Maggie's Farm

On September 6, 1620, our Pilgrim Fathers and Mothers set sail from Holland, where many Puritans had fled, to England to furnish the boat and pick up more passengers, and headed to what was called "North Virginia" - New York harbor, specifically.

They left too late in the year. The leaky Speedwell slowed them down, and the Mayflower herself was an old tub. On November 9 they made landfall in Cape Cod (a mere 2 degrees off course), but found heading south to NY was treacherous with the autumn storms, so they gave up that effort and returned to the Cape, anchored in Provincetown Harbor, and began exploring Cape Cod (and stealing caches of Indian corn) until deciding on Plymouth as the spot to settle down for the very hard first winter.

Only 50 of the 110 on board the Mayflower survived the first winter. Had they anticipated that catastrophe, they never would have left Europe. Samoset and Squanto appeared in March (Squanto spoke English, and had already been to England, and probably to Spain too), and helped them figure out how to live, farm, hunt, and fish, in rugged New England. Plymouth, fortunately, had many large, abandoned Indian corn fields so it wasn't too difficult to get the spring planting underway.

How differently history might have developed had they ended up where they had intended in the environs of the soon-to-be wealthy Dutch mercantile colony of New Amsterdam.

"Let her (Truth) and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?"

December 9th will be John Milton's 400th birthday (1608-1674).

A poet, for sure. People are doing fun things like this to celebrate Paradise Lost written, as he said, "to justify the ways of God to men." (It was also likely written to express his disappointment in the Restoration.)

Milton's writings primarily�dealt with�religion. He was a Protestant and a supporter�of Cromwell. Milton was a college drop-out (hated college and hated the other kids), and spent two years thereafter educating himself.�His father was a successful London scrivener, and Milton helped manage the family's business interests.

I'd like to highlight his pamphleteering, with which he busied himself before he wrote his epic poems. In the 1630s and 40's there were no newspapers, no broadsheets. Mass retail printing was just getting going, and "newsbooks" were in the future. There was little knowledge about current events for the average person, nor was government comfortable with that idea.

If you had some money, though, you could publish your thoughts and sell them as pamphlets. Those having other opinions would publish their own pamphlets in response. Public discussion and debate would ensue. This was citizen journalism, and sort of a blogging model.

Referring to his motives for writing pamphlets, he said:

I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.

Milton's first well-known pamphlet was Divorce (1643), a provocative and�highly controversial theological defense of divorce. His views, it was said, would lead to social chaos. They referred to him as "The Divorcer,"�but he never did divorce. He was big on the modern notion of the "companionate marriage."

His best-known polemic today is Areopagitica (1644), written in defiance of, and as an attack on, government licensing laws on publication. (It was never a real speech.)

While often viewed today as a defense of freedom of speech (and most of his arguments tend that way), it was not written to propose free political speech: it was written to propose freedom of religious speech - freedom from government and church interference in seeking�God's truth. That was a distinctly Protestant view.�In his words:

And though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play on the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously by licensing and prohibiting misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?

For those interested in Milton's life, I recommend the highly enjoyable new Milton: Poet, Pamphleteer, and Patriot by Anna Beer.

I would like to go, unless Dem taxes prevent me from ever going anywhere again. These islands were Scandinavian until relatively recently.

Photo by Will Self of the Brough of Mousa, a remarkably well-preserved Iron Age dwelling. More like a fortress. I'd guess it had a thatched roof on top.

It is especially interesting to me because I am halfway through Francis Pryor's Britain BC. Do not read Pryor's book unless you want a ton of detail about prehistoric Britain. My sense is that pre-Neolithic, ie pre-agricultural man lived pretty much the same way everywhere on the planet, digging roots and picking nuts and killing stuff - including each other. Likely eating each other too.

During most of that late-glacial history, Britain was connected to the Continent, with what is now the southern part of the North Sea being a giant marshy plain full of reindeer, elk, horses, pig, auroch, moose, beaver, and deer. (There are tons of prehistoric artifacts sitting in the now-undersea peat.)

The Neolithic history is more interesting, and everything post-Neolithic isn't too much different from today except technologically.

Macaulay's books are Bird Dog family favorites:

Johnny Appleseed - John Chapman - was an interesting character: an ascetic, a Swedenborgian missionary, and a nurseryman who had little interest in making money.

Read about him and his unusual life at a good Wiki entry.

Re our Yankee Stadium post yesterday, here's a photo of the "Old Met" from 1905, looking uptown. The yellow brick building stood at 1411 Broadway, occupying the block between 39th and 40th street. The Met moved to its new home in Lincoln Center in 1966, after which the Old Met, built in 1880, was torn down.

We may be a Yankee website, but we love the South - and the West. The Mid-west too. 

We are a bit ambivalent about California, however, except for their wines, because it seems they put something strange in the water out there. THC or LSD or something. Luckily, it doesn't get into their grape juice.

A reader alerts us to this site for interesting stuff: Southern Culture and History. "Veritate Superare."

By the way, there is nothing racist about that flag. That was the battle flag of a proud but short-lived nation. "Insurgents," as the MSM might term them today.

How do societies do it, and how come some don't? The Culture of Prosperity

...whenever Christians actually dare to make political choices on the basis of those beliefs, then the enlightened gatekeepers of American secularism in the academy and in the media rise up in righteous wrath and rush to the barricades to defend us against the barbarian hordes of true believers who if unchecked will transform our republic into a "theocracy" and impose their intolerant bigotry on everybody else. And when the President himself is one of these religious fanatics, then the prospects for the republic and the Constitution are dark indeed—even the usually rational New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman whined after the election that he was depressed "because Bush's base is pushing so hard to legislate social issues and extend the boundaries of religion that it felt as if we were rewriting the Constitution, not electing a president." 

Back by popular demand!

This funny but handsome hodge-podge of a place�is called Morning Glory, now undergoing long-delayed major renovation and necessary graffiti:

�I like this simple�look very much. It could use a garden, though. Or maybe not.

More on continuation page below -

From Bowyer's Teddy Roosevelt vs. the Noisy Environmentalists at TCS, one quote:

TR and his Director of Forestry Services, Gifford Pinchot created a system of 'wildlife Reserves'. They argued that it would not be fair for one generation to do all the logging and all the digging and to leave nothing behind for future generations. They didn't think of these reserves as something pristine, which would be rendered somehow ceremonially unclean by the signs of human development. They just wanted to share natural resources and beauty with future generations, like ours. In fact the shift in language from 'resources' to 'the environment' signals the shift in world-view from conservation to preservation. A resource, by its very nature, is to be used, sparingly, perhaps, but nonetheless, used.

This is why the Roosevelt-Pinchot philosophy is known to historians as the 'wise-use' movement. It's why the administration's forestry handbook contained explicit instructions for how to extract lumber and minerals from the protected lands. That's why the memorial lauds 'development', which contemporary environmentalists forbid in places like ANWR.

The preservationists of the time, like Sierra Club founder, John Muir, fought against them. While Roosevelt/Pinchot sought to make nature useful to humanity, by opening it to efficient use, and protecting it from destruction, Muir claimed that nature was to be useful to nature itself, not to man. For Roosevelt earth is for us, for people. For Muir man and land were equals. It wasn't the conservationist Roosevelt who put ANWR's oil out of our reach, but the environmentalist Carter.

The Opinion Journal's piece on Solzhenitsyn begins like this:

"The hammer banged reveille on the rail outside camp HQ at five o'clock as always. Time to get up. The ragged noise was muffled by ice two fingers thick on the windows and soon died away. Too cold for the warder to go on hammering."

Thus did Alexander Solzhenitsyn begin "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," his reveille for the world about totalitarianism. Published in 1962, in the brief post-Stalinist thaw under Khrushchev, the novel about a prisoner in a Soviet prison camp made Solzhenitsyn at first a Russian sensation and later the country's most famous dissident after the Kremlin reverted to brutal form.

And as quoted by Vanderleun,

"When all of the rest of the civilized world, as well as the Marxist world, was tossing God into the dustbin of history, Solzhenitsyn realized that only God really matters. He chided the West for embracing materialism and forgetting God, a lesson that is just as true today as thirty years ago." -