American Literature Before 1700:

Exploring the "Land that Never Has Been Yet"


A multiple-perspective curriculum which meets the specifications of the Virginia Standards of Learning for 11th grade English.

Rationale
Objectives
Virginia Standards of Learning
Readings
Instructional Sets:

  • Introduction
  • Governors
  • Natives and Colonists, Perspectives
  • Africans, Slavery and Colonists
  • Puritans, Women, and Witches

    • Assessment and Evaluation Options
     

    Rationale


    A few days ago, I substitute taught for a first grade teacher and was asked to finish a book they had been reading called The First Thanksgiving.  The events of the story were very warm and promising.  The family worked hard and loved each other.  In its one historically accurate portrayal, the story related how the family's mother remained in England, so the family talked about their mother, how they missed her, and when she'd arrive.  In accordance with the 20th Century story of the first Thanksgiving, the family's hard work and moral purity paid off -- they were provided with an abundant harvest which they shared with the native people in a feast of thanksgiving. 

    The message of the story is to work hard, do the "right" thing, and be thankful for everything you get in return.  Collectively, we have always considered this a nice story and a healthy lesson for children to learn.  The problem is this story never happenned.  It's a romanticized version of a few Puritans' experience that has somehow come to suppress the real and various experiences of colonial America.

    Take a moment to visit the following websites, in order:

    The First Thanksgiving
    The First Thanksgiving
    Governor Bradford's Thanksgiving Proclamation
    Primary Source References to "The First Thanksgiving"

    As you move from one site to the next, it becomes more and more clear that the story we teach our children as "history" is at best a legend.  What motivates us to so readily accept such a story as history?  What would it mean to learn a more "realistic" story in the first place?

    The students didn't realize that the book was showing them an unrealistic stereotype of both Native Americans and Puritans.  They didn't realize that there were female Native Americans, because there were no female Native Americans in the book.  Several white students in the class didn't understand how Native Americans were different from African Americans.  The only history they were learning, "their history," was in fact a legend of an impossible ideal, a legend they were asked to see themselves in, though most of them probably did not or could not.

    The day I substitute taught that first grade class I thought of my own experience as a young student of American history.  It was so difficult for me, as a student, to imagine these Puritan people in the books!  How could they be so different from the people who live today? Did they ever have fun? Did they laugh?  Did they go to the bathroom?  What did they eat?  I also imagined the one African-American student in the class and how he may have felt as we looked at such flawless representations of Puritan people, the very same people who enslaved African people and questioned whether they had souls!  How good is a curriculum that asks the students it educates to associate themselves with the "white" Pilgrims, participants in history, or the "non-white" other?

    I can't offer solutions to problem of the first grade curriculum (though our students will!)-- but the problem that remains, a huge problem, is that most of us never truly see beyond the formative myths of first grade when we look at our country's history.  We don't see the complicated, plural experience our country was and always has been.  We see the paper-bag Puritan projects that we made in first grade, with stuffed bellies and a row of buttons, clean black hats, round white paper faces and a choice of two hair colors: brown or blond.  We don't see the real human experience. 

    We also don't see all the humans.  We see a governing white man and perhaps his relation of the good wife and children behind him.  We don't see the colonists who were ostracized and often executed for deviating from the Puritan ideal..  We don't see the Native Americans sharing their knowledge of the land they have known for thousands of years, being pushed off that same land, dying from European attacks and diseases.  We don't see the African slaves who were forced to contributed so much of the work that made survival and prosperity possible for the colonists.

    James Baldwin said, in his "Talk to Teachers":

    If... one managed to change the curriculum in all the schools so Negroes learned more about themselves and their real contributions to this culture, you would be liberating white people who know nothing about their own history.  And the reason is that if you are compelled to lie about one aspect of anybody's history, you mist lie about it all.

    Baldwin speaks to all of us here: telling the truth about history means becoming "sane" as a society-- starting from who each of us really is in relation to the other and in relation to our histories.

    Thus my goal as a teacher is to try, to the best of my ability, to give my students access to a more accurate representation of the early colonial settlements, a perspective that includes more of the real people who lived among each other in the settlements and continue to live among each other, in the same country, today. 

    Some people think that looking at our history from this perspective is "unpatriotic" or "makes white people look bad."  Certainly it does make English and European-American people look "worse" than they look in the traditional history books where they are the heroes, but it also makes them look real.  In some ways it's that concept, the concept of worse and better, bad and good, and our need to see ourselves always on the side of "good," that is the problem.  None of history is as simple as "right" and "wrong," "good" and bad". Acknowledging the imperfect, painful, and at moments promising, reality of our history while continuing to work "for liberty and justice for all" seems to me the key to becoming an honest, compassionate citizen in both reflection and action.

    		           Let America Be America Again
                     by  Langston Hughes

                      Let America be America again.
                      Let it be the dream it used to be.
                      Let it be the pioneer on the plain
                      Seeking a home where he himself is free.

                      (America never was America to me.)

                      Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed--
                      Let it be that great strong land of love
                      Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
                      That any man be crushed by one above.

                      (It never was America to me.)

                      O, let my land be a land where Liberty
                      Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
                      But opportunity is real, and life is free,
                      Equality is in the air we breathe.

                      (There's never been equality for me,
                      Nor freedom in this "homeland of the free.")

                      Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark? 
                      And who are you that 
                      draws your veil across
                      the stars?

                      I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
                      I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars.
                      I am the red man driven from the land,
                      I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek--
                      And finding only the same old stupid plan
                      Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

                      I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
                      Tangled in that ancient endless chain
                      Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
                      Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
                      Of work the men! Of take the pay!
                      Of owning everything for one's own greed!

                      I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
                      I am the worker sold to the machine.
                      I am the Negro, servant to you all.
                      I am the people, humble, hungry, mean--
                      Hungry yet today despite the dream.
                      Beaten yet today--O, Pioneers!
                      I am the man who never got ahead,
                      The poorest worker bartered through the years.

                      Yet I'm the one who dreamt our basic dream
                      In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
                      Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
                      That even yet its mighty daring sings
                      In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
                      That's made America the land it has become.
                      O, I'm the man who sailed those early seas
                      In search of what I meant to be my home--
                      For I'm the one who left dark Ireland's shore,
                      And Poland's plain, and England's grassy lea,
                      And torn from Black Africa's strand I came
                      To build a "homeland of the free."

                      The free?

                      Who said the free? Not me?
                      Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
                      The millions shot down when we strike?
                      The millions who have nothing for our pay?
                      For all the dreams we've dreamed
                      And all the songs we've sung
                      And all the hopes we've held
                      And all the flags we've hung,
                      The millions who have nothing for our pay--
                      Except the dream that's almost dead today.

                      O, let America be America again--
                      The land that never has been yet--
                      And yet must be--the land where every man is free.
                      The land that's mine--the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME--
                      Who made America,
                      Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
                      Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
                      Must bring back our mighty dream again.

                      Sure, call me any ugly name you choose--
                      The steel of freedom does not stain.
                      From those who live like leeches on the people's lives,
                      We must take back our land again,
                      America!

                      O, yes,
                      I say it plain,
                      America never was America to me,
                      And yet I swear this oath--
                      America will be!

                      Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
                      The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
                      We, the people, must redeem
                      The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
                      The mountains and the endless plain--
                      All, all the stretch of these great green states--
                      And make America again!

    From The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Copyright © 1994 the Estate of Langston Hughes. Used without permission.
     

    The founders of one of America's "Democratic Schools" define the "ideal citizen" as one who possesses "empathy and skepticism: the ability to see a situation from the eyes of another and the tendency to wonder about the validity of what we encounter." (Meier and Schwartz, 1995)  The school cultivates those qualities in their students by asking them to habitually ask these five questions:
    1. How do you know what you know?
    2. From whose viewpoint is this being presented?
    3. How is this event or work connected to others?
    4. What if things were different?
    5. Why is this important?

    I would add the question, "Whose viewpoint is not represented and how might they interpret the subject?"

    Questions like these prevent "future shock"-- what occurs when you are confronted by the fact that the world you were educated to believe in doesn't exist" (Postman, 1969)

    With those ideas in mind, I tried to collect period literature and documents that might better represent the multiple perspectives of the colonial experience.  That was very difficult because, as we know, history is written by the victors. The documents I have chosen still overwhelmingly represent the perspectives of ruling class English men.  There are, to the best of my knowledge, no primary sources from Native American peoples or slaves during this time; but that doesn't mean we can't learn literature before 1700 in a multicultural context.  Multicultural education isn't only content integration, which would be very difficult during this time period in America.  It is also about how knowledge is constructed (Banks, 1993).  Through the literatures and documents we do have, we can use critical readings skills to understand the investments of the author in a certain "reality" and to infer the possible experiences of the "others" the author mentions.  A lot of the "others" of society-- women, slaves, servants, natives-- live between the lines of the ruling class literatures.  There may not be autobiographical documents for their lives, but their undocumented lives were as real as the documented ones.

    My commitment as a learner and teacher is to listen to and understand all of those lives as equally important, and to show students how to do the same.  This may sound like a ridiculous statment, but our marginalization of non-European cultures and peoples is often hidden behind an empty rhetoric of freedom and opportunity.  Take a moment to read the poem above by Langston Hughes, "Let America Be America Again."  Hughes's poem shatters any perception we may want to cling to that America is a land where "opportunity is real, and life is free,/ equality is in the air we breathe."  But  it is not without hope-- it calls us to bring together the historic America and the dreamed America into one entity-- a real America that really is a land of freedom and equality.

    Of course, the question of how to do that has just about as many answers as there are people.  The words "freedom" and "equality" are loaded words; they mean different things to different people.  To a gay and lesbian rights activist, or to a feminist activist, freedom may sound like this:

    Until all children are free to realize their full potential, until all women and men are free from the stigma, threats, alienation, or violence that come from stepping outside their roles, we are all at risk.


    For June Jordan, who has experienced systematic racism through her entire life as an African American woman, freedom means something else:

    Freedom...meant looking for a job and, if you found something for which you qualified-- on the basis of education and/ or experience-- being able to take that position.  Freedom had to do with getting into college if your grades were good enough.  Freedom meant you could register to vote and live to talk about it.

    So, when we hear the rhetoric of freedom, we have to ask ourselves, "Whose freedom?"  And the answer should be, "Everyone's freedom."

    For America's original colonists, certainly "everyone" wasn't the answer.  The motivation for and foundation of our country have been disastrously misrepresented.  It's time to acknowledge that right alongside the new Puritan "freedom," African people were enslaved, Native American lives invalidated and thrown away, and of the colonists themselves, "witches" were hung, "heretics" banished, and "sodomists" executed.  Certainly it is no illusion that many Americans still take of pride in sharing the ideals of those original colonists.  They are invested in the legend, in the ideal, the "land that never has been."  But the legend blocks out the destructive results and the unpleasant circumstances that accompany those ideals and their limitations.  Embedded in those ideologies and their literatures are the roots of the inequality and injustice our country still suffers from.

    Literature can act as a balance to the victor's history. In developing this curriculum for American Literature before 1700, I have sought to include the literatures that will help students gain insight into the men who professed the Puritan ideal, how their application of that ideal affected the people who weren't included among the Elect, and the writings of those who departed from that ideal.  Specifically, we will look at perceptions of race and gender in Puritan culture and how those perceptions have shaped our society today.

    The real content of this curriculum project is its content.  I have suggested methods and activities for engaging the text, as well as possible activities, projects and papers for the evaluation of student learning.  These, however, can and should be altered and embelished upon to best suit the needs and style of your students.  The priority should be to engage your students at the critical level-- to help them understand the literature in the context of history, power, and perspective.

    Objectives

    Long term objectives

  • students will have an historic and conceptual framework for future readings, including Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter
  • students will have a critical awareness of American archetypes and mythologies
  • students will see literature as perspective, not necessarily fact or fiction
  • students will understand the connections between history and literature
  • students will habitually approach subject matter through these questions:

    • 1. How do you know what you know?
    2. From whose viewpoint is this/ is this not being presented?
    3. How is this event or work connected to others?
    4. What if things were different?
    5. Why is this important?

    Short-term objectives

  • students will understand the historic contexts of American colonization, specifically perspectives on why the Puritans left England.
  • students will read a variety of journal entries, narratives, poetry, and historic documents written before 1700
  • students will practice critical reading of the materials-- specifically how the author uses selective inclusion and omission, tone, and word choice to manipulate the reader's perceptions (consciously or unconsciously)
  • students will use critical thinking to evaluate the accuracy of the author's explainations
  • students will use their historical knowledge to create a context for understanding the author's point of view and personal investments that might bias the author
  • students will understand and be able to articulate the unique challenges of colonist men, women, Native Americans, and slaves occupied in 17th century life
  • students will understand the concept of duality as an interpretive construct
  • explore themes of civilization v. wilderness, lightness v. darkness, good v. evil, order v. chaos in Puritan literature

    • Standards of Learning

    Applicable Standards of Learning are Underlined

    11.3 The student will read a American literature, history, and culture.
    and analyze relationships among

  • Describe contributions of different cultures to the development of American literature.
  • Describe the development of American literature in the 17th, 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries.
  • Contrast periods in American literature.(prepares)
  •  Differentiate among archetypal characters in American  literature.
  •  Describe the major themes in American literature.
  •  Describe how use of context and language structures conveys an author's point of view in contemporary and historical essays, speeches, and critical reviews.

    • 11.5  The student will read and critique a variety of poetry.
  •  Analyze the poetic elements of classic poems.(possible, but I'm not doing it here)
  • Identify the poetic elements and techniques that are most appealing and that make poetry enjoyable.
  • Compare and contrast the works of contemporary and past American poets.

    • 11.4  The student will read a variety of print material.
  • Use information from texts to clarify or refine understanding of academic concepts.
  • Read and follow directions to complete an application for college admission, a scholarship, or for employment.
  • Read and follow directions to complete a laboratory experiment.
  • Extend general and specialized vocabularies for reading and writing.
  • Generalize ideas from selections to make predictions about other texts.

    • Readings

    Introduction

  • Langston Hughes: "Let America Be America Again" (Hughes,789)
  • Howard Zinn.  A People's History of the United States.  "Columbus, the Indians, and Human Progress."

    • Governors

    William Bradford Of Plymouth Plantation:
  • Chapter I: "Showing the Reasons and Causes of Their Remoovall"
  • Chapter IX: "Of their Voyage and How they Passed the Sea; and of Their Safe Arrival at Cape Cod"
  • Chapter X : "How they Sought Out a Place of Habitation; and What Befell Them Thereabout"
  • Chapter XII: The Narragansett Challenge
  • 1623: Economic Experiments "The strong, or man of parts, had no more in division of victuals and clothes, than he that was weak and not able to do a quarter the other could; this was thought injustice."
  • 1637: The Pequot War
  • 1642: Sodomy

    •  
  • John Winthrop. " A Model of Christian Charity" (McMichael, 65)

    •  

    Colonists and Natives, Perspectives

  • Christopher Columbus.  from a Letter to the King and Queen of Castile. 1493. (Jehlen, 13-14). Impressions of native peoples: "they bartered, like idiots, cotton and gold for fragments of bows, glasses, bottles..."

    •  
  • G.E. Thomas. "Purtitans, Indians, and the Concept of Race." New England Quarterly, 48 (1975), 3-27.

    •  
  • Michael Wigglesworth. "God's Controversy with New England." 1662 (Jehlen, 563): poem concerned with the enlightening of heathens
  • Roger Williams. from A Key to the Language of America. (McMichael, 77-81)

    • "Of Sleep and Lodging"
    "Of Their Persons and Parts of Body"
    "Of Their Nakedness and Clothing"
    "Of Their Government"
     
  • Thomas Morton. from New Englsih Canaan. 1634 (Jehlen, 168): sympathetic relation of Indian experiences, departs from Puritan ideals
  • William Bradford."Another Version of the Maypole Episode." (Jehlen, 175)
  • John Cotton. from God's Promise to His Plantations. 1630 (Jehlen,160): three Biblical justifications for Indian extermination
  • Virgin Soil Epidemics as a Factor in the Aboriginal Depopulation in America


    • optional readings:

  • Mary Rowlandson: Soverainty and Goodness of God, 1682 (Jehlen, 349-82)
  • Increase Mather: "Predestination and Human Exertion."p. 96 in McMichael Puritan idea that some were predestined for Heaven and others weren't

    •  

    Colonists and Slavery

  • Bernard Rosenthal, "Puritan Conscience and New England Slavery" New England Quarterly, vol. 46
  • Cotton Mather: excerpts from "The Negro Christianized"
  • Samuel Sewall: The Selling of Joseph" 1700. ( Jehlen, 817-820)
  • John Saffin, "A Brief and Candid Answer [to "The Selling of Joseph"]." 1701. (Jehlen, 821)

    •  

    Puritans, Women, and Witches

     
  • John Winthrop. Journal. (Jehlen, 312)

    • 1644: Death for Adultry
    1645: Women and Books
    1648: A Witch
  • Anne Bradstreet. Prologue (McMichael,101)
  • Ann Hutchinson from The Examination of Mrs. Ann Hutchingson at the Court at Newtown, 1637. (Jehlen, 435)

    •  
  • Cotton Mather. The Wonders of the Invisible World. (McMichael,166-171).
  • Carol Karlsen. "The Economic Basis of Witchcraft." The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England. 77-116.
  • Samuel Sewall. from Diary 1692-1720.

    • Reflective Essays (in addition to those included with the themes)

    Ben Barker Benfield. "Anne Hutchinson and the Puritan Attitude Toward Women." Feminist Studies, 1 (1972), 65-96.
    Philip L. Berg. "Racism and the Puritan Mind". Phylon, 34 (1975), 1-7.
     

    Historical context

  • Spencer, Colin, "Puritanism and the Rise of the Work Ethic" in Homosexuality in History Harcourt & Brace, New York; 1995 (171-196).
  • Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States Harper Perennial, New York; 1980.

    • Chapter 1:Columbus, the Indians, and Human Progress
    Chapter 2: Drawing the Color Line
  • Perry Miller. Errand into the Wilderness.  Cambridge, Massachssetts: Belknap Press.  1964.

    • Chapter V: "The Puritan State and Puritan Society"
  • Anne Barstowe. Witchcraze: A New History of the European Witch Hunts. San Francisco: Pandora Publications; 1994.

    •  

    Understanding Puritan Origins in England:

  • ed. Russ McDonald. The Bedford Companion to Shakespeare: An Introduction with Documents.  Boston, Bedford Books: 1996.

    • John Field and Thomas Wilcox from "An Admonition to the Parliament" (331-334).
    What about homosexuality in the Renaissance?... (268-69)
  • Of Plymoth Plantation: p. 43 notice how they think the corn and beans they found naturally belonged to them and there was no question of stealing.

    • Instructional Sets Arranged by Theme

    These instructional sets are meant only as guidelines.  You will have to adjust them to suit the variety of learning styles in your class, as well as your own style!

    Introduction

  • Thanksgiving Stories  Select several children's "First Thanksgiving" books to read or browse with your students.  Try to find a variety of stories: from those that completely idealize the Pilgrims and dismiss the helping role of the Natives to those that attempt to give fair representation to both (and email me if you find the latter!).  Use these stories to access students' prior knowledge about Pilgrims and colonists.  Write what they know about the historic Pilgrims and colonists on the board (or ask them to).
  • Ask your students how they would critique the books.  Ask them to think from the perspective of the different characters in the book.  Ask them to imagine all different Americans reading it.  Do they see any stereotypes?  misrepresentations?
  • Journal  entry: What is your idea of the first Thanksgiving?  Was it different when you were younger?  How would you write a children's book about Thanksgiving?

    •  
  • Vocabulary notebook  Use the journal and vocabulary notebook continuously. Ask students to keep a list of new vocabulary from discussion and reading in their journals.  I like the idea of using etymology and morphology to make connections in meaning between words, so students can place the words in "family trees" in any way that's helpful to them.  This puts them in the practice of intuiting meaning and avoids the ineffective practice of  relying on definitions.  (That students learn words from looking them up and "remembering" them is a myth in itself.)
  • Have students share their lists daily, so they can add words that they Make sure you point out words you use in discussion.  In this theme you will probably use a lot of language related to systems of power, racism, and sexism.  Point out these words and help the students use them in their discussion.

    •  
  • Historical Context Ask students to read Howard Zinn , A People's History of the United States. Chapter 1:  "Columbus, the Indians, and Human Progress" and take note of any new ideas or ideas that conflict with what they previously believed in their journals. (See alternatives!  Or, you can split it into two readings, 2-11, 11-22.)
  • Alternatives Each theme has a chapter or essay to provide historic context.  These chapters and essays are more valuable for their content than their text, so... Consider alternatives to individual homework, which will be time consuming and challenging for those with reading difficulties.  Divide the class into groups and assign each group the task of teaching one chapter or essay to the rest of the class in an oral presentation accompanied by a handout that captures key points in any creative way.
  • Zinn in Class  Share the new ideas from the journals in partners or small groups.  Ask students to choose one new idea to share with the whole class.  Use class discussion to highlight important points including the role of the historian.  Focus particularly on information the students were completely surprised by or resist believing.
  • Langston Hughes   read "Let America Be America Again" (Hughes,789).  Ask them to situate themselves within the poem: Where does their voice fit?  Read the poem aloud as a class and then let the students respond in their journals.  Group discussion: Explain the two senses of the word "America" in the poem (Columbo 1998).  Revisit the stories of the First Thanksgiving through the lense of the poem.

    • Governors

  • Critical reading  depending on time restrictions, read selected chapters of William Bradford Of Plymouth Plantation.  Remind the students about the Zinn chapter and the importance of perspective in written history.  Ask them to be revisionist historians, like Zinn, as they read William Bradford.
  • Use historical contexts to come to some agreement concerning Bradford's potential biases and personal interests.
  • If students aren't familiar with concepts of perspective and bias, you might 1. Discuss differring media coverage of the same event or  2. Have them remember something they've done recently that they have purposely kept from a teacher or guardian.  Ask them to compare the story they would tell to their best friend concerning the event with the story they would tell to their teacher or guardian.  Discuss tone, selctive inclusion and omission, and word choice.
  • Guide them through the readings, asking them to notice how the author uses selective inclusion and omission, tone, and word choice to construct his version of the story.  You might prepare reading guides with specific questions, depending on your class's style.
  • Chapter I: "The Separtist Interpretation of the Reformation in England" (1 page) Contrast with John Field and Thomas Wilcox from "An Admonition to the Parliament."  Discuss the use of the word "Saints" and the idea of the Puritan elect.  Discuss the multiple definitions of Christian in the two texts.
  • Chapter IX: "Of their Voyage and How they Passed the Sea; and of Their Safe Arrival at Cape Cod"  (3 pages) Bradford's wife jumped off the ship, possibly in a suicide, as soon as they spotted land.  How might her narrative have sounded?  This might be used as a creative project in which students could write her narrative while imitating Bradford's period language.
  • Chapter X : "How they Sought Out a Place of Habitation; and What Befell Them Thereabout" (2 pages)  Analyze how Bradford tells the story of stealing food from Indians.. Look at specific words and phrases like: "where the Indians had formerly set corn, and some of their graves", and "the fruits of the land" (It reads as if they'd found a squirrel's store).   How does Bradford evade the usual moral consequences a Puritan would face for stealing?  What does this say about Puritans' respect for Native Americans?  How would the Native Americans who had stored that food tell the story?  Remember they may not have had the same concept of theft that the English had.  What were some of the Puritan punishments for stealing?
  • Choose three key verbs in one of the chapters and ask the students to replace them with verbs that represent another perspective.
  • Chapter XII:  "The Narragansett Challenge" (1 page) Ask students to imagine what other messages the bundle of arrows may have been meant to convey.  Let come up with this on their own.  My deduction is that the Native Americans saw that the people were hungry and sent the arrows as gifts so they might kill game to eat, since they had no prior experience using arrrows to kill humans.
  • 1623: Economic Experiments (1 page) Discuss this economic model in terns of capitalism.  What is Bradford's critique of Plato's idea of common wealth?  How is Bradford's idea like capitalism?  How is it different?  (Everyone started out with equal amounts of property and land.)
  • 1637: The Pequot War Compare and contrast with Zinn's version.  They are radically different!  How can we explain that?
  • 1642: Sodomy (2 pages) This chapter has explicit sexual content, including bestiality.  Don't pass it up unless your students and community are part a culture that would be very sensitive to it.  It is interesting because our popular culture portrays the Puritans and other groups in history as morally superior to our contemporary culture and that sex only happened within heterosexual marriages.  How does this narrative undermine the popular culture idea that sex used to be "under control" and now "everybody's doing it".

    •  

    Natives and Colonists, Perspectives

  • Historical Context  "Purtitans, Indians, and the Concept of Race" is an excellent essay for background and context.  You can assign the reading individually or, to save student homework time, as a group presentation.  If you don't ask your students to read it, you should relate the key points to them somehow.
  • Christopher Columbus  read selected quotes from a Letter to the King and Queen of Castile.  Recall Columbus's impressions of native peoples and add: "they bartered, like idiots, cotton and gold for fragments of bows, glasses, bottles...".  Imagine the disparity between the two cultures' realities.  Ask students to make a list of values that these reflections reveal-- one for natives and one for Columbus -- in their journals.  Share these and put them on the board so students can add ones they've missed.

    •  
  • Comparing Poetry distribute a reading guide based on the concepts below and read the first ten or so stanzas of Michael Wigglesworth  "God's Controversy with New England"  followed by a selection of of Roger Williams poems.
  • Roger Williams  from A Key to the Language of America. (McMichael, 77-81)

    • "Of Sleep and Lodging"
    "Of Their Persons and Parts of Body"
    "Of Their Nakedness and Clothing"
    "Of Their Government"
  • Reading Guide , some questions

    • 1.  How are these concepts defined differently by Wigglesworth and Williams:  wilderness, shame, nakedness, barbarians?
    2.  How does Williams use irony to expose the contradictions of his own society?  Give three examples.
    3.  Williams's poems are some of the first appearances of the "Noble Savage" archetype in American Literature.  What do you think the "Noble Savage" is?
    4.  How does Migglesworth's poem express racist ideas?
    5.  Ask students to list words as they occur in a chart of dualities.  They can fill in any implied opposites.  Discuss how those dualities might relate to concepts of race and gender. (We will explore this more in depth later.  This will be very useful for The Scarlet Letter!)
     
  • A Sympathetic Relation of Native Culture Compare the perspectives of Thomas Morton in  New English Canaan and  William Bradford in "Another Version of the Maypole Episode".  Focus again on tone, selective omission and inclusion, and word choice.
  • Ask the students to choose which settlement they'd rather live in.  Put them in groups by settlement.  Ask them to work together to justify their decisions with evidence from Morton and Bradford's writings.  They can change their minds if the other side convinces them of its advantages.

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  • The beginning of Indian Extermination Read John Cotton, from God's Promise to His Plantations (1 page).   Ask students to summarize the three Biblical justifications for Indian extermination in their journals.  Relate "Manifest Destiny."  In terms of human equality, what is wrong with these concepts?
  • excerpts from Virgin Soil Epidemics as a Factor in the Aboriginal Depopulation in America

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  • The New First Thanksgiving  Revisit the Thanksgiving story.  A possible assignment would be to write a children's story that sensitively portrays the story of the Pilgrims and the first "Thanskgiving" without lying.  The story should keep in mind young students of different cultural backgrounds.  The story should be accompanied by a rationale.

    • Africans, Slavery, and Colonists

  • Historical Context  Use "Puritan Conscience and New England Slavery" and "Racism in the Puritan Mind" for background.  Again, depending on your class you can assign the readings individually, as a group presentation, or relate it in a lecture.
  • Journal entry Ask students to think about why there are no primary sources from African (American) slaves at this time. What does it mean to rely on European narratives?
  • Journal entry: Read aloud the description of the experiences of West African people on the ships that brought them here in bondage (Zinn Chapter 2).   Let the students respond in their journals.

    •  
  • Compare and Contrast Read the following.  They are difficult.  Perhaps let students read them once for homework and then let them get in groups to clarify and summarize the main points.  Before they read, ask students to consider which cultural authorities each author draws from, and where those authorities get their validity from.

    • Cotton Mather  Read excerpts from  "The Negro Christianized"
    Samuel Sewall  Read "The Selling of Joseph"
    John Saffin  Read "A Brief and Candid Answer [to "The Selling of Joseph"]
    Some concepts are 1. how each man's religious and ethical philosophy is directly connected to the public policy he endorsed 2. how each person defined human beings (do they live up to their own definitions?), how their definition were problematic and ignorant  3. Sewall was the "first [white] abolitionist."  How, in light of contemporary concepts of racism, are Saffin's ideologies still racist? 4. cultural authority and validity 5. concept of Native Americans compared with concept of Africans.

    Puritans, Women, and Witches

  • Anne Bradstreet  Read Bradstreet's Prologue.  How does Bradstreet define herself as a woman? Where does she look for her identity? What are her boundaries?
  • Journal  Make a list of men's roles and women's roles as defined in the poem.  What qualities do you associate with these roles?

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  • The Role of Women  Read the following brief selections from John Winthrop's Journal. Think about how Winthrop's concerns and fears are connected with women's power.  How do the defined roles keep women from having power?
  • 1644: Death for Adultry  Ask students to imagine the woman's side of the story.  Ask them to write it in a journal entry.  Share.
  • 1645: Women and Books  Discuss other historic misconceptions about what women can and can't do, or should and shouldn't do.
  • 1648: A Witch  The idea of the witch trials is puzzling.  The fact that they really happened even more so.  Tell students that about 60,000 people, almost all women, were executed as witches in Europe.  In America 14 women and 5 men were tried and executed ias witches while others died in prison for a total of 37 people, mostly women. Ask students to generate questions regarding the witch trials.  What do they want to know?  Why do they think this was an attack primarily on women?

    •  
  • Economic Basis of Witchcraft  Read excepts from "The Economic Basis of Witchcraft" or have a group present the chapter.  Discuss how these economic factors might motivate people in power, given the unity of church and state.  Why were single or independent women particularly vulnerable?  How did this violently reinforce compulsory heterosexual marriage?
  • Women and the Devil  Read Malleus Malleficarum or excerpts and use it to situate women in the Puritan dualities.  Do you see any evidence of these fears in our contemporary society?
  • Salem Witch Trials  Read The Wonders of the Invisible World.  Ask students, as they read, to think of as many plausible explanations as they can for why this happened.  Remind them of Malleus Malleficarum and "The Economic Basis for Witchcraft."

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  • Ann Hutchinson Read from The Examination of Mrs. Ann Hutchinson at the Court at Newtown.  Recreate the trial in you classroom.  Ask students to serve as the jury.

    • Assessment and Evaluation Options

    Keeping track of learning:
  • Journal entries Respond regularly to the content of students' journals with positive comments and questions that will deepen their understanding
  • Vocabulary notebook  Students should keep lists and etymological/morphological family trees of the words that are new to them.  They should demonstrate, in their writing ans discussion, that they are trying to integrate those words into their own vocabulary.
  • Class participation  Keep track of student participation in whole class discussions, group work, and journal sharing.


    • Collaboration:

  • Group Presentations Students should work collaboratively to prepare a presentation designed to teach a chapter or essay giving historical context to the rest of the class.  The group presentation has two components: the oral presentation and a handout.  50/50 evaluation: You evaluate the content and accuracy and let the students develop a rubric which they use to evaluate the effectiveness.


    • Papers and Projects (general topics and ideas):

  • The First Thanksgiving, a children's book  Students can write a revisionist children's book that educates young children (5-7) about the first "Thanksgiving" accompanied by a 2-page rationale defending their version of the story.
  • A paper discussing the themes of race and gender in Puritan literature through the contsruct of duality.
  • A paper discussing three ideals present in contemporary society that have directly descended from Puritan literature, with possible alternatives.
  • A paper analyzing William Bradford's selective inclusion and exclusion, word choice, and tone referencing other sources to support your own analysis.
  • Creative Writing Collage Students will make a collage with several genres of writing, expressing 5 different points of view we have discussed.


    • I'd love your comments!  Email me at knugent@vt.edu