The World Will Turn

The beginning of the Magnificat in the Gutenberg Bible

This past Sunday the text for the day was Luke 1:50-55, the second part of the Magnificat, the song of Mary. Our pastor gave some good insight into the text. The most striking thing about the service, though, was one of the hymns. Based on the text of the Magnificat, it puts Mary’s son into modern terms and it is arresting. This contemporary version, “The Canticle of the Turning,” is a hopeful view of how God is changing the world. Here’s a link:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9QeTmRCpW4

A secular version, just as powerful, is Bob Dylan’s “The Times, They Are a’Changing.” Although it is not based on the Magnificat it expresses the same sentiment--that things are changing.

The Magnificat, which gets its name from the first word of the Latin text, first has Mary stating that she is just one person, yet God is able to work through her. In all likelihood Mary was in her early teens. Not exactly someone who could effect change in the world.

The song changes with verse 50 and arrives at the central theme, that God will change the world and the rich and powerful will have nothing and the poor will have what they need.

Anyone with the vaguest idea of the history of the world knows that for millennia the way of the world has been war, poverty, and the oppression of those who get in the way. Yes, there have been advances in technology and the understanding of the universe, but this is balanced by the cruelty practiced by those in power.

Will it change? I don’t know.

Yes.

When? I don’t know. We’ve been waiting 2000 years and it still hasn’t happened. The wealthy continue to get wealthy. People such as Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos earn more in a single minute than what I earn in an entire year. A reliable statistic is that approximately 3,000 children die of starvation every hour of the day around the world. Governments continue to wage war to benefit the wealthy in their societies. It hasn’t changed yet.

This song, the Magnificat, needs to be heard far and wide. It is revolutionary in tone and substance. Kings will be toppled from their thrones. The powerful will be made weak. Those aren’t beautiful words from a teenage girl. They are words of hope in the power of God.

Christians must take this song seriously and become a part of God’s changing of the world. It is easy to sit back, pop open a cold one and wait for something to happen. In this case waiting is not getting on the roof of your house wearing a white robe and waiting for Jesus to return and scoop you up, delivering you from a world of sin. Here, waiting is a matter of working with God. No, it isn't easy to wait. I'm impatient for change. Why can't the world muster enough resources to overthrow those powers that continue to manipulate millions to their own advantage? I don't know. All I know is that the world will change. As in the song, it will turn.

The Dangers of Economic Polarization: A Cautionary Tale

Burial chamber of the Sutton Hoo ship-burial 1, England. Reconstruction shown in the Sutton Hoo Exhibition Hall.

I feel another blog entry coming on.

I’m currently reading a fascinating book by Robin Fleming entitled Britain After Rome: The Fall and Rise 400 to 1070. Fleming has a trajectory that is *not* in the direction of the typical book about this poorly documented period in British history, a trajectory that tells the story of elites, of kings and bishops and warring kingdoms. Instead she focuses mostly on the lives of everyday people and what their lives were like. There are very few written records of the lives of ordinary people but there is an archaeological record. In particular, burials give a good idea of the economic circumstances in which people lived. Not just burials either. You have to take your garden variety mound burial with a grain of salt. People were buried in their Sunday best, not the equivalent of the t-shirt and stained jeans that they wore to paint the garage. Burials often contain remnants of cloth, jewelry, and bones and teeth which will indicate the sort of diet the person had in various times in their lives.  House sites indicate the living conditions of different classes, if “class” is a word you can use in this unorganized period of British history.

Fleming’s thesis is that in the third and fourth centuries Britain became economically polarized. Increasing Romano Britons built elaborate villas and the island became almost a bit of a resort. Meanwhile, average people struggled to make ends meet. As the third century continued the economy began to include more and more goods, especially ceramics, made in Britain and sold to Britons. Small villages began to form while cities began to decline.

Eventually by the later fourth century the economic polarization and the weakening of Rome’s grip on the island through invasions from the north caused the economic and social structure to collapse in the matter of a few decades. Cities and villages disappeared and the island became a large landscape with farms. Cities such as London and York (to name two) lay uninhabited. The large villas in which wealthy elite entertained their high status friends fell into ruin and were gradually demolished by locals looking for ready made building materials.

It wasn’t until the sixth century, along with the re-introduction of Christianity and the gradual immigration of Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and other Germanic peoples, that cities began to come to life again. Villages and towns began to form, and the Church in Britain grew by leaps and bounds. The stratification of society began again, with local families who had talent gradually grew into higher status dynasties. Burials record this shift. If you could afford to bury your loved one with a valuable brooch, sword or other prestige item you had money. Some local families eventually raised up sons who became chieftains and later kings, and thus established the foundation of the British nobility that still exists today.

Although Fleming doesn’t use this term, this is essentially an apocalyptic scenario. It’s a cautionary tale, and an important one to remember. When societies reach the point that a small minority own the majority of wealth in a society they’re headed for trouble. This has been a political issue, rightly so, in the last several Presidential elections, and will certainly be a major issue in 2020. I’m not going to suggest that our society and economy is on the verge of collapsed, although for some it has already collapsed, such as the family that files for bankruptcy because they have depleted their life savings to pay for treatment for cancer, or the homeless person on the street in any major US city who needs but does not have basic mental health care and who dies on a park bench from exposure in a late fall cold snap, one that most people are aware of only because they bump the thermostat up a couple of degrees. Some scientists argue that we are already too late to retreat from catastrophic disaster

We could be heading for an apocalyptic scenario that might involve the collapse of the Internet, and various other elements of life that we take for granted. We must address the inequality in our society or it will turn around and bite us in a most uncomfortable way when we don’t expect it.

We've come to the point in the United States when the individual is supreme. What I want is more important than anything else. The immediate problem with this, however, is that each of of nearly 300 million people may want something different. There will be conflict. The conflict is between the self-interest of the 1% and the interest of those without adequate resources to meet their daily needs. This self-interest manifests itself in how elites carry themselves in society, from the way they drive to how they behave when told that they can't have what they want when they want it. We could easily go down the drain unless something changes.

The Challenges of Colonial New England Genealogy

Me standing next to the memorial stone for my 9 gr. grandfather
Thomas Hooker, first pastor of the First Church of Christ in Hartford,
CT and the co-founder of Connecticut and Hartford. He's not actually
buried with the stone. He is buried somewhere in the cemetery but
nobody knows exactly where.

I've been doing genealogy all my life. My parents were interested in it, and my mother became a crackerjack researcher with her job as a reference librarian. I grew up in an area where my family has been for centuries, central Connecticut. I have large clusters of ancestors all around Connecticut, in the Connecticut River valley in Massachusetts, and all of eastern Massachusetts. New England genealogy has its own characteristics. With New England genealogy, the thing you need to keep in mind is this. If you have ancestry going back to the 17th century (1600's) in New England, there is a relatively small pool of people from whom you are going to be descended. The growth of each generation is exponential. In many small farming communities it was common for first cousins to marry. As a result, it is possible to be descended from the same family multiple times. For instance, I am descended from a Nathaniel Merrimam in Wallingford, CT who was one of the original settlers of Wallingford in 1670. I go back to him seven different times. I am descended from three of his children. This is in separate lines back. How could this happen? People tended to say in one place. It wasn't unusual for the most eligible young woman to find that her only prospects were her nearby cousins, or vice versa. 

Published genealogies covering the period before 1900 are common for a number of early settlers who had a lot of descendants. How many descendants can one couple have? Consider this. Generations grow exponentially. Imagine immigrant settlers John and Mary Smith, both born around 1610, come to New England in the 1630's and settle in Massachusetts. They have ten children, three of whom die in childhood. Out of the remaining seven, one does not marry, but the other six do. Each of those six children has ten children. Voila. John and Mary Smith have sixty grandchildren. Sound implausible? Not at all. Now imagine forty of those sixty grandchildren each having eight children. John and Mary Smith, by now dead, have 320 great grandchildren. Out of those 320, 250 have six children each. Now John and Mary Smith, whose gravestones by now are growing lichen, have 3,000 descendants. Keep doing the math and you will see how it grows. I'm generally 9 or 10 generations from my immigrant ancestors. Someone with better math skills can spin out the possibilities.

Another factor that will boost the number of descendants of one family is if the father was married more than once. Childbearing was a very risky enterprise for a woman in the colonial period. Death from complications after childbirth were common, from causes such as hemorrhaging or puerperal sepsis, when the placenta does not come out completely. It was common for a man to be married two or three times during his lifetime. If the second and subsequent wives were younger and of the age to have children, a man could be fathering children into his sixties. That creates another odd scenario, of shortening or lengthening generations. If someone is the youngest child of the second wife, the generation is longer. Compound this several times and a large gap, multigenerational in fact, will occur. I am in different generations descended from the same person. On the other hand, if a person is an early child, and that compounds itself, the generation is shorter.

Prime examples of couples with a huge number of descendants are some of the Mayflower settlers. John and Priscilla Alden are good examples. They have many tens of thousand descendants. So do John and Priscilla Howland, William Bradford, and William Brewster. Mayflower ancestry isn't an exclusive club, it's one in which a lot of people haven't realized yet that they are members.

So far I have found two Mayflower ancestors, Thomas Rogers, who died during the first winter, and Peter Browne. Through their mother my children are descended from four Mayflower passengers--one entire family. My wife is related to John Alden through his sister. I'm descended from the uncle of William Brewster. Undoubtedly some more will pop up. Right now I think my wife may have a Mayflower passenger but I'm still working on that.

My ancestry from all these English nobility, royalty, and such is just luck of the draw. Since the pool of people who came over from England is small, their own ancestry is magnified many times over. And, by then, they probably had no clue that they were descended from nobility, and probably couldn't care less.

Common pitfalls in researching New England genealogy include a general repetition of names, especially in any given family. I've seen lines in which the oldest son was named after his father, who in turn was named after his father. Finding a line in a family that has three or four Samuel Smiths in a row is common. Then there is the issue of children dying young, an unfortunate occurrence that was all too common. It was fairly common for the name of a child who died to be repeated the next time a child of the same sex was born. Having two children named John Brown, for instance, would not be common.

The problem of names being used a lot gets even more complicated. Suppose you have two cousins both named Samuel Heath. Each of them names their first son Samuel Heath. These cousins are six months apart in age. Which Samuel Heath do you go back to?

Common names for men included John, Samuel, Nathaniel, Jonathan, Israel, Josiah, Benjamin, and others. Common names for women included Mary, Elizabeth, Sarah, Deborah, Margaret, Hannah, and others. Occasionally women will have names such as Silence, Patience, Prudence, or some other virtue.

Occasionally you will come across someone who seems to have dropped out of the sky. One of my great great grandmothers is such a case. I can't find a trace of her family of origin. Nothing. All I know about her is that she was born around 1820 in New York state, and that she married my great great grandfather and raised a family. Another is an earlier ancestor, Samuel Sturdevant, who appeared in Plymouth, Massachusetts around 1645. His wife's name is uncertain, and nothing can be found about him--where he came from in England, whether he was born in Plymouth or in England. Those are dead ends, either permanent or temporary. I just discovered Sturdevant this week. I doubt anything will ever turn up on him. As for my great great grandmother, I've been on her trail for 30 years. I haven't given up yet.

I subscribe to Ancestry.com, which has made research much easier. Remember, though, that not everything you need is going to be online, and when you are looking at someone else's research do so with a critical eye, and don't take everything they put out as accurate. I have found much good research on Ancestry.com but I have also seen a lot of wishful thinking on the part of someone who wants to be descended from a famous person in history.

New England genealogy is an acquired taste, although it is very addictive. It is a great way to learn about history and the lives that people lived in various times in the past.

The Passage of Time

My great great grandfather, George H. Lewis

In a few months we’ll be entering another year. Another year into this century. I was born in the previous century, just past halfway, at the peak of the Baby Boom. As we chew our way through the twenty first century I reflect back on previous centuries.

Trained as a historian, I don’t see time the way many do. Obviously, time passes in my personal life as it does for everyone else, but historical time is different. For me, the American Civil War is relatively recent. The American Revolution? Further back. Hallowed antiquity starts with the Tudor era in England. In-between? The modern world.

Historians have this view of history. There’s a famous story about Chou En Lai (1898-1976) who was the President of China for a number of years. Chou was steeped in the study of history. At a diplomatic reception he was asked what he thought the implications of the French Revolution were. He replied that it was too early to tell. That’s a good historian.

I have always had a long view of my family history. Genealogy was an indoor sport for us, and for me it still is. You always have to be ready for bombshells and surprises, such as my mother’s discovery that she was descended from Anne Boleyn’s sister Mary, or my recent discovery that my wife and I are both descended from Sir John Hawkins, who was a leader in the English Navy under Elizabeth I and who started the transatlantic slave trade from Africa. You can choose your friends but you're stuck with your relatives.

Getting back to centuries, as the nineteenth century and earlier recede into the past I remember that growing up the 1800’s were not that long ago and were still in living memory. My grandparents were all born in that century. My maternal grandfather was born in 1876. He would be 143 today. Not likely to still be around, which of course he isn’t. With the passing of the twentieth century he has receded into the past. So have great aunts and uncles, and some aunts and uncles as well. My parents, both of whom survived into this century, were born in the 1920's. They met and were married when they were both around thirty so they were a decade or so older than the parents of many of my friends. It didn't matter to me. It was normal. I grew up hearing about my father's experiences in World War II, not in tones of glory, but rather with regret that war was so destructive. He entered that war in 1943--seventy six years ago. At least for the more recent generations in my family the generations have stretched out longer. My mother's father, born in 1876, was fifty when she was born. He was already old enough to be an grandfather.

With the nineteenth century no longer the last century I’ve also left behind significant ancestors. My great great grandfather George H. Lewis, who died of dysentery in 1863 in the Civil War. My Great great great great great grandfather Jared Lewis, who served in the American Revolution. Also Robert Monroe, who died on Lexington Green.

I have left behind many whose names I don’t know yet.

I’m left by these reflections with a feeling of mortality. Hm.

Origins of American Racism Toward Latinos: Elizabethan England Part II "Who Stinketh The Most?"

A 1588 engraving by Theodore DeBry depicting a Spaniard feeding native babies to his dogs.

Part II

England and Roman Catholicism

As Catholic activity increased in England, with exiled priests making incursions in to England in the 1580’s Elizabeth’s government ramped up the persecution of Catholics. Possies roamed the countryside seeking out country houses that secretly kept priests safe, where they could celebrate Mass. A number of Tudor era country houses still have their “priest holes,” or hiding places for priests when the heat was on. The assumption was that if an English citizen were a Catholic, their allegiance was to the Pope, and the Pope had, without exaggeration, ordered the assassination of Elizabeth. To be Catholic was treasonous.

England had already had a taste of a return to Catholicism under Elizabeth’s half-sister Mary and many wanted nothing to do with it.

The other issue with Catholicism was the nature of the Mass. Anglicanism at the time did not hold to transubstantiation as such, and saw the Mass as little more than a pagan ritual.

The Cruelty of the Spanish

The Spanish government made it clear that part of the reason for colonization in the Americas was to convert the heathen. Of course, this involved eradicating their culture and turning them into European Christians. Today, decent people are abhorred by such a view but it was commonly held at the time.

In 1583 (note the date) a 1552 work by Bartholome de Las Casas (1484-1566) was published in English for the first time. de La Casas is still a controversial figure since as a colonist he favored the enslavement and subjugation of the native peoples“The Spanish Colonie” describes the program of genocide that the Spanish inflicted on the native peoples of the Caribbean and Central America. De Las Casa writes:

“Upon these lames so meek, so qualified & endowed of their maker and creator, as hath bin said, entree the Spanish incontinent as they knewe them, as wolves, as lions, & as tigers most cruel of long time famished: and have not done in those quarters these 40.yeres be past, neither yet doe at the present, ought else save tears them in peeses, kill them, martyre them, afflict them, torment them, & destroy them by straunge sorts of cruelties never neithere seene, nor read, nor hearde of the like . . .so Farr forth that of above three millions of souls that were in the Isle of Hispaniola, and that we have seene, there are not nowe two hundredth natives of the countrey.”  (f A2 obv.)

De Las Casa remains a controversial figure in the Roman Catholic Church, which beatified him in 2006. The Episcopal Church venerates him as a saint. He advocated, for one thing, that African slavery replace the slavery of native peoples.

 Map of the New World Martin Waldseemüller(1513) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tabula_Terre_Nove.jpg

This became known as the “Black Legend,” the narrative that the Spanish were cruel to the native peoples of the region. Today, scholars disagree over the causes of such a drop in population. Descendants of the Taino people still live in Puerto Rico. Some scholars favor slavery as a major cause of death. Others credit the introduction of European disease as the major cause of death. Clearly it is both. The conditions of slavery undoubtedly were a major factor. During the years of Columbus’ control of the island somewhere in the range of 100,000 committed mass suicide in protest of their conditions.

I’m not going to debate this issue because there simply isn’t space. It is clear that the Spanish saw the Taino as either pests to be eradicated or as slave labor. This aspect of the Spanish character stemmed from the Reconquista--the gradual reconquest of the Iberian peninsula (minus Portugal) from the Muslim kingdoms there. Get rid of the heathen then things will be good. God wills it.

So, the relationship with Latinos today? Peoples in the Latino world have a complicated ethnic background. Their ancestors include enslaved Africans, native peoples, and Spanish colonists, all in varying degrees. Native languages probably survived to an extent but Spanish became the universal colonial language. The same is true today. So here we have it. People of mixed descent in the region speak Spanish because it was the colonial language in Spanish colonies. The stereotype is that they are lazy, arrogant (because, supposedly, they don't learn English, which actually isn't true). So we have the worst of both worlds--a stubborn stereotype of native peoples as uncivilized, and their forced inheritance of a language that brings up residual images of cruelty and ignorance. For more on this see my previous post on the Origins of Racism: Colonialism. https://ccowing.blogspot.com/2018/07/origins-of-racism-colonialism.html

Here's an easy way to test this out. If some hear Spanish being spoken in a public place they might go ballistic. "Go back to where you came from!" is the refrain. But what if they were speaking German, or Russian, or French? Big difference. Then you would want to know where they were from. Spanish has with it the baggage of being the language that Elizabethan England connected with money-grubbing, cruel Catholics.

By the way--English publications from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries also promoted the idea that God had given England the New World that they might spread the faith and, while they were at it, make a buttload of money:

"...that you seeing and knowing the continuance of the action by the view hereof you may generally know & learne what thecountrey is, & therupon consider how your dealing therein if it proceede, may returne you profit and gaine; bee it either by inhabitting & planting or otherwise in furthering thereof." Thomas Harriot, A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (Frankfurt, 1590) p. 5.

And, of course, their motivations were clean, godly, and pure. In 1584 Richard Hakluyt wrote in the preface of his "Discourse of Western Planting" his outline for the rationale for colonizing what is now the East Coast of the United States:

1. That this westerne discoverie will be greately for thinlargement of the gospell of Christ whereunto the Princes of the refourmed relligion are chefely bound amongest whome her ma[jes]tie ys principall.

2. That all other englishe Trades are growen beggerly or daungerous, especially in all the king of Spayne his Domynions, where our men are dryven to flinge their Bibles and prayer Bokes into the sea, and to forsweare and renouwnce their relligion and conscience and consequently theyr obedience to her Ma[jes]tie.

3. That this westerne voyadge will yelde unto us all the commodities of Europe, Affrica, and Asia, as far as wee were wonte to travell, and supply the wantes of all our decayed trades.

4. That this enterprise will be for the manifolde imploymente of nombers of idle men, and for bredinge of many sufficient, and for utterance of the greate quantitie of the commodities of our Realme. (in The Original Writings & Correspondence of the Two Richard Hakluyts, E.G.R. Taylor, ed. London: the Hakluyt Society, 1935, II:211)

In other words, the New World provided the opportunity for Christianizing the heathen, gaining access to trade in Asia and Africa and making lots of money, beating Spain at their own gaine, and providing employment for a burgeoning English population.

The record of genocide in the English treatment of native peoples in North America needs no repeating. As Edward Rutledge sings in the musical 1776 in the song "Molasses and Rum and Slaves," to misappropriate the last line of this song about the triangle slave trade:

"Who stinketh the most?"