As some of you may know, I have more than once blog. In my other blog, I am starting a series where I use the tools and skills I have learned through studying history to try and understand Donald Trump. Love or hate him, he's definitely a person historians will be talking about for a long, long time.
https://peterhuston.blogspot.com/2019/07/trump-watch-trump-and-social-media.html
The American Revolution --"WE should rule OURSELVES" and European thought.
Random thoughts from the last few days:
No one should be mocked for the color of their skin or their sex and that includes White males. Nuff said. Not sure why it has become fashionable in some circles to pretend this isn't racism, but it is. The goal, I thought, was to work towards an America that was a color-blind meritocracy where people of all classes and colors work in harmony and if you think this sort of divisive nonsense somehow helps, well, you are wrong and deserve to be called out on it. Nuff said.
If you think it is appropriate to mock White Males because they are White Males then your vision of America and its ideals does not match mine because my vision of America welcomes people of all races, and colors and I will resist you. Simple enough.
Second, three days after July 4th I find myself reading a classic historical work on the Hessians and other German Auxiliaries of the American revolution. (I finished the book on the French in that war.) For those who don't know their history, in 1775, the British government found itself faced with a large scale uprising in its North American colonies. They needed to send large amounts of troops to try to put down the armed uprising. There were not enough British troops to do this and meet the other obligations of the British army. So the British government looked to hire troops abroad to send to fight in America. Germany was not a unified nation and instead a collection of independent feudal states of various sizes. About half a dozen of the petty tyrants of the minor German states agreed to rent or sell their subjects and citizens to the British with the plan being to put them in military units and ship them to America to fight in a distant war all without their consent or agreement.
As Hesse-Hanau sent the most, such troops are often called Hessians, but this was not the only small German state that sent it's citizens to the USA.
Along the way, the German draftees at times tried to mutiny and riot or escape, but most got to America where they fought George Washington, the other patriot leaders, and their armies. (Please no airport jokes, please. They've worn thin.) And they often fought surprisingly well once there, and despite not having chosen their lot, there seem to be few if any records that they considered their fate to be unjust, immoral, or a sign of an underlying social or political problem. After all these Germans considered such acts by petty tyrants to be a natural state of affairs for mankind. Instead they seemed to have just considered themselves rather unlucky to be the ones having gotten chosen to do this, but it was only natural to expect such things to happen and it wasn't something one could really do anything about.
Which sort of makes me think how amazing it was that the Americans of this time said "WE should rules OURSELVES." And that was a pretty radical idea for the time. A very radical idea.
And then they tried to make it happen.
And while half informed pseudo-intellectuals today are quite quick to say "What about the Indians? What about the Blacks? The women?" and then use this as a reason to dismiss the entire process and events of the American Revolution as somehow being unimportant and even immoral, they're missing the significance of the whole thing.
The idea was "WE should rules OURSELVES."
And this was in direct contrast to how the Germans of the day lived.
The Germans sort of thought "WE are ruled by others, WE have no say in the process, and that is the way things always have been and always will be. It is natural.
And not only that, the bulk of the German citizenry had never considered that there might be a better different way to be governed.
The Americans of the time had begun to think outside the box, outside the traditional cultural framework of most Europeans of the time.
The idea that "WE should rule OURSELVES" was a radical one.
And what about the Indians, well. they were clearly not "WE" to the Americans of the time. The Indians were "THEM", the classic other, and, besides not only were the bulk of the Indians already ruling themselves, but they had no desire to become part of the American governmental system and its ethnocentric to think they would have. (Heck, there are still Iroquois today, Mohawks in particular, who are asserting their independence from the USA and its government. I'm not saying the Indians were treated fairly at this time, they weren't, but that does not mean they wished to become US citizens. The issue is, as they say, complicated.)
And the Black slaves, obviously a social and moral problem of the time that still has continuing repercussions today, cannot be ignored. The role of Blacks in the armies of the American Revolution (they fought in surprisingly large numbers on both sides) being a very complicated issue. It was essentially, a war for freedom being fought by a society that had legal slavery, an issue that was grappled with for years and finally only settled with a surprising amount of bloodshed.
But one that does not need distract us from the radical notion of the time that "WE should rules OURSELVES."
Clearly America still had a need to work out for itself who it meant when it say "WE" but the notion was still important and revolutionary for its day.
Women, the same thing. "Are they WE, US, or THEM?" Another issue worth looking at. Despite the presence of religious groups like the Quakers who practiced equality for women and the nearby Iroquois who had developed a Democracy that pre-dated the contact with Whites but one where, interestingly enough, only women could vote, it would be astonishingly long before women got the right to vote in the USA. (Women only got the right to vote in the USA in 1920,believe it or not.)
But regardless, the notion that "WE should rule OURSELVES" was a surprisingly radical idea for the time and an idea that was completely alien to much of the European population of the time.
You can find a PDF of Lowell's book here: https://themarshallhouse.org/assets/pdf_files/Lowell%20-%20Hessians.pdf
If you prefer, you can buy a copy. As the work is out of copyright, it is available from multiple publishers. If you buy though these links you will support this blog.
No one should be mocked for the color of their skin or their sex and that includes White males. Nuff said. Not sure why it has become fashionable in some circles to pretend this isn't racism, but it is. The goal, I thought, was to work towards an America that was a color-blind meritocracy where people of all classes and colors work in harmony and if you think this sort of divisive nonsense somehow helps, well, you are wrong and deserve to be called out on it. Nuff said.
If you think it is appropriate to mock White Males because they are White Males then your vision of America and its ideals does not match mine because my vision of America welcomes people of all races, and colors and I will resist you. Simple enough.
Second, three days after July 4th I find myself reading a classic historical work on the Hessians and other German Auxiliaries of the American revolution. (I finished the book on the French in that war.) For those who don't know their history, in 1775, the British government found itself faced with a large scale uprising in its North American colonies. They needed to send large amounts of troops to try to put down the armed uprising. There were not enough British troops to do this and meet the other obligations of the British army. So the British government looked to hire troops abroad to send to fight in America. Germany was not a unified nation and instead a collection of independent feudal states of various sizes. About half a dozen of the petty tyrants of the minor German states agreed to rent or sell their subjects and citizens to the British with the plan being to put them in military units and ship them to America to fight in a distant war all without their consent or agreement.
As Hesse-Hanau sent the most, such troops are often called Hessians, but this was not the only small German state that sent it's citizens to the USA.
Along the way, the German draftees at times tried to mutiny and riot or escape, but most got to America where they fought George Washington, the other patriot leaders, and their armies. (Please no airport jokes, please. They've worn thin.) And they often fought surprisingly well once there, and despite not having chosen their lot, there seem to be few if any records that they considered their fate to be unjust, immoral, or a sign of an underlying social or political problem. After all these Germans considered such acts by petty tyrants to be a natural state of affairs for mankind. Instead they seemed to have just considered themselves rather unlucky to be the ones having gotten chosen to do this, but it was only natural to expect such things to happen and it wasn't something one could really do anything about.
Which sort of makes me think how amazing it was that the Americans of this time said "WE should rules OURSELVES." And that was a pretty radical idea for the time. A very radical idea.
And then they tried to make it happen.
And while half informed pseudo-intellectuals today are quite quick to say "What about the Indians? What about the Blacks? The women?" and then use this as a reason to dismiss the entire process and events of the American Revolution as somehow being unimportant and even immoral, they're missing the significance of the whole thing.
The idea was "WE should rules OURSELVES."
And this was in direct contrast to how the Germans of the day lived.
The Germans sort of thought "WE are ruled by others, WE have no say in the process, and that is the way things always have been and always will be. It is natural.
And not only that, the bulk of the German citizenry had never considered that there might be a better different way to be governed.
The Americans of the time had begun to think outside the box, outside the traditional cultural framework of most Europeans of the time.
The idea that "WE should rule OURSELVES" was a radical one.
And what about the Indians, well. they were clearly not "WE" to the Americans of the time. The Indians were "THEM", the classic other, and, besides not only were the bulk of the Indians already ruling themselves, but they had no desire to become part of the American governmental system and its ethnocentric to think they would have. (Heck, there are still Iroquois today, Mohawks in particular, who are asserting their independence from the USA and its government. I'm not saying the Indians were treated fairly at this time, they weren't, but that does not mean they wished to become US citizens. The issue is, as they say, complicated.)
And the Black slaves, obviously a social and moral problem of the time that still has continuing repercussions today, cannot be ignored. The role of Blacks in the armies of the American Revolution (they fought in surprisingly large numbers on both sides) being a very complicated issue. It was essentially, a war for freedom being fought by a society that had legal slavery, an issue that was grappled with for years and finally only settled with a surprising amount of bloodshed.
But one that does not need distract us from the radical notion of the time that "WE should rules OURSELVES."
Clearly America still had a need to work out for itself who it meant when it say "WE" but the notion was still important and revolutionary for its day.
Women, the same thing. "Are they WE, US, or THEM?" Another issue worth looking at. Despite the presence of religious groups like the Quakers who practiced equality for women and the nearby Iroquois who had developed a Democracy that pre-dated the contact with Whites but one where, interestingly enough, only women could vote, it would be astonishingly long before women got the right to vote in the USA. (Women only got the right to vote in the USA in 1920,believe it or not.)
But regardless, the notion that "WE should rule OURSELVES" was a surprisingly radical idea for the time and an idea that was completely alien to much of the European population of the time.
You can find a PDF of Lowell's book here: https://themarshallhouse.org/assets/pdf_files/Lowell%20-%20Hessians.pdf
If you prefer, you can buy a copy. As the work is out of copyright, it is available from multiple publishers. If you buy though these links you will support this blog.
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