On the
most unique, significant, and inspiring paragraphs in Jennings’ book.
The Creation of America is
ostensibly a re-interpretation of the Revolutionary era; but as I wrote in the
weekend post, it also and more overarchingly represents a chance for Jennings,
near the culmination of his career and life, to articulate some of his most significant
ideas about American historiography and scholarship, history and culture,
identity and ideals. No such idea jumped out at me more than that comprised by
the final two paragraphs of Jennings’ “Introduction,” and those two paragraphs
are worth quoting in full:
“Even at the very beginning of English
attempts at colonization, established data suggest a need for new angles of
interpretation. When Sir Walter Raleigh’s abandoned colony at Roanoke picked
itself up and emigrated to Chief Manteo’s town of Croatan in 1586,
ethnocentrism has dictated that bloodlusting savages exterminated those white and civilized colonists. But it seems clear that the Roanoke people
went voluntarily to Croatan for refuge, and it is quite well established today
that Indians all over North America were trying desperately to rebuild
populations ravaged by epidemic disease. It would be perfectly rational for
Manteo’s people to adopt those Roanoke refugees who had been abandoned by their
civilized countrymen, and it would have been equally rational for the adoptees
to settle down where they were given ‘savage’ hospitality. It is conceivable—it
can be neither proved nor disproved—that Roanoke’s people became part of the
ancestry of today’s tribe of Lumbee Indians. Would it not be wondrous if Virginia
Dare, the first English child born on American soil, became one of those Lumbee
ancestors?
I like this as a pleasanter notion than
equally speculative and equally unprovable racist snarls about murderous
savages. More evidence exists for subsequent events. Let us accept the door
opened to them by the courtesy of Virginia Dare.”
How do I
love those paragraphs? I won’t count all the ways, but I’ll highlight two of (to
my mind) the most significant. For one thing, I’ll admit that I have never
encountered another scholarly narrative of America’s (possible) origins that
lines up more exactly with my concept of
cross-cultural transformation; I named Cabeza de Vaca my 16th-century
exemplary American within that definition, but Jennings’ take on Virginia Dare,
while more speculative, would work just as well—and given Dare’s symbolic
status as that first-born Anglo-American would make this cross-cultural
experience even more overtly defining of the American experience.
But for another
thing, I love Jennings’ perspective here, on two key levels. He’s
straight-forwardly honest about preferring a particular take on American history
and identity—obviously such preferences shouldn’t lead us to misrepresent the
historical sources and facts, but as Jennings recognizes here, history-writing
is always partly about an interpretation of those sources and facts, about
creating our own narratives based on them; and why shouldn’t we try to find the
more communal and inspiring narratives in them, rather than then most divisive
and violent? Moreover, while there are of course plenty of cases in which we
can’t dispute that cultural contacts led to such divisions and violence, there
are likewise plenty in which they produced communal understanding and
connections, and the kinds of transformations that can result from them—so why
should we assume the worst of our histories, rather than arguing for the best?
Those are
my favorite paragraphs in Jennings’ book, but they’re far from the only inspiring
ones. Next example tomorrow!
Ben
PS. What
do you think? How would you respond to these ideas?
7/23 Memory Day nominee: Raymond Chandler, one of America’s
(and the world’s) greatest mystery novelists, and also one of our most thoughtful
and complex chroniclers of masculinity, heroism, social
class, and more.
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