December 21, 1620. The Mayflower Passengers Land.

 That is, exactly 400 years ago.

The landing was partially precipitated by the fact that the Mayflower had run out of beer, which was a more important matter than it might sound.  The English were overall used to drinking beer, but the reason was that beer, because of the way that it was made, was safe to drink. Running out of things to drink is bad anyway you look at it.

In modern times its become common to levy all sort of criticism and virtue signaling on this event, noting how "horrible" Europeans were for colonizing North America.  All of that views the world from was the comfortable late 20th and early 21st Century prospective which has only been shook up a little by the visitation of a plague upon is, something that people in the 17th Century regarded as one of life's norms.  It is true, of course, that the Mayflower passengers were essentially landing where they weren't invited to take land that wasn't theirs, but they didn't see it that way. And its important to remember that the native residents of the land that they were essentially if unknowingly invading viewed the world much differently than anyone in North America does today, through eyes that tended to regard their own tribes as "the people" with everyone else being some sort of alien people.

Indeed, the Mayflower passengers were only in possession of marginally technically superior implements than their unwilling hosts, who themselves were a more or less constant state of war, near war, or soon to be war, with their neighbors.  It's not true, as some have suggested as a reactionary counterfactual, that the Europeans were regarded as one more tribe. They were definitely different. But early on the technological advantage that's so often assumed to be there simply wasn't.  In warfare the natives were every bit the equals, and maybe the superiors in every sense to the new arrivals.

And none of this is to suggest the old grade school version of the "pilgrims" either. They were religious bigots whose situation was brought about by the fact that they couldn't get along at all with the Church of England or darned near anyone else.  They would have regarded Catholics, which all the British had been less than a century ago, as heretics and they didn't view the Church of England cheerfully.  They had adopted very rigorous concepts of Calvinism and regarded most people damned by God to Hell from the moment of their conception, a novelty that no  Christian had held before the Reformation.  Our concept of them and what they approved of and didn't approve of is accordingly massively off the mark.  They approved of piety, but because it was temporal proof of their predestination. As noted, unlike many who look back to them now as religious ancestors, they approved of alcohol as well.  They were also huge supporters of marital sex, which is something we don't associate their piety with.

They disapproved of most forms of entertainment, which was another thing that had gotten them in trouble in Europe.  They required church attendance on Sunday by law, but then that was also a legal norm in much of Europe. They'd approved of the Calvinist ban of sports on Sunday in England during the Cromwell era.

Not everyone on board the Mayflower was a member of their group by any means.  Indeed, the "pilgrim" passengers.  The ship held 102 passengers but some were just that, not religious dissenters.  Be that as it may, the puritans dominated the ship in culture and conduct, and as colonist.

Their journey was no doubt arduous, and coming in winter, risky in more ways than one.  One person died on the way, and another was born.

I personally have no known connection with them.  The first of my ancestors to set sail across the Atlantic for the New World left from Normandy, not Holland, and arrived in Quebec, not New England.  I'm completely comfortable with that.  But my much more American by ancestry wife has a demonstrated ancestral connection with the 102 passengers of the Mayflower but, as her curiosity on historical matters is much lower than mine, if I asked her right now who it was, she wouldn't recall, and wouldn't be interested in looking it up. Still, that means my two children likewise have ancestors who landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620.

And its important to note, that really was something, no matter how human or failed those people may have been.  I can't say, as I look around, that people are doing much better in any segment of human conduct today.

September 16, 1620. The day the "Pilgrims" . . .

 set sail for the New World.

It was at sea for ten weeks, putting in near Cape Cod on November 11, 1620.

Thanksgiving Reflections

Puritans on their way to church.

It's become sort of an odd tradition in the US in recent years to either criticize a holiday in general or to lament how weakened its become in the modern observance of it. The two are diametrically opposed feelings of course, but they seem to be equally present.

In regard to Thanksgiving, the trend has been by some to comment on how we just don't grasp how the very first Thanksgiving is misunderstood.  This commentary takes the form of the mild, in noting that the Mayflower immigrants and their Indian guests were just as likely to have had deer on the table as they were to have turkey (although there's frankly no reason not to suppose they had turkey. . . or maybe goose), to hardcore comments on their being nasty colonialist.  The commentary on the early menu is historically interesting but latent prejudging of their overall natures is seemingly rarely done accurately and opens up moderns to criticism as well.

Of course, this website itself hasn't been immune to that as we've noted more than once that the "first Thanksgiving" wasn't that.  Thanksgiving feasts are common feature of every society that farms, which means almost every society.  Those feasts are, it should be noted, uniformly religious in nature.

We noted all of that in our first posts here, in 2012, that dealt with the holiday:

When we were kids were taught, back in the old days, that the holiday was thought up by the Pilgrims, those Puritan colonist who landed at Plymouth Rock, as an original day, celebrated with their Indian neighbors, to give thanks for their first harvest.  That's not really true.  I'm sure it's true that they celebrated a Thanksgiving, but then they would have for a variety of reasons. The most significant of those would have been that a Thanksgiving was the European norm.

Thanksgiving was a universally recognized religious celebration recognized in every European country.  The holiday gave thanks to God for the harvest.  At some point in Europe the celebration came to be formally recognized in the Catholic Church, centered date wise around the harvest in southern Europe, by a few days of fasting prior to the Church recognized holiday.  How the Reformation effected this I do not know, but I am certain that the Puritan colonists would have celebrated Thanksgiving in England and in Holland prior to every having celebrated it in the New World.  Indeed, as is sometimes missed, not all of the Mayflower passengers were Puritans by any means, and this is no less true for the other passengers on that vessel. They all would have come from a relatively rural English background and they all would have been familiar with a Thanksgiving Day.

Thanksgiving remained a generally recognized religious based holiday in North America well before it was established as a national holiday in the United States, and in Canada (on a different day).  In the United States, the first Federal recognition of the holiday came during the Civil War, during which time Abraham Lincoln sought fit to note it, in the context of the terrible national tragedy then ongoing.  While that may seem odd to us now, there were real efforts even while the war was raging to try to fit what was occurring into context, which would eventually lead to Decoration Day and Memorial Day (essentially the same holiday). During the war, noting what was occurring on Thanksgiving seemed fitting.  The holiday was seemingly moved around endlessly for many years, and even as late as Franklin Roosevelt's administration new dates for it were fixed, all generally in November. States got into the act too, such as Wyoming, with governors occasionally fixing the date.  The current date stems from a 1941 statutory provision.

We also noted there, regarding its religious nature:

It's interesting to note that up until the mid 20th Century the norm was to take a turkey home alive, and dispatch it at home.  This is rare now, as people have become somewhat delusional and wimpy about food, with some even going so far to believe that if they abstain from meat entirely, that they're not killing anything, a delusion which demonstrates a complete lack of knowledge of any kind of farming or food transportation (more animals die smacked by trucks on the road than most can begin to imagine).  That meant that the turkey was no doubt pretty darned fresh, as well as tasty.

Man bringing home Thanksgiving dinner.

Boy with plucked Thanksgiving dinner.

Connecticut farmer plucking turkey for sale.

Outside of a big gathering, for many people a church service was part of Thanksgiving, and for quite a few it still is.  Other than that, activities that occurred were, according to what I've read, games.  Various types of games seemed quite popular for such gatherings.  Thanksgiving football goes back amazingly far in the United States, and I've seen a poster advertising a college game that dates back to 1903.  If it dated back to 1903, I'd presume it went back somewhat further than that.

What all of this tells us, as noted before, is that the observance of the holiday has been incredibly consistent for an extremely long time.

Efforts to formalize it as a national holiday, only dealt with in part, really came about during the Civil War and it was clear right from that time that effort, which built upon an already existing civil custom, were both familial in nature, tied to the harvest, and had an emphasis on giving thanks to God.

Indeed, on that latter point, Thanksgiving is one of those days like Christmas that frankly makes no sense whatsoever outside of a religious context.  While I'm well aware that there are people who don't make it a religious observation and have the holiday anyhow, it seems weird and even hollow if they don't.  I've been, for example, to Thanksgiving dinners in which no prayer of thanksgiving was done and they seem really lacking. And not only is something lacking, but it's obviously lacking.  Be that as it may, in spite of feeling that way, I come across poorly as I never make a personal attempt to intervene and offer one.  I say one to myself.

Anyhow, with this in mind it strikes me for an odd reason how this holiday, celebrated across the US and in every culture, is one that is really carried over from a distinctly Protestant tradition, and indeed a tradition within a tradition.  I'll not go into it too deep, but its associated with the Puritans for a reason.

The "Pilgrims" as we used to hear them called more often, where Calvinist Puritans who had very distinct and strict religious views.  They didn't practice religious tolerance whatsoever, although at that first English Thanksgiving in North America they no doubt had to as they were a religious minority at the time, something rarely noted about them.

Indeed, the English colonist who came over on the Mayflower were buy and large not Puritans, a religious sect that had grown up in the early English Reformation and which was hostile to the Church of England, with the Church of England being in turn hostile to it.  The history of the early English Reformation is something we'll not deal with here, but we'll note that the early Church of England reflected a schism, rather than an outright separation, from the Catholic Church.  The first Bishops and Priests of the Church of England had all been ordained as Catholic Priest and they all had Catholic theology as their primary view in spite of following Henry VIII into schism on the question of his claimed right to head the church.  Indeed, it's really doubtful that many of them took his claims all that seriously, quite frankly, and the Church of England as a Protestant Church didn't really come about until some time later.  Henry had advisers who were Protestant in their views right from the onset (at least one lost his head for heresy) and he had one wife, if I recall correctly, who was hardcore Protestant, so the door was open.   But he no doubt went to his death in 1547 at age 55 thinking he was a Catholic.

After that the period of turmoil he'd unleashed in his country really ramped up and as we've addressed elsewhere the Elizabethan Religious Settlement ultimately came about through the imposition of certain views by Queen Elizabeth I.  The degree to which she herself agreed with them is open to question, at least one unconformable story holds that she rejected her own clerics on her deathbed as being false clerics, but the settlement was only partially that. While England would become rabidly anti Catholic in later years, that would take years and years and it would have at least two Catholic monarchs after Elizabeth's death, thereby making her sister Mary not the last one.

Oliver Cromwell, Puritan Lord Protector.

One party that didn't accept the settlement was the Puritans.  With no really definable origin, they came up originally as a party within the Church of England that was steadfastly opposed to all of its retained Catholic nature.  Hitting their high water mark during the dictatorship of Puritan Oliver Cromwell, they fit in with the group of British Protestants who were darned near opposed to every sort of religious and even civil custom that the English had. That operated to make them really hated and when the Restoration came about not too surprisingly they were suppressed by an English population that was sick to death of them.  That caused some to relocate to the Netherlands which had religious tolerance due to a religious split existing in that country between a Catholic and Protestant population, but even the Dutch grew sick of them pretty darned quickly.

Mary Dyer, Puritan evangelist, going off to execution in Boston in 1660.

And that caused them to relocate to North America.  Or more properly, for some of them to undertake to do that.

As this isn't a history of the Puritans in North America, we'll basically stop their history there, other than to note that they became really unpopular in the colonies as well. So much so, that even some female Puritan evangelist were executed for returning to a colony from which they'd been earlier expelled.

Anyhow, all of that is noted for a simple reason.

The Puritans were amazing opposed to almost every form of human celebration as we'd recognize it.  Religious holidays that were deeply ingrained in Christianity and which Protestant religions kept right on observing after the start of the Reformation were banned in Puritan regions, including all of England while the dictatorship was ongoing.  Attendance at church on Sundays was compulsory and omission of attendance was punishable as a crime, but Christmas and Easter were banned and actually outlaws.  Sports on Sunday, an English tradition, was also banned.  Certain sorts of sports were completely banned.  May Day was banned.

But Thanksgiving, a day of thanks for a bountiful harvest, never was.  And that's really remarkable.

Thanksgiving was a feature of England's Catholic culture that survived the Reformation and continued to survive into the Puritan era.  It seems to be the one pre Reformation religious observation they were okay with, perhaps because it was a custom, rather than a Canon.

So we now have a civil holiday in the United States with deep religious roots. A Catholic origin, but Protestantized, and proving resistant to real secularization.

With that noted, one thing that's interesting in addition to note is how its a Western tradition, by which we mean that came up in the Latin Rite of the Church as a cultural institution, but not in the Eastern one. And that really shows as its in November.

Having the holiday in October, which Canada does, would actually make just as much sense as having it in November.  Maybe more sense actually.  Most places have actually harvested by late October at the latest.  When I used to have a large garden, which I continue to think I'll do again every year, I'd harvest anything not already harvested on the opening day of deer season, which is in early November.

In the West, the Christmas Season really opens up with Thanksgiving.  Indeed, the setting of the holiday in its current calendar setting was partially influenced by the Christmas shopping seasons.

The time leading up to Christmas is, of course, advent.  This year Advent starts on December 1.

In the west, Advent has become a time of celebratory anticipation of Christmas, and this custom is the case everywhere in the west.  Advent also exists in the East, but the focus is really different.

Indeed, in the East, the forty days prior to Christmas is a second Lent featuring a Nativity Fast.  For Byzantine and other Eastern Rite Catholics as well as the Orthodox that is going on right now.

The rigor of the fast varies by Rite and location and I'm not qualified to really comment on it.  As I understand it, and I may not understand it correctly, in the U.S. the fast basically applies to Monday, Wednesday and Friday.  Like other Eastern fasts, its more strict than the ones that have come to exist in the Latin Rite.

This expresses the view that "there is no feast without the fast", a quote that I'm sure others know the source of but which I do not.  There is a lot to it. Father Michael O'Loughlin, of Catholic Stuff You Should Know fame, holds that the cycle of fasting and feasting puts things in order.  And indeed it might.

Cycling back to Thanksgiving, the Puritans, in spite of their hostility to all things Catholic, and the nation, during the tragedy of the Civil War during which the holiday was first somewhat instituted as a national holiday, got that.  Indeed, both Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt, in taking steps to institutionalize it on the nation's civil calendar, got that as well.  It's not an accident that all of those event took place during periods during which there was something equivalent to a vast national fast going on.

Something to consider.

Today In Wyoming's History: October 14. Columbus and Duke William make the scene.

Today In Wyoming's History: October 14:

October 14

Today is Columbus Day for 2013.



1066. Duke William of Normandy defeats King Harold Godwinson as the Battle of Hastings.  The result of this battle would bring feudalism into England and result in the birth of English Common Law.

The Bayeux Tapestry depicting the vents of October, 1066.

And its Columbus Day for this year, 2019, as well.

At least in my part of the country Columbus Day doesn't mean much, other than Federal offices are closed.  In some parts of the country there are protests regarding what ultimately occurred with the arrival of European Americans in the New World, again, and this time to stay.  Indeed, in some localities it is Indigenous Peoples Day.

Columbus was working for the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella, of course.  They were having a big year, to say the least.  On January 2, Granada, the last Moorish kingdom in Spain, had surrendered to them, having failed to receive aid from any other Muslim power.  In an odd sort of way, Granada's experience was therefore similar to that of Constantinople, the seat of the shrunken Byzantine Empire, in 1453, some forty years earlier, which had failed to secure the support of other Christian powers against the Ottomans.

Columbus' expedition is typically claimed to have sighted land on October 12, 1492, but that date was on the "Old Calendar".  Using the "New Calendar", that date is actually October 21, 1492.

It's also the anniversary of the Battle of Hastings, one of the single most important dates in English history and the history of the English speaking peoples.  Perhaps the single most important date.  Saxon England entered the feudal world and English met French.

Gluten and the American diet. A blog mirror rambling journey.

Wheat field, Walla Walla Washington, 1941.

This interesting item appeared on the always interesting A Hundred Years Ago blog just recently:

1919 Farwell & Rhines Gluten Flour Advertisement

As folks here know, I'll riff off of the excellent blog A Hundred Years Ago from time to time. When I do, I usually have already posted on the thread there and I usually post a link to my item here, if I build one based on one of the many interesting topics there.

In this case, I didn't comment and I'm not going to post a link back, as I want to avoid unintentionally offending, which would be easy to do with this post.

That's because I'm a "Gluten Skeptic", if you will, and somebody there has already noted in a comment to this post that they've had to give up foods with gluten.  I'm frankly of the opinion that most people who give up foods with gluten don't need to, just as I'm of the opinion that about 90% of our modern "must give up" food fads is not only a fad, it's part of the remaining Puritan DNA in our American culture.*  If we're not suffering we're just not living right.

Before we look at this, what the heck is gluten anyway?  Well, here's a snipped from an article in Scientific American:

Gluten is a protein found in many grains, including wheat, rye and barley. It's found in most breads, cereals, pastas and many processed foods, according to WebMD. People who have a condition called celiac disease develop an immune reaction to gluten that damages the intestine, and so they need to avoid the protein. About 1 percent of the population has celiac disease.

Wait a minute. . . not only do we now know what gluten is, but did that say 1% of the population has celiac disease?

Yes it did.

1%.

Now, in a country that is as populated as the United States is, 1% is not a small number.  It'd mean something like 3,600,000 people.  That's a lot.

But if you go through the store and read the articles and talk to people who really follow the latest trends in things, you'd be left with the impression that something like 30% of the population is wheat intolerant now, and that's just flat out bull.

The headline of that article was, by the way, the following:

Most People Shouldn't Eat Gluten-Free

Gluten-free products made with refined grains can be low in fiber, vitamins and minerals

Yup, most people ought to knock that off.

The article further noted:

For most other people, a gluten-free diet won't provide a benefit, said Katherine Tallmadge, a dietitian and the author of "Diet Simple" (LifeLine Press, 2011). What's more, people who unnecessarily shun gluten may do so at the expense of their health, Tallmadge said.

This article, I'd note, is kind.  I've seen others that just flat out state that most of the people who are dead set convinced they have some sort of intolerance to gluten are just flat out wrong.

While I'll not go into it, I'll also note that there's some speculation why we've arrived at a point where this is a concern when it wasn't previously.  If it hasn't always been the case that 1% of the population has been so afflicted, then there's something going on. And nearly anyone over 30 years of age can recall a time when there was no concern in this area whatsoever. That would suggest that this is a disease, for those who actually have it that has come on in very modern times. Why?

The same has been noted for allergies, I'll note.  The percentage of the population that suffers from allergies is higher today than at any time in t he past, and I'm in that group.  Why?

In my case, I'm certain its genetic.  I didn't lead a sheltered life indoors as a kid prior to my developing asthma, and my mother didn't douse the house with more anti biologic agents than are used in a biological weapons lab like most modern mothers seem to do (Americans are insanely germ phobic).  It's in my DNA, darn it.  And so is the case, no doubt for most of those with celiac disease. 

But if more people than the historical norm are developing this condition otherwise. . . something is going on.

Humans have eaten grains, we now know, back to the neolithic age.  For years and years archaeologists and anthropologists used to have the nonsensical idea, which a lot of them still advance, that there were hunters and gathers and then suddenly one day farmers sprang up and everyone moved to the farm.  That never made any sense and we now know that hunters and gatherers, in the regions friendly to grains, started cultivating it.  They did that for an extremely long, long time, before they settled on farms.  While that's another story, one we've already told, what that also tells us is that humans have been eating grains for a really long time, although not necessarily wheat for the whole time, but other grasses in addition to, or in place of, wheat.  Wheat has been cultivated, according to archaeologists from between 9,000 and 8,000 years ago, which means that in reality it's almost certainly been cultivated for 10,000 to 14,000 years.

It's never been grown everywhere, and that's important to note. The reason for this is that it's also fairly clear, but widely ignored, that individual human populations are evolved to eat certain foods more than others, or even where others are not. This is the entire basis of certain people being lactose intolerant. Cultures that have drank cow's milk for a long time are not lactose intolerant, as evolution operated against that condition.  Where cow's milk was not drunk, it wouldn't matter, and when the ancestors of people from those cultures encounter milk it can be unpleasant.

Mediterranean cultures have been growing wheat forever and it spread all over the grain growing regions of Europe in antiquity.  It was grown way out in the steppes, all over North Africa, as far north as Greenland, and into regions of Africa that are deserts and grow nothing today.  But that isn't everywhere.  That alone may explain the rise in gluten, which is in wheat of course, but also in rye and barely.  It isn't in rice, which is the other major grain spread all over the world.

But it isn't in simply everything either, and if its a much bigger problem now than it once was, there's a reason for that. The reason may not be there and it might not be a much bigger problem than it once was.  Or, if it is there, there's an explanation, but what is it?

One of the hypothesis that was advanced is that modern wheat flours had more gluten in them.  Indeed, the item noted above had been blended to triple the amount of gluten in the what in issue.  At least one study, however, has been skeptical of that explanation.

In response to the suggestion that an increase in the incidence of celiac disease might be attributable to an increase in the gluten content of wheat resulting from wheat breeding, a survey of data from the 20th and 21st centuries for the United States was carried out. The results do not support the likelihood that wheat breeding has increased the protein content (proportional to gluten content) of wheat in the United States. Possible roles for changes in the per capita consumption of wheat flour and the use of vital gluten as a food additive are discussed.

None of which gets back to the item originally linked in. . . or does it? 

A century ago, we find an advertisement, amazingly, for something with added gluten.  Why was that?

One thing is that it changed the consistency of bread, improving it.  It also boosted protein, but I don't know that this was the reason.  Indeed, I don't know what the real reason for really adding gluten was.

Quite a change from what we see today, of course, at the grocery store, where there are things you darned well know never had gluten in them, advertised as "gluten free".

________________________________________________________________________________

*The Puritan comment alone is likely to offend some and be cheered by others for the wrong reasons, but its meant sincerely.  One of the real offshoots of the Reformation was that certain strands of Protestant theology that rapidly developed contained a very strong sense of suffering and double predestination which provided no relief from it.  The Puritans, if recalled today positively for their "work ethic" and various virtues, were notable in this regard, although contrary to what people imagine, they weren't opposed to alcohol and they were very much not opposed to marital sex (something nearly completely forgotten about them).

This post doesn't deal with their theology in any meaningful sense, and it's not going to.  There are still those who fairly closely adhere to some variants of it, and this isn't intended to debate them. Rather, what it notes is that their early views and developed ones had a very strong influence on current cultural views, and likewise strains of thought developed during the Reformation continue to have an influence on European secular thought as well, even though those holding them would hardly recognize that and in fact would likely deny it.  A certain irony exists here, however, as the cliches of "Catholic guilt" and "Jewish guilt" are in fact largely wholesale myths, whereas the inherited need for suffering that springs to some degree from the Reformation isn't even really recognized.

The Puritans, whom we used to cite, and did cite up until very recently, as the foundational cultural pioneers of America, were opposed to all other religions and religious tolerance itself, and they were also extremely strictly opposed to a lot of activities that average people enjoyed, including sports, for example.  Activities on Sundays were extremely strictly limited where they held sway.  All this caused them to really be hated by people who had to deal with them who were not Puritans, including outright banning their presence in some areas of Colonial North America, but none the less,  as time developed in the United States, offshoots of their lines of thought continued to be influential and highly opposed to certain things.  Added to this, a very literal reading of certain portions of the New Testament, and the omission of study of others, lead to a sense that everything was foreordained and that most people were going to Hell, which made suffering on Earth the basic norm.  This line of thought, we should note, was by no means limited to the Puritans and it spread to some other Protestant regions during the Reformation, although it did not characterize all of them by any means and it has very much waned even among those Protestant faiths that descend from denominations that were sympathetic to that view.  Of interest to an upcoming post, it spread to Scandinavia late but took hold very strongly there, which has an impact on certain things today.

Be all that as it may, and without intending to offend anyone, in the modern United States the Puritan heritage in particular, and certain reformation strains elsewhere in Europe in general, while very much cast off by the population in religious terms continues to express itself in the idea that we must suffer, and suffering in diet is a good way to do that.  It also expresses itself in a certain desire to spread the suffering in a puritanical cultural way.  A person can hardly go to a restaurant, for example, in a group without somebody who has chosen to endure food deprivation of some sort making it public in the group and basically casting implied aspersions on those who don't join in the culinary grief.  We like to imagine that all of this is very much past us, but it isn't.  A person ordering a steak with a big side of wheat rolls is just as welcome at a lot of dinner tables in 2019 as a person ordering a bucket of beer would have been in 1919, or a person suggesting in a that everyone go enjoy a football game in England in 1645.

Again, this isn't intended to be a religious comment.  There remain those who hold views very close to those held by the Puritans, the Congregationalist is a direct descendant of them, and there are those who hold views that are close to theirs on most things or even stricter in regard to some.  The theological points that could be debated regarding those views aren't going to be debated here now or at any time. Rather, what's interesting about this is that the United States, culturally, is a very Protestant country, as are some European countries, even among those who don't recognize that or who are not Protestants of any kind.  It gets back to our Third Law of History.

August 20, 1619. Slavery comes to British America

The date isn't known with precision.  Only that it occurred in August.  But this date, August 20, is used as the usual date for the event when a slaver arrived off the port at Port Comfort, Virginia, carrying 20 to 30 African who were held in bondage and sold into slavery.

The event marked the return of the English to being a slave owning society.  Slavery had been abolished by the Normans after conquering Anglo Saxon Britain in 1066 and while it's common to see claims of other types of servitude, including involuntary servitude, equating with slavery, they do not.  Slavery is unique.

And late European chattel slavery, which commenced with the expansion of European powers into African waters and into the Americas, was particularly unique and in someways uniquely horrific.

Slavery itself was not introduce to African populations by Europeans; they found it there upon their arrival, but they surprisingly accommodated themselves to participating in it very rapidly.  Europeans had been the victims of Arab slavers for a long time themselves, who raided both for the purposes of acquiring forced labor, and fairly horrifically, for forced concubinage, the latter sort of slave having existed in their society for perhaps time immemorial but which had been licensed by Muhammad in the Koran.  Arab slave traders had been quite active in Africa early on, purchasing slaves from those who had taken them as prisoners of war, an ancient way of dealing with such prisoners, and the Europeans, starting really with the Portuguese, seemingly stepped right into it as Europe's seafaring powers grew.

Having waned tremendously in Europe following the rise of Christianity, European powers somehow found themselves tolerating the purchase and transportation for resale of Africans for European purchasers by the 15th Century, with most of those purchasers being ultimately located in the Americas.

The English were somewhat slow to become involved.  It wasn't clear at first if slavery was legal under English Common Law and the English lacked statutory clarification on the point such as had been done with other European powers.  Early English decisions were unclear on the point. However, starting with the 17th Century, the institution worked its way into English society, even as opposition to it grew from the very onset.

The importation of slaves to English populations was not limited to North American, but it was certainly the absolute strongest, in the English speaking world, in England's New World colonies.  While every European seafaring power recognized slavery by the mid 17th Century, the really powerful markets were actually limited to the Caribbean, English North American, and Portuguese Brazil.  European slavery existed everywhere in the New World, and no country with colonies in North America was exempt from it, but it was strongest in these locations.

And slavery as reintroduced by Europeans was uniquely abhorrent.  Slavery, it is often noted, has existed in most advanced and semi advanced societies at some point, but slavery also was normally based in warfare and economics nearly everywhere.  I.e., it was a means of handling conquered armies, conquered peoples, and economic distress.  The word "servant" and "slave" in ancient Greek was the same word for this latter reason.  In eras in which resources were tight and there was little other means of handling these situations, slavery was applied as the cruel solution.

But it wasn't raced based.  The slavery that the Europeans applied was. Even Arab slavery, which was ongoing well before the Europeans joined in and continued well after, was not based on race but status.  If a lot of Arab slaves were black in the 17th Century, that was mostly due to an environment existing which facilitated that. Earlier, a lot of forced concubine Arab slaves, for example, were Irish.  The Arabs were equal opportunity slavers.

Europeans were not.  European slaves were nearly always black, and even examples of trying to note occasions in which Indians were held as slaves are very strained.  And because it was raced based, it took on a unique inhuman quality.  Slavery wasn't justified on the basis that the slaves were prisoners of war that had fallen into that state, but that the state was better than death, nor were they held on the basis that they had sold themselves or had been sold into servitude due to extreme poverty, and that was better than absolute destitution.  It wasn't even justified on a likely misapplied allowance granted by Muhammad for slaves that were held due to war, and could be used for carnal purposes, reinterpreted (I'm guessing) for convenient purposes.  It was simply that they were black and, therefore, something about that made them suitable for forced labor.

And forced labor it was.  Servants in the ancient world had often been servants and even tutors.  While it did become common in North America to use slaves as household domestics, most slaves in North America performed heavy agricultural labor their entire lives.  It was awful and they worked in awful conditions.

And it tainted the early history of the country in a way that's ongoing to this day.  With opposition to its reintroduction right from the onset, but the late 18th Century it was clear that its abhorrent nature meant it was soon to go out everywhere.  Almost every European country abolished it very early in the 19th Century, which is still shockingly late.  It was falling into disfavor in the northern part of the British North American by the Revolution, in part because agriculture in the North was based on a developed agrarian pattern while in the South the planter class engaged in production agriculture (making it ironic that the yeoman class would be such a feature of the American south).  The pattern of agriculture had meant that there were comparatively few slaves in the north.  This is not to say it was limited to the South, however.  Slavery even existed in Quebec.

With the Revolution came the belief that slavery would go out, but it didn't.  By that time the American South had a huge black slave population.  Slavery would if anything become entrenched in the South, where most of the American black population lived, and it would take the worst war in the nation's history to abolish it.  So horrific was that war that even today the descendants of those who fought to keep men slaves sometimes strain the confines of history to find an excuse for what their ancestors did.  And following their Emancipation, the nation did a poor job of addressing the racism that had allowed it to exist.  It wasn't until the second quarter of the 20th Century that things really began to change, with the Great Migration occurring first, followed by a slow improvement in status following World War One, followed by a rapid one after World War Two that culminated in the Civil Rights Era of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s.

But the stain of slavery lingers on in innumerable ways even now.  Having taken to slavery in 1619, and having tolerated it for over two hundred years thereafter, and having struggled with how to handle the residual effects of that for a century thereafter, we've still failed to really absorb the impact of the great sin of our colonial predecessor.

I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.

Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of captivity.
But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself in exile in his own land. So we have come here today to dramatize an shameful condition.
In a sense we've come to our nation's Capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.
This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check; a check which has come back marked "insufficient funds."
But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. So we have come to cash this check- a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.
We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism.
Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God's children.
It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment. This sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. Nineteen sixty-three is not an end, but a beginning. Those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.
But there is something that I must say to my people who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice. In the process of gaining our rightful place we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.
The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to a distrust of all white people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny. And they have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom. We cannot walk alone.
And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall march ahead. We cannot turn back. There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, "When will you be satisfied?"
We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality.
We can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities.
We cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro's basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one.
We can never be satisfied as long as our chlidren are stripped of their selfhood and robbed of their dignity by signs stating "for whites only."
We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote.
No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.
I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you have come fresh from narrow jail cells. Some of you have come from areas where your quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality. You have been the veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive.
Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to South Carolina, go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana, go back to the slums and ghettos of our northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed. Let us not wallow in the valley of despair.
I say to you today, my friends, so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal."
I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.
I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
I have a dream today.
I have a dream that one day down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification, that one day right down in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.
I have a dream today.
I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exhalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.
This is our hope. This is the faith that I will go back to the South with. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood.
With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.
This will be the day when all of God's children will be able to sing with new meaning, "My country 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the Pilgrims' pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring."
And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true. So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania.
Let freedom ring from the snow-capped Rockies of Colorado. Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California. But not only that; let freedom ring from the Stone Mountain of Georgia. Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee.
Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi. From every mountainside, let freedom ring.
And when this happens, and when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"

Rev. Martin Luther King, August 28, 1963.

The Nebraska floods and Wyoming agriculture

The Tribune published a story today on how the huge floods in Nebraska may impact Wyoming and Nebraska agriculture.  It's a story I've been wondering about a bit myself.

The paper reported that 1,000,000 head of cattle may have been lost in the floods.  If so, that's a devastating loss.  A person is reporting with the quote from Wyoming that "that's not good", which is self evident.

It's likely to mean a rise in cattle prices, almost certainly.  A 1,000,000 head loss at one time is something that flat out can't be absorbed by the industry without a price result.  It may also mean the loss of quite a few feedlots, I suspect, and that'll have an impact as well.  My guess is that by summer the price of putting that steak on the grill will be up, and noticeably, but that's just a guess.  As my steaks come from volunteer cattle of our own seeking to enter retirement, the price doesn't impact me much directly and I'm often really surprised by it.  But anyhow, that's my guess.

A big jump in price, it might be noted, isn't a great thing for cattlemen.  Too big of rise really favors other meat industries such as pork and poultry, although I'd be surprised if the pork industry wasn't also hit.  Anyhow, when the price goes up at the grocery store counter it doesn't always mean good things for cattlemen, and it never does in a direct dollar to dollar correlation.

Loss of agriculture production will have an impact.  The paper had this quote, and its quite correct:

“We rely on Nebraska a lot,” said Brett Moline, director of public and governmental affairs for the Wyoming Farm Bureau Association. “A lot of our feed grains come in from Nebraska and eastern South Dakota. That’s one reason we move cattle out there – it’s cheaper to move the cattle than it is to move the feed. We’ll have to see what the storms do to feed prices too.”

And that's not only true of Wyoming, in regards to Nebraska, but other local ares of the Northern Plains as well.

On a total side note, the author of the article, which wasn't a bad article by any means, did insert an odd term, apparently not knowing what it means.  That's found here.

Though life has continued unabated in Wyoming – upriver from the swollen sections of the North Platte – the devastation felt across the state’s 138-mile border could ripple into the agrarian economy of the Equality State.

Agrarian economy?

Wyoming doesn't have an agrarian economy and it never has had one, save for perhaps the very early New Mexican vegetable farmers who lived  out on the Mexican Hills outside of Ft. Laramie.  They probably could be regarded as being agrarians, but they're the only ones.

Agrarianism is the production of agriculture principally for self subsistence.  Lots of North Americans engaged in agrarian agriculture at one time, even into the 20th Century, but Wyoming's agriculturist never did, or never did on any substantial level.  Agrarians can and have existed in modern economies, so we shouldn't mistake that fact, but that style of agriculture emphasizes self subsistence and reliance over the market, and production is sold that's surplus.  A surplus crop, however, is never the principal goal.

Almost all early North American farming was agrarian.  At the time of the Civil War much of American agriculture and nearly all of the edible crop and animal farming in the South was agrarian (cotton and tobacco farming were production agriculture, not agrarian agriculture).  All farming of all types at that point retained some agrarian aspects, and that remained true up until after World War Two.

At that point, following World War Two, the South's agriculture, which featured the last remaining bits of agrarian agriculture, was rapidly disappearing. That was a result of the policies of the New Deal, which were hostile to it.  Quebec's agriculture remained highly agrarian at that point, but it too would start to really fade quickly.

Wyoming's agriculture, however, and Nebraska's as well, was always principally production agriculture.  The farming of wheat and large scale corn is production, not agrarian, in nature.  Cattle ranching in the West, outside some regional pockets in New Mexico and southern Colorado, has also always been production agriculture.

All of which we'll explore in a future post.

At any rate, pray for Nebraska and its farmers.  This is a true disater.

Sunday Morning Scene: Churches of the West: Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi, Santa Fe, New Mexico

Churches of the West: Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi, Santa...:

Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi, Santa Fe, New Mexico

This is the Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi in Santa Fe, New Mexico. This Catholic Cathedral was built from 1869 through 1886  in the Romanesque style, although the style is not completely obvious as the spires planned for the church, a prominent feature of that style, were never installed.

The cathedral was built on the location of an earlier church, La Parroquia, which had been built in 1714 through 1717, and which itself stood on the location of a church built in 1626 that had been destroyed in the Pueblo Revolt.  A small portion of the earlier church was incorporated in the construction of the cathedral.

An interesting feature of this church is that it is located only two blocks away from San Miguel church.  This tends to show the Catholic concentration of the community at the time these various churches were built, as they were being built in close proximity to each other.  Santa Fe retains at least one more downtown Catholic church today.

We brutes killed them all. . . or actually we didn't. Misplaced guilt.

This related to the item I just posted about Neanderthals and allergies, and I've posted directly on this topic, in regards to our ancient ancestors, before.  But I'm doing so again, as the way this topic has been historically treated is rather interesting. It says something, well. . . about us.  Not them

It's invariably the theory amongst any historical or scientific work written by Europeans or European Americans that our ancestors were Bad. And those Baddies killed off any other group of people that they came in contact with.  Always.

Well, DNA studies are showing not so much.

And I'm not surprised.

Perhaps the classic example of this is the long accepted story of the Anglo Saxon invasion of Great Britain.  Classically, the story is that Horsa and Hengest came in as mercenaries and saw that Britain, or at least southern Britain, was ripe for hte taking and this sparked the invasion of the Angles, Saxons and Jutes.  They came in, killed all the British save for those basically north of Hadrian's Wall and who didn't manage to hold out in Wales, and established the series of Kingdoms that became England in later years.  Some, like Winston Churchill in his classic History of the English Speaking Peoples, allowed for the survival of a British woman here and there, but not much.

 Brothers Horsa and Hengest come with the tribe, as depicted in the Renaissance.  In reality, they probably not only didn't look this calm, but they wouldn't have looked this modern, if you will, either. They probably looked a lot like what we imagine Vikings to look like, as they really weren't much different. Assuming they existed at all.  Their names, oddly, mean "horse" and "horse", and they might be allegorical.

Well, a study of DNA on Great Britain reveals that the British, including the English, are mostly truly British. That is, while that German DNA is in there, it's not in there so much.  Seems the Germanic invaders came in, or sort of meandered in really, and ultimately gained political dominance over any one region, but never gained a population dominance. And while entire tribes moved, once settled, they started marrying amongst the existing population.

Gee, what a surprise.

This is true, by the way, for the Vikings too.

Now, I'm not saying the Vikings weren't bad. They really were.  And I don't appreciate the latter day revision of them which would hold that they were a bunch of misunderstood hippies. Baloney.  They did invade, and they ultimately brought their families with them.

But, missed in the modern stories of them somewhat, their language was intelligible with the Old English of the time, and they weren't all that different in some ways.  A huge difference, of course, was religion, as they adhered to a really primitive form of the old Germanic paganism. . . for a time.

But they started converting themselves. By the last Viking invasion of 1066 their king was a Catholic monarch.  So, like the Angles, Saxon and Jutes before them, they slowly melted into the existing population. You can tell, by their DNA, where they were strong today, but the British remain the dominant British genetic contributors.

Although some British DNA, it should be noted, like Irish DNA, goes back 10,000 years.  That's right. All the way back. Showing, once again, that earlier populations were not slaughtered like people like to imagine.

Now this is becoming increasingly evident about the Neanderthals.  The popular imagination has held that the Cro Magnons, i.e., us, came in and killed the whole lot of them, because we are bad.  Well, not it appears that the populations, which weren't as different as we imagine, merged.  Some would have held that "oh they were too ugly that can't be true", but that's turning out to be less true as well.  They did look a bit different, but then existing populations do as well.  Existing populations of humans mix readily today and frankly there will come a day when the mixing is sufficiently complete that there will be no differences in human populations (i.e., no races), so why we ever thought that it was the case that no Cro Magnon began to think that some young Neanderthal female wasn't somewhat cute is beyond me.

Now, all of these examples go a ways back. But it might serve to reconsider some ideas that became very popular in the United States in the 1970s, about European Americans and their presence in North America.  At that time, the old image of heroic colonist taming a wilderness yielded to an image of savage Europeans dominating the native populations.

Now, the conquering of North America was violent. And, contrary to the popular imagination, the conquering of American east of the Mississippi was much more violent than that event west of the Mississippi. But the use of terms like genocide are really misplaced. The killing impact of disease is very real, but what is probably the case is that it was much more accidental than anything else. That isn't good, but it also isn't quite what its recently been portrayed as. And, as with the other example, populations mixed a lot more than sometimes imagined.  This is particularly true in Spanish and French speaking regions of North America, where there tended to be a lot less fighting and a lot more attraction than seems to be commonly considered.  Indeed, we should be well aware of this as it's well known that the first Spanish Indian couples showed up as early as Cortez' conquest of Mexico and even English colonial populations, which were amongst the least likely to mix in North America, started mixing right from the onset.

Rebecca Rolfe, the wife of John Wolfe.  Known better to history as Pocahontas, although that was a nickname and she had several other "Indian" names.  She married John Wolfe in 1614.

So, what's the point of this?  Well, perhaps simply a pleas that occasionally we slow down and consider human beings as human beings before getting retrospectively indignant and righteous.  It's easy to look back and condemn all of our ancestors for avarice and violence.  But truth be known, most people have always been people.  And, frankly, most people here are the product of mixed ancestries even if they aren't ware of it.  Somebody crossed that color line, cultural line and even that subspecies line at some point.  Probably a lot of your ancestors did.

And, let's give ourselves credit.  We don't always do the right thing.  But we don't have a roadmap to the future either.  And we might do the right thing more often than not.  And at least here, while it's easy to imagine everyone from our culture, as we belong to that human culture that uniquely feels guilt about itself, was a baddie.  More often than not, chances were high that what happened is that young hunter Gronk of the newly arrived Cro Magnons was invited over for aurock by the family of young gatherer Gronella of the old Neanderthals, and things went fine.

 As mundane as it might seem, scenes like this probably have a lot more to do with average human ancestry that warfare.