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Why does the Mayflower get any play at all? It wasn’t the first English colony. Hell, it came 13 years after Jamestown. So why the emphasis?
Why does the Mayflower Compact get any attention at all? We had a representative government already in place in Virginia a year before the goofballs on the Mayflower went off course and landed in Massachusetts.
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The Compact was a document that recognized the government as an agreement among the governed and was initiated from among the governed. (Regardless whether the story I heard that the Separatists engineered it to consolidate their power or the story that MichaelQReilly heard that it was an effort by the other settlers to prevent one group from wielding too much power, it still arose from the people aboard the ship. In contrast, the House of Burgesses was established by changes to the rules of the colony as set forth by owners of the Virginia Company in London and was (originally) a top-down institution that included the governor and six people picked by the governor along with representatives of the largest plantations. There is a fundamental difference with a clear tie from the Compact to the U.S. Constitution while the House of Burgesses looks remarkably like the unreformed British Parliament. Nothing wrong with the Burgesses, but they did not set any precedents.)
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Let’s face it: The Plymouth Colony is emphasized because history was largely written in Boston and New Haven.
And Tom, I didn’t say northern historians were successful in writing the South out of history; I said they tried their damnedest. Of course you can’t write Jamestown out entirely. What you can do is de-emphasize it and marginalize it. (By focusing on the Mayflower Compact for example, while ignoring Virginia’s House of Burgesses.) You can’t ignore George Washington, but you can de-emphasize his Southern-ness (to the extent that the thread I started many years ago on this board suggesting that George Washington had a Southern accent was met with astonished denial by several posters).
You can’t ignore Cowpens, or King’s Mountain, but you can gloss over them on the way to a detailed analysis of Saratoga or the crossing of the Delaware. Did your high school history books detail the fall of Savannah, or the fall of Charleston (which was the largest colonial city)? I’ll bet they covered in obsessive detail the fall of of Manhattan. Did your history books tell you that hicks in South Carolina and North Carolina turned the tide of war? Was there any mention in your textbooks of William Campbell or John Sevier? Or was the focus rather on Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys in Vermont? Did your books mention the Tryon Resolves?
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I have never seen King’s Mountain or Cowpens downrated anywhere. They just about always get more play than crossing the Delaware and Trenton. (First) Saratoga is a bigger deal because it resulted in the loss of an entire British army and led directly to French recognition of the U.S. The Southern campaign led to Yorktown but each battle was incremental in the campaign and of the two named, neither resulted in the loss of an entire army.
As to the cities, New York only got a brief treatment to demonstrate the brilliance that Washington (of Virginia) always displayed in defeat, with no special emphasis on the campaign.
Well, you are changing the goalposts, here. Why could they not have found actors who could do New England Accents to represent the folks around Boston if it was such a terrible thing to have the Virginia delegates sound like they were from Chicago? (I will also note that few people portrayed as Southern rednecks were given Southern drawls. The more common accent used was the Midlands dialect that stretches from Pennsylavania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois down through the Northern sections of Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. This reflects the attitudes toward “hillbillies” more than Southerners, per se, although I have already agreed with you that the arts and entertainment establishments have focused on portraying many Southerners as dumb yokels.
And you still seem to be implying that the historians favored the North throughout 400 years of history simply as though it was some sort of conspiracy. On the one hand, you have not succeeded in persuading me that the South has been neglected by historians, but if it is as you described, it would appear to be simply a matter of parochialism, with folks writing about their own regions. So where are the Southerrn historians? Did the Northern historians lock them up in closets, burn their manuscripts, take away their quills, pens, and typewriters?
I would agree that the entertainment industry has subjected the South to a lot of prejudicial stereotypes, but I do not see the same thing as true regarding the presentation of actual history.
