Word: jamestown
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...great achievement of the civil rights revolution was the dismantling of what the inheritors of Jamestown had instituted. Today a black woman fills one of the most powerful political offices after the presidency, and a black man holds serious promise of becoming the presidential candidate of the Democratic Party. Whatever the persisting problems of black Americans--many of which, like a fragile family life and the lack of inheritance, also originated in slavery--it is now incontestable that they belong to America as America belongs to them. In this, America stands far above all other multiethnic Western nations. Nonetheless...
...Jamestown's 400th birthday, and Queen Elizabeth II, James I's great-great-great-great-great-great- great-great-great-great-granddaughter, will be present to celebrate the occasion. But it's worth remembering that Jamestown was a giant gamble. The trials were severe, the errors numerous, the losses colossal, the gains, eventually, great. Life in Jamestown was a three-way tug-of-war between daily survival, the settlers' own preconceptions and the need to adapt to a new world. Jamestown did not invent America, but in its will to survive, its quest for democracy, its exploitation of both Indians...
...Jamestown spawned four centuries of myths. The wreck of a reinforcement expedition in Bermuda inspired Shakespeare's magic play, The Tempest (1611), complete with Caliban, a savage aboriginal; a passage in one of John Smith's many promotional tracts inspired a verse in Peggy Lee's song Fever (1958)--"Captain Smith and Pocahontas had a very mad affair." In reality, Jamestown was a hardheaded business proposition. The 104 English settlers who stayed when the ships went home--gentlemen, soldiers, privateers, artisans, laborers, boys (no women yet)--were late entrants in the New World sweepstakes. Spain had conquered Mexico...
That would have surprised the Jamestown settlers, who faced an array of challenges, all of them together crushing. It was a project of the London Co., a group of merchants with a royal patent: Imagine that Congress gave Wal-Mart and General Electric permission to colonize Mars. But of necessity, the day-to-day decisions were made in Jamestown, and its leaders were always fighting. Leaders who were incompetent or unpopular--sometimes the most competent were the least popular--were deposed on the spot. The typical 17th century account of Jamestown argues that everything would have gone well if everyone...
...return on its outlay, but it was slow in coming. It's not that the settlers weren't capable of working hard. One month after they landed, they realized they needed a log palisade to protect them from Indian arrows. As archaeologist William M. Kelso points out (in Jamestown: The Buried Truth), in 19 days and in a June swelter they cut and split more than 600 trees weighing 400 to 800 lbs. each and set them in a triangular trench three football fields long and 2 1/2 ft. deep. In 2004 New Line Cinema built a replica...