Thursday, 15 November: The Pilgrims and the Hebrew model of national migration; prototype of white exclusiveness and purity? William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation (introduction, esp. p. xxii; chapters I-IV).

·        Web highlight (final essays and/or research reports): Ashley Webb

·        Report on William Bradford: Mary Caraway

·        Poetry reader: Julie Matuszczak

Poem: Enid Dame, “On the Road to Damascus, Maryland,” UA 141

Brief overview of chapters 1-4

short reading assignment, only Bradford's first 4 chapters (28 pages in Modern Library text), but  . . .

it so happens they're the hardest chapters to read

Chapter 1: locates Pilgrims as part of the Protestant Reformation against the Catholic Church in the 1500s and 1600s

"North parts" refers to Germany, England, and other areas of Northern Europe where Protestant Reformation was centered

"Church of England," then associated with Catholic Church or "popery"

These are the old, bad ways against which Bradford and other Protestants rebel, and for which they are "hunted and persecuted on every side," forcing them to leave their homes

end of chapter 1: Pilgrims resolve to go into "the Low Countries" = the Netherlands, Holland

Chapters 2-4: concerns how the Pilgrims, persecuted in England, first moved to Holland ("the Low Countries" or Netherlands).

In Holland, the Pilgrims are much like later immigrants to America. They work hard and appreciate the Dutch atmosphere of religious tolerance, but . . . 

Their children start assimilating to the freer Dutch ways. The Pilgrims don't like this. In Holland, they basically refuse the typical immigrant pattern.

Some then decide to move to "some of those vast and unpeopled countries of America, . . . where there are only savage and brutish men . . . little otherwise than the wild beasts . . . ."

In other words, the Pilgrims aren't planning to assimilate to the Indian culture that is then currently in America.

In this regard the Pilgrims differ from later immigrant groups, who come to America with the idea of "joining up" with the existing system of government and economics (more or less)

In this regard the Pilgrims come to resemble the Jews in their attitude toward the "Promised Land" of Canaan, where they are told not to intermarry or take up Canaanite ways.