I was reading this thread earlier today: TMP link I noted that Monticello has gone full woke condemning Jefferson and how terrible western civilization is, how bad America was for tolerating slavery, etc.
I try to read and learn as much as I can and I'm sure most people who frequent this website realize how simplified and wrong this view of America, Jefferson, and western civilization is. History is far more nuanced than allowed by modern discussions which, let's face it, have a purpose in modern politics.
I recently read this book: link "Terror to the Wicked: America's First Trial by Jury That Ended a War and Helped to Form a Nation" The book is about the first murder trial in what would become the United States. In 1638 four runaway English indentured servants came across a member of the Nipmuc tribe. They murdered him and stole his possessions. He survived long enough to be found and tell some members of, (I believe), the Narraganset tribe what had happened. The English found the murderers and tried three of them for the murder. The fourth escaped to a lawless part of the colony. The three were executed and the author contends that this act set the tone for future Indian-English relations in New England. She also believes that it ensured the colonies would be a place of law and order.
I found it a good read and noted several things, some of which I knew, and some I didn't.
1) The Narraganset essentially asked, "Why are you doing all this? He was just a Nipmuc."
2) The colonists wrote elaborate, and generally one sided, contracts which they scrupulously enforced on both the Indians and the colonists.
3) The amount of slavery practiced the Indians by both the colonists and other Indian tribes as well as the colonists held Indians as indentured servants.
4) How quickly the colonists spread out across New England. Only 18 years after landing at Plymouth Rock there were English settlements in what is now Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Maine.
The author appears to be an amateur historian and its clear where she put information she found during research not necessary to the story into the book, (I've done the same at times). But it is such an interesting story in a period I know little about that any quibbles I have are very minor.
Recommended not only for the interesting story, but for a small insight into how complicated our past truly is.
is a big fan of the Age of Sail, and these ships really speak to him - he loves transitional eras, and the Anglo-Dutch Wars was one of those.
