- Sep 2021
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inst-fs-iad-prod.inscloudgate.net inst-fs-iad-prod.inscloudgate.net
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The Virginians needed labor, to grow corn for subsistence, to grow tobaccofor export. They had just figured out how to grow tobacco, and in 1617 theysent off the first cargo to England. Finding that, like all pleasurable drugstainted with moral disapproval, it brought a high price, the planters, despitetheir high religious talk, were not going to ask questions about something soprofitable.
Told from this perspective and with the knowledge of the importance of the theory of First Effective Settlement, is it any wonder that America has grown up to be so heavily influenced by moral and mental depravity, over-influenced by capitalism and religion, ready to enslave others, and push vice and drugs? The founding Virginians are truly America in miniature.
Cross reference: Theory of First Effective Settlement
“Whenever an empty territory undergoes settlement, or an earlier population is dislodged by invaders, the specific characteristics of the first group able to effect a viable, self-perpetuating society are of crucial significance for the later social and cultural geography of the area, no matter how tiny the initial band of settlers may have been.” “Thus, in terms of lasting impact, the activities of a few hundred, or even a few score, initial colonizers can mean much more for the cultural geography of a place than the contributions of tens of thousands of new immigrants a few generations later.” — Wilbur Zelinsky, The Cultural Geography of the United States, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1973, pp. 13–14.
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sakai.duke.edu sakai.duke.edu
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re had evolved, which the propagandists of discipline regarded with dismay. Josiah Tucker, the dean of Gloucester, declared in 1745 that "the lower class of people" were utterly degenerated. Foreigners (he sermonized) found "the common people of our populous cities to be the most abandoned, and licentious wretches on earth
Such brutality and insolence, such debauchery and extravagance, such idleness, irreligion, cursing and swearing, and contempt of all rule and authority ... Our people are drunk with the cup of liberty.
This sounds eerily like some of the same sorts of fears, uncertainties, and doubt that middle America has about our bigger cities. Though I'll note that broadly they feel like they're the party of "liberty" now.
This is an interesting data point in the long-running contention between the city and the countryside that seems to dominate large swaths of human history.
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