Ok off we go to the South. We are first introduced to Royal Governor Sir William Berkeley of the Berkeleys of Berkeley. Here he is next to my cat for contrastpic.twitter.com/FqC27Zj3EA
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You see claims about regional or national character in history. Lots are self-serving (eg la perfide Albion, the barbarous Hun, w/e) and obviously shouldn't apply uniformly to inhabitants, but I wonder if psychometric features apart from That One That I Dare Not Name . . .
actually vary in distribution across populations and time, and have an effect on history. These don't need to be (and if I were to guess aren't) principally genetic, but often culturally and here, tantalizingly, pathogenically determined. Hm. Something something xenoestrogens
"As we shall see . . . these new forms of slavery did not create the culture of Tidewater Virginia; that culture created slavery." This is a pretty profound claim on a first pass: institutions are downstream from culture. Heavy implications from this model.
Section on linguistics is a delight and too long to summarize so I will just mention my favorite example: persistence of old Germanic pluralization by -en (a la "child" -> "children") in Gloucestershire to produce "wenchen"
The cavaliers died like flies, author speculates this contributed to the relative strength of extended family ties in the Tidewater No discussion of influence from the emanations of the Chesapeake Bay Impact Object that still lies dreaming, beyond even death as we know itpic.twitter.com/0OWL0U0NBE
"'Patriarchy' . . . was rarely employed by the Puritans, and some times actually condemned" plus ça change
"Virginia and New England were alike in their ideas of universal marriage; both rejected the ideal of celibacy which was so strong in Catholic countries." welcome to AMERICA where everyone Has to Fuck here is your culturally-mandated Protestant gf
Here's Lucy Parke Byrd who wanted to brand a slave girl with a hot iron for a minor fault She was stopped by her husband, almost hit him, then decided rather to deliver "an abundance of bad words" before trying to strangle herself Later he "rogered her by way of reconciliation"pic.twitter.com/z78ComGUNE
Another miserable couple "rode in sullen silence through the Virginia countryside, until suddenly the colonel turned his carriage . . . straight into Chesapeake Bay." "Where are you going, Mr. Custis?" "To Hell, Madam." "Drive on. Any place is better than Arlington."
"The journal which recorded [Richards' wife's fury about his infidelity] was normally kept in English, but when things went wrong Richards switched to French, and when they went very wrong he wrote in Italian" fellas I could read about Tidewater marital conflicts all day
Here's Sarah Harrison Blair, who repeatedly refused to vow to obey her husband James at their marriage ceremony. "Dr. Blair finally agreed to take his chances and the wedding went forward without any promise of obedience. Their married life together proved to be deeply unhappy."pic.twitter.com/j3f4pFLjM2
"At a rich planter's table as late as 1773, the northern tutor Philip Fithian was startled to hear an argument on the question of whether women had souls." no word any resulting consensus
Oh cute. Unmarried mothers were whipped bloody in public. If she was a servant, she had to serve another term to compensate her master for time lost to pregnancy, even if he was the father.
Wow, remember Lucy Byrd, with the iron? Her husband William is a D I C K. "With very mixed success he attempted to seduce relatives, neighbors, casual acquaintances, strangers, prostitutes, the wives of his best friends, and servants [whom he often raped]."pic.twitter.com/oAhSO17dM1
His entire diary is just pages and pages of "I visited Mrs So-and-so, rogered her twice very well, neglected my prayers" "I met a very tall woman and rogered her three times" "rogered [Betty S-t-r-d] twice, for which God forgive me" literally his entire diary for years unreal
"An old Tidewater folk saying in Prince George's County, Maryland, defined a virgin as a girl who could run faster than her uncle."
"The founders of New England made rape a hanging crime. In the courts of Chesapeake it was sometimes punished less severely than petty theft." Tidewater trying real hard to make the Puritans look good
Onto childrearing and character. Lots of Rules and Etiquette covering a basically barbaric spirit. Yet: George Washington read a translation of Seneca's dialogues, and Addison's Cato, and frequently quoted the latter.
Lucy Parke Byrd, with the iron and the dick husband? Also had a crazy father, Col. Daniel Parke! Publicly challenged the governor of Maryland to a duel. Kidnapped a married woman from England as a concubine. When the local priest condemned him from the pulpit? DUEL.pic.twitter.com/LptCu4ZxAg
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