Study Questions:

What does Abigail Adams mean when she writes “remember the ladies”?

What is John Adams reply to her request?

What power does she claim for women?

Abigail Adams (1744–1818) wrote to her husband John in 1776, as he and other colonial leaders were meeting in Philadelphia in the Second Continental Congress. Adams wrote from Braintree, Massachusetts, where she was raising her four young children and managing the family farm. Although her days were busy with the duties of a single parent living both in a war zone — the British Army was only about twelve miles away in Boston — and in an area ravaged by a smallpox epidemic, she still contemplated the political changes taking place, and those changes are reflected in her appeal to her husband.

wish? I wish I had a husband?

Ok, but also skeptical about using Christian tropes to define the story...

So somehow the inability to hold their tongues is involved with them being a "little people?" Confused about how colonialism and genocide figure in...

Ok, so she spills the beans. Is this a grave sin of some kind?

Why do you think Katahdin doesn't want anyone to ask, and doesn't want his wife to tell, about the fact that he is the boy's father and her husband?

their religion is a cult by whose definition?

holy magic medicine!

heaven & hell?

a near-death experience that gives you a new perspective on life

he's preaching

do they basically worship this "medicine"?

he is using "ill" for being physically, mentally, and spiritually unwell

he's becoming a kind of religious healer

if he isn't white, why is he referring to Nat. Am. as Indians? Does he mean actual Indians from India?

his people

for some reason this line reminds me of "The Road Not Taken"

for some reason this line reminds me of "The Road Not Taken"

he's hooked!

the devil?

didn't take much convincing

own people? His name is John, so is he white?

interesting that Christian influences literally changed the meaning of the words of the Peyote baptism to its younger members

the leader

Does the Peyote religion have ties to Christianity?

forgiveness for what? their "sins"?

why is it considered a cult?

was Christmas a significant holiday/day for the Peyote?

How does it change the story of European colonization and genocide if it is recast this way?

Hmm. Ok, so why does he want his mother Christened? To understand this, I think we need to understand the history of the tribe, paticularly at the time that this story is being written down.

I love this.

Always intrigued by how these stories don't work out in the way that we are accustomed, with no final moral, no full explanation of the metaphor, no tying up of threads...

A metaphor for colonization by the Europeans?

Denial isn't just a river in Egypt.

Interesting. Need to look into how historical preservation is used to perpetuate oppression.

I love the details, the pride, the power of this description!

This is such a powerful articulation--borrowed from Baldwin as the epigraph makes clear--of the social construct of whiteness.

A riff on the title of TNC's forthcoming book, itself a a riff on WEB Du Bois's famous description of black experience in The Souls of Black Folk (1903). As he opens that book in a chapter entitled "Of Our Spiritual Strivings":

BETWEEN me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter round it.

This reminds me of the incident during the Baltimore Uprising in April where Toya Graham beats her son. Stacey Patton wrote about this:

The kind of violent discipline Graham unleashed on her son did not originate with her, or with my adoptive mother who publicly beat me when I was a child, or with the legions of black parents who equate pain with protection and love. The beatings originated with white supremacy, a history of cultural and physical violence that devalues black life at every turn. From slavery through Jim Crow, from the school-to-prison pipeline, the innocence and protection of black children has always been a dream deferred. http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/04/29/why-is-america-celebrating-the-beating-of-a-black-child/

Hard not to relate this piece to another great statement of African American experience: Frederick Douglass's 1841 speech “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”

Because those creation myths are aligned with the cult of the individual in American culture. We tend to value individual accomplishment over collaboration.

Doesn't this project also radically depart from the traditional textbook format and industry in less than "safe," but equally exciting ways?

I really love this idea as the "yawp" as an organizing principle for a collaborative, open textbook. Given his own obsessively iterative composition of Leaves of Grass Whitman really is a great analogy for this project.

The "Gods of the mountains" line was a piece of Muir's larger metaphor for the holiness of natural places that figured those who would develop them as "temple destroyers." Here's the full quote from Muir's defense of the Hetch Hetchy in his book The Yosemite.:

These temple destroyers, devotees of ravaging commercialism, seem to have a perfect contempt for Nature, and, instead of lifting their eyes to the God of the mountains, lift them to the Almighty Dollar.

Dam Hetch Hetchy! As well dam for water-tanks the people's cathedrals and churches, for no holier temple has ever been consecrated by the heart of man.

Recent scholars have critiqued Riis's work despite its effective advocacy for tenement reform. His photography certainly exposed the problem of urban poverty, but also exposed the personal lives of the poor to a largely wealthy audience.

How does this mess, though, relate directly to the "unraveling" of American promise signified by the late 60s. Was Hunter killed because he was black? Or because he was high? Or because the Angels were drunk?

Such an ambivalent phrase. The narrator seems to be claiming that this is a "moment" unparalleled in its significance. Yet this significance is "undetermined"; it remains unclear exactly how the moment is significant.

A line from Elvie Thomas's "Motherless Child Blues":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmj23UrVF80

The trope of the motherless child is a popular one in African American art. Of course the destruction of families was a major consequence of the slave trade and the institution of slavery.