Amherst Politics and Podunk

"`Where is Podunk?' we asked, failing entirely to suppress a quiver of anticipation.

"`This is Podunk now,' said the small boy.

—from an article in the Worcester Telegraph, 1941

Just one final piece on our political culture in the wake of Town Meeting.

Much of the recent debate on the floor of our venerable assembly involved the proposed village center rezoning: how to focus growth in existing built-up areas in order to prevent sprawl, but without compromising their existing look and feel. Much of the debate outside the hall involved the frustration felt by each side regarding the presumed intransigence and narrow-mindedness of the other. Some proponents of the zoning changes, for example, blamed the defeat on "naysayers" allegedly resistant to any change, many of them new to and unfamiliar with the intricacies of both town planning and the political process. Some rezoning opponents (particularly the newbies), by contrast, saw themselves as waging a heroic fight against entrenched interests, high-handed practices, and old ways of thinking.

As I was looking over my book collection last week, I recalled that one volume contained the humorous old story, "The Politician of Podunk," which involves another such tale of political ideals and frustration from nearly a century and three-quarters ago.

The average reader is familiar with the term "Podunk" as a synonym for rural backwardness, but few know where it comes from. In fact, even supposed experts have long disagreed.

In the view of many, it does not exist, though that has not stopped others from trying to find it, or at least a plausible connection between the idea and a real place.

The Oxford Etymological Dictionary of the English Language (OED) lists both an adjective and a noun corresponding to the general understanding of the term: "Of or designating an obscure or insignificant town; out-of-the-way, small-town, provincial; insignificant" "A name for a fictitious, insignificant, out-of-the-way town; a typical small town." Examples:

1846   Daily National Pilot (Buffalo, N.Y.) 13 Jan. 3a,   Messrs. Editors: I hear you ask, ‘Where in the world is Podunk?’ It is in the world, sir; and more than that, is a little world of itself. It stands ‘high up the big Pigeon’, a bright and shining light amid the surrounding darkness. I look back, sir, with pride upon the day when I located in the then unincorporated burgh of Podunk. 

1846   Daily National Pilot (Buffalo, N.Y.) 6 Mar. 2b,   Podunk is a huge town, not distinguished exactly as the geographies have it, for its ‘fertile soil, salubrious and healthy climate’, but for some of the characters that here do congregate.

But it also lists Podunk as both an adjective and a noun associated with "a North American Indian people formerly inhabiting an area around the Podunk River in Hartford County, Connecticut."

Perhaps for the latter reason, efforts to get to the bottom of the mystery focused on our own central New England. In a 1988 piece, columnist "Cecil Adams" reviewed the evidence. He explains, "In 1925 philologist G.P. Krapp noted that no Podunk was to be found in the list of American post offices" but did find a connection with Native American geographic names. In 1933, the Boston Herald declared that the place did not exist. Soon thereafter, etymologist Allen Walker Read found the term applied to meadows, ponds, and small bodies of flowing water in the Hartford and Worcester area, as well as "throughout New York State." He "opined that Podunk derived from an Algonquin Indian word meaning 'a boggy place.'"

In 1941, the Herald thereupon resumed the quest, but as Adams explains, fobbed the job off on the Worcester Telegraph, whose dramatic quest led to the prosaic conclusion that it was (in his words) "an unincorporated area about six square miles in extent containing about 100 families" "located mostly within East Brookfield, a town about 15 miles west of Worcester."

Satisfying and plausible, but there the story does not end. Perhaps the clue, like the purloined letter, was right in front of our faces. One of the leading entries in the always entertaining though not necessarily reliable (or serious) Urban Dictionary traces the popularization of the term to the 1971 film, "The French Connection," via a reference to the backwardness of Poughkeepsie. Indeed, as the OED shows, the term seems to have a New York association, but it in fact goes back to the 1840s. However, few have looked hard enough and far enough back. The Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE)—a product of my  alma mater, The University of Wisconsin, I am proud to say—correctly traces the first known use to my aforementioned little story, thus reinforcing the connection with a New York location; there is in fact a real Podunk, a hamlet in the town of Ulysses.

"The Politician of Podunk" appeared in The Token and Atlantic Souvenir, a "gift book" published in Boston in 1839.

Gift books flourished in the UK and US from the early 1820s until circa 1860, and derived from the tradition of French and German literary annuals and almanacs, which arose in the second third of the eighteenth century. Containing a variety of literary pieces, usually embellished with engravings and elegantly bound, they were issued around the autumn season and intended, as the name suggests, as gifts for the Christmas and New Year holidays.

The editor of The Token was one Samuel Griswold Goodrich (1793-1860), a Massachusetts and Connecticut bookseller and publisher (later: diplomat) who also wrote under the pseudonym, "Peter Parley." (As chance would have it, some of Goodrich's papers are also housed in Amherst College Archives and Special Collections.)


At any rate, here, without further ado, is the story itself:

[p. 109] THE POLITICIAN OF PODUNK.

SOLOMON WAXTEND was a shoemaker of Podunk, a small village of New York, some forty years ago. He was an Englishman by birth, and had come over the water to mend the institutions, as well as the soles, of the country. He was a perfectly honest man, and of natural good sense; but, having taken pretty large doses of new light from the works of Tom Paine and the French Revolutionists, he became, like an inflated balloon, light-headed, and soared aloft into the unknown regions of air. Like many of his countrymen brought up under monarchical institutions, he was slow in understanding the mysteries of our political system; and, wanting the ballast of Yankee common sense, he nevertheless thought himself specially qualified to instruct the people of Podunk in every thing relating to civil liberty.

Accordingly he held forth, at first, over his lapstone, then at the bar-room, and finally at a caucus. He had some gifts, and more of the grace of assurance. He set up for a great man, became a candidate for representative, and was [110] triumphantly elected a member of the General Assembly of New York. With all the spirit of a true reformer, he set forth for Albany, to discharge the high functions of his official state. He went. He rose to make a speech. His voice failed, his knees tottered, he became silent; he sat down. The whole affair was duly reported in the papers. It was read at the alehouse in Podunk!

Solomon Waxtend came back an altered man. He went away round, ruddy, and self-sufficient; he returned lean, sullen, and subdued. He shut himself up for a month, and nothing was heard in his house by the neighbours, save the vigorous hammer upon the lapstone. At length, one evening, he appeared at the village inn. It was a sort of holiday eve, and many of his partisans were there. They looked at Solomon, as if they saw a ghost; but he had that calmness of countenance which betokens a mind made up. His late friends crowded round him; but Solomon, waving his hand, bade them sit down. Having done this, he spoke as follows.

"I trust I am duly sensible, my friends, of the honor you intended me, in sending me to the Assembly. If I have disgraced you, it has, at least, been a lesson to me. I find, that in order [111] to understand your institutions, and to cope with your Yankee people, it is necessary, like them, to live long in the country, and to study its history, and become familiar with its political system. I find that an Englishman, with his Tory notions, his hereditary love of monarchy, his loyalty, woven in with his first lessons of life, is like a 'fish out of water' in one of your democratic assemblies. I have, therefore, only one thing to say, and that will be told in the way of a story.

"Some people, digging in a sandbank by the seaside, in search of Kid's money, came to a chest, with the following inscription, —' Take me up, and I will tell you more!' This gave them fresh courage, and they continued their efforts. At length they dug up the chest, and on the bottom, they found the following inscription, —' Lay me down as I was before.'"

Having told this story, the cobler departed, leaving his hearers to apply the obvious hint conveyed by the legend.

No specific lesson for Amherst intended here.

Rather, it's just a useful reminder that the collision of ideals and desires with reality, and the mutual frustration of old hands and newcomers are nothing new.

the shoemaker as political amateur

The illustration accompanying the story:  "The Politician," by Henry Liverseege (1803-32), steel engraving by Oliver Pelton (1798-1882) of Hartford. As the record in the holdings of the American Antiquarian Society indicates, the engraving appears in several American literary annuals issued between 1839 and1853.



Resources

• The 1840 volume of The Token via Google Books

Putting the Hampshire College Divestment Myth in its Grave

The anti-Israel “BDS” (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement seems to be at a tipping point. It confidently promises an unprecedented campaign in 2012, yet its efforts in the past year met with pushback and setbacks around the globe. Its choice of targets moreover grew increasingly petty, not to say, bizarre: hummus (made in New York)? chocolate shops in Australia? a symphony orchestra on tour? (1 vs. 2)  WTF?! The world finally seems to be catching on.

Plans for a national conference of the BDS movement, to be held at the University of Pennsylvania in February (1, 2), are already bringing bad news. The administration not only declared in advance that hosting the gathering did not constitute endorsement (standard operating procedure for all sorts of student events). It also took the notable step of explicitly condemning the BDS movement and affirming the importance of ties with Israeli academics.

Bummer.

The Penn activists claim to be “Picking up where the 2009 Hampshire conference left off.” They may wish to reconsider their chosen model. The rather lackluster original conference at Hampshire (1, 2, 3)  followed on the heels of the claim that the College had divested from “the Israeli Occupation of Palestine” earlier that year. Unfortunately, as everyone else in the world seems to know, that divestment claim is false. Call it what you will—misinterpretation, wishful thinking, hoax, fraud, lie—it didn’t happen, and that’s that. Hampshire College disposed of any remaining doubts when it presented its new socially responsible investing policy last month.

Jon Haber, who has followed anti-Israel divestment efforts closely, likens the so-called BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement to a vampire: (1) every time you think it’s dead, it comes back, a phenomenon that conveys (in accordance with its hopes and wishes) an air of invincibility. In fact, (2) its powers are more limited than it would like you to believe, because it can become a threat only when you allow it to cross your threshold. In Jon’s view, the BDS movement—which has scored no major or lasting victories in the course of a decade—has survived beyond its normal life only by virtue of the fact that its dedicated activists prey upon those who, whether deliberately or unwittingly, allow it to gain entrance to their organizations.

high time for institutions to wake up to the threat of BDS

This explains why the academically robust but financially anemic Hampshire College would prove such an enticing victim for the vampires: the endorsement of the first American institution of higher education to divest from South Africa would lend weight to the false assertion that Israel, too, practices “apartheid.”

That the College, following a divestment request by anti-Israel activists, made changes to its investment portfolio in 2009 is not in dispute. The dispute turns instead on the meaning of that action. The task of the historian, as Thomas Babington Macaulay says in the motto on the masthead of this blog, is not merely to establish the facts, but above all, to interpret them.

As is well known: the College, upon reviewing the fund in question, found that multiple companies were in violation of its socially responsible investment policy, and reallocated its assets accordingly. That standard (e.g. declining to invest in military products) was the sole rationale behind the action. The decision had nothing to do with Israel, affected a far greater number of firms having no association with Israel, and above all, rendered no verdict on Israel or its policies, whether within the “Green Line” or in the “occupied territories.”

No credible observer believes that divestment took place, for three very simple reasons: Divestment is a political action that therefore has meaning only if it is (1) deliberate and (2) accompanied by a public statement (3) on the part of an officially responsible body. When the College divested from holdings in South Africa, the administration and trustees publicly announced their action and stated the reasons. That contrast says it all.

A mere change in resource allocation makes no such statement. I once tried to illustrate this distinction by analogy:

If I sell my shares in Chrysler because I think it's a badly-run company that does not serve its stockholders, it's technically "true" that I have "relinquished" (to use the language of another recent student flier) my investment in a particular firm that profits from our irresponsible reliance on fossil fuels, but I have hardly "divested" myself—as a conscious and political statement (which is the only practical meaning that "divestment" can have in this context)—of participation in the carbon-based economy: especially if I continue to hold stock in Ford, Toyota, and Mobil.

The disinclination of Hampshire College to invest in certain areas does not necessarily render a verdict on their legality or morality:

• The College (although this is nowhere formally stated) does not invest in companies dealing in alcoholic beverages. Unlike tobacco, the latter do not necessarily cause harm when used responsibly. However, alcohol is neither a necessity of life nor an unmitigated good, and the College simply prefers to direct its resources to firms that, e.g. “Provide beneficial goods and services such as food, clothing, housing, health, education, transportation and energy.” (Policy, p. 2: Point 1) No rational person would conclude that, by declining to support the alcohol industry, we are endorsing prohibition—or even temperance. Hampshire College serves beer, wine, and liquor at some of its events—for example, dinners of the Board of Trustees, who approve the investment policy.

• The policy does not allow investment in companies that “Make nuclear, biological, or conventional weapons.” (Policy, p. 2: Point A) Nations have the right to self-defense. The US Constitution requires the government “to provide for the common defence,” and authorizes Congress “to raise and support armies” and “provide and maintain a navy.” No rational person would therefore conclude that our policy entails a rejection of the Constitution or the armed forces of the United States.

The decision taken in response to the divestment request had to do with military products, not their recipient: not Israel, not anyone else. If and when there is a Palestinian state, the College will likewise refuse to invest in firms that provide it with weapons.

Clear, one would think.

And yet the divestment myth refused to die. BDS advocates clung to it with a religious fervor, as if repeating it often enough could make it true.

They will find it more difficult than ever to maintain that position following the report on the new socially responsible investment policy last month.

Former President Marlene Fried:

there is clarity and unanimity on the Board that it did not make a decision to divest from the State of Israel, that it did not decide that Israel was in the same camp as South Africa.

Although the student questioner, fearing some semantic or conceptual confusion, correctly pointed out that the divestment claim involved the “Israeli occupation of Palestine” rather than investment in Israel, as such, it is a distinction without a difference in light of the above (as well as the stance of the BDS movement, for that matter)—and indeed, Fried responded by reaffirming the College’s rejection of the claim: “the Board does not believe that.”

There was no dissent from any member of the committee, and that includes Professor Emeritus Stan Warner, a well-known economist and political progressive, who was the faculty representative on the subcommittee on investment responsibility (CHOIR) at the time of the original divestment request, and who advised and educated student members about investment policy. Surely, if divestment had succeeded, he would know and be duty-bound to say so. But no, in the course of the nearly twelve-minute discussion of the issue, he was in fact the only member of the committee who did not speak to the controversy, as such, jumping in only briefly to answer a procedural question.

The College has made it clear, time and again: no divestment took place in 2009.

It has now affirmed that even more clearly at the end of 2011.

As they used to say in the olden days:

Q.E.D.
(1, 2)

Or, as we say nowadays:

Myth busted!

It’s high time that we put the divestment myth in the graveyard of history, where it belongs.

History: Twice as Useful as Philosophy

As the great Michel de Montaigne famously said, "philosopher, c'est apprendre à mourir."  According to Felipe Fernández-Armesto:

There are, in my submission, only two reasons for studying anything: to enhance life and to prepare for death. The study of history embraces life because it conjures in the mind a vivid context for the appreciation and understanding of encounters with people and with artefacts, with streets and texts, with landscapes and ruins.  And it prepares you for death by cultivating what [E. H.] Carr called 'imaginative understanding', which some contributors to this volume would have called 'empathy' or other names of which Carr would disapprove.  By broadening the mind, by exercising the ability to understand the other, history has a moral effect on the person that studies it.  It can make you a better person.  Our best peculiar justification for history is to say that it needs no justification.  Because it is everything, it is inescapable.  You can say of it what Mallory said of Everest.

— Felipe Fernández-Armesto, "Epilogue:  What is History Now?" in David Cannadine, ed., What is History Now? (Houndsmills and NY:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 154

New US Polling Results on Evolution: What Do They Mean?

• Nearly eighty percent of Americans believe God played a role in the development of the human species.
• More than fifty percent of Americans believe in evolution.
• Only sixteen percent of Americans really understand and believe in evolution.

All of these are reasonable interpretations of the latest Gallup poll on American attitudes toward evolution, which, incidentally, have not markedly changed in the last generation.

Is the glass half-empty or half-full? Well, that may depend on how desperate you are for good news.

Gallup headlined its report with the negative, but put a sugar cube at the bottom of the bitter cup of tea, i.e. in the subtitle:

Four in 10 Americans Believe in Strict Creationism
Belief in evolutionary origins of humans slowly rising, however
by Frank Newport

PRINCETON, NJ -- Four in 10 Americans, slightly fewer today than in years past, believe God created humans in their present form about 10,000 years ago. Thirty-eight percent believe God guided a process by which humans developed over millions of years from less advanced life forms, while 16%, up slightly from years past, believe humans developed over millions of years, without God's involvement. (full story, with numbers and graphs)

By contrast, veteran skeptic Michael Shermer simply tweeted his satisfaction, "New Gallup poll shows acceptance of evolution increasing!" and cited a post by the National Center for Science Education, which had likewise led with the positive. Maybe that was because he had also just rejoiced at the fifth anniversary of the Kitzmiller v. Dover Board of Education case, which had dealt a blow to the attempt to sneak cretinism creationism through the back door of the schools by teaching "intelligent design."

The increase is indeed slight: up from 14 percent in 2008 (the low was 9 percent in 1982 and 1999, the average, just over 11 percent from 1982 through 2007). Maybe I'm just an inveterate pessimist, but—stop to think about this—we're still at 16 percent!. For me, the poll reveals the sobering truth that only about one in six Americans believes in the universally acknowledged scientific explanation for the development of life on our planet. Rejecting the "theory of evolution" is only slightly less scary than rejecting the "theory of gravitation."  (Maybe I should have said the glass was only one-sixth full.)

That forty percent of Americans reject the most basic evidence of the archaeological (not to mention, fossil and astrophysical) record is astounding but no longer surprising, if I may put it that way. After all, 79 percent of us believe in miracles, and 62 percent believe in the devil.

Over at Archaeology magazine, scholars are debating (and rejecting) the thesis that a comet's collision with the earth caused mass extinctions—and the disappearance of the early human "Clovis culture" (named for the site in New Mexico where distinctive and sophisticated stone tools were found).  That happened 12,900 years ago. According to nearly half of our population, then, these sophisticated ancestors cannot have existed. And what about all the whack jobs (regularly featured on the History Channel, alas), who insist on the existence of a great, amazingly sophisticated, vanished civilization—so utterly vanished, in fact, that it left behind not a document and not a pot shard, in short, not any of the usual material traces of a civilization—and instead (how, then ??) only the message for posterity that it had been, well, really smart and really special. The adherents all claim that this mysterious disappearing act took place around 12,000 years ago. Even this crackpot theory would seem to become an impossibility for believers in recent human origins.The question, then, is: are we dealing with the same nuts, or is this a case of mixed nuts?

Personally, I was most intrigued by the statistic that "Thirty-eight percent believe God guided a process by which humans developed over millions of years from less advanced life forms." It's not surprising. The mockery of all but the most unforgiving and self-congratulatory atheists notwithstanding, it is well known that large numbers of religious people in the west believe in evolution in the sense that they acknowledge some of its key premises, at least as concerns starting assumptions and consequences:  a very ancient earth and the development of more complex life forms—including humans (this is crucial)—from simpler ones. The Papacy accepts this (1, 2). The Chief Rabbi of England accepts this (1, 2). Mainstream American Protestant theologians accept this.

The question is: is that really belief in evolution?  Strictly speaking (which should be the only manner of speaking about science): no, or at least, not necessarily.  Evolution is an entirely natural process, requiring and allowing no supernatural intervention. The essence is the appearance and preservation of advantageous chance mutations. Chance and nature are the key: the changes occur by chance, and on the genetic level (this is the mechanism that Darwin could not yet explain).  Useful changes are retained in the evolutionary process to the extent that they render the possessor more adaptable, better able to survive.

Unfortunately, we'd really need to drill down deeper than the questions allow. It all really depends on what "guided" means.  There are two possibilities. If the thirty-eight percent really believe that "God guided" the process of evolution from the start in any meaningful sense, such as "intelligent design," or intervened at any point, then that's just hogwash from a scientific point of view (and not even theologically justifiable in some cases). If, by contrast, these respondents in effect adopt something closer to a deist position whereby a supreme being set the processes of natural law in motion at the start of time and thereafter refrained from meddling (again: without any specific intended outcome), then that's somewhat different. Science cannot really address that possibility, for evolution is more concerned with the processes, mechanisms, and results.  A concept of God as merely first cause would, in theory, allow for the scientific process of evolution to unfold. Whether such a notion is scientifically tenable, and what a God confined to that domain would imply for many traditional religions, those are another matter.

So, whether the 38 percent are closer to the 40 percent or the 16 percent is the key question: Do 78 percent of Americans reject or fail to understand evolution? (coincidentally or otherwise, a figure close to that of the 82 percent that believe in God) Or can we instead say that 54 percent of Americans accept evolution?

Bottom line:  We have overcome some of our deepest societal barriers and taboos. We have elected a black president.  We have (in Massachusetts and a few other states) recognized the full range of gay rights, including marriage (42 percent of Americans now accept it). We have, most recently, eliminated discrimination against gays in the military (77 percent of Americans support that). And yet, we shy away from embracing the simple, overwhelmingly demonstrated, objective truths of nature and science.

Interesting.

Related articles

• Four in 10 Americans Believe in Strict Creationism (gallup.com)
• Dover Day (whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com)
• New Gallup poll: America still creationist (surprise!) (whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com)

How Rigorous Are Anthropology and Physics? Hard to Know

Cross-check: Science "faction": Is theoretical physics becoming "softer" than anthropology?

What makes a doctrine or field "scientific"?

Writing in Scientific American, John Horgan observes:

"Two recent science stories, one in anthropology and the other in physics, have me wondering which field is "hard" and which "soft.""

The logic:

1) The American Anthropological Association drops "science" from mission statement, whereupon some members protested.

2) In the meantime, physics, once that "hardest" of disciplines, whose mathematical foundations have since Newton defined what it means to be "scientific," becomes ever more speculative, venturing "beyond the bounds of measurable reality," as evidenced by the recent debate over colliding black holes as the source of the cosmic background radiation.

Much food for thought in a brief piece.

Related articles

• Science 'faction': Is theoretical physics becoming 'softer' than anthropology? (scientificamerican.com)
• "Is Anthropology Science?" and related posts (telicthoughts.com)
• ""Anthropology is not a science" - American Anthropological Association" and related posts (publishingarchaeology.blogspot.com)
• "Anthropologists say sayonara to science" and related posts (isteve.blogspot.com)
• Hold the science, says anthropology society (blogs.nature.com)
• Open Letter to the Anthropological Community (peterme.com)

Boston Tea Party update

So, just when did people start calling it the "Tea Party"? 1805?  J.L. Bell, who pursued the mystery of David Kinnison's alleged account of the incident, now turns his detective skills from the thing to the name.  Follow the quest at Boston 1775.

New Census Data on the Way

Back in April, I noted the national and local effort on behalf of a "complete count" for the US 2010 census.  The results will be out on Tuesday, and the Census Bureau has a handy new interactive map that allows you to view the data.

Related articles

• Census Cost Doubles Due to Technical Issues (foxnews.com)
• Census Bureau to post 2010 population data Dec. 21 (sfgate.com)
• Census Bureau Projects U.S. Population as High as 312.7 Million (businessweek.com)
• U.S. Hispanic Population Is Booming (politics.usnews.com)

13 December 1621: The "Fortune" Sails from Plymouth to England (and why the Pilgrims were neither "socialists" nor "capitalists")

As MassMoments tells the story:

On this day in 1621, the ship Fortune set sail from Plymouth Colony. The arrival of the vessel two weeks earlier — sent by the English investors who had funded the Mayflower colonists— should have been a cause for celebration. But for the Pilgrims, Fortune was poorly named. The ship brought 35 new settlers, but...

It's an important story in its own right, because it tells us what happened after that fabled "first Thanksgiving," and it indicates how difficult the lives of the settlers remained. But it's especially interesting this year because it helps to debunk the trending right-wing myth about the Pilgrims' economic philosophy.

As I noted in the Thanksgiving post: to believe the Tea Party movement and a host of like-minded critics, the Pilgrims began as idealistic (or was it: dogmatic?) "socialists," who agreed to share burdens and benefits equally, starved, saw the error of their ways, and then finally adopted a "capitalist" model based on private property and incentives. Voilà: problem solved, nation prospers, there's still a Massachusetts, in which I can live today. Whew.

There was a lot going on in that corner of Massachusetts in the early seventeenth century, but the character of the various groups and individuals in the Colony and the contractual terms that governed their relations to one another, the sponsoring body, and the homeland go a long way toward explaining the situation in simple historical terms.

As MassMoments reminds us, the Pilgrims first sought refuge in the Netherlands, and then, when dissatisfied with conditions there, decided to venture across the ocean, a move they had never originally contemplated:

But funding an overseas voyage and establishing a colony would be expensive. There were, however, a number of wealthy gentlemen, merchants, and craftsmen in London who believed that there was money to be made from exploiting America's natural resources. What they needed was a base for gathering and shipping furs, timber, fish, and other trade goods. A group of about 70 of these speculators, whom the Separatists called Adventurers, put up the money to transport and provision the colonists; in return, the colonists, or Planters, agreed to live communally, to work for the company, and to ship goods back to England for a period of seven years to repay their debt.

After several aborted attempts, the Mayflower sailed from Plymouth, England, on September 6, 1620. It was bound for the area around Manhattan in the northernmost part what was then Virginia. No one knows whether the ship was blown off course or purposely headed to a location out of the jurisdiction of the Anglican Church, which was established in Virginia. In any case, the Mayflower anchored in Provincetown harbor on November11th. Some of the non-Separatists on board objected that since they had not gone to Virginia, as planned, they were not bound by their work contracts and needed to take orders from no one. After debating the issue, the group agreed "that we should combine together in one body, and to submit to such government and governours, as we should by common consent make and choose." All free adult male passengers signed the historic Mayflower Compact, the first document in the Americas to embrace the democratic principle of majority rule.

Only thanks to the help of Native Americans did they survive in the new land, but the margin was narrow, and they still expected help from home:

But when Fortune sailed into Plymouth harbor on November 10th, it brought only more mouths to feed. While the Planters were grateful for the additional workers, they were dismayed to discover that the men had been sent without provisions. The ship did not even carry food to sustain the crew on the return trip. The Adventurers also sent a letter castigating the Planters for the fact that the Mayflower had arrived in England with an empty hold and demanding that the Fortune return immediately filled with valuable goods.

The colonists complied. For the next six years, they sent sizable shipments, especially of furs, back to England. But the goods yielded far less profit than the Adventurers had anticipated, and as the seven-year mark approached, the colonists were still in debt. Finally, 27 of them pooled their personal resources and paid off the debt. Once free of the requirement to live communally and hold all property in common, the original settlers divided the land into private grants. The era of the "Old Comers" was over. 

So much for the morality tale or conversion narrative propagated by the right-wing ideologues.  News flash: there was no socialism in seventeenth-century New England to abandon.  To begin with, as James and Patricia Deetz point out, the Pilgrims "bridled at this arrangement [for holding property in common], and it had not been resolved in a satisfactory fashion at the time of their departure" (35). In any case, the Pilgrims had yoked their fate to a classical mercantilist undertaking rather than a proto-Bolshevist one.  Scholars still debate the precise place of mercantilism in the history of economic development, but although it was a certainly a commercial undertaking that generated merchant capital, it was not based on a "capitalist mode of production" in the strict sense. Indeed, as Karl Polanyi says, to the extent that mercantilism "thought of markets in a way exactly contrary to market economy" and was more concerned with regulation than commercialization, "there was no difference between mercantilists and feudalists."  So, not only was the original arrangement with the Virginia Company not "socialist":  it would be fairer to say that we are looking back to the sixteenth century then ahead to the nineteenth.  For that matter, even after the dissolution of the agreement, life in the colony was no laissez-faire paradise.

As Eugene Aubrey Stanton observes,

It would seem as it nothing was beyond the concern of the courts—elections, weights and measures, land grants, permits for ordinaries, excuses from military service, public and private purchases and other transactions, the levying of taxes and troops, fines for absence from church meetings, the recording of apprentice and servant indentures, divorce, regulation of prices and wages, the laying out of streets, the reaction against Quakers, and of course criminal trials.

Constant state meddling in all public and private affairs? Wage and price controls? Hardly the Tea Party's cup of tea, one would think.  Remember, these are the people who just got the rather timid health care package that they label "ObamaCare" provisionally declared unconstitutional. (Georgetown law professor Randy Barnett warned that, as a result of the mandate to purchase health insurance, "Americans will be demoted from citizens to subjects."  more: 1, 2 ).

On both sides of the caesura of 1627, then, the Pilgrims lived lives far removed from anything resembling modern laissez-faire capitalism, which lay over the horizon, and did not really exist even in England itself.  Whatever the strengths or weaknesses of the their evolving social and economic arrangements, to pretend that any of this had anything to do with "capitalism" versus "socialism" is either ignorant or disingenuous.  Face it, that argument is a turkey.


Resource

The Plymouth Colony Archive Project

Amelia Earhart's Fate: Bone of Contention

Just a brief update on a post from this summer regarding the mystery of Amelia Earhart's disappearance.

The team that claimed to have discovered the Pacific island site where pilot Amelia Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan allegedly perished as castaways has now announced new evidence: an object formerly identified as a turtle bone that may turn out to be part of a human finger bone.

"Finding Amelia," the two-hour program that aired on Discovery Channel tonight, contains the usual mixture of intriguing circumstantial evidence, free-wheeling speculation, and excessive padding with background information. Special feature of this program: horror-movie speculation about the dead or dying being devoured by vicious crabs.

Will the new information solve the case? As team leader Ric Gillespie says, "I crossed my threshold of belief long ago." Indeed.

To save you the trouble of watching the whole thing for yourself:

The program doesn't actually provide any answers about the finger bone—which seems to be the only thing new here; the rest of the information has been published in Gillespie's 2006 book and dribbled out in various news reports over the years.

The researchers still harp on the issue of "touch DNA," which, as I suggested last time, was less than a long shot.  Somewhat to my surprise, DNA was indeed present. I was less surprised when I learned the result: turns out that the DNA recovered from two small objects did not match Earhart's—because it was Gillespie's. Naturally, he is shocked and mystified, because he claimed he never directly handled the items.

His response:  "When you test the evidence and the answer is 'no,' the answer is not 'no': it's 'not yet.'" (huh?) "You have to ask the right questions," he says.  A revealing statement.

He may indeed have solved the mystery or Amelia Earhart, but the new evidence thus far turns out to be chimeric, and if the foregoing represents his idea of scientific method, it's no wonder he's having trouble convincing people.

Related articles

• Amelia Earhart's finger bone recovered? (msnbc.msn.com)

28 October-1 November 1928: First Flight of the "Graf Zeppelin" from America to Germany

These days, as we take the ready availability of trans-Atlantic air travel for granted but agonize over extra charges for luggage, it's worth recalling the distant origins of that commerce.   In October 1928, the “Graf Zeppelin” (LZ 127) made the first intercontinental passenger airship flight. This postcard is one of the historical artifacts of that event.

It was the seventh voyage for the largest airship in the world:  776 feet long, with a volume of 3.7 million cubic feet.  The maiden flight took place on 18 September.  Transatlantic trips between the home base at Friedrichshafen, Germany, and the Naval Air Station at Lakehurst, NJ lasted about four and a half days.

Both legs of this voyage were marked by some drama.  On the way to America, from 11 to 15 October, the ship was nearly lost in a storm and suffered damage.  The return trip, which lasted from 28 October until the morning of 1 November, was noteworthy not only because it broke the record for fastest long-distance flight, but also because it included a nineteen-year-old stowaway from New Jersey who became something of an instant celebrity.

By contrast, the fame of Commander of the "Graf Zeppelin" was enduring. It was none other than Hugo Eckener (1868-1954), the Manager of the Zeppelin enterprise, who had taken over following the death of the ship’s namesake, Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin in 1917 (“Graf” just means Count, as in the name of the pocket battleship, "Graf Spee").  Eckener also piloted the LZ 127 on the first (and only) round-the-world flight by an airship in 1929 (sponsored by William Randolph Hearst), and the pioneering polar research flight two years later.  Fêted as a national hero under the Weimar Republic, Eckener was an opponent of the Nazis and even planned to run against Hitler for President in 1932.  After coming to power in 1933, they steadily reduced his role in the firm and public life.  After the war, he worked as a journalist and politician for the cause of international reconciliation. (Briefly condemned by the French for alleged collaboration with the Nazis, he was soon rehabilitated.)

Eckener's birthplace (today, a restaurant) in Flensburg, Germany

What few Americans (aside from devotees of aviation history) know is that it was in our country, while serving as an observer with the Union forces during the Civil War, that the Count began his aeronautical career. That much seems reasonably certain, attested to in an interview that the inventor gave toward the end of his life, in 1915.  The details, however, have always been fuzzy or in dispute.

I grew up learning that he had made his first balloon ascension in 1863 from the distinctive round tower at Fort Snelling, Minnesota, a site that I passed by every week, in my parents’ car, when I was a child.  Much later, I learned that the story was more complicated: perhaps less dramatic than we had been led to believe, but more intriguing as a case of historical myth-making. Rhoda R. Gilman did the painstaking and masterful detective work in an article for Minnesota History 45 years ago. Here’s the connection to today’s post: It was a Saint Paul newspaper article prompted by the maiden voyage of the “Graf Zeppelin” to the United States in October 1928 that apparently gave birth to the Fort Snelling story. Depending on the version at issue, either the ascent took place there or in Saint Paul. Either the balloon was free or tethered. Either the Count borrowed a balloon or had one made. The accounts even disagree on the nature of his mission in the area. As best we can tell, however, he simply joined the civilian residents of Saint Paul in taking advantage of the presence of a traveling balloonist (another German count, to be sure) for a brief joyride.

As Gilman puts it:

The vision of him as a paying passenger in a tethered balloon a few hundred feet over Seventh and Jackson Streets is a tame one. It lacks the drama of a daring young military attaché soaring off the Round Tower beneath an experimental gas bag. Nor does it have the dramatic overtones suggested by a German count ‘barnstorming’ under an assumed name. Yet for all that, the incident may have had large consequences for the history of aeronautics. As to whether or not it did, Zeppelin himself is the only possible witness. His own words [in the 1915 interview; JW] were: ‘While I was above Saint Paul I had my first idea of aerial navigation strongly impressed upon me and it was there that the first idea of my Zeppelins came to me.’

 (enlarge)

Fort Snelling would remain a site of great historic interest regardless of the Count's precise affiliation with it.   It was a key outpost on the northwestern frontier:   in the words of the Minnesota Historical Society, for several decades,  "the hub of the Upper Mississippi and the meeting place of diverse cultures." At times, that interaction was peaceful, but the fort was a site of vicious repression in the ignoble Dakota War in 1862.  Dred Scott married and raised a family while living at Fort Snelling as the slave of a military surgeon, and it was his residence there and in other free territories that moved him to sue for his liberty in the infamous court case.  All the while, the Fort trained soldiers for America's wars, from the conflict on the frontier through World War II.  Threatened by highway development in the 1950s, the once-isolated early nineteenth-century Fort became a National Landmark, and part of a National Historic Register District.  However, the modern Upper Post still in active use through World War II was allowed to deteriorate until, in 2006, it earned a spot on the National Trust's "11 Most Endangered Places."  But all that is part of another story


Postscript:

As for the cost of sending that postcard by Zeppelin: 53 cents was a great deal of money at that time: one cent, as one can see, was the cost of mailing a standard domestic postcard.  Adjusted for inflation, the mailing expense was the equivalent of $ 6.64 in today's dollars (measured by the Consumer Price Index), or $ 21.60, measured by the earning power of an unskilled worker).

Update July 2011:
The 150th anniversary of the beginning of the Civil War—and of the Union Army Balloon Corps—has prompted renewed interest in the Zeppelin story.  Here, speaking, to USA Today, National Air and Space Museum Curator Tom Crouch tells the story matter-of-factly and correctly.

Related articles

• Scientists Use Flying Zeppelin to Film Whales (abcnews.go.com)
• Airship race round the world planned for 2011 (go.theregister.com)
• Scientists use hovering zeppelin to film whales (sfgate.com)
• America the airship: the first transatlantic crossing (telegraph.co.uk)
• 'Gas bag' (bbc.co.uk)

Don't Know Much About History: Letter-writer blames Truman for recognizing Israel but forgets when he was President

A modest little news item, but one that I am unable to let pass without comment because its errors are too egregious and too typical of a fashionable strain of casual argumentation.

I have nothing against ignorance, but I do have a problem with arrogance.

What people do not know, they do not know, and often, they cannot be expected to know more.  To criticize them in such cases would be uncharitable at best, and nasty, at worst. However, those who do not know yet think they do, and those who simply should know better—they are in a different category. 

One sadly typical example of this kind of smug class bias and cultural elitism appeared in a letter to the Gazette over the weekend. Responding to an earlier letter attacking President Obama as a smart man but a political failure, the writer took the opportunity to explain how "Truman's lack of learning led to tragic decision." No, not the dropping of the first atomic bomb, as one might expect.

Saturday, August 7, 2010

To the editor:

For the most part, the July 10 letter "Wise leadership not guaranteed by genius" is one with which I can agree. A first-class education does not guarantee good judgment by our presidents. However, I would not sleep better with Harry S. Truman at the helm directing the ship of state in our time of spectacular crisis, as the letter states.

Perhaps the letter writer is too young to remember one of Truman's first acts as president. Without consulting either the American people or the Congress, Truman recognized what became the state of Israel and, by so doing, made us the hated enemy of millions of Palestinians and their fellow Muslims. Truman wanted to lessen the pain of Holocaust survivors and their fellow Jews, as the majority of Americans did. The Holocaust was the creation of Hitler and the German Nazis. Why would Truman wish to punish the Palestinians for the atrocious crimes of the Nazis? I doubt that he did.

Ben Franklin maintained that the man who educates himself has a fool for a teacher. Harry S. Truman was no fool but he did have a very limited educational background. In a documentary on the career of former Secretary of State George Shultz, this leader credits his formal education, a very rich one indeed, for his very long, successful career as a statesman starting with high honors in economics at Princeton and continuing both as a scholar and teacher at the University of Chicago. As I watched the film, I found myself thinking about Harry Truman and I have come to believe that had he been able to afford the high-quality education available to Mr. Shultz, Truman would not have taken it upon himself, well meaning though it was, to recognize the founding of the new nation of Israel in the midst of another country, a move that has resulted in years and years of turmoil and death.

Beverly Parker Bingham

Northampton

It's not worth taking the time to point out the host of factual and other errors, whether the canard that Israel was nothing but a misguided response to the Holocaust, or the convenient omission of the fact the UN had called for the partition of Palestine into Arab and Jewish states over five months earlier.

So let me focus on the main point: it is stunning that, in the midst of condescendingly accusing our 33rd president of ignorance, the writer reveals herself to be, uh,  less than fully informed:

"one of Truman's first acts as president"?

Well, let's see:  when did Truman become President? Upon the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, on 12 April 1945. And when did he recognize Israel? On 14 May 1948. Truman had in effect served more than three quarters of the presidential term by this point.

There are many things to debate with regard to US policy in the Middle East, but fortunately, the calendar is not yet one of them.

Truman ignorant?  Physician, heal thyself! (As an "educated" person, Ms. Bingham presumably knows the source of that quote.) Or, as we'd say nowadays,  attempted history lesson:  FAIL (she may need to look that one up:  here's a link.)

As for that great tv program on George Shultz:  We may note in passing that the three-hour (!) documentary was in fact controversial because of both its funders and its content (1, 2, 3, 4).  To be sure, Georg Shultz did some fine things, though he had a disturbing habit of working for or otherwise supporting some of the worst recent presidents.  Under Nixon, he helped to integrate construction unions.  And as Secretary of State under Reagan, he helped to re-professionalize the State Department.  He also attempted to maintain some distance from the Iran-Contra scheme, and eventually came to advocate dialogue with the USSR, though his record on both the Soviet bloc and Latin America is rather more complicated than the program suggests.

The writer would presumably take issue with some of Shultz's stances as a Cold Warrior. He endorsed and has even been called "Father" of the "Bush Doctrine" of preventive war.   Already in 1984, he said,

We must reach a consensus in this country that our responses [to terrorism] should go beyond passive defense to consider means of active prevention, preemption, and retaliation.

And as for Truman's "tragic decision"?  In 2007, in "The 'Israel Lobby' Myth," Shultz declared:

Israel is a free, democratic, open, and relentlessly self-analytical place. To hear harsh criticism of Israel's policies and leaders, listen to the Israelis. So questioning Israel for its actions is legitimate, but lies are something else. Throughout human history, they have been used not only to vilify but to establish a basis for cruel and inhuman acts. The catalog of lies about Jews is long and astonishingly crude, matched only by the suffering that has followed their promulgation.

Defaming the Jews by disputing their rightful place among the peoples of the world has been a long-running, well-documented, and disgraceful series of episodes across history. Again and again a time has come when legitimate criticism slips across an invisible line into what might be called the "badlands," a place where those who should be regarded as worthy adversaries in debate are turned into scapegoats, targets, all-purpose objects of blame.

Of course, it's really no different from what then presidental candidate Barack Obama himself said the following year:

It was just a few years after the liberation of the camps that David Ben-Gurion declared the founding of the Jewish State of Israel. We know that the establishment of Israel was just and necessary, rooted in centuries of struggle and decades of patient work. But 60 years later, we know that we cannot relent, we cannot yield, and as president I will never compromise when it comes to Israel's security. . . .

a secure, lasting peace is in Israel's national interest. It is in America's national interest. And it is in the interest of the Palestinian people and the Arab world. As president, I will work to help Israel achieve the goal of two states, a Jewish state of Israel and a Palestinian state, living side by side in peace and security

So, which is it?  Did Shultz take these positions because of or despite the "rich," "high-quality education" that he received from his elite prep school, Princeton, and MIT? And what's Obama's excuse? It was his educational qualifications that sparked the exchange of letters. Can both Truman the dummy and Obama the whiz kid be wrong?  It is perplexing.

President Obama also said, concerning peace-making, "I have no illusions that this will be easy."  Ignorant pronouncements of the sort contained in that letter certainly will not make the task any easier.

The next time the elitist writer is seized with a desire to dash off a letter to the Gazette, she would be better advised to walk over to the reference desk rather than rely on a stroll down memory lane.

Maurice Olender on the craft of reading and historical reasoning

A little gem from what Umberto Eco calls "one of the most beautiful books that I know on this subject":

A scholar's writings can be a place where conflicts crystallize: an author's whole work can be based on positions that to us seem mutually contradictory . . . .
  To confine an author to a simple image of his work, often concocted by later researchers for purposes of their own, is to recreate the past by inventing precursors for the present. . . .
  To take an author seriously, to view his work in the context of its times, to attempt to describe the twists and turns of his thinking does not, however, mean that one agrees with his conclusions or subscribes to his views. Obvious as this point is, it is worth making explicitly here.

Maurice Olender, The Languages of Paradise: Aryans and Semites, a Match Made in Heaven, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, revised and augmented ed. (NY: Other Press, 2002), 18

Questions About Historical Analogies? Read Richard Evans

I wanted to add a footnote to my recent discussions of historical analogies by recommending the work of Richard J. Evans. Evans, Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, is one of my favorite historians who, with only a handful of others in recent generations, has reshaped the field of German history and our attitudes toward it.

Evans is energetic, of dauntingly wide-ranging interests and knowledge, as his major publications show. He was a pioneer of real social history in the field of German studies. He has written about feminists, peasants, and workers. His conceptually as well as empirically studies of Hamburg are anything but mere "local studies."  Among the main themes of his work are the questions of continuity and change in German history, as represented by the twin emphases on the Wilhelmian Kaiserreich and the Third Reich. In the course of writing on the latter, he has also produced major works on historiography dealing with both the challenge of the Nazi past and general issues of method. His In Defence of History has been translated into German, Swedish, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Italian and Turkish.

Evans has just brought out the third and final volume of what is bound to be regarded as his magnum opus, a history of Nazi Germany (irony of success: one can only hope that it brings additional and deserved attention to his earlier works rather than eclipses them).

I thought of a review of his Third Reich at War this May and June, as Nazi analogies burst out like summer flowers on both the domestic and international fronts. The New York Times Book Review appraisal (May 17), by Walter Reich, former director of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, made the point very simply:

The public’s memory of what Nazi Germany was and did has been, in recent years, mangled and trivialized. Widely seen but misleading films and politicized accusations of countries perpetrating “holocausts” against various groups have debased people’s sense of the real nature of the Germans’ deeds during World War II.

Which is why Richard J. Evans’s “Third Reich at War” couldn’t have come at a better time. The book may well be not only the finest but also the most riveting account of that period. If any work of accurate history has a chance to correct the distortions of public memory, this is it.

Agreed.  Read the book and learn.

Coming Attractions: this Sunday, on National Geographic, "and Man created Dog"

 Just a heads-up on a new program about the human role in the evolution of the dog.

Here, an excerpt:




It runs Sunday evening at 9 p.m.

More later, perhaps.

The History Beneath Our Feet: Discoveries in New York (with a footnote on New England)

The discovery of the remains of an eighteenth-century ship in the course of construction work at the World Trade Center site has been big news these past few days. Yesterday the New York Times performed a very useful service by calling attention to the wealth of similar discoveries that receive far less attention but are no less illuminating.

Raiders of the Lost City
Last week, workers at the World Trade Center site discovered a 30-foot section of an 18th-century ship, buried about 20 to 30 feet below street level. It’s a remarkable find, but hardly a first for New York. Since the late 1970s, hundreds of archaeological digs around the city have uncovered thousands of artifacts and structures — each of which have helped to shape our understanding of New York’s history. The Op-Ed editors asked 12 local archaeologists to share their most memorable discoveries.

Here is a partial screen shot of the map (the internet version is interactive; the print version places the explanatory captions along the sides):

Although we tend to think of historic preservation as involving primarily extant buildings, they are in fact only a part of our domain.  Especially in heavily developed urban areas of long standing, the traces of the past were regularly obliterated, but in many cases, they have been covered over and are now concealed rather than gone forever.

And as the case of the ship shows, and the "Op-Chart" makes even more clear, what is covered (so to speak) encompasses a wide range of things: not even just structures or the expected small artifacts.  Of the twelve examples described in the piece, half are foundations or other significant remains of structures, and at least two others—another ship (this time used in creating an embankment for new land), and a lost cemetery—similarly involved large fixed remains.

These are wonderful examples, but the other four are my favorites because they show how much the trained eye and mind can discern from the slightest evidence.  Two are objects, of the sort one might expect an archaeologist to find, but with special stories.  A Chinese porcelain teacup with a monogram allowed researchers to identify the owner as an early 19th-century grocer, "one of the very few cases in which a person has left such a direct archaeological signature."  A piece of glass with a personal mark turned out to tell part of a collective story:  the "x" carved into a wine bottle fragment "is most likely a West African Bakongo cosmogram, a depiction of the universe—strong evidence that Africans in New York preserved their ancestral communal beliefs despite their enslavement." In the second two cases, the evidence was even harder to discern.  A 1982 dig at Sheridan Square turned up telltale dark streaks in deep soil, "unmistakable proof that one spring day, in the 18th or early 19th century, a farmer had been there plowing his fields."  Finally, it was well known that the "Collect Pond" north of Foley Square had been "home to the city's tanning industry—but there were no artifacts to prove it." "[S]ubtle changes in the soil composition" from rotting organic matter used in the tanning industry pointed to the location of the site, which, when excavated, yielded artifacts of the industry—goat horns and tanning hooks—that confirmed the identification.  (Those seeking an additional window into the lost life of early New York may be interested in "The Dutchman Series" of historical mysteries by Maan Meyers.)

One can see the reason that we have historic preservation regulations and bodies empowered to enforce them.  In Massachusetts, for example, local historical commissions are charged with "the preservation, protection and development of the historical or archeological assets."  Our Massachusetts General Law moreover follows the national practice, mandated in the Historic Preservation Act of 1966:

new construction projects or renovations to existing buildings that require funding, licenses, or permits from any state or federal governmental agencies must be reviewed by the Massachusetts Historical Commission (MHC) for impacts to historic and archaeological properties.

Although we therefore undertake all the proper surveys and investigations as such occasions demand, thoroughgoing archaeological investigation remains among our chief desiderata.  An archaeologist for the State Historical Commission determined that evidence of both prehistoric and historic archaeology in the Amherst area is "an underreported resource."
We have to date even identified a mere handful of sites:  only 15 from the "ancient" period out of 15,000 in the Commonwealth; and only 6 from the "historic" period from the late 18th through 20th centuries. Even the effort remains to be made:  only 13 studies out of the more than 2,000 done in the Commonwealth from the 1970s through the early part of the current century.

And most sites that are known are merely listed, but "lack interpretative material." (Admittedly, in the case of Native American archaeology, there is a reason:  fear of plunder by "pot-hunters" and others insufficiently respectful of the indigenous past sometimes leads the authorities to document the existence of such sites without calling public attention to them.

Here in Amherst, we are embarking upon a major reconstruction of the heavily traveled but awkwardly aligned intersection of Bay Road and Route 116 (also related to the "Atkins Corner" project (1, 2).  I have been involved, in several capacities over the last ten years, in planning and deliberations regarding this site. This past winter, I read the most recent archaeological reports conducted prior to the start of the new highway work, and I am pleased to report that they found no significant Native American archaeological resources in the work area. From one perspective, this might be disappointing news. From another, we may be glad that no resources are threatened by the construction.  However, in this case, neither outcome would fundamentally alter the historical significance of the site, for the entire historical topography is of interest. It is a matter of more than artifacts. Although Amherst, as part of the larger Connecticut River drainage area, was home to Native Americans, evidence of their actual settlement here in the contact period is lacking. Instead, they visited the area seasonally for hunting, fishing, and gathering of food.  Several of their traditional transit routes became roads still used today.  Present-day Bay Road, running east-west, was one of these principal corridors, which became a major transportation route for colonials and citizens of the new nation.  As old maps show, the basic configuration has not changed since the 18th century. The road ran from Hadley to the Brookfields in the center of the territory, to Boston (the "Bay" in the name thus signifying the destination or end-point, as was the practice in that day. Along it, farms, mills, inns, and homes sprang up.  It was over this road that troops and matériel passed in every major military conflict from the French and Indian Wars through the Revolution to the War of 1812. (One can still encounter the occasional elderly resident who can recall hearing her grandparents tell of how their great-grandparents saw cannon and other supplies for Commodore Perry's Lake Erie fleet pass in front of their home.)

Among the plans of the Historical Commission is therefore the creation of an appropriately marked "Bay Road Corridor" National Historic Register District: in our view, the best means of acknowledging the long-standing and ever-evolving role of this historical topography.  New York City is not the only place where there is history under our feet.

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• "18th Century Ship Found Buried at New York's World Trade Center Site" and related posts (oldsaltblog.com)
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• What history lurks beneath Seattle highways? (crosscut.com)
• SFgate.com Public digs up pieces of history in Sonoma (sfgate.com)