Eulogy on King Philip

I finally finished Dan Richter's Facing East from Indian Country. Very strong ending as he writes that the Revolutionary War was as much about nullifying the British treaties with Northeastern Indians as it was about taxes, illustrating how the Colonists felt that the Indians were allies with the British, and that the British treaties impeded Westward territorial expansion. After the war, when some of the Northeast tribes were able to forge treaties with new United States, Jefferson and others undermined them by encouraging northeastern territorial governors, like William Henry Harrison in the Indiana territory, to encourage trade which would put the local tribes into debt, settled only by land acquisitions. In this way the US was able to get Ohio and Indiana for roughly two cents per acre.

The frustration among the indigenous tribes was best summed up in William Apess' Eulogy on King Philip, referring to the famous Metacom. Apess, a metis who had skipped around from foster home to foster home as a youth, elevated the famous Wampanoag chief to an indigenous hero, far greater than George Washington and other heroes immortalized by the Revolutionary War. Apess had been an itinerant Methodist preacher before organizing the Mashpee Revolt in Massachusetts in the early 1830s. He essentially turned Daniel Webster's mythmaking about the Pilgrims on its head, offering a counter-version of the settling of America that went largely ignored in its time, but has since been resurrected in North American literature anthologies. He was one of the few native Americans effectively able to convey his sentiments in English, and was quite prolific in his writings.

Richter does for Appess's Eulogy what Eric Foner did for W.E.B. DuBois' Black Reconstruction, restoring a famous narrative to its rightful place in history.

Comments

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

Welcome to this month's reading group selection. David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908. At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades. Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society. I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran. Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...

Team of Rivals Reading Group

''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005

The Searchers

You are invited to join us in a discussion of The Searchers , a new book on John Ford's boldest Western, which cast John Wayne against type as the vengeful Ethan Edwards who spends eight years tracking down a notorious Comanche warrior, who had killed his cousins and abducted a 9 year old girl. The film has had its fair share of detractors as well as fans over the years, but is consistently ranked in most critics' Top Ten Greatest Films . Glenn Frankel examines the origins of the story as well as the film itself, breaking his book down into four parts. The first two parts deal with Cynthia Ann Parker and her son Quanah, perhaps the most famous of the 19th century abduction stories. The short third part focuses on the author of the novel, Alan Le May, and how he came to write The Searchers. The final part is about Pappy and the Duke and the making of the film. Frankel noted that Le May researched 60+ abduction stories, fusing them together into a nar...

Dispatches from Vilnius

Search This Blog