What I've Learned

            Throughout my time at my current school I can honestly say that up until this semester, I have learned relatively little as most of the material covered seems to have been material that was rehashed from high school.  However, this semester has surprisingly been different.  Within this class, the main thing that I have learned is the differences in the way people thought back in the 1600s through the 1800s as opposed to how people think today.  While I was aware that people had different thought patterns it never really set in just how differently people thought.

            One of the eras that really stood out was the 1600s and just how different it was and how terrible the conditions were for early settlers.  Now, anyone who took an early American History class in any grade knows that life was extremely difficult for early settlers.  There was constant war with the natives, the weather was bad, food was often scarce and many of the settlers would die.  However before I took this class, I was never truly understood just how miserable these people were.  My true understanding of this came when I read a letter by a man of the era by the name of Richard Frethorne.  In the letter he writes to his mother and father, regarding the horrible conditions of the colony.  Within the letter, he describes that he is often malnourished, eating only gruel and peas, has had things stolen from him by his fellow colonists, and is constantly afraid of native attacks.  He truly makes you feel his situation in the New World and I honestly can’t help but wonder why schools do not require this as reading for the time period.

Our study of New England literature from this era also proved to be enlightening.  Today, we now know that many of the indigenous populations were wiped out by disease brought over from Europe, particularly Small Pox.  Now, the ways that people interpreted the cause of these massive deaths was quite interesting.  Again, we now know that it was Small Pox that killed off most of the indigenous population.  However, the Puritans believed that it was the will of God that the land be cleansed of the heathens in order for their religion and populations to prosper.  On the side of the natives, they believed that the settlers were some kind of gods or wizards who were able wipe out entire populations on a whim.  While I always knew that people from that time period were a little zealous when it came to their religion and that most explanations they had to major events had something to do with God or the spirits I had no idea just how far this went with these people and I found it a little disconcerting.

            Later on in the century there was the conflict known as King Philip’s War.  Now as with most wars with the natives, the general consensus seems to be that during this war King Philip was in the right.  That it was the settlers who were the invaders and constantly mistreating the natives in various ways.  However, again, the settlers had a very different way of looking at things.  In many ways they saw the war with the natives as almost a war forces that were an affront to God.  In one particular piece we read, A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, we see this war in a much different light.  In the narrative she graphically describes the deaths of her friends and family and in what light she views them.  It is something that is difficult to put into words but you really get a sense of what her mind set was like and just how different the settlers were from the natives. 

This was something that I ultimately took two things away from.  The first was that I was a bit more sympathetic towards the settlers who, up until now, had been the villainous invaders who had wiped out the native population and these reading made me see them more as people then these faceless monsters.  The second, and possibly the most important, was that the main cause of many of these conflicts was simple ignorance on both sides.  They didn’t understand each other’s ways of thinking and this was what ultimately led to conflict.  The ideas of property, religion, and ones role in society were radically different.  This would lead to people getting into wars that were often misunderstandings and I can’t help but believe that if both sides had made more effort to reach out and understand one another many of the conflicts that arose may have been prevented.  Perhaps this is naïve of me to think so but it’s one of the many what-ifs we will never get to experience.

Another major thing that I took away from this class was the thought process of the founding fathers while forming the nation and the political battles that ensued after the constitution was ratified.  Now I had always known that things like the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were documents that were founded on compromise but what I did not know was just how bitter some their arguments got and these arguments often tore families and friends apart.  During the Revolutionary War, for example Ben Franklin and his son were on opposite sides of the war and the two never spoke again after the lines were drawn in the sand and actually inspired him to write his autobiography as a kind of explanation of his actions.  Several of the founding fathers argued over what rights the individual should have and how the government should be run.  One of the most notable examples was an argument between Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson over the separation of Church and State.  Before I had taken this class I had always assumed that all of the founding fathers had agreed on this and I hadn’t realized that this was something that was ever open for debate.  Patrick Henry was firmly against this mainly citing that the church needed to be a kind moral compass for the government and in order to do this it had to be directly involved in its running.  Thomas Jefferson argued for this, citing that it would eventually violate people’s right to freedom of religion and that such things always led to one group dominating the other, ensuring some form of tyranny.  While it is obvious who won this argument this was a debate that I honestly did not know happened and feel more enlighten for the information.

  On a similar note, when the founding fathers were forming the nation under the Constitution many of them argued over what should be or what should not be part of it.  Some of the founding fathers argued that a bill of rights should be added to the Constitution in order to prevent the Federal Government from violating them.  However, others argued against having them included and the readings in this class offered an alternate explanation as to why this may have been.  Before, I had assumed that their arguments against the passage of the amendment was just a way for the upper class to try to restrict the rights of the lower classes, as men of power usually do.  And to be perfectly honest, I’m not entirely convinced that this is entirely untrue as some of the actions of the founding fathers, (such as the Electoral College process or the restricted voting rights), could easily be interpreted as actions to keep the lower classes down.  However, the explanations given by some of these founding fathers were valid.  The main argument basically said including a bill of rights into the Constitution would ultimately limit the rights that the individual would ultimately have.  Now, in the long term this turned out to be inaccurate and to this day we have arguments over how far these rights go and without them in the Constitution it would be a much more bitter battle.  All the same, you can see where these founding fathers were coming from in this belief and it may have very well ended up that way if certain events in history had gone one way rather than the other.  However, I’m still not entirely convinced that my theory was wrong and believe that arguments such as these should be viewed with caution at best. 

Jumping ahead a few decades, I’ve often found books, novels and stories from this period to be really dull, dry and often incoherent and just assumed that was the way people wrote in those days and just hadn’t aged very well.  I also never entirely understood why it was that authors were often either broke or had other professions in this era and this class served to enlighten me in both areas.  As it turned out, I was only partly right on the former and this directly affects the latter.  What I had not realized was just how expensive books were in this era and were not available for mass distribution.  It was because of this that making a living as an author was next to impossible, hence the poverty or multiple carriers of said writers.  I also discovered that the reason why these books were so long and cryptic was that they were supposed to be that way.  Again, books were very expensive in those days so the consumer would want the book to last for as long as possible and the authors would intentionally write the books so they would have to be read multiple times before the reader could decipher the author’s true meaning.  It’s a concept that may be alien to the general reader today, but when you put all of these things into context, it makes a lot more sense and I have viewed literature from that era in a whole new light.

But perhaps the greatest thing that I took away from this class was the information I gained while reading The Way to Wealth by Benjamin Franklin.  One thing that I have constantly heard throughout my life is to save money but I have never really had a proper guide as to how I would do it.  This is where The Way to Wealth came in as it told me blatantly how to do it; work hard, avoid being lazy and don’t buy things you don’t need and save your money.  This is an over simplification of what the almanac said but it described how to do it in such a way that I have never heard before.  Even if all of what I have learned in this class proves relatively useless in the long term this is one thing that I will keep in mind for the rest of my life and have vowed to reread his advice at least once a year.

So, what have I ultimately taken away from this class?  The most important thing was probably the advice I received from The Way to Wealth as it seems to have given me a way to avoid bankruptcy so long as I follow its advice and I intend to so long as I can.  The other main thing and almost as important is the broader understanding I have gained for people of these eras.  Before the events and hardships of the people of Jamestown were just words in books but because of this class I have really gained a feeling and insight into the suffering of these people.  These feelings can also be said of the wars with the natives fought in New England and the plagues that spread to them as this class really allowed me some insight into how the people on both sides thought.  I was also astounded at just what the Revolutionary War did to some families and how the game of politics was played during the nation’s formation and the immediate rivalries that came after.  And of course there is my understanding of what books were truly for in the 18^th/19^th centuries; to be read again and again to find the true meaning of the words.  Maybe this was not what was intended for me to take away from this class but I feel enlighten by taking it for these reasons all the same.