Grades have been posted.

I finished reading and grading this morning, and I went ahead a posted the grades I felt you'd earned.  If you have any questions about your grade, please get in touch, and I'l be happy to provide further information.  Since the college is closed today due to the upcoming snow, it may take a few days for your grades to process.

Steve

Portfolios Are Due at 1:40 PM, Wednesday, 15 December.

Reminder:  Portfolios are due tomorrow at 1:40 PM, Wednesday, 15 December.  I will look for them on the blog address I have listed on the "General Assembly" tab, in emails from you to sbrandon@reynolds.edu, and/or turned in as physical/hard copy to 231 Massey.  

If there is a legitimate reason for the portfolio not being handed in, let me know immediately.  I will be turning grades in within 48 hours of 1:40 PM, Wednesday, 15 December.

Steve

Week Sixteen and Final Assignments Are Active.

On the map below, notice all which wasn't known about the new world in the first years of English settlement.  Those who created this map for the Virginia Company thought that just beyond the Virginia mountains the Pacific was to be found.  They thought they could row up the James, and, instead of petering out, there came a point where it widened into the Pacific.  This vision of the world was as real to them as the globe you know is to you.  In many ways, your own journey on Early American literature is like this map.  There's still a lot of fascinating land left to fill in.  

There is always more Early American literature than can be covered in a scant semester.  Just look at your two texts to see all we haven't read, and these excerpts are only a selections of all which could be read.  

There is a section books in most research libraries which do nothing else but list the books published in the three hundred years post contact in the Americas. I have taught entire upper and graduate level classes on captivity narratives and the Native American literature of the period.  I've also taken entire classes on Early American African American and Woman's literature.  We haven't read the plays, listened to more than a scattering of music, nor read the travel narratives or diaries produced during the period.  If you ever get a chance, take classes in these areas or in the literature surrounding the settlement of the West, Spanish and French contact and conquest, etc. et etc.  I promise you there will be less writing than you've experienced in this course, but this course is designated writing intensive, and--as you've found out--writing is a good way to learn in an online course.  Just look through your classmate's learning reflections and look at the times they were most engaged.

Most of what I wanted you to get out of our course was that the people you've studied are fascinating and just like you.  This and an appreciation for literature and the role it has played in people's lives, it can play in yours, and how it's changed society. Everyone is fascinating, and the decisions you make, the books you read, make history.  Literature and history are not made by professors.  We just clean it up and argue about what the real actors--like you--do.  We teach this cleaned up version, that is, until students--again, like you--are ready for the real truth, namely, that you are making history and reading the literature which will be studied tomorrow.  Our greatest tool is our humanity and our ability to see ourselves in others.  Learning history and literature is a journey, and yours has just begun.    

Visit Williamsburg.  Visit Jamestown.  Follow the John Smith Trail or the route of Lewis and Clark.  Read Lydia Child or Elias Boudinot.  Begin to fill in the gaps on the map.  As you have discovered this semester, your own voyage of discovery will repay you with a glimpse into an America you can only know through the exploration, but it will also allow you to discover the America you already life in; so, you'll be discovering yourself and why you and our society works the way it does.

One of the things I hope you have learned is just how rich and varied Early American literature and the time period is, and how your own lives and incidental writing can and will capture the imagination of future readers.  Individuals, like you and me, make literature and history.

However, the only real sections of lit we haven't read that I wanted you to know about is that surrounding non-English contact and conquest and the literature of Native America prior to contact and just after.  The reading for last week was that surrounding Virgina settlement. You can continue to read the selections from the Heath at your leisure, because they won't be required for this course.  Remember that you can also find this literature for free and online. 

Just in case you do have any questions about the portfolio, I have opened a Q&A discussion thread on the portfolio open, and--of course--I will be happy to answer any questions you might have about the reading, authors, and periods we've covered.

Instead, I want you to spend the final week of the course putting together the best portfolio you can.  Look to the discussion thread to answer any questions.  

As always, write with questions.

Steve

Week Fifteen Assignments are Active.

Jamestown and the James River Valley are celebrated as the first permanent English settlements in the new world.  What most don't know--outside of the Lost Colony (1585)--is the history of temporary English settlements prior to Jamestown.  When Squanto met the Pilgrims in Massachusetts, he spoke English and was asked for beer.  Powhatan knew of the failed Roanoke colony, and the English were not welcome in all the villages of the Powhatan Confederacy which they visited.  Why? Because the British had been fishing the Newfoundland coast for almost a century prior to settlement, and this fishing included coming to shore to establish temporary trading bases, camps to fill up water supplies, and to take Indian slaves.  The same was true in what would become the Middle and Southern Colonies.  Squanto had been taken captive as a slave, learned English (and a taste for beer) while fishing and living in England, and, finally, escaped on a return voyage.  Unfortunately, he came home to find his village and family gone, destroyed by diseases the English brought with them on the initial raid.  One reason Powhatan could build the confederacy was that most of the Indian nations, who had once lived along the Chesapeake Bay, were weakened by diseases introduced by Europeans; Powhatan took advantage of the aftermath and the power vacuum created.

The Spanish, French, and Dutch had been in contact and had set up more or less permanent settlements prior to Jamestown.  In fact, one of the reasons Jamestown was settled on an malaria infested, brackish watered, marshy island was to give it the ability to be defended, not so much from Indians, as from the Spanish, who the English feared would come to reclaim the land on which the English were squatting.  In fact, de Soto--a Spanish explorer--had explored the Southeast in 1540, eighty years prior to the settlement of Jamestown, and the Spanish had set up a failed colony decades prior to Jamestown in what is today the Hampton Roads area.  

Most also don't know just how ill prepared the early Jamestown Colony was for survival.  The colony was the product of the Virginia Company, a kind of early corporation, which wanted profits, and quick profits at that, from their investment.  They honestly thought that the James River would provide a short link to the Pacific Ocean, that they would find gold among the Indian population or--at the least--silver, and that there were profits to be had for easy taking.  Many of the initial settlers were sons of the nobility, who just weren't used to doing a hard day's labor.  Although they started in December, they made landfall in the Bay until the summer, so there wasn't much chance to clear land for farming, that is, if this is what they had been told to do.   Most saw the colony as an expedition rather than a settlement, and almost all didn't think they had come to settle.  They thought they were there to make a quick profit and to head home rich. Add in the little Ice Age, storms, the wreak of the ships coming with relief supplies, political infighting, malaria, camp diseases, bad drinking water, and a longer than expected crossing--added together all this mean they'd already eaten most the supplies which were to last them through the winter--and you have a disaster in the making.  

There are moments in American history and its literature which seem miraculous, where things happen in such a bizarre set of circumstances that one wonders about divine providence.  Early Jamestown had four such moments:

1) John Smith was part of the expedition.  Smith was a mercenary and professional explorer.  The expedition was getting ready to hang him for mutiny when they opened their orders--which were only to be opened once in the New World--and they found out that Smith had been named as one of the board which was to help run the colony.  Smith was saved.  In turn, Smith saved the colony more than once, mostly by exploring, trading, and raiding the local Indians for the food the colony wouldn't have had, and--finally--putting everyone to work almost at gunpoint, regardless of rank or status.  You can get a handle on Smith by thinking of him as a kind of self-made Captain Kirk with  bits of a con man thrown in.  Long before Pocahontas, Smith had already lived a life of wonder and narrow squeaks.  He was a survivor, and because of him Jamestown survived.  Most important, Smith managed to set up a shaky, working relationship with Powhatan, who needed allies--remember, he was setting up a new confederacy of Indian nations and a new political order in land once controlled by others--and English trade goods.

2) After the starving time, after the disease, killing cold, malaria, and lack of food had taken its toll, when the surviving colony was down to only a small percentage of those who started, and everyone had literally gotten on board the ships to head back home, after everyone was headed back, the relief expedition with supplies and new personal meet the survivors coming out of the James River on their way home.  

3) John Rolfe--Pocahontas's husband--buys, steals, or borrows Spanish tobacco seed.  In planting Spanish tobacco as an experiment in Virginia, he creates a staple for the colony's economy, saving it again from sure doom.  He also begins the Virginia plantation economy, which will put some on top, like William Byrd and other planters. [Note: one extra-credit field trip you might consider is a trip to Byrd’s plantation.  He’s the guy who donated the land for Richmond.]  However, Rolfe’s gift of tobacco creates a life of leisure and education for some at the expense of Indian and African slaves and English indentured servants. (The first American slaves were Native Americans, and African American slaves arrive in 1619.) Most important, Rolfe's discovery convinces another group of settlers to invest their lives (and capital) in coming to the new world; and, after the bad press of the original settlement--where more died than survived and no one got rich--the colony wouldn't have survived without this influx of cash and good press.
 
4) The English arrive just as Powhatan, the Indian leader of kind of loose confederacy, is working to fill up a political vacuum.  He needs allies to fight enemies and trade goods to insure his status as leader.  He, hence, helps the English survive through trade and outright gifts of food.  It is a shaky alliance, just look at Smith's writings and how leery both the Indians and the English were of one another, and the alliance will quickly break down; but, it goes on long enough for relief supplies to arrive.

Now you know.  The Virginia colony’s survival was as much chance, circumstance, and near miracle than careful planning and heroism.  Once again, literature played an important part in bringing about the right circumstances.  Ballads were written both for and against the colony.  Smith writes a history which is as much a sales pitch for colonizing America (and hiring Smith as a colony leader) as history.  The Virgina Company pays writers to put together ballads and pamphlets designed to convince the poor of England to come to the new world and fill a constant labor shortage.  

As with most of literature (and history and solutions to life’s problems), there were both intended and unintended affects to the literature.  After a precarious beginning and after the hard work of survival, the Virginia colonists who survived discovered cheap land, where they could work for themselves, not a noble, and being so far away from London, they got the odd idea that they could run their own affairs.  Read the history of the Virgina General Assembly; this rich history is one reason the class forum is named the General Assembly.  What began as the colony’s assembly to solve local problems ended up being one of the first semi-democratic legislatures, and it helped start the careers of folks like Jefferson, Patrick Henry, Madison, Washington, etc.  

This brings us full circle and back to where we started the semester, that is, with de Crevecours’s Letters from an American Farmer and trying to figure out what created and what is an American.  Here is the story as best as I can figure it out.  As people settled the land, the land--that is, having access to it, having separation from the mother country, and possessing a frontier--changed the people who survived.  They developed a taste for ownership.  They developed a taste for opportunity.  They developed a taste for hard work and the pay off which comes with hard work.  In the process, they became very protective of these opportunities and liberties. Eventually, they recognized that they had to get over their differences--particularly differences of religion--if they wanted to be strong enough to defend their liberties, and they developed a new way of solving problems, one based on reason, debate, and representative voting. The result was something which would come to be called an American.

As always, write with questions.

Steve