0 comment Tuesday, August 19, 2014 | admin
Today is the 241st anniversary of the Boston Massacre, which occurred on March 5, 1770.
Oddly, when I look over my blog stats for today, there are no hits coming in on my earlier piece(s) on the Boston Massacre, and I say it's odd because I consistently get hits on that piece on an ongoing basis. Some of the feedback indicates that students are following a link to that piece, probably relating to an assignment about the Boston Massacre.
As our historic America vanishes, I expect there will be less and less interest in our old American history. The Boston Massacre had meaning for us and our ancestors; what can it mean to people who have no roots in this country and no kinship to the people who founded it, the people who were involved in the events of 1770? Well, I suspect for a while the memory of that event will be maintained because there was a lone black man killed in the events of that day, and people like Glenn Beck have written him into the canon of our heroes and martyrs. After all, what good is history without diversity to validate it?
But even the presence of a black at that event will have little interest for the people who are now colonizing Massachusetts: Latin Americans, Caribbeans, Asians, Middle Easterners. And even the Whites in the area are likely to be descended from more recent immigrants. Despite popular stereotype, New England is not crawling with hoity-toity Boston Brahmins, descended from Mayflower arrivals.
According to this information, some of the towns where my maternal ancestors lived, or which they founded, are now home to ever-greater numbers of foreign-born people, in some cases around a third of the population. And why should the new arrivals care about what a lot of dead old White guys, Englishmen in fact, did 200+ years ago? Their descendants have long since moved on to settle the Midwest and the far West, as many of my New England kin did, abandoning those historical sites to the new arrivals, who will remake it in their image.
Still, even though things look bleak for us, we have to keep our folk memory alive and not forget our forebears.
Oddly, when I look over my blog stats for today, there are no hits coming in on my earlier piece(s) on the Boston Massacre, and I say it's odd because I consistently get hits on that piece on an ongoing basis. Some of the feedback indicates that students are following a link to that piece, probably relating to an assignment about the Boston Massacre.
As our historic America vanishes, I expect there will be less and less interest in our old American history. The Boston Massacre had meaning for us and our ancestors; what can it mean to people who have no roots in this country and no kinship to the people who founded it, the people who were involved in the events of 1770? Well, I suspect for a while the memory of that event will be maintained because there was a lone black man killed in the events of that day, and people like Glenn Beck have written him into the canon of our heroes and martyrs. After all, what good is history without diversity to validate it?
But even the presence of a black at that event will have little interest for the people who are now colonizing Massachusetts: Latin Americans, Caribbeans, Asians, Middle Easterners. And even the Whites in the area are likely to be descended from more recent immigrants. Despite popular stereotype, New England is not crawling with hoity-toity Boston Brahmins, descended from Mayflower arrivals.
According to this information, some of the towns where my maternal ancestors lived, or which they founded, are now home to ever-greater numbers of foreign-born people, in some cases around a third of the population. And why should the new arrivals care about what a lot of dead old White guys, Englishmen in fact, did 200+ years ago? Their descendants have long since moved on to settle the Midwest and the far West, as many of my New England kin did, abandoning those historical sites to the new arrivals, who will remake it in their image.
Still, even though things look bleak for us, we have to keep our folk memory alive and not forget our forebears.
Labels: American Culture, American History, Cultural Marxism, Folk Memory