had a revolution- every time one party did somehting, the other felt compelled to trump them, and neither side felt they could treat with the British without losing face before their local rivals. Thus Americans put up a – more or less – united front.
CJ’s comments about families emigrating together reminds me of a passage in James Boswell’s ‘Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides’. There was a lot of emigration from the island of Skye to America at the time.
“In the evening the company danced as usual. We performed, with much activity, a dance which, I suppose, the emigration from Skye has occasioned. They call it ‘America’. Each of the couples, after the common involutions and evolutions, successively whirls round in a circle, till all are in motion; and the dance seems intended to shew how emigration catches, till a whole neighbourhood is set afloat. Mrs M’Kinnon told me, that last year when a ship sailed from Portree for America, the people on shore were almost distracted when they saw their relations go off; they lay down on the ground, tumbled, and tore the grass with their teeth. This year there was not a tear shed. The people on shore seemed
to think that they would soon follow.”
Flora MacDonald and her family, whom Boswell and Johnson visited in their tour, emigrated the following year for financial reasons. (“She is a little woman, of a genteel appearance, and uncommonly mild and well bred.”) This was the period when the Highland Clearances where getting into full swing, after the suppression of the clan system.
The passage you quoted made me think of the Runrig song “Dance Called America” – I never knew what the song was about, but a little googling turns up that it is apparently based on exactly that same passage about the Highland Clearances. Funny how things connect!
(Runrig, by the way, is a fabulous Scottish folk rock band. Well worth a listen!)
Runrig is good, but I prefer a more traditional approach.
If you want to hear the real living tradition of Scottish bards, try The Corries. Totally unpretentious, highly skilled musicians and singers, very versatile, who really brought the music to life.
Some links on YouTube:
MacPherson’s Rant (rousing and heroic – James Macperson’s song before he was hanged in 1700)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Xk97yaZnMM
The Four Marys (a sad and beautiful song)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVcr9LW2ZaQ
Kishmul’s Galley (about a Scottish pirate)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sPi51PdvcM
You can find the lyrics and histories of these songs by googling.
Hmm, have to check that out. Thanks!
On accuracy of Roman history in movies and documentaries, I read an interesting account a few years ago, written by a consultant on the movie Gladiator. She is a professor from an ivy league university who is an expert on gladiators.
She told a long and woeful tale about how every single input of hers was totally ignored, even though they were paying her a high fee as a consultant. Even small changes which would improve historical accuracy, but not affect the plot or the cost of the movie, were ignored. In fact, she didn’t think that anyone even had even read the notes which she spent a lot of time working on.
She also recommended that they should have an expert on set to ensure the accuracy of gladiatorial combats and help with fight choreography. She gave them the names of half a dozen suitable people, all highly experienced and qualified. None of them was even contacted.
In the end, the movie was so historically inaccurate that she asked the producers not to put her name in the credits, because she has a professional reputation to uphold. After many arguments over a period of several months, they finally agreed… but the final release of the movie had her name in the credits anyway.
Today’s topic has drawn me from my usual lurkdom as it strikes a personal chord. Your comment on reasons for leaving in particular “And if you think about the psychology of it all, the notion of one person or a couple deciding to throw it all up and move to the ends of the earth would be pretty remarkable. The fact is political pressure, economic pressure…”.
My parents emmigrated from West Germany to Australia after WWII with 4 children and my grandmother. They underwent some amazing things during and after the war. They are not Jewish, but nevertheless were refugees twice over, Czecheslovakia to East to West Germany, each time leaving homes with only what they could carry.
After all this, they elected to move to Australia in the Early 1960s, late in the European emmigration wave. In the meantime they had established themselves, secure jobs, home, mortgage, car, that sort of thing.
What made my parents decide to up sticks again? The Cold War escalation of the time. The way my father puts it, he could see it all happening again and all he wanted was to get as far away as possible.
Making such a fundamental move has always seemed incredibly brave to me, and they had at least some idea of what they might find and potential to return should they desire. I can only wonder at the bravery of the American Immigrants in those colonial times, less information, fewer resources and almost certainly no liklihood of a return.
Cheers all, Irene
On the other hand, the – perceived – gap between what people had at home right now and what they would find on the other hand might well have been smaller _to them_ – we forget that the level of technology and living standards were much more variable, and that for someone from an isolated rural community ‘going very far away’ might well have been ‘going very far away’ with the distance between the Scottish Isles and America and the Scottish Isles and London showing up fairly equal on mental maps. (Also, people from fishing communities might not have thought of America as a one-way trip.) So, lots of local variables to consider.
Yes, that does make sense. When there is no real basis for comparison, and the situation is desperate enough…
One of my junior high friends was a spectacularly blond Czecholovakian lad whose family had also seen it coming: he and his family made it out by crawling under barbed-wire, over mud and in the dark and with the knowledge there were guards not that far away. He would have been very small at the time, barely six. He rarely talked about it, but that was another family with determination.
I read an article several years ago, right after “Gladiator” came out. The author was a professor of history, but I cannot remember the university where he was located. He said that gladiators, at least the big stars, were highly trained which cost plenty of denarii. Why would you want your very expensive fighter to go into a match to the death? Maybe having inept and klutzy prisoners who were condemned anyway fight it out to the death made sense to the Romans. I don’t recall Dr. Daly’s (Bowling Green State University, OH) lectures on gladitorial combat, and I don’t think we really covered it that much, if at all.
The famous “thumbs down” is also incorrect. Some painter portrayed it as the “kill the loser” signal, but actually, the signal of thumbs down meant to spare the fighter. Thumbs up was the kill signal.
Well, anyway, back to the Native Americans of North America, they were just as warlike, preyed on their weaker neighbors, and made their tribes’ territories bigger. I don’t know how prevalent that was, but the Iroquois Nation was built that way, the Sioux Nation was built that way. Of course, since they had no written history, we don’t necessarily know what the facts were, and white people seldom cared about someone else’s history, especially if they felt those people were inferior to them. So, humanity in general is hardly perfect, we are the only species which preys upon itself regularly.
The economics of the gladiators is my argument. Say you’re running a gladiator school. Are you going to let your guys get killed without compensation? And is a town, say, like Pompeii, going to be able to afford a death-match? would they even want one? The arena there is tiny, and everything is up close and personal. The sensational and unusual gets into books. But I have a feeling the bloody shows were in the big arena in Rome, and probably even so, less than you might think. There was supposed to be a ‘death test’ involving a hot iron once the bodies were dragged off, to be sure. But I have the feeling a lot of ‘dead’ gladiators went on fighting under different names, probably more than once, and I’d even suspect there were some professional ‘die-ers’. Why? It was a business, and not a business that was respected: you ran gladiators? Nice people didn’t invite you to dinner. So what was the inducement? Money. It was also theater. And no few of the bigtime gladiators weren’t recalcitrant slaves: they enlisted, for the money, and for, apparently, enjoyment. Mostly the money. A successful gladiator or charioteer could retire rich.
I sometimes get a feeling that professional gladiators had more than a little in common with modern-day professional wrestlers. 🙂
Bigtime. They had their groupies (who were a seriously weird lot), they swaggered around town, they wore outlandish jewelry, they had drinks bought for them, all the appurtenances of a rap star, along with the raffish reputation.
Remember the old Star Trek episode, “Bread and Circuses” where they had canned cheering and booing dubbed over the sound so that you got the impression that you were watching a big match somewhere. Just like today’s WWF, WWE, TNT, or whatever initials they go by, I don’t watch them or the MMA matches, cage matches, UFC, etc.
(But I do watch professional, sanctioned boxing)
Does anyone know about the beast-hunts? I was watching a Discovery (I think.. might have been the History Channel or one of the others) about what it took to keep the arenas supplied with beasts, and it was pretty mind-boggling. Since the hunters seemed to be pretty safe in those shows, it seems to have been more about numbers than danger. They mentioned things like 200 leopards against 300 lions, at a time. And that it wasn’t always easy to stage a fight, since the animals weren’t in really good shape by the time they got to the arena, and for some reason being dumped into a large, open, noisy area tends to make most animals want to escape or hide, not attack each other.
The show postulated that the need to find beasts drove at least some of the exploration and expansion of the Empire, and that it also had a direct affect on local ecologies, since the demand was so high, especially for the big animals.
Not to mention the shipping losses: the people were fascinated, much as you and I would be by going to a zoo, and the animals were on exhibit, but the mindset said these all were fierce predators who liked to fight, so they didn’t have a smidge of remorse for the ecological damage they were doing…naive to the max, in a younger planet which thought it was inexhaustible.
The gladiators largely (with exceptions) chose to be there. The critters didn’t. The condemned criminals didn’t. But there is one mitigating aspect to Roman mindset: they didn’t believe in killing people with no chance to fight back—which is where the gladiatorial games started, with the Etruscans, who had them for funeral rites; and they graduated to a way to dispose of death-penalty cases, who presumably would be naturally inclined to weapons and killing; and then to slaves (read: prisoners of war) who wouldn’t be reconciled to their situation and who attacked or harmed somebody. These constituted the non-volunteers, but even so it was felt they had a chance to live and get out of their circumstances if Fortuna favored them and they had virtue. It was rationalization; but it beat what their neighbors were doing, which was killing every last soul in a defeated army or city not to mention rape and looting. The Romans considered their system moderate and civilized, compared to the world at large.
The perspective, over here in Scotland, is much different than what we learned in school in California. Nobody over here really has any clue about the Puritans, but they all know about the Battle of Culloden*, and the people Transported. People here still want to know your clan**, mostly because they can place your family by clan name to a town or two, and will know whether you’re a clan enemy or friend. Migration between Scotland and the rest of the world is huge, as is the urge to return. The Scots … tolerate it, mostly.
Funnily enough, I read somewhere that 25% of the officers in the US Military during the Revolutionary War were Scots.
* (and don’t speak of it, preferring to talk about the Battle of Bannockburn)
** (mine sided against Robert the Bruce, so were dispossessed of their lands, moved in with the Ulster Scots for awhile, then on to Pennsylvania, and changed the spelling of their name)
My ancestry is a mess of clans who didn’t like each other. 🙂
(And we’re some of those crazies, who pulled up stakes – in about 3 months – and moved 1/3 of the way around the world. Go figure.)
If I had to up stakes and move on short notice there is a short list of places I’d go. Canada is only 90 miles from here. But my choice of choices would be Lanarkshire or Stirlingshire, Scotland. I have only to drive into the country and breathe the air there and my blood pressure goes down ten points. There’s Devon or York, where most of my people came from; and there’s Tuscany in Italy, which looks as if it were designed by Tolkein. We also have a very soft spot for a town called Moffit, which we have always found extremely beautiful and hospitable.
We took out of Moffit and climbed The Grey Mare’s Tail, myself in a huge flying raincoat, which was the only coat I had—big grey thing that has more fabric in it than any 4 coats should have; and I recall climbing up that narrow trail beside the thread of a waterfall, up and up and up, over, ahem, sheep evidence, which is amazingly slippery in the rain; but it was absolutely gorgeous, and we were so glad to have done it. I’m not into walking, but I make an exception for that. I love that country.
Have people changed a lot since the mass movements, or is my family just odd? We were not heavy into family relationships… more the “visit the grandparents twice a year”, and for some reason half my dad’s family disowned the other half, and some of those who weren’t disowned were grown up and out of the house before my dad was even born, so it definitely wasn’t a close-knit family. But I had no second thoughts about moving states away to go to school, or half-way across the country for a job. Is it that we don’t NEED family to survive economically anymore (not like the old days when more people to help farm were a bonus) and that phone/e-mail, etc helps us keep in touch, so you don’t need to live within walking distance? Or, like I said, is my family just an aberration?