Stephen Palmie and Francisco A. Scarano’s The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples is a sweeping 600+ page overview of the history of the Caribbean from 1492 to 2010.
The state of the art book is far too comprehensive to sum up in a short little review. It will suffice to say that this is the go to resource for any general reader trying to get a grip on why the Caribbean is the way it is today. In spite of the typical leftwing bias, I highly recommend it and any reader who grabs a copy will learn a lot from this book.
OD’s first book, Shattering The Golden Circle: The Failure of Free Society in Dixie, Haiti, and the Caribbean, will be published sometime early next year. In the meantime, this book has helped me focus and answer some of my own research questions while opening up some more fruitful veins of inquiry:
(1) What is “the Caribbean”? Which countries/islands are included and which are excluded?
The Caribbean region consists of three archipelagos: the Bahamas and Turks & Caicos islands, the Greater Antilles (Cuba, Jamaica*, Puerto Rico, Haiti and the Dominican Republic), and the Lesser Antilles (Leeward Islands and Windward Islands), as well as Belize in Central America and the Guianas in northern South America (Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana).
The Leeward Islands include the U.S. Virgin Islands, British Virgin Islands, Anguilla, St. Martin/Sint Maarten, St. Bartholomew, Saba, St. Eustatius, St. Kitts and Nevis, Antigua and Barbuda, Montserrat, Guadeloupe, Aruba, Curaçao, and Bonaire.
The Windward Islands include Martinique, Dominica, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Grenada, along with Barbados and Trinidad and Tobago which are commonly classified with them.
A few months ago, I couldn’t have named all these islands much less placed them on a map, and I knew little about their history, culture, or relationship to the United States.
*The Cayman Islands have traditionally been a dependency of Jamaica.
(2) Is there a connection between the culture of the Caribbean and the American South?
Yes.
Few Southerners are aware of our strong historical ties to the Caribbean. South Carolina was founded as a cultural extension of the British West Indies and the other Lower South states were molded in its image.
Virginia and the Upper South colonies were not founded as slave societies, but they too adopted the South Carolina model in the late seventeenth/early eighteenth century, at least in their coastal lowlands.
From the British Caribbean we borrowed negro slavery, racialism, conservatism, white supremacy, the plantation system, the slave code, anti-miscegenation laws, speech patterns, architecture, and some of our cuisine.
The American Revolution artificially severed the Southern colonies from the British Caribbean colonies and geopolitically oriented “the South” toward “the Northeast” and inland and west toward the continent and away from our previous orientation east toward the Atlantic.
In 1776, there were 26 – not 13 – British American colonies, and defense of the more valuable colonies in the British West Indies from France significantly affected the military course of the American Revolution.
In 1861, Caribbean expansion was the poison pill that killed the Crittendon Compromise and ensured the destruction of the Union. Tensions between the North and South over the failed attempts to annex Cuba was a major grievance that motivated secession in the Old Southwest (Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana).
Southerners were also motivated to secede from the Union by having spent half a century observing the post-apocalyptic fruits of abolition – the failure of free society – in Haiti and the British and French West Indies.
(3) What is the “Golden Circle”? Why would anyone think of the Caribbean as being part of a “Golden Circle”? Isn’t the Caribbean part of the “Third World”?
First, the “Golden Circle” is a phrase that was used in the antebellum South to refer to a peculiar vision of Manifest Destiny as a federation or an empire of slave states based on the U.S. South that would stretch across Central America and the Caribbean.
The Knights of the Golden Circle was an antebellum secret society that advocated the creation of a new Southern empire in the Caribbean. Its flag consisted of a crescent and fifteen stars – the crescent symbolized the rising Southern nation around the Gulf of Mexico and the fifteen stars the various parts of the Southern empire.
The Southern empire would have been an agricultural powerhouse based on plantation slavery and classical republicanism that would have controlled the world markets for cotton, tobacco, sugar, rice, and coffee.
Second, Americans tend to be grossly ignorant of world history, and one example of this is that the Caribbean used to be the richest region in the Americas and the geographic center of European imperialism during the late seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries.
The plantation complex that stretched from southern North America through the Caribbean to northern South America was at the center of the world economy and produced the agricultural commodities that drove the industrialization of Europe.
The “South Atlantic System,” which refers to the same entity, was a lucrative transnational economic organism based on the Caribbean. The American South and Cuba were its northern periphery. The “Golden Circle” was a world economic engine that would have been valuable to control and develop to its full potential during its heyday.
Third, the Caribbean has been a part of the “Third World” only since the disastrous experiment in abolition destroyed the prosperity of the region during the early nineteenth century by forcing slave societies to conform to the liberal social model.
(4) How did the “Golden Circle” develop? When was it destroyed?
The rise of the “Golden Circle” can be precisely dated to the transformation of Barbados into the model slave society from 1640 to 1643 and the from there to the publication of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen in 1789.
This is followed by a crisis period during the French Revolution that resulted in the destruction of its geographic epicenter – Saint-Domingue, the richest colony in the world – and a recovery period after 1804 that saw the final expansion of the Golden Circle north into Cuba and Puerto Rico and the Cotton Kingdom in the American South and south into the new British colonies of Trinidad and Tobago and British Guiana.
The fall can be dated from 1807 when Britain and America abolished the slave trade to the final abolition of slavery in Cuba and Puerto Rico in 1886. Significant events within this time frame include British abolition in 1834 to 1838, French abolition in 1848, Dutch abolition in 1863, and American abolition in 1865.
(5) Who destroyed the Golden Circle? Why was it destroyed?
It was indisputably destroyed by metropolitan Whites in Britain, France, Spain, the Netherlands, and the northern United States, not by slave uprisings. Even Haiti would have been reconquered were it not for the Napoleonic Wars.
Britain was the animating force behind its destruction and it came in three successive waves: the end of the slave trade (1807), abolition (1834 to 1838), and free trade (1846) – the Golden Circle had survived the foolishness of the French Revolution.
The fundamental cause was a moral, religious, and ideological sea change in values in Britain that stemmed from the twin evils of evangelical Christianity and Enlightenment ideology that weakened its national character and laid the foundation for the hopelessly degenerate Britain of our own times.
(6) Is there any truth to a Jewish role in the rise of slavery?
Yes.
Interestingly enough, the anti-slavery movement was the one utopian reform movement where Jews were noticeably overshadowed by Gentiles.
In an earlier phase of their history, Jews were not notable for being anti-White. In fact, Jews seem to have played a major role in pioneering the slave trade and creating race-based plantation slavery.
My preliminary research indicates that Sephardic Jews in Brazil were heavily involved in the slave trade and kickstarting the plantation complex which they spread to the British and French West Indies after they were kicked out of northern Brazil.
From the Caribbean the plantation complex spread to southern North America where Jews were noticeably present in large numbers in colonial Charleston, New Orleans, and Savannah.
(7) What was the result of abolition and imposing “free society” on the slave societies of the American South, Haiti, and Caribbean?
We can say without qualification that the results of abolition and the triumph of freedom and equality, or “free society” as it was called by its Southern critics like George Fitzhugh, was total and unmitigated economic devastation.
The South sunk into an abyss of poverty which lasted for nearly a hundred years. The sugar industry temporarily collapsed in the Caribbean. Some places like Haiti and Jamaica never recovered their former relative prosperity.
Freedom failed. There was a collapse on the level of the western Roman Empire entering the Dark Ages. What you had was an intensely cultivated area that had been at the forefront of modern agriculture suddenly taking on an intensely archaic appearance.
Nowhere more so than Haiti.
(8) Why is Haiti so much worse off than its black neighbors in the Caribbean?
Haiti is the most extreme case of the regional social and economic collapse which I call “Shattering the Golden Circle.”
– First, 2/3 of the slaves in Saint-Domingue in 1791 had been born in Africa, so the blacks there were particularly barbaric, shook off the European yoke, retained much of their culture and wallowed in their own barbarism which was stamped out to a far greater degree elsewhere.
– Second, Haiti is the only country that succeeded in violently throwing off European rule – freedom and equality triumphed there in 1804 whereas Jamaica didn’t become independent until 1962.
Guadeloupe is the anti-Haiti – the Richepance expedition succeeded whereas the Leclerc expedition failed. Slavery, white supremacy, and colonialism were restored there in 1803. That’s why Guadeloupe, which is now the French equivalent of Hawaii, has one of the highest standard of livings in the region while Haiti is the poorest country in the Western hemisphere, even though the blacks on both islands are the same people.
– Third, the blacks in Haiti exterminated the French population and banned Europeans from owning property in Haiti, which kind of deterred foreign investment. This didn’t change until Haiti adopted a new constitution during the American occupation in 1918.
This is highly significant. In Haiti, we can see what would have happened in Dixie if Reconstruction had not been overthrown in South Carolina and if the blacks had gotten the “40 acres and a mule.”
That’s why Haiti is so much worse off than its neighbors: as an independent country that was relatively ignored by Europeans until the early twentieth century, the blacks in Haiti seized political power and got their hands on the land, which was not the case in, say, America or Jamaica.
In Haiti, they exercised their freedom and equality which they associated with the rejection of the plantation system and the market economy in favor of subsistence peasant agriculture, and the result was the division of the land into small unproductive plots and the crushing rural poverty and backwardness of modern deforested and overpopulated Haiti.
(9) Some of the black countries in the Caribbean region – Bermuda, the Bahamas, the Cayman Islands, the British Virgin Islands – have high per capita incomes. If freedom has failed, how do we explain these success stories?
There is a very simple answer: offshore financial centers.
In the late twentieth century, several of these black countries developed a new role in the world economy as centers of tax evasion and money laundering and catering to the South American narcotraffickers.
Europeans and Americans pour their money into banks in places like the Cayman Islands because there is no income tax there. Corporations also incorporate there for tax reasons.
This is how a place like Bermuda which has no agriculture, manufacturing, or natural resources like oil or natural gas can have the appearance of a first world standard of living. Most of these corporations exist there only on paper and employ few natives.
Bermuda and other blacks islands have many of the same problems of the other countries like Black Undertow violent crime.
(10) Why did White settlement in the Caribbean fail?
Slavery, sugar, and disease.
It is clear that tropical diseases like malaria and yellow fever decimated the White population in the British and French West Indies. Hundreds of thousands of British and French settlers went to the Caribbean but left behind few descendants because of disease.
Further researching this matter has convinced me though that disease was an effect of slavery and sugar monoculture. Malaria and yellow fever came to the Caribbean with African slaves. The deforestation of the sugar islands created the ideal habitat for the mosquitos that transmitted these diseases.
Cuba had a strong White majority until the end of the eighteenth century. Then again, Cuba only became a deforested slave society in the early nineteenth century, which shows that White colonization of the Caribbean could have succeeded were it not for sugar and slavery.
(11) What happened to the Whites of the Caribbean?
Poor White communities exist throughout the Caribbean. The Red Legs of Barbados are probably the mist famous group. There are other White communities in places like Jamaica and Guadeloupe.
It will suffice to say that freedom and equality has progressively decimated the White population ever since the Haitian Revolution in 1791. This subject will be thoroughly covered in a chapter in my book.
(12) Are there any counterpoints to the fate of Whites in the Caribbean?
Yes.
St. Martin/Sint Maarten and St. Bartholomew are examples of the what the whole Caribbean region could be like – not to mention Hawaii, America’s own tropical sugar island – if the black population there disappeared tomorrow.
(13) What about the tourist industry?
The Caribbean used to have a reputation as a death trap before it became a “tropical paradise.”
After the Spanish-American War, the Americans invested a lot of money in bringing disease under control by eliminating the fetid mosquito breeding grounds in Cuba and Puerto Rico. Disease ceased to be a problem after the European powers learned how malaria and yellow fever were transmitted.
The elimination of disease along with long distance air travel, air conditioning, cruise ships and the like made the American and European driven tourism industry possible. As with the offshore financial centers on the Caymans or the oil industry in Trinidad and Tobago, foreign capital has created pockets of prosperity in the Caribbean like Montego Bay in Jamaica.
(14) Isn’t imperialism responsible for the poverty and backwardness of the Caribbean?
No.
First, Haiti is by far the poorest country in the region, and that is due to its success in throwing off European imperialism and exterminating the French population, whereas Guadeloupe is one of the richest islands in the Caribbean because it is part of France.
Second, Puerto Rico is far richer than Haiti or Jamaica because it is an American colony and like Guadeloupe is showered by federal welfare state spending.
Third, half of Puerto Rico now lives in the United States and 41 percent of Suriname moved to the Netherlands before independence. Hundreds of thousands of Haitians have moved to the U.S., Cuba, Canada, and the Dominican Republic.
Jamaica has exported a huge percentage of its own people to the United States, Britain, and Canada. The blacks in the Caribbean desperately want to live under white supremacy and white privilege because they lack the racial capacity to generate wealth and maintain civilization in their own countries.
The poorest countries in the Caribbean are independent nations. The richest ones are all overseas territories of the U.S., Britain, France, and the Netherlands. And it is due to the richer black islands being in a position to reap the benefits of white privilege.
(15) Does Haiti need a Marshall Plan?
There are more NGOs operating in Haiti than any country in the world – ever since the fall of “Baby Doc” Duvalier, the NGOs have effectively run Haiti, especially over the last ten years. Let’s not forget that modern Haiti is the fruit of the first NGO in world history, the Société des amis des Noirs, or the so-called “Friends of the Blacks.”
The international community has poured an unprecedented amount of foreign aid into Haiti. I don’t have the exact figure at hand which will be in the book, but Haiti has received the equivalent of multiple Marshall Plans, even though Sean Penn recently slammed the whole fucking world at the Cannes Film Festival for Haiti fatigue.
(16) What’s your solution to the poverty and backwardness of the Caribbean?
The poverty and backwardness of the modern Caribbean was caused by the “Shattering of the Golden Circle” – led by Britain, nineteenth century liberals imposed “free society” on race-based, slave-based plantation societies with predictable catastrophic results.
I think the Caribbean could be fixed if private filibusters were allowed to operate unmolested in the region like the ones who seized Jamaica in 1655. The Caribbean needs a Norman Conquest that would reestablish white supremacy and civilization in these islands and return the black population to Africa.
(17) Does Haiti have a halo?
Haiti’s halo would be the brown ring around the toilet of the Third World. It is a failed society that was born in a Satanic anti-White voodoo ceremony. 208 years of free society should have discredited that model by now.
(18) Whal is the state of the Black Undertow in the Caribbean?
The Black Caribbean is one of the most violent regions in the world – in fact, it is significantly more violent than the United States, and the blight, the poverty, the eroded tax base, the low property values and all the other known manifestations of the Visible Black Hand of Economics have far surpassed Detroit there.
Haiti is a Fourth World country. Jamaica is a warlord democracy they caters to “garrison constituencies.” Last year, the Black Undertow violent crime in Trinidad became so bad that a national state of emergency was declared and troops were put on the street to restore order.
The Caribbean, which is the most Africanized region in the New World and home to 15 separate experiments in black freedom and equality ranging from Cuban communism to Puerto Rican capitalism, is now peripheral to the world economy.
Much of its prosperity is driven by Americans and Europeans: tourism, international business, oil and gas, all of which are sectors which are certain to be negatively affected as the global depression accelerates. Storm clouds are on the horizon.
Note: Here are some videos of my proposed filibuster solution:
John said,
“However, the Irish do IMHO exaggerate the treatment metered out by the British Government in the 1650s….”
OT, but their Hollywood friends really push it, too. Their nationalism is great (just like the movie Ghandi. As long as it’s anti-Anglo “nationals” they are LOVED. They were the “out-group” used to push all the initial policies. Hart of Hart-Celler was an Irish RC banker, and many other names. Sadly, in the final analysis, probably more than any ethnic group, they have screwed Americans.
But in a way, I feel sorry for them. The Irish in Ireland seem fine, if a little gullible and superstitious when I’ve met them. But the way they’ve been used in the u.s., and translated their anti-angloism and catholicism (like doing Hart-Celler and the Kennedy’s etc.) —-
Well, what might have been livable in the horrid post 1865 Empire, became impossible.
Many u.s. Wasp-women, I suspect, have pulled Magda Goebbels and will simply not ever reproduce children for such a sick open border society.
“Many u.s. Wasp-women, I suspect, have pulled Magda Goebbels and will simply not ever reproduce children for such a sick open border society.”
Let’s see now: you are arguing for racial suicide based upon your distaste for Irish immigration? Not only are you factually incorrect (Magda murdered her children, she actually “produced” a passle of them,) you are absolutely bonkers.
There is a very simple reason that aside from the Errol Flynn movie Captain Blood, you don’t hear much about Irish slavery. It was relatively short lived and in comparison to the numbers involved with negro slavery, insignificant. Sorry if that hurts your victimhood, but that’s all there is to it.
Most early colonists came to America as indentured servants.
Deo Vindice
Chris,
I ain’t mocking America. You are wilfully misreading me. Please stop contructing strawmen. I don’t like the multiracial Brown tide Anerica that is rapidly swamping people who look very much like myself and share a history together. Okay?
I just don’t see any way out of racial oblivion apart without partition, separation, secession. I don’t think the Union troops would have bothered if they could see America today. Lincoln might be high giving but not the ordinary kepi wearing rifleman.
The anti-whites don’t want whites to separate from the USA and have our own nation, because they know we are a scattered army and they don’t want us to regroup. They are waging war on us after all.
I’ve personally seen the regression since 1994. Didn’t notice it conscously until 2007.
@John
“I don’t see any way out of racial oblivion apart without partition, separation, secession.”
I don’t want secession. I don’t want my country to be destroyed, because it’s all I have. Like most Americans, I don’t have a back-up country in Europe that I can “return” to, if America one day ceased to exist.
The stark realities that Hunter and many others on here refuse to accept, are that 1.) NOBODY in South, in REAL LIFE, gives a happy damn about secession. Most Southerners consider themselves American as much as Northerners do. All that Civil War bullshit is ancient history and just like the rest of us, they have more important things to deal with. And 2.)If any part of this country, aside from say Alaska or Hawaii, were to secede, it would start a chain reaction that would utterly shatter us down to the smallest communties, and leave the weakest and most vulnerable of us to be brutally devoured by God knows who. I will not have that.
Secession was tried once, for all the wrong reasons, and it failed. There are other ways to regain control of one’s country, besides the futility of electoral politics or vainglorious acts of suicide like secession.
John says:
Sam you are whiny. The airish are whiny.
Apuleius says:
‘There is a very simple reason that aside from the Errol Flynn movie Captain Blood, you don’t hear much about Irish slavery. It was relatively short lived and in comparison to the numbers involved with negro slavery, insignificant. Sorry if that hurts your victimhood, but that’s all there is to it.’
It’s laughable for Southrons to lecture anyone on victimhood. This site is filled with whiners crying the blues about the yanks and Civil War all day, every day. Post after post after post. Those damn yankees this, that and the other. Waaaaa! We lost the war to those freaking Northerners. Waaaaa! Sniff sniff.
I’m sick of hearing your caterwauling. The past is the past – get over it! It was ONLY a relatively short time of history anyway, you big effin babies.
You ought to thank your lucky stars the Yanks did not make y’all into slaves. Then you would be totally SOL! All your pleading and praying to God would be pointless. The heavens would be as brass. The Bible does not forbid slavery and Jesus didn’t condemn it, right? So by that reasoning the North would have been justified in treating you exactly like the Irish or any other group of hapless, vanquished White LOSERS throughout history.
As if there is a nickel’s worth of genetic difference between Scots, Ulster-Scots and the Irish truth be told.
So, please, just STFU already. Your constant pathetic whining is making you seem like a bunch of hysterical school girls. Go watch ‘God and Generals’ again for the millionth time and have a good cry. Bunch of pussies.
I’m obviously being very sarcastic to make a point. Probably to no avail.
I’m surprised anyone here would credulously accept tall tales floating around on the internet. The historians in the book dismiss this nonsense.
It is not really about the “Civil War.”
It is about the North repeatedly forcing its destructive racial and cultural ideas on the South and an electoral system that is useless for trying to stop it. Of course this will be crystal clear in November when the North reelects Obama.
BTW, the subject of this thread is a thousand miles away from most of us.
Southerners are quite right to resent northerners. Just as Irish resent the Brits.
It’s just matter of how far you go with it. The Irish play up victimhood far too much. Not as bad as blacks by any means, but it’s still corosive. There are elements of southern greivances that get silly. Like Connie Chastaine. I think the GOPcynically exploit the flag issues every four years. Bush even put on a good ol’ boy accent to fake out everyone. Awful stuff.
I would like to a diagram animated elapse
video of where slavery starts in the Western Hemisphere
then over lay that with cotton, tobacco, indigo and sugar and see how concentrated slave populations got in the various territories.
Can it done?
@Hunter
“Of course this will be crystal clear in November when the North reelects Obama.”
And what if they don’t? There are at least five Northern states that either historically always voted Democrat, or flipped to Obama last time, that might well go for Romney this time. What will that say about your presumptions about Northern whites, if a Northern block of states brings down Obama?
Just out of curiosity, have you ever even been to the North?
@Sam
“Gettysburg” is better than “Gods and Generals”. But I agree with rest of your post.
I’m somewhat qualified to talk about Trinidad here. By great uncle owns a hotel there. He was a bookie in London, saved up his money and migrated to the Islands. He spoke with a very heavy Scottish accent. White men who get there do very well even today. (Ian Fleming wrote his bond novels while hanging out in dives in Jamaica. It’s a really good place to write books.
“but it’s still corosive. “
From whose point of view? The Brits? It seems to have had a positive effect on Irish cohesiveness and has contributed to efforts to stop the disappearance of the Gaelic language.
“As if there is a nickel’s worth of genetic difference between Scots, Ulster-Scots and the Irish truth be told.”
The Ulster Scots or Scotch-Irish as I prefer to call them have a significant amount of Northern England border land “Reiver” blood in them which contains DNA fragments from the far flung regions of the Roman Empire and beyond.
http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~gallgaedhil/dna_by_haplogroup.htm
Chris,
They won’t. You will see.
The WBTS reenactments in the comments get incredibly tiresome, but we usually end up learning a lot from these exchanges. I’m growing tired of the Caribbean threads too, but I want to wrap this up and physically publish a book like Paul Kersey that will circulate beyond OD.
Looking forward, I am mulling over my next project, and seeing as how we have so many Northerners here, I am considering another one of my aborted ideas which was to research the history of race relations in the North.
I was supposed to do that last December but never got around to it.
They did a great deal of damage to themselves with the EU. See Irishsavant on this.
It’s also been corrosive in the US. That book: How the Irish became white! My god what utter horsemanure.
The Ulster-Scots are a clannish bunch. I particularly like the small wars they conducted.
Northern white pathologies would be a great run up to explain them voting for Obama in November.
A parody of Colbert’s Better Know Your District might be fun. May also get you on TV if you like. Better know your state! Michigan first up. Leaning Obama only 10% black but still almost in the bag for the President…why?
Vermont in the Chicagoan’s swagbag. What is it with them?
“They did a great deal of damage to themselves with the EU.”
Soon to be known again as Europe.
<i."Michigan first up. Leaning Obama only 10% black but still almost in the bag for the President…why?"
Easy. It’s the heart of the “Rustbelt.” Lot’s of unionized ex-factory workers. Why do the Industrial Midlands vote for Labour? Same reason.
“Vermont in the Chicagoan’s swagbag. What is it with them?”
Lots of Jews and twee advertising types up from Jew York City.
Michigan elected a Republican governer in 2010. And the sight of Jennifer Granholm and her bizarre display at the DNC the other nigh, suret didn’t help Obama’s supposed “lock” on Michigan one bit. But, what do I know? I just live here…
I’ll bet anyone a six pack of beer and a kick in the ass that Michigan goes for Obama.
Any takers?
Deo Vindice
I don’t drink beer. And you throw a kick at me, you’ll never walk again. But I’ll take your bet just for the satisfaction of reading your reaction when Romney wins.
Such diaries are needed to explain the pathologies of northern whites.
John asked: “Vermont in the Chicagoan’s swagbag. What is it with them?”
Another question for you: How is it that New Hampshire at the far end of the Appalachian mountain chain is fairly consistently “red” unlike the rest of New England? It also went heavily for Ron Paul.
Re: New Hampshire conservatives: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZubTju7g_s
How are English-heritant “Yankees” such as these any different genetically from English-heritant “Southrons”? Don’t we all, north and south, belong to (this spoken from my Briton half) the same (British) fatherland — and all have the same music in our blood? Rural farm folks in their church meetings, and at their Granges and other country folk gatherings are all much the same.
Border Revivers are genetically very English. Folks on both sides of the line would switch allegiances and intermarry as it suited their family. Neither side was particularly loyal to which ever crown that tried to lay claim to their land but put family and blood oaths 1st. Anyone who thinks we are “pure” this that or the other is… not up to speed on the history of the area
You Chris are not a real American. You have no founding stock blood in you. You came here as part of the proposition nation and support all its horrors, but now you rail at what it has created. Hell now you even think negros are human. Clearly, you don’t know very many generational Southron people. All I know like the idea of secession to one degree or another. Most think it impractical but none condemn the idea but it’s growing in popularity
Rehashing the war of northern aggression is a good reminder to Southron men who the enemy is, and who has been the enemy since before 1860
Britain is a mother country. Not a fatherland.
Stonelifter, did you know real northern farm folks like real music and country dances, even to this day?
Ps, I think its a little presumptions to pick who will win the presidential election or who will carry which states. I get the strong impression everything is more fluid then folks think. Outside a few diehard locals that is. I’m thinking this will be one bizarre election. I won’t be surprised with the results
New Hampshire is a funny place. It ranks number one on the liberty scale and if I recall correctly the state legislators meet once every two years. Really odd given all that surrounds it
Of course I know Mosin, but I don’t see why its relevant
I considered that choice of word, John, but good Welshmen, who are Britons too, call it fatherland, John.
I know it’s not very relevant, Stonelifter. I’m relaxing with music end of the day. Here’s one from the other end of the Appalachians: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cs2j8f7H2WY&feature=relmfu
New Hampshire is slightly anomalous, except when you consider it is rural, agricultural and very Anglo.
“The South” used to be a synonym for the slave states.
Southern culture was defined by racialism, white supremacy, slavery, and the plantation system. Two centuries of slavery created a culture here that was very different from the culture of New England.
Where to start? The South had little need for major cities because the plantation system grew export crops. Southerners tended to live in the countryside whereas Yankees lived in towns.
The South didn’t need factories to produce manufactured goods. We didn’t need huge numbers of European immigrants to work in non-existent factories. The structure of the plantation system created a race-based society with a hierarchical authoritarian culture.
The South has always opposed the consolidation of the government because Northern industries attracted huge numbers of European immigrants. Southern slaves couldn’t vote. A strong central government was not in our interest as a minority for all kinds of reasons.
High tariffs made manufactured goods more expensive in the South while harming planters who exported cotton to foreign markets. The South was in favor of “free trade” because it dominated world production of cotton. OTOH, sugar planters in Louisiana favored a protected market.
It will suffice to say that everything from ethnicity to religion to racial demographics to to the culture of the founding settlers to the climate to the plantation system has conspired to create an enduring culture here that has never been on the same page as its New England counterpart.
BTW, if the Caribbean Project has proven anything, it has established that “Southern culture” owes a great deal to slavery and the plantation system, and that this cultural zone used to stretch from northern South America through the Caribbean all the way to parts of Maryland and Kentucky.
New Hampshire is slightly anomalous, except when you consider it is rural, agricultural and very Anglo
Mosin
funny, that’s about all I could figure out too. No city vote to overwhelm the rest of the state
@Stonelifter
I’ll bet it just burns you up that a bunch of starving, ragged, ethnic European peasants, from the roach-infested hulls of ships, and freezing in rat-infested tenements of Northern cities, were able to accomplish in only two generations with only their sheer will, what you privileged Southerners with your cotton fortunes and nigger slaves couldn’t do in two centuries.
I’m more American than you could ever be.
Hunter, in our European mother countries, or fatherlands, our people live/lived mostly in towns and farming villages, not many on self-sufficient farms or plantations.
They didn’t accomplish anything Chris, they showed up and piggy backed on the work of other men, because yankee industrialist lusted for more money via lower native born wages. Just like now with the mexicans
You have no idea what the word means, let alone how to actually be american. You are very lincoln like though
A third mode of existence: Scattered rural hamlets and subsistence farms and small farms were the norm from one end to the other of the Appalachian chain.
“all the way to parts of Maryland and Kentucky.”
Make that all of Maryland, plus the District of Columbia, and don’t forget Delaware!
Hunter, I wasn’t equating New England and the “Caribbean culture,” but noting a common genetic heritage and music.
“and don’t forget Delaware!” Delaware, which I know well, is another “two-states state”: The rural agricultural, conservative “Delmarvan” state begins below the canal.