#Ph.D Scholarships in England

[thewitfire]

Ph.D Scholarships in England 2023-2024

Ph.D Scholarships in England 2023-2024. #PHD #Ph.DScholarshipsinEngland

Ph.D Scholarships for England: The pursuit of a PhD is a journey of intellectual curiosity and rigorous scholarship. England, with its rich academic heritage and cutting-edge research facilities, offers a plethora of scholarship opportunities for the 2023-2024 academic year. These scholarships provide a pathway for aspiring academics to delve into research without the burden of financial…

[sempersirens]

a bird in your teeth, I

masterlist

summary: since moving into the neighborhood a couple of years ago, you've become close with the miller family. as a young woman living alone joel is protective of you, and he intends to show you how much so

pairing: joel miller x f!reader

warnings: 18+, mdni, neighbour!joel, age gap: reader is early-mid 20s, joel early 30s. no break-out. no smut (yet)

word count: ~1k

"Okay, missy. Bedtime!" Slapping your knees, you rise from your armchair to eject the copy of Notting Hill from the Millers' VCR.

You check your watch and curse softly under your breath. 10:06 pm. Joel should be pulling into the driveway any minute.

"Are there really guys like Hugh Grant back in England?" Sarah asks, tossing her quilt over her shoulder and bundling the pillows under her arm.

"If there are, I could never find them."

"That why you moved all the way across the ocean?"

You turned to Sarah, clutching your chest in mock outrage.

"Maybe. I liked the idea of finding a cowboy. Like Clint Eastwood!" You giggled and clapped your hands together. "Anyway, get upstairs before your old man gets home and initiates a Mexican standoff because I let you stay up past nine on a school night."

Smoothing down Sarah's hair, you place a quick kiss on the top of her head before scurrying her up the stairs.

"Goodnight!" She shouted over her shoulder before her bedroom door closed behind her.

Sarah was definitely old enough to look after herself on evenings like these, but since you moved into the neighborhood a few years ago it became routine to watch the teenager whenever her dad was going to be home late. Neither of you minded, you had bonded like sisters over your time spent together, despite your ten year age gap. You got the impression that Joel liked knowing you were both under one roof while he was away.

Ain't no need f'a young woman to be alone too long he would say, always eliciting an eye roll from both you and Sarah.

Living alone wasn't something that bored or intimidated you. On the contrary; independence excited you. The thrill hadn't subsided in the slightest. Texas had been more than welcoming to you since you decided to leave North London for a new life. As soon as you received the scholarship letter to undertake a Ph.D. at UT Austin, your bags were packed and you hailed a cab to Heathrow Airport.

You had, however, been immediately put at ease when you pulled up to your new home and caught a glimpse of Joel and Sarah walking to the truck in their driveway, lost in conversation, wide-eyed and giddy on an inside joke. You watched over time as the two spent their days in a blissful world of their own making, soaking up each other's company as naturally as the sun burns into the tops of your shoulders on a hot afternoon.

It had been an exceptionally warm Friday evening when Joel first knocked on your front door.

"Evening, ma'am." He had spoken, tipping his head slightly with his hands tucked loosely in his jeans pockets. Your palms had instantly turned clammy, internally praying that he didn't reach a hand forward to introduce himself.

"Hey. What can I do for you?" You had just about managed a reply between mediating your quickened breathing and trying to actually speak words rather than babble.

The rest of the encounter felt like it had flown by. Joel had invited you to a barbecue, too many burgers for jus' two people, he had reasoned. No such thing, you'd replied. Like you had needed any incentive to accept his invitation. You spent the evening with your ankles dipped in their paddling pool, belly laughing and wiping ketchup from the corners of your mouth. You'd be lying if you said your stomach didn't flutter every time Joel directed a question or comment solely toward you, or that your breath didn't hitch when you accidentally brushed fingers passing him the bottle opener. But that had been then, and you promised yourself you wouldn't get so Pride and Prejudice about a man you had just met. A single father, no less. As time passed, you spent most weekends together along with Joel's brother Tommy. Barbecues, family get-togethers, birthday parties; you were invited to them all. Weekends bled into weeknights, and you became an extension of their little family, let into their secret language of exchanged glances and inside jokes.

Lines were never crossed between you and Joel, but that knot in your stomach never seemed to fade either. You knew it was just an unreciprocated crush; misplaced gratitude for all the kindness he had shown you. Southern hospitality and charm had that effect.

Pulling you from your thoughts, Joel's truck headlights illuminated the living room. You quickly cleared the bowls of popcorn and bags of M&Ms from the coffee table before heading into the kitchen to refill your glass of water.

Joel's keys turned in the door and you heard his shoes wiping on the doormat. He called your name softly.

"In here." You responded in just above a whisper.

He walked in wearing a smart button-up, the top two undone, rubbing a hand over his stubble.

"Pint?"

"If you'd be so kind, darlin'." Joel sighed, pulling out a stool before tapping the one next to him for you to perch on.

"Date not go so well?"

"Do they ever?" He laughed as you handed him a cold bottle of beer. "Not having one f'yourself?"

"They won't if you keep expecting them to be a disaster. None for me, I need to head out soon. Meeting some friends for a few at a bar in the city."

"They're all fine women. Just got nothin' in common. S'probably me."

It made you feel dirty when Joel came back tipsy. With his guard down and inhibitions numbed, he was so open. It felt like you were taking advantage of him. You had to fight everything inside of you to argue with his self-deprecation. Of course it wasn't him. He was the perfect man. You tried to not show too much pleasure at his string of failed first dates.

"Should've told me y'had plans, sugar. I would've come back earlier so you could get goin'."

You waved his statement away. "It's no problem, the less time I'm there the better. I should probably head off, though." Before you could move to grab your keys, Joel's hand hovered over yours resting on the table.

"Thank you, by the way. I doubt I say it enough." Eye contact with Joel always stirred something inside of you. Those damn brown eyes. You smiled at him, softly.

"You don't need to thank me, Joel. I like spending time with Sarah. You know that."

He shook his head slightly. "S'not just that. I mean for everythin'. If you ever need me, you call. You know that, right? Hate thinkin' 'bout you in that house all alone."

It's not the first time he had said something of the sort. You always assumed it was the over-protective father inside of him, bursting out at the seams. Or maybe his Southern chivalry finding its feet after a couple of beers.

"Thank you, Joel. I appreciate it." You turned your hand in his and squeezed once before making your way to the door. You felt his eyes on you as you walked. You always felt his eyes on you. Sometimes you would be changing in front of your window and be sure you could feel Joel's gaze from across the street burning into you. But whenever you turned around, he was never there.

"I'm sorry your date didn't go well." You said, lingering in the doorway.

Joel scrunched his nose slightly and shook his head.

"I'm not."

a/n: hi guys! this is my first fic uploaded to tumblr lol kind of nervy but hope you guys enjoy. i plan on writing a couple more parts to this! message me for taglist for part two!

dee x

[accuratepicuresofanthropologists]

Bronislaw Malinowski

Bronislaw Malinowski and his mother Józefa, via American Ethnologist. 

During his years in England, Bronislaw Kasper Malinowski — "Bronio" to his friends — would often emphasize his noble lineage. Lofty origins were useful in the class-conscious UK, but his claim to nobility was more complicated than he made it out. Malinowski was born in 1884 in Cracow. Today that is in Poland, but in Malinowski's time it was part of Austria because Austria and several other countries had conquered Poland, sliced it into pieces, and each taken a piece for themselves. His family were Szlachta, or landed gentry, who had lost their estate and moved into the cities, where they formed a sort of educated upper-middle class. Lucjan Malinowski was a professor who had been both "the father of Polish dialectology" (wikipedia) as well as of Bronislaw, but he died young and Malinowski was raised by his mother, Jozefa.

Malinowski’s life would be marked by a curious mix of vitality and illness — he had endless energy and passion, but also suffered constantly from poor health, and often had trouble breathing. He was also his mother’s only child, and so she lavished enormous amounts of energy and attention on him. His 1908 Ph.D. in physics is written in her handwriting because he dictated it to her from his sick-bed. Malinowski's strong attachment to his mother would lead him to a lifetime of intense relationships with women.

Malinowski’s Poland may have smarted under imperial rule, but in many ways it was similar to much of Central Europe in the late nineteenth century. Cracow was a swirling mix of late-Imperial decadence, scientific progress, artistic modernism, and bohemian debauchery. One of his closest friends, Staś Witkiewicz, would become a leading Polish writer. Malinowski tried his hand at poetry and literature, but lacked his friend’s talent. What he did have was an aptitude for mathematics, philosophy, and the natural sciences. After his graduation Malinowski knocked around Europe, taking classes with notable intellectuals. Then one day he read Frazer's The Golden Bough and set his sights on anthropology. he wanted to be an anthropologist, so he moved to England and began studies at the London School of Economics.

A young Malinowski, portrayed by his friend Staś Witkiewicz from Stocking's volume Malinowski, Rivers, Benedict and Others.

The London School of Economics (or LSE) was only 15 years old at the time. It had a progressive, liberal orientation and focused on cutting edge social sciences which would help improve the world. It was on its way to becoming one of the great anthropology departments, and was far ahead of conservative Cambridge and elitist Oxford. Malinowski studied with Edward Westermark and Charles Seligman and wrote a book on kinship in aboriginal Australia, despite never having been there. Luckily, the 1914 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science was having a meeting in Australia, and Malinowski became one of the literal boat-load of scientists which left England to attend the meeting. Perhaps once he was there he could meet some real Australians and do fieldwork?

Unfortunately, Malinowski's timing was not good. On the 28th -- when Malinowski had made it as far as Sri Lanka (Young 277) -- archduke Ferdinand was assassinated by a Serbian nationalist. On 21 July Malinowski arrived in Australia (Young 290). A week later, the Austrians began shelling Belgrade, the capital of Serbia: World War I had begun. Britain (including Australia) was now at war with Austria (which included Poland). Malinowski loved his adopted home of England and had little sympathy for its enemies, who had after all conquered Poland. As a result he was, somewhat confusingly, a pro-British enemy alien. More pressingly, he was broke: his English scholarship was no longer available and his funds in Poland, where his poor mother was stuck, were frozen. Technically, he was supposed to be imprisoned. Ever the extrovert, Malinowski made the Australian government a proposition: Rather than paying for his upkeep in an Australian jail, wouldn’t it be cheaper to give him a grant to do fieldwork and send him off to Papua?

Malinowski (left) took great pains to be incredibly Coifed in all pictures. This one, taking during his Trobriands fieldwork, shows a rather frumpier side of the famous Pole. On his right is Billy Hancock. Via Flickr. 

The government agreed, and Malinowski spent the rest of the war shuttling between Australia and New Guinea. He describes himself as doing four years of fieldwork (Coral I, 453) in Papua New Guinea, but this is an exaggeration. He did three bouts of fieldwork: First there was a roughly four month stint on Mailu island, where he with the local missionary and worked with Ahuia Ova, an influential local constable and who had assisted Seligman, Malinowski's teacher. Then there were two stints of fieldwork in Milne Bay, in the Trobriand Islands. One lasted around nine months, while the second laster about four months. This is about the same length of time that Boas spent in the arctic, or the average Ph.D. student is supposed to do research. But whileMalinowski's fieldwork was hardly as epic as he presented it, it is none the less true that the amount of detail he recorded and his mastery of Kilavila was extraordinary. While people have had criticisms of his work, even now (a century later) he is considered a quality source on life in the Trobes in that period.

Bronislaw Malinowski and Elsie Malinowska with their children. I believe the elder if Józefa Mary and the younger is Wanda. Helena was born in 1925 so this picture must be from before that. Via the Malinowski Forum for Ethnography and Anthropology Project.

Elsie Malinowska, via the book The Story of a Marriage

At the close of the the war, Malinowski returned to England to teach at the LSE, first as a lecturer, then as a reader, and finally as a professor. He brought along with him his new wife, Elsie Masson, who was herself an author and ethnographer (her book on rural Australia came out in 1915). Malinowski's lungs needed dry air, so they purchased a home in the Austrian alps. Malinowski would teach in England and then spend the rest of the year with his wife and their two daughters. They also vacationed in the Canary Islands, and it is there that Malinowski wrote Argonauts of the Western Pacific. Elsie helped edit his English and made suggestions. The book that made his reputation and turned him into a world-wide authority on anthropology.

The standard picture of Malinowski at the LSE, via the LSE

Freud was very popular in this period, and Malinowski would do anything for attention, so he wrote ethnographies of the Tribes with scandalous names like Crime and Custom in Savage Society, Sex and Repression in Savage Society, and The Sexual Life of Savages in North-West Melanesia. These titles, which Malinowski intended to be provocative, drive indigenous scholars to fits today. Much of them are pedestrian accounts of kinship and customary law. But there are also descriptions of the erotic life of Papua New Guineans, including sex and sexual fantasy which are relatively scholarly and sober -- and probably not based on the informed consent of his research subjects. Malinowski is an anthropologist that many loved to hate.

Bronislaw Malinowski around 1920, via the LSE’s Formal LSE Staff Portraits Flickr account. The LSE has done a great job putting resources about its history online for anyone to see.

Throughout the 1920s, Malinowski and the LSE became a center for anthropology. He trained a generation of students in his famous seminar, and was especially supportive of women students. His male students often had a more difficult relationship, since Malinowski was always very competitive with men. Max Gluckman and E.E. Evans-Pritchard found Malinowski brilliant and infuriating and ended up gravitating to A.R. Radcliffe-Brown. During this period the Rockefeller Foundation and other philanthropic foundations funded all anthropology, and Malinowski eagerly embraced them. He stole funding away from racist approaches to anthropology, as well as from his frenemy A.R. Radcliffe-Brown. He championed 'applied anthropology' in Africa, sending students there (rather than to Melanesia) and encouraging reforms to the often-harsh colonial regime. He promoted the idea of 'functionalism': the notion that every part of a culture must serve a function in serving the well-being of an individual. He and Radcliffe-Brown went on a tour of the United States (paid for by Rockefeller) in 1926, meeting Franz Boas. A new, transatlantic anthropology was beginning to form.

Bronislaw Malinowski (center) with Ruth and Alden Jones at Jackrabbit Ruin on the Tohono O’odham reservation in 1939, via the Journal of the Southwest.

While the 1930s were a time of success for Malinowski, the 1930s were much more complicated. His two volume description of farming in the Trobes, Coral Gardens and Their Magic appeared in 1935. It was extremely accurate but not of theoretical interest to those not planting yams in Milne Bay. Malinowski developed the reputation (which remains today) as a great ethnographer and unimpressive theorist. The same year, his wife Elsie died after a long illness. Then, he was on another tour of the United States when World War II broke out. With U-boats patrolling the Atlantic, he was advised to say in the US for the duration of the war. Luckily, Malinowski was able to find a position at Yale (he succeeded Edward Sapir). He remarried, carried out fieldwork in Oaxaca, and was preparing to undertake a broader study of that area. He wrote and lectured widely on the evils of fascism and the Nazis. His health, never good, finally gave out in 1942. He was 58 years old. He is buried in Connecticut.

Bronislaw Malinowski (in white hat). On his left is Alfonso Villa Rojas, on his right Don Manuel. Via Malinowski in Mexico.

Memorial plaque in Omarakana commemorating Malinowski's fieldwork in Polish and English. Via Wikipedia

Sources: This article draws from Michael Young's biography of Malinowski.

[distilled-prose]

From Facebook 5/30/23

Star Lady

“Young people, especially young women, often ask me for advice. Here it is. Do not undertake a scientific career in quest of fame or money. There are easier and better ways to reach them. Undertake it only if nothing else will satisfy you. Cecilia Payne

1925 – Harvard Observatory – Cambridge, Massachusetts: Most people know that Isaac Newton discovered gravity, Charles Darwin his theory of evolution and Albert Einstein the relativity of time. But almost 100 years since her discovery of the composition of the stars, few know the name Cecilia Payne. Her road to the stars had plenty of twists and turns.

Raised by a single mother in the small town of Wendover, England, Cecilia graduated high school in 1919. There was no money to attend college, so she worked hard to earn a scholarship to Cambridge University. Cecilia wanted to study science but was unsure which field until she participated in a lecture about the 1919 total solar eclipse – the longest eclipse in 500 years. Astronomy and astrophysics became her love.

In 1923, women were not welcome in the world of science. When Cecilia completed her degree in astronomy, Cambridge refused to award her a degree. It would be 25 years before Cambridge awarded degrees to women. After realizing there would be no opportunity for graduate work, Cecilia left England for Harvard University in America – one of the only academic institutes that accepted women in physics.

Cecilia received a graduate fellowship to study at the Harvard Observatory. At the time, astronomers believed that the earth and the sun consisted of the same chemical elements.

Cecilia’s doctoral thesis, Stellar Atmospheres, used the new science of quantum physics to determine if this hypothesis was true

Cecilia could study the color spectrums of several hundred thousand stars archived in the observatory by attaching a spectroscope to a telescope. She demonstrated how to decode complicated starlight spectra to determine the chemical elements in the stars. For the first time, Cecilia discovered that the sun and stars consisted primarily of hydrogen and helium. At the same time, the earth was known to consist of more than 100 elements.

Cecilia’s astronomy advisor, Harlow Shapely, was so excited about her discovery that he sent a copy of her thesis to the distinguished Princeton University astronomer, Dr. Henry Norris Russell. Russell responded, “This is clearly impossible. It contradicts prevailing wisdom.”

In 1925, 25-year-old Cecilia Payne became the first person to earn a Ph.D. in astronomy from Radcliffe College because Harvard did not grant doctoral degrees to women. She inserted a disclaimer in her thesis to protect her career: “The calculated abundances of hydrogen and helium were almost certainly not real.” Russell published Cecilia’s discovery four years later and took the credit for himself.

After completing her doctoral work, Cecilia remained at Harvard and worked for Shapely. Although she did the same job as other professors, her title and salary were that of a technical assistant. There were no female professor positions. Cecilia and her team made more than three million observations of stars’ light spectrums helping scientists and astronomers to better understand the origins of the universe. Much of her work was done with Russian astronomer Sergei Gaposchkin, whom she married in 1934.

In 1956, more than 30 years after her landmark discovery, and despite the grumbling of some professors, 56-year-old Dr. Cecilia Payne became the first woman promoted to full professor at Harvard. She also became the first woman to chair the astronomy department. Cecilia retired from teaching at Harvard a decade later. Despite retirement, she continued her research as a member of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.

In 1976, in a touch of irony, Cecilia Payne received the Henry Norris Russell Prize presented by the America Astronomical Society. Distinguished astronomer, Otto Struve, referred to her doctoral work as “the most brilliant Ph.D. thesis ever written in astronomy.”

She died three years later. Her obituary reads in part, “Cecilia Helena Payne-Gaposchkin, a pioneering astrophysicist and probably the most eminent woman astronomer of all time, died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on December 7, 1979.”

Cecilia blazed a trail for women at Harvard and beyond, inspiring several generations of women to study science and astronomy. In 2008, in recognition of her pioneering work in understanding the composition of the stars and the universe, the Institute of Physics established the Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin Medal and Prize.

[ramrodd]

COMMENTARY:

In regards to the absolute existential substance of the Resurrection that is the essential anchor of History as a Post Modern Historic Deconstruction sub-genre to the literature of the Bible. The Bible contains all genres and History is the forensic record of Anthropology as the residue of the Mythos of the age. The problem with the current academic culture of History is that it is dominated by a toxic paternalism lingering from the actual politics of the radical liberals of the 60s was dominated by the pre-19th Amendment cultural norm of male dominance. The 19th Amendment is all about Mary of Magdalene. One of the things Jesus came to earth to fix was the strategic misogamy of Moses's corruption of God's Commandments to the 10 Commandments.

Molly Worthen is the first female Ph.D in Biblical scholarship to escape the orbit of the toxic paternalism of the current History debate in the academe, It was that way coming out of the campus protests that resulted in the take=over of Columbia in 1968 in a campaign to avoid going to Vietnam, Dr. Worthen has determined, from the literature, that the Resurrection occurred pretty much as reported in the body of literature surrounding the Gospels and Acts,, including Paul's sabbatical treatise on the ethical system of Jesus totally within the boundary of circumcision, Pauline Theology is Jesus Judaism, the essence of the Hellenistic Judaism of the mid-platonic school of Philo of Alexandria. The Overture to the Gospel of john, 1:1 -18 is right out of Philo's mission statement.

Dr. Worthen can explain for herself how she arrived at that conclusion and that process is who she broke free of the orbit of the toxic paternalism of the debate in the History departments of the American university system, but Dr. Worthens epiphany was the moment she left Plato's Cave and stepped into the light of the Son, (intentional pun).

Dr. Worthen' s epiphany will have the same effect on current academic historical trends that P-52 has had on the theory that the Gospel of John was written no earlier than 130 and probably 200 Ce.

Your conceit, Giggles, that the Gospel of Mark is derivative of Pauline Theology, is a perfect example of the Marxist dialectic at work in the Post Modern Historic Deconstruction, But if you turn your scholarship on its head, everything you have written since Misquoting Jesus was achieve a new focus that totally validates your "Born Again" experience. Dr. Worthen has the evidence in the Gospel of Mark that validates your Christian vocation, You have yet to write your opus of Misquoting Jesus and Dr. Worthen will remind you when you left Plato's Cave and stood in the light of the Son and went back down into the cave to bring everyone else up with you.

The Gospels are more true than Harry Potter, but lead in exactly the same direction, Harry Potter is the Druid version of Christianity, in the same way The Lord of the Rings is the Druid Version of Pauline Theology, as interpreted by N; T; Wright, The King James Bible is the Druid interpretation of the Greek manuscripts within the context of the Covenant of the Talking Cross.

The Church of England exists totally withing the Druid Mythos of Midsummer's Nights Dream, with Boudicca, queen of Battle, their patron saint in exactly the same manner as Jean d'Arc. The XP on Constantine's shield's at the Milvian Bridge was a Druid talisman of Boudicca, queen of Battle, This dismayed Maxentius's soldiers and threw the Moral advantage to Constantine, who also commanded the high ground.

You need to consider Dr. Worthen's epiphany as a talisman of Boudicca, Queen of Battle in the literature of the Bible.

[smutsalon2024]

Bunny The Secret History meets Heathers meets Alice in Wonderland. Bunny, by Mona Awad is an American contemporary horror novel published in June 2019 by Penguin Books. Bunny is darkly funny, seductive, and an extremely absurd novel that follows a year in the life of a lonely graduate student, Samantha Heather Mackey (nod to the 1988 musical Heathers), drawn into a social clique of rich girls who seem to move and speak as one.  Samantha is an outsider at her small, highly selective MFA program at New England's Warren University. She is a scholarship student who prefers the company of her dark imagination and her best friend, Ava, over spending time having “Bento boxes😊” with the rest of her fiction writing cohort--a clique of unbearably rich twee girls who call each other "Bunny," and are often found braiding each other’s hair or entangled in a group hug so tight that Samantha always thinks “their chests will implode” (3).  Bunny, I love you.  I love you, Bunny. Everything changes for Samantha when she receives an invitation letter to the Bunny's writing workshop fabled “Smut Salon,” and soon finds herself drawn to the front door of the Bunny's house – ditching her only friend, Ava, a rebellious art school dropout in the process. As Samantha falls deeper down the rabbit hole of the social hive’s saccharine yet sinister Bunny cult, the edges of reality begin to blur, and her friendships with Ava and the Bunnies are brought into a gory collision.  Through the events of Samantha ditching her best friend to introduce herself to the Bunny cult, in-class lectures at Warren’s elite narrative writing classes, and tango dance classes with Ava; Mona Awad brings themes of Absurdism, social indoctrination, internalized misogyny, clique mentality, the creative process, and mental health into her whimsical horror tale.  About The Author Mona Awad is the Canadian-American author of Bunny, All’s Well and 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl. Bunny is her second novel, and was a finalist for a Goodreads Choice Award for Best Horror, the New England Book Award, and won the Ladies of Horror Fiction Best Novel Award. Bunny is being optioned for film with Bad Robot Productions.  Awad earned an MFA from Brown University and an MSc degree in English from the University of Edinburgh where she studied horror in fairy tales. In 2018, she completed a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Literary Studies at the University of Denver. Now she teaches creative writing at Syracuse University and lives in Boston.

[eternal-echoes]

“Although the extent of the practice varied over the centuries, monks were teachers. Saint John Chrysostom tells us that already in his day (c. 347-407) it was customary for people in Antioch to send their sons to be educated by the monks. Saint Benedict instructed the sons of Roman nobles.1 Saint Boniface established a school in every monastery he founded in Germany, and in England Saint Augustine and his monks set up schools wherever they went.2 Saint Patrick is given credit for encouraging Irish scholarship, and the Irish monasteries would develop into important centers of learning, dispensing instruction to monks and laymen alike.3”

- Thomas E. Woods Jr., Ph.D., “How the Monks Saved Civilization,” How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization

—

1 & 2 Charles Montalembert, The Monks of the West: From Saint Benedict to Saint Bernard, vol. 5 (London: Nimmo, 1896)

3. Thomas Cahill, How the Irish Saved Civilization (New York: Dou-bleday, 1995), 150, 158.

[thisbluespirit]

I made a post about the lure of Dame Edith Evans that brought James Maxwell from the US to the UK, but the flipside of that is, of course, to ask what he was leaving behind him.

The draw of the Old Vic was clearly a big one, and once he got there, it wasn’t only the theatre work that kept him in the UK - he met his wife Avril Elgar there and they married early in 1952.  But it does seem that in some way he wasn’t happy in the US - England was quickly home to him, and he didn’t want to go back. According to Braham Murray, his fellow artistic director at the Royal Exchange, "He had disliked America, disliked academia and had fled to England.” 

His friends also noted a deep contradiction in him - that he was highly intellectual and yet hated academia or to be thought of as such, but that he couldn’t help being so “by dint of grey matter.” He was, said Braham Murray, possessed of an encyclopaedic knowledge of music and literature and easily the intellectual match of their fellow directors Caspar Wrede and Michael Elliott, though he disguised it “behind a languid and tolerant drawl,” giving “the impression that he wasn't sure of anything much.“ Tom Courtenay, meeting him as a student, felt he was “far more intelligent than anyone teaching at RADA,” and to Caspar Wrede he was “the most cultured, musical and literate friend we all have ever had.” 

His background wasn’t as average as he liked to imply, although in contrast to some of the group he hung around with*, it probably was more regular and stable - and records give the impression of a close family.  (Braham Murray has nothing to say about any issues with James’s family or his father, unlike some of the other people he mentions in his autobiography.)

* [To put in context: He was not, for instance, the seventh son of a Finnish Baron, and didn’t have an uncle who sent female members of the family mad.]

So, why did an otherwise fairly reasonable-seeming son of a US professor come away with such a lifelong loathing for academia and possibly the country of his birth?  Well, that’s a question only he could really answer, but I can at least throw some light on the matter!

While James Maxwell was American - he was born James Ackley Maxwell Jr  in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1929 - both of his parents were  Canadian, so he may easily have felt as much Canadian as American, growing up.  The family returned to Nova Scotia several times to visit relatives while he and his older brother William (born in 1927) were young, and neither of his parents became US citizens.

[Main Street, Westville, Pictou County, Nova Scotia in 1910.]

His father, James Ackley Maxwell Sr, was the son of William Maxwell, a successful coal owner from Westville, Nova Scotia, and his wife Anna Marshall, but his path to academia hadn’t been smooth.  When he reached adulthood, World War I was in progress, and study had to wait on duty.  In 1915, aged 18, he left his post as a bank clerk to join the Nova Scotia Highlanders, where he rose to the rank of Lieutenant by the age of 21 and received the Distinguished Conduct Medal for an “extremely high act of bravery” at the Battle of Amiens.  He “carried himself in a magnificent, soldierly manner and displayed the greatest devotion to duty...” inspiring “with confidence all with whom he came in contact. He went from section to section as they held up by his skill and coolness cleared the opposition and made advance of the company possible.”

After the war, James Sr finally got to down to serious study - first at Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia (1919-21), before leaving for the US to study at Harvard (1921-23), where he also gained a Ph.D in Economics (1923-27), thanks to a scholarship.  By that time he was already an assistant professor at Clark University (from 1925), where he would remain until his retirement in 1966.

[James Ackley Maxwell, via SaltWire; background Clark University, from their website.]

He specialised in  Public Finance and Fiscal Policy and was in demand as a public policy adviser to the US government throughout his career.  Outside the US, he acted on various occasions as adviser to the Royal Commission on Provincial Financial Relations in Ottawa, was a visiting lecturer at Melbourne University and National University, Australia, and at the Brookings Institute in Washington, and took part in the International Institute of Public Finance in Istanbul, Turkey.  He wrote several books, including Tax Credits and Intergovernmental Fiscal Relations, Financing State and Local Governments, Tax Credits and Intergovernmental Fiscal Relations, The Fiscal Impact on Federalism in the United States and Commonwealth State Financial Relations in Australia, work that displayed “his command over a most complex and intricate area of public finance.” 

[Conant Hall, Harvard - the post-grads’ hall - where James Maxwell Sr was living at the time of his marriage.]

He married Reta Nickerson in 1923, shortly after her arrival in the US.  She was also from Nova Scotia, born in Halifax in 1897.  They must have met before he left for the US in 1921 and probably had to wait on his studies to marry.  James Sr was living in Harvard’s Conant Hall, while she was staying nearby at Hingham.

She had also had a college education and, now as Professor Maxwell’s wife, was involved with campus life at Clark - having students back to the house after the Spring Spree, or attending meetings of the Massachusetts branch of the American Association of University Women, who were at the time, concerned with the experiences of foreign students.  She was a singer and musician, although not, it seems, professionally as such.  She was a soprano and soloist and did sing in public on occasions.  In 1934 she assisted (a friend?) Annie Russell Marble in her work collecting songs of latter-day poets, by accompanying her to talks to sing some of the songs at various places, including the association’s meetings and Boston Public Library.  One of them was “O Moonlight Deep and Tender” by poet James Russell Lowell, to music composed in 1921 by Henry Leland Clarke.

James Maxwell spoke of inheriting his love of music from her, and how he, too, had started out as a singer - as an actor in musical theatre and had considered at first making that his career. 

[2 Stoneland Road, off Main Street, Worcester, close to Clark University.  The Maxwells were living here in 1930, in a flat separate from the main house.  Later that year, James & Reta made a trip back to Canada with their two young sons, William aged 3 and James Jr, 18 months.]

Clark University had been founded in 1887 as a post-graduate research university, with Clark College for undergraduates from 1902.  The two amalgamated under new president Wallace W. Atwood in 1920, a few years before Professor Maxwell joined the staff.  It was one of the fourteen founding members of the Association of American Universities (one of three in New England; the other two being Harvard and Yale).  Although female post-graduate students had been permitted since 1907, the undergraduate courses were male-only until 1942.

The campus is on Main Street, and centres around the green.  The Maxwells lived very close to the university in both 1930 and 40, so James and William must have grown up very familiar with its grounds.

[1930s postcard of Clark University, showing various buildings, including the Library.]

In 1938, Professor Maxwell was invited to lecture at either Melbourne University or the National University in Australia, or both - and he took Reta and the two boys with him, so James Maxwell had made a cross-continental voyage long before he left for the UK, and got to see something of a third continent.  I’m not sure how long the Maxwells were in Australia, but they left Sydney for the US on the SS Mariposa on 19th August, arriving in San Francisco on 6th September.  

[5 Shirley Street, close to Clark campus, where the Maxwells where living in 1940s.]

Once back in the US, nine-year old James must have resumed his usual studies - and it’s clear that his friends weren’t exaggerating his intellectual abilities.  His scholastic achievements earned him a place at Mercersburg Academy in Pennsylvania, a college prepatory boarding school (boys only at that time).  It currently accommodates 444 students.   The age range was 14-18, so presumably he started in fall 1943 - but he graduated only two years later, at 16. 

His classes included German (which he would later use to translate Buechner & Schiller).  The Academy was founded in 1836 and had several long-standing traditions, some of which continue today. Pupils regularly gathered on the Main Steps to sing, and all students belonged to one of two Literary societies, who competed against each other in a midwinter weeklong competition that could be intense and culminated in a debate-like event known as the Declamation.  James Maxwell belonged to the John Marshall Literary Society and it looks as if he may have played a significant part in the 1945 competition, perhaps as one of the five John Marshall students to give a monologue in the Declamation.  (The yearbook is online, but only as a preview, so I could be mistaken.)

[Mercersburg Academy chapel, 1930s or 40s postcard.]

The school had 300 acres of grounds, plus its own chapel, and doctor - but it was still an institution, and 420 or so miles away from his family in Worcester.  The local doctor’s son, growing up at the same time in Mercersburg comforted himself through a bad bout of scarlet fever that at least he got to be at home, unlike the “Students at the Academy [who], we knew, were removed from the dormitories by Dr. Hitzrot and made to tough it out in a separate building near the Infirmary that we called The Pest House.”

[The 1945 Karux (Mercersburg yearbook) is only partially viewable to  passing Brits who can’t enter their own high school graduation details, but despite the blurriness, you can see a small "JAMES ACKLEY MAXWELL JR.”  He’s signed: “Best of luck [?], James.”]

While he was studying there his family life changed dramatically.

On 1 February 1944, his mother Reta died, aged 47.  James was still not quite fifteen.  I don’t know the circumstances of her death, although the distance from Mercersburg inevitably raises the question of whether or not he was able to be there.   It wasn’t the only family loss that month, although it must have been the most significant for James.  Back in Nova Scotia, his grandfather William Maxwell also passed away on the 13th.

James continued at Mercersburg until his early graduation in 1945, after which he went straight onto Amherst College in Massachusetts.

In 1946 Professor Maxwell married again, this time to Mary Newall.  The couple went on to have three more children over the next few years - Daniel, Anne, and Ellen.

By that time, James Jr had been at Amherst for a year.  He started in 1945, aged 16, and continued to do well, graduating in 1949 magna cum laude (with great disinction).  Amherst was another male-only educational institution, but it allowed him to explore more of his his own interests - after starting out in Glee Club in his first year, he joined the drama club, The Masquers, which was where he first became seriously interested in acting as a career. By his last year, he was vice president of The Masquers, and even got the chance to play Brutus in a production of Julius Caesar recorded at the Folger Library and broadcast on TV.

[James Maxwell, third row, in the ‘Lord Jeff Club’.]

He also avoided joining one of the more traditional frat socities and instead opted for the Lord Jeffrey Amherst Club, described in the yearbook as “a new and different kind of social organization on the Amherst campus.”  It was “completely democratic, and no unaffiliated student is barred from membership for any other than scholastic reasons” and they invited faculty members and visitors to lead political, social & economic discussions. 

He graduated from Amherst in 1949, but it was another year before he left for the UK.  I don’t know what he was doing, but Caspar Wrede, who had known him since his arrival at the Old Vic in 1950, wrote that he “studied at Yale.”  A post-grad course of some kind is certainly feasible, given his claim of having run away from academia, and Yale would put him in the right area to be able to see Edith Evans on Broadway that September. 

[Extract from Google Maps, showing (L-R) Amherst, Worcester, Harvard & Hingham (where Reta Maxwell was staying at the time of her marriage).]

So, as to why he was so set against academia, it’s clear that he had already experienced a surfeit of it, from his childhood at Clark, through Mercersburg, to Amherst and maybe even elsewhere, after.  Despite the elegant buildings and privilege of his scholastic institutions and their beautiful surroundings, James Maxwell preferred smoggy, dirty, war-damaged 1950s London - and a theatre school that might be world-famous but was “the aesthetic equivalent of a boot camp.”  One, some, or all of these places left him with his lifelong distaste for academia in the US, even if we can’t know exactly which, while the death of his mother and remarriage of his father may have made it easier to leave than it otherwise might have been. 

Whatever the case, he didn’t leave forever in 1950 - he went back to the States the summer of 1951, after his first year at the Old Vic Theatre School, even if it appears to have been the last time.  The address he planned to stay at was his father’s, despite his dramatic exit the previous year.  He never gave up his US citizenship, either, settling for dual citizenship status through his marriage to Avril Elgar.  And (whether coincidentally or not) their younger son Dan shares the same name as his half-brother Daniel.

He had a gardening anecdote he used to tell Tom Courtenay, on the subject of transplantation - that he had a shrub in his garden, in a spot where it wasn’t getting enough light, but it had a tap root, so couldn’t be moved:  “It will have to stay where it is,” he said.  “It may have to have a less than perfect life.”

[sources: Braham Murray The Worst It Can Be Is A Disaster; Tom Courtenay Dear Tom; The Royal Exchange Theatre Company Words & Pictures 1976-1998; US/Canada Border records, ancestry; Field Family Tree website; irwincollier.com; “Westville’s War Hero Economist” SaltWire; Boston Globe (various, 1920s-1960s); Cambridge Chronicle 1923; Ancestry.com 1930 US census & 1940 census, Maxwell household; Clark University website; Boston Symphony Orchestra 53rd Season 1933/4; Wellesley College News, 1934; The Stage, 1968; Wikipedia; Ancestry US Passenger records; The Karux1945 via Classmates & e-yearbook.com; Mercersburg Historical Society; Findagrave James Ackley Maxwell & Reta Nickerson Maxwell; The Olio 1948, 1949, Amherst College website; Aberdeen Evening Press July 1964; Google Maps; Michael Billington State of the Nation: British Theatre Since 1945; various images from Google StreetView & Google Images.]

[seatownpublishing]

Annotated bibliography...a writing and researching tool

Starting off annotating some sources I’ve already read. An annotated bib entry consists of citation and annotation. Obviously I’m gonna do a toned down, informal version of it because there’s a considerable criteria (100-300 words, summary, source’s strengths and weaknesses, conclusions, relevance, relationship to other studies in the field, evaluation of the research methodology, author’s background, personal conclusions). Yes, I am using MLA. Don’t hate me LOL.

Allison, R. J. The Coastal Landforms of West Dorset. London: Geologists' Association, 1992. Print.

What it says on the tin. This slim volume is a comprehensive survey of the geomorphology of the Dorset coast of England. While it is a scientific work, there is no conclusion; it’s basically just reference. As my novel is centered around landscape it’s important that I know what every part of the beach and cliffs are called. Robert Allison has his own wiki page. Earned a Ph.D. in Geography from King's College London and a CBE this year, list of creds as long as your arm, so he’s legit. Generally, this is a must-have volume for understanding how the landscape was formed and how it’s changed. 

Muriel A. Arber, The Coastal Landslips of West Dorset, Proceedings of the Geologists’ Association, Volume 52, Issue 3, 1941, Pages 273-IN10, ISSN 0016-7878, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0016-7878(41)80010-8.

This is a gem of a pamphlet. The geologist I’m in contact with sent me a PDF and it’s so useful. Arber (1913-2004) was a well-loved geologist who drew from her education and traditional sources as well. It’s the same kind of source as Dr. Allison’s but with a more relevant historical placement, as she wrote this in the 1940s and my book is set in the 1920s. One of the best things I found in here is the etymology of a particular cliff name. 

Darton, F. J. H. The Soul of Dorset. Boston and New York, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1922.

I’ve gotten a lot of good out of this one. It’s written around the period I’m writing in, so it gives me some great context. Darton was an author, publisher, and historian of children's literature. He wrote with great passion about Dorset and the places I know which is something to aspire to. I’m not sure about his methodology, but I’m certain it he was an intrepid and determined researcher whose travels likely contributed to his death. While not a technical or scientific guide, his work captures what it’s like to actually be at one with the landscape. 

Myers, Charles S. “A Contribution to the Study of Shell Shock.” The Lancet, vol. 185, no. 4772, 1915, pp. 316–320., doi:10.1016/s0140-6736(00)52916-x.

This is tough to read. Renowned English physician Charles Myers did not invent the term “shell shock” but he was the first to write an academic paper on the condition in The Lancet in 1915. He was instrumental in advocating for the traumatized soldier and fought against much opposition within the medical field. My main character has PTSD so understanding it in the context of war, and more importantly in the context of war-time and immediately post-war scholarship is vital as the characters would not have a modern understanding of PTSD. Also important is historically accurate word usage and attitudes. 

These are my main sources so far but I also have others I need to read and a whole pile of what is referred to as “works consulted.” Many professors are against the use of works consulted as they find it superfluous and go by the logic that if you don’t cite something in an academic work it need not be included in the bibliography. While that’s a fair point, in the context of a novel as opposed to an academic paper I feel that a works consulted is somewhat useful and necessary to "covering all my bases” when it comes to understanding an historical era. 

[multipleservicelisting]

Mary Catherine Bateson Dies at 82; Anthropologist on Lives of Women

Mary Catherine Bateson, a cultural anthropologist who was the author of quietly groundbreaking books on women’s lives — and who as the only child of Margaret Mead had once been one of the most famous babies in America — died on Jan. 2 in Dartmouth, N.H. She was 81.

Her husband, J. Barkev Kassarjian, confirmed the death, at a hospice facility. He did not specify the cause but said she had suffered a fall earlier that week and experienced brain damage.

Dr. Bateson’s parents, Dr. Mead and Gregory Bateson, an Englishman, were celebrated anthropologists who fell in love in New Guinea while both were studying the cultures there. (Dr. Mead was married to someone else at the time.) They treated their daughter’s arrival almost as more field work, documenting her birth on film — not a typical practice in 1939 — and continuing to record her early childhood with the intention of using the footage not just as home movies but also as educational material. (Dr. Bateson’s first memory of her father was with a Leica camera hanging from his neck.)

Benjamin Spock was her pediatrician — she was Dr. Spock’s first baby, it was often said — and his celebrated books on child care drew from lessons learned by Dr. Mead.

Still, it wasn’t her babyhood, her lineage or her scholarship — an expert on classical Arabic poetry, she was as polymathic as her mother — that brought Dr. Bateson renown; it was her 1989 book “Composing a Life,” an examination of the stop-and-start nature of women’s lives and their adaptive responses — “life as an improvisatory art,” as she wrote.

In the book, Dr. Bateson used her own history and those of four friends as examples of ambitious women at midlife. (She was 50 at the time of its publication.) All five had lived long enough to have experienced loss, the strains of motherhood, sexism, racism, career setbacks and betrayals. In Dr. Bateson’s case, she had been ousted as dean of faculty at Amherst College in Massachusetts in an apparent back-room deal orchestrated by male colleagues. It left her hurt at first; her anger would take years to blossom.

Jane Fonda hailed Dr. Bateson’s 1989  book as an inspiration, as did Hillary Clinton, who as first lady invited Dr. Bateson to advise her.

Written with wry compassion and a behavorial scientist’s sharp eye, the book became in its way an unassumimg blockbuster and a touchstone for feminists. Jane Fonda hailed it as an inspiration, as did Hillary Clinton, who as first lady invited Dr. Bateson to advise her.

“Reading ‘Composing a Life’ made me gnash my teeth and weep,” the author and Ms. magazine co-founder Jane O’Reilly wrote in The New York Times Book Review in 1989. “I scribbled all over the margins, turned down every other page corner and underlined passages with such ferocity that my desk was flecked with broken-off pencil points.”

The insights in the book, Dr. Bateson wrote, “started from a disgruntled reflection on my own life as a sort of desperate improvisation in which I was constantly trying to make something coherent from conflicting elements to fit rapidly changing settings,” as if she were rummaging frantically in the fridge to make a meal for unexpected guests.

dMary Catherine Bateson was born on Dec. 8, 1939, in New York City. Her father was in England at the time; an avowed atheist, he sent his wife a congratulatory telegram instructing, “Do Not Christen.”

Mary Catherine was reared according to the rituals and practices her parents had observed in their fieldwork, including being breastfed on demand; her mother would consult with Dr. Spock. So committed was Dr. Mead to record-keeping that when Mary Catherine was in college and wanted to throw out her childhood artwork, her mother declared that she had no right to do so.

Mary Catherine grew up in Manhattan, mostly in the ground floor apartments of two townhouses in Greenwich Village that Dr. Mead shared in succession with friends who lived on the upper floors. As Dr. Mead was often away from home for work — or, when at home, working full-time — it was a convenient living arrangement: Mary Catherine could be looked after when necessary by a full bench of unofficial siblings and their parents, as well as an English nanny and her adolescent daughter.

Dr. Mead’s housekeeping techniques were also novel: When home, she cooked and ate dinner with her daughter but eschewed dishwashing, so as not to waste time that could be better spent with Mary Catherine or on her work. Day after day, dishes piled up in dizzying verticals “like a Chinese puzzle,” awaiting a maid who would arrive on Mondays, as Dr. Bateson recalled in an earlier book, “With a Daughter’s Eye: A Memoir of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson” (1984).

The memoir is an affectionate yet sober portrait of two very complicated people. “One of the premises of the household in which I grew up,” Dr. Bateson wrote diplomatically, “was that there was no clear line between objectivity and subjectivity, that observation does not preclude involvement.”

In his review of the book in The Times, Anatole Broyard noted that Dr. Bateson had brought “almost as much sophistication to bear on the picture of her childhood and her parents as they did on her.”

“We are used to novelists and poets giving us their highly colored or hyperbolic versions of their fathers and mothers,” he went on, “but Miss Bateson, who was born in 1939, is a behavioral scientist as well as a writer with considerable literary skill.”

Her parents were married for 14 years before divorcing. Dr. Mead died in 1978 at 76. Gregory Batesman died in 1980 at 76.

Mary Catherine attended the private Brearley School in Manhattan. At 16, after accompanying her mother on a trip to Israel for one of Dr. Mead’s lectures, she stayed behind and spent part of that year on a kibbutz, where she learned Hebrew. Over the years she would also learn classical Arabic, Armenian, Turkish, Tagalog, Farsi and Georgian, the latter because she thought it would be fun.

She entered Radcliffe at 17, studied Semitic languages and history, and graduated in two and a half years. She had already met Dr. Kassarjian, a Harvard graduate student at the time, but promised her mother that she would not marry until she finished college. She earned her Ph.D. in linguistics and Middle Eastern languages at Harvard in 1963; her husband earned his there in business administration.

Early in their marriage, she and Dr. Kassarjian lived in the Philippines and then Iran, following his career running Harvard-related graduate institutes in those countries. Dr. Bateson found work as an academic and an anthropologist, learning Tagalog in the Philippines and Farsi in Iran to do so. They lived in Iran for seven years, until they were forced out in the late 1970s by the revolution there, having to leave most of their possessions behind.

Dr. Bateson taught at Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Brandeis University and Spelman College in Atlanta, among other institutions. At her death, she was professor emerita of anthropology and English at George Mason University in Virginia and a visiting scholar at the Center on Aging & Work at Boston College.

Her husband is a professor emeritus of management at Babson College in Wellesley, Mass., and professor emeritus of strategy and organization at the International Institute for Management Development in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Dr. Bateson published a number of books on human development, creativity and spirituality, including “Composing a Further Life: The Age of Active Wisdom” (2010).

In addition to her husband, she is survived by their daughter, Sevanne Kassarjian; her half sister, Nora Bateson; and two grandsons.

At her death, Dr. Bateson was working on a book titled “Love Across Difference,” about how diversity of all stripes — gender, culture and nationality — can be a source of insight, collaboration and creativity.

    Multiple Service Listing for Business Owners | Tools to Grow Your Local Business

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[creepingsharia]

Thanksgiving on the Net: Roast Bull with Cranberry Sauce

Debunking revisionist history about Thanksgiving. Take the time to read it all, print it,  and share it with your children no matter what age they are.

EDITORS NOTE: Due to the length of this article it has been presented here in three (3) parts. You may access the other pages by clicking the links at the bottom of this page or from the 'Related Links' section in the right column of the page.

http://www.sail1620.org/discover_feature_thanksgiving_on_the_net_roast_bull_with_cranberry_sauce_part_1.shtml

Thanksgiving on the Net:  Roast Bull with Cranberry Sauce Part 1

by Jeremy D. Bangs

Jeremy Bangs (Ph.D., Leiden University), a Fellow of the Pilgrim Society, is Director of the Leiden American Pilgrim Museum, having previously been Visiting Curator of Manuscripts at Pilgrim Hall Museum, Chief Curator at Plimoth Plantation, and Curator of the Leiden Pilgrim Documents Center. Among his books are "Pilgrim Edward Winslow: New England's First International Diplomat" (2004); "Indian Deeds, Land Transactions in Plymouth Colony, 1620-1691" (2002); and "The Seventeenth-Century Town Records of Scituate, Massachusetts" (3 vols, 1997-1999-2001), all published by the New England Historic Genealogical Society. He has written many articles about the Pilgrims and Plymouth Colony, and is currently completing the manuscript of a book about the Pilgrims and Leiden. He was awarded the Distinguished Mayflower Scholarship Award by the Society of Mayflower Descendants in the Commonwealth of PA in 2001. Bangs is among a small, select number of historians of the Pilgrims (those who have no family relation to them whatsoever!). He has also published articles and books on Dutch history and art history of the 16th and 17th centuries.

Setting people straight about Thanksgiving myths has become as much a part of the annual holiday as turkey, cranberry sauce, and pumpkin pie. But should historians bother? Jane Kamensky, a professor of history at Brandeis, thinks not. She asks on the website "Common-Place" (in 2001) whether it's worth while "to plumb the bottom of it all - to determine, for example, [...] whether Plymouth's 'Pilgrims' were indeed the grave-robbing hypocrites that UAINE describes [i.e. United American Indians of New England]. [...] Was the 'first Thanksgiving' merely a pretext for bloodshed, enslavement, and displacement that would follow in later decades? Combing period documents and archaeological evidence, we might peel away some of the myths [...] But to do so would be to miss a fundamental point of these holidays. [...] in this new millenium, these sacred secular rites are once again pressed into service - this time by new nations, with new visions of the present, to be reached through new versions of the past. In place of one origins myth, the inventors of Indigenous Peoples' Day [intended to replace Columbus Day] and the National Day of Mourning [intended to replace Thanksgiving Day] invoke another. One in which all Europeans were villains and all Natives, victims. One in which indigenous peoples knew neither strife nor war until the treachery of Columbus and his cultural heirs taught them to hate and fear. To ask whether this is true is to ask the wrong question. It's true to its purposes. Every bit as true, that is, as the stories some Americans in 1792 and 1863 told about the events of 1492 and 1621. And that's all it needs to be. For these holidays say much less about who we really were in some specific Then, than about who we want to be in an ever changing Now."

"And that's all it needs to be"? I disagree. I think that anyone who wants to approach the question of Thanksgiving Day as a historian in the "ever changing Now" will need to ask "the wrong question" - what of all this is true?

Surveying more than two hundred websites that "correct" our assumptions about Thanksgiving, it's possible to sort them into groups and themes, especially since internet sites often parrot each other. Very few present anything like the myths that most claim to combat. Almost all of the corrections are themselves incorrect or banal, and otherwise not germane to the topic of what happened in 1621. With heavy self-importance they demonstrate quite unsurprisingly that what was once commonly taught in grade school lacked scope, subtlety, and minority insight. The political posturing is pathetic.

Commonly the first point scored is that lots of people gave thanks before the Pilgrims did it in 1621. Local boosters in Virginia, Florida, and Texas promote their own colonists, who (like many people getting off a boat) gave thanks for setting foot again on dry land. Several sites claim that Indians had six thanksgivings every year; at least one says that every day, every act, every thought was carried out with thanksgiving by pre-contact Indians. (My thanksgiving is bigger than your thanksgiving?) Among many examples:

* http://www.new-life.net/thanks01.htm

* http://www.oyate.org/resources/shortthanks.html

The Text

Many sites point out in a rankly naive sort of way that only one brief documentary account records Plymouth Colony's 1621 harvest festivities, the specific descriptive words of Edward Winslow, while additional information can be derived from the seasonal comments of William Bradford, who mentioned that the Pilgrims ate turkey among other things. See, for example, Pilgrim Hall Museum's website, which is consistently informative and of high scholarly quality:

Reporting on the colonists' first year, Winslow wrote that wheat and Indian corn had grown well; the barley crop was "indifferently good"; but pease were "not worth the gathering." Winslow continues: "Our harvest being gotten in, our Governor sent foure men on fowling; so that we might after a more speciall manner rejoyce together, after we had gathered the fruit of our labours. They foure in one day killed as much fowle as, with a little help besid, served the company almost a weeke. At which time amongst other Recreations, we exercised our Armes, many of the Indians coming amongst us, and amongst the rest their greatest King Massasoyt, with some nintie men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted. And they went out and killed five deere, which they brought to the plantation and bestowed on our Governour, and upon the Captaine and others. And although it be not alwayes so plentifull, as it was at this time, with us, yet by goodnesse of God, we are so farre from want, that we often wish you partakers of our plentie."[1]

Governor William Bradford, in Of Plymouth Plantation, reported that fishing had been good all summer, and, in the fall, "begane to come in store of foule, as winter approached [...] And besides water foule, ther was great store of wild Turkies, of which they tooke many, besids venison, etc."[2]

Archaeologist James Deetz made much of the fact that Winslow did not name the turkeys Bradford mentioned.

This startling revelation (that in this case one should ignore Bradford's general comments and suppose that Winslow was providing a complete menu listing) recurs in various websites, such as the 2002 article posted by the Christian Science Monitor.

More frequently repeated is Deetz's emphatic reminder that Winslow did not use the word "thanksgiving" - drawing the conclusion that therefore the 1621 event was not a thanksgiving but some sort of traditional English harvest festival he characterized as "secular."

I've discussed this oversimplification previously in an previous article.

Further, see "Re-bunking the Pilgrims" [subscribers]

On the one hand, whatever their folk customs may have been, harvest festivals in England with which the Pilgrims had been familiar were not "secular." (The Elizabethan and Jacobean-period Anglican Book of Common Prayer included an obligatory harvest thanksgiving prayer among the prayers whose use was increasingly enforced in the early seventeenth century.) On the other, Winslow's description includes biblical phrases referring to texts whose completion includes thanksgiving (particularly John 4:36 and Psalm 33). Winslow's contemporaries, unlike modern archaeologists, caught the meaning of the full texts to which he alluded. They knew their Bible.

But Deetz's assertion that there was no thanksgiving in 1621 is repeated in numerous websites. Often authors explain that what took place was so unlike later Puritan thanksgivings that it couldn't have been a true thanksgiving (usually citing, for the definition of what that would have been, William DeLoss Love, The Fast and Thanksgiving Days of New England (Boston, New York: Houghton and Mifflin, 1895), a book whose title alone seems to have inspired the common web article notion that in New England people fasted as an _expression of thanksgiving). For example, in "Top 10 Myths About Thanksgiving,' Rick Shenkman announces that Thanksgiving was not about religion.

Had it been, he says, "the Pilgrims never would have invited the Indians to join them. Besides, the Pilgrims would never have tolerated festivities at a true religious event. Indeed, what we think of as Thanksgiving was really a harvest festival. Actual 'Thanksgivings' were religious affairs; everybody spent the day praying. Incidentally, these Pilgrim Thanksgivings occurred at different times of the year, not just in November."

Responding to this in reverse order: (1) that Thanksgivings were not limited to November does not mean that the first one held by the colonists in Plymouth (which incidentally was presumably in September or early October) was not a thanksgiving. (2) The modern idea that in a religious thanksgiving "everyone spent the day praying" is inconsistent with the only description of the specific activities of a definitely identified thanksgiving day in early Plymouth Colony - the thanksgiving held in Scituate in 1636 when a religious service was followed by feasting. (See my book The Seventeenth-Century Town Records of Scituate, Massachusetts (Boston: NEHGS, 2001), vol. 3, p. 513.) (3) That "what we think of as Thanksgiving was really a harvest festival" (as if that meant it could not have been a thanksgiving) repeats Deetz's incorrect opinion that an English harvest festival was non-religious or even irreligious. (4) That the Pilgrims "would never have tolerated festivities at a true religious event" presumes a narrow definition of what a true religious event was before arriving through circular argument at a denial that what the Pilgrims did was such an event, because it differed from the axiomatic definition. (Ever been to a midwestern church picnic? Did tossing horseshoes and playing softball make it non-religious?) (5) As is repeatedly demonstrated by the writings of the Pilgrims' minister John Robinson, the Pilgrims attempted to pattern their religious activities according to biblical precedent. The precedent for a harvest festival was the Old Testament Feast of Tabernacles, Sukkoth (Deut. 16: 13-14). This harvest festival (as described in the 1560 Geneva translation of the Bible, used by the Pilgrims) was established to last "seuen daies, when thou hast gathered in thy corne, and thy wine. And thou shalt reioyce in thy feast, thou, and they sonne, and thy daughter, and thy servant, and thy maid, and the Levite and the stranger, and the fatherles, and the widow, that are within thy gates." The biblical injunction to include the "stranger" probably accounts for the Pilgrims' inviting their Native neighbors to rejoice with them, although Winslow does not explicitly say anything about invitation. Besides Sukkoth, the Pilgrims' experience of a Reformed Protestant thanksgiving every year in Leiden probably contributed to what they considered appropriate. Leiden's October 3 festivities commemorated the lifting of the Siege of Leiden in 1574, when half the town had died (an obvious parallel with the experience of the Pilgrims in the winter of 1620-21). Lasting ten days, the first Leiden event was a religious service of thanksgiving and prayer, followed by festivities that included meals, military exercises, games, and a free fair. To summarize, the common assumption that the Pilgrims' 1621 event should be judged against the forms taken by later Puritan thanksgivings - whether or not those are even correctly understood - overlooks the circumstance that the Pilgrims did not have those precedents when they attempted something new, intentionally based not on old English tradition but on biblical and Reformed example.

Shenkman has not invented these views. Attempts to be accurate frequently make the same assumptions. For example, the History Channel states that, "the colonists didn't even call the day Thanksgiving. To them, a thanksgiving was a religious holiday in which they would go to church and thank God for a specific event, such as the winning of a battle. On such a religious day, the types of recreational activities that the pilgrims and Wampanoag Indians participated in during the 1621 harvest feast - dancing, singing secular songs, playing games - wouldn't have been allowed. The feast was a secular celebration, so it never would have been considered a thanksgiving in the pilgrims minds."

The identical text is copied without credit on the webpage of the International Student & Scholar Programs of Emory University:

It's worth pointing out that Winslow says nothing about "dancing, singing secular songs, [or] playing games." Those might be intended among Winslow's general term "recreations," but to specify and cite them as proof that the Pilgrims' day was "a secular celebration" is over-reaching.

Thanking Whom?

Assuming the nature of the festival was non-religious, some sites proclaim that there was a thanksgiving, but that the Pilgrims were not thanking God. Instead they were thanking the Indians for the help that had contributed to the colonists� survival during the first year. For example, "Rumela Web" says, "The Pilgrims of Plymouth Rock held their Thanksgiving in 1621 as a three day 'thank you' celebration to the leaders of the Wampanoag Indian tribe and their families for teaching them the survival skills they needed to make it in the New World."

A site that provides Thanksgiving Day recipes and menus says, "The Pilgrims invited the Native Americans to a feast to thank them for all they had learned."

Another site [member account required] provides a psychological analysis: "Not only was this festival a way to thank the Wampanoag, but it also served to boost the morale of the remaining settlers."

Such redirection of the thanks is consistent with the modern assessment expressed in "The Truth about the First Thanksgiving," by James Loewen, "Settlement proceeded, not with God's help, but with the Indians'."

We think the Pilgrims should have thanked the Indians. Nonetheless, while most modern historians explain events without dependence on providential intervention, it is still inaccurate to bend the evidence to suggest that the Pilgrims' attitude was not predominantly providential, and did not result in thanks to God for help received from the Indians.

Bending evidence, plus inventing details found in no historical source, is not a monopoly of the secular interpretation. For example, Kathryn Capoccia's online Sunday School lesson, "American Thanksgiving Celebrations," displays an incredibly imaginative disregard for historical evidence:

"Two weeks before the celebration was to take place a proclamation was issued stating that a harvest festival was to be held, which would be preceded by a special religious service and would be open to both Separatist church members and nonmembers. Everyone was urged to publicly offer gratitude for God's provision. The invitation was also extended to chief Massasoit." [...] "In response to the invitation Massasoit appeared in camp with three braves. Two days later he was joined by ninety other braves who provided five deer, a flock of geese, fifteen swordfish and small sweet apples for the celebration. The ceremonies began on the last morning of the festival [sic] with a worship service led by Elder Brewster. Then ground sports, such as foot racing and wrestling were held, as well as knife throwing contests. The settlers demonstrated musket drilling and shot a cannon volley. Then the feasting began in mid-afternoon at the fort. Everyone was seated in the open at long tables. At the end of the meal the settlers toasted the Indians as friends. The adults exchanged gifts with each other: Massasoit was given a bolt of cloth by Bradford, the warriors received cooking pots and colored beads in strings. The Indians reciprocated with a beaver cloak for Bradford and several freshly killed deer that could be smoked and stored for winter. The Indians presented the children with lumps of candy made from sugar extracted from wild beet plants. When the ceremonies were completed Elder Brewster quoted the Bible as a benediction, 'I thank my God upon every remembrance of you'". This level of fabrication is rare. It recalls the oratory of a century ago, that inspired the balloon-pricking emotions of countless would-be debunkers.

Colored Clothes, No Buckled Hats! My Goodness!

Similarly disconnected from Winslow's version are the common corrections to misconceptions about Pilgrim costume. Numerous sites let us know that the Pilgrims did not always wear black, and some even assert excitedly that it is important that we know about this discovery.

Timothy Walch, writing for History News Services, says, "Finally, it's important to dispel one last Thanksgiving myth — that the Pilgrims dressed in black and white clothing, wore pointed hats and starched bonnets and favored buckles on their shoes. It's true that they dressed in black on Sundays; but on most days, including the first Thanksgiving, they dressed in white, beige, black, green and brown." Surprisingly, Walch talks about buckles on shoes, instead of the common cartoon iconography of buckles on hats (itself an anachronism derived from a brief fashion in the 1790's). While Walch's point about color in workday clothing is true, I'm not sure it can come as a surprise to very many people. Nowadays most illustrations show Pilgrims in multi-colored clothing, often using photographs of the colorful actors at Plimoth Plantation. Even children now in their thirties will have learned about the Pilgrims from pictures showing varie-colored clothing. It wasn't always that way (cheaper books once were restricted to monochrome illustrations), but none of the websites gives a good explanation of the origin of the stereotype - the error is paraded simply as yet another example of inherited ignorance.

Only one genuine portrait of a Pilgrim exists - that of Edward Winslow (now in Pilgrim Hall Museum). Painted in 1651 in London, where Winslow acted as a diplomat representing the interests of New England colonies before various government committees, it shows him dressed appropriately in the very expensive black formal wear that most Pilgrims could not afford. From his portrait, as well as from other 17th-century portraits (that tended to show rich people) history painters of the early 19th century derived some ideas of costume. But they did not restrict their research to portraits of the rich, they also looked at pictures of common people in Dutch genre paintings. In romantic visions of historical scenes, the 19th-century history painters showed Pilgrim leaders in black, but others in a variety of colors. None of the dozen or so history paintings on Pilgrim themes at Pilgrim Hall Museum (the foremost collection) shows the Pilgrims uniformly in black - most wear scarlet, russet, green, ochre, grey, blue, or brown.

However, 19th century Americans became familiar with the Pilgrims through black and white stereoptype engravings, not paintings. At the same time, black clothing had become cheaper to produce and was expected for Sunday-best attire, not just among the wealthy. It was easy to imagine that the Pilgrim leaders as seen in black-and-white engravings were dressed in a way that was nearly familiar.

And, yes, they did call themselves "Pilgrims."

Almost as frequent as remarks about the color of their clothes are the website assertions that these colonists did not call themselves "Pilgrims." James Loewen, in "The Truth About the First Thanksgiving," writes that "no one even called them 'Pilgrims' until the 1870s."

This sort of belief is derived from a common misconception that because the manuscript of William Bradford's journal "Of Plymouth Plantation" was lost from the late 18th until the mid 19th century, no one was familiar, until the rediscovery, with his famous phrase, "They knew they were Pilgrims." The discovery of that phrase is thought to have appealed strongly to the Victorian imagination and to have led to the term "Pilgrims" as a designation for the Plymouth colonists. Bradford, however, was not the first to apply the name in print to these colonists - that was Robert Cushman in 1622 (in the book now called Mourt's Relation). Bradford's own words were excerpted and published by Nathaniel Morton in New England's Memorial, first printed in 1669 (and reprinted in 1721, 1772, and twice in 1826). The term Pilgrim, never forgotten, was used repeatedly in the later 18th century and throughout the 19th century, at celebrations in Plymouth that attracted attention throughout New England if not farther. If Mr. Loewen thinks the word "Pilgrim" was not applied to these people before the 1870's, one wonders what he thinks the local worthies of Plymouth were doing when in 1820 they founded the Pilgrim Society.

The Plymouth colonists considered themselves and all other earnest Christians to be on an earthly pilgrimage to a heavenly goal. Most of them were serious about their faith and puzzled by the presence among them of a few who demonstratively were not. Referring to themselves in that context they used the New Testament image expressed in print by Robert Cushman in 1622: "But now we are all in all places strangers and pilgrims, travelers and sojourners [...]" The full Bible citation, which these people knew and recognized as a text that gave re-assuring self-identification, was this (Hebrews 11:13-16, Geneva translation, 1560):

"All these dyed in the faith, and receiued not the promises, but sawe them a farre of[f], and beleued them, and receiued them thankefully, and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrimes on the earth. For they that say suche things, declare plainely that they seke a countrey. And if they had bene mindeful of that countrey, from whence they came out, they had leasure to haue returned. But now they desire a better, that is an heauenlie: wherefore God is not ashamed of them to be called their God: for he hathe prepared for them a citie."

The foregoing unifying phrase - strangers and pilgrims on the earth - is misunderstood as a dichotomy in George Willison's book Saints and Strangers (New York: Reynall & Hitchcock, 1945). Willison�s Hegelian analysis of Pilgrim history as a conflict between religious fanatics he calls "saints" and disinterested, economically motivated opponents to them, whom he identifies as "strangers," has become a rarely questioned presumed truth, never doubted on the internet. It is basic to Willison's dismissive interpretation of the Mayflower Compact as an instrument of minority control. For Willison, the dialectical tension was resolved by a happy synthesis that bore similarities to the democratic triumph of the American common man over tyranny at the end of World War II. Willison was speaking to people who saw themselves in his description of the Pilgrims, as people who "were valiantly engaged [...] in a desperate struggle for a better order of things, for a more generous measure of freedom for all men, for a higher and nobler conception of life based upon recognition of the intrinsic worth and dignity of the individual." Stirring words, they introduce Willison�s description of the process of conflict that was for him the meaning of being a Pilgrim.

For the Pilgrims themselves, in specific contexts other identifying terms were useful. In their application to move to Leiden, they said they were members of the Christian Reformed religion - thus indicating that they were the sort of people Leiden wanted as immigrants. Distinguishing themselves from Puritans who stayed in the Church of England, they called themselves Separatists. In New England, for legal purposes connected with rights to distribution of the common property and land, the colonists referred to anyone who had arrived before the 1627 division as "Old Comers" or "First Comers." Their general self-identification, however, was "pilgrims" in the New Testament sense. Their first use of the term in America is seen in the name given the first child born in the colony - Peregrine White. "Peregrine" comes from the Latin peregrinus meaning "pilgrim" or "stranger."

[1]Mourt's Relation, published in cooperation with Plimoth Plantation by Applewood Books, Bedford MA, Edited by Dwight B. Heath from the original text of 1622 and copyright 1963 by Dwight B. Heath, p. 82.

[2]Of Plymouth Plantation 1620-1647 by William Bradford. A new edition by Samuel Eliot Morison; First published Sept. 19, 1952; 21st printing Jan. 2001, p. 90.

Thanksgiving on the Net:  Roast Bull with Cranberry Sauce Part 2

The Fake Thanksgiving Proclamation of 1623

The invented secular harvest festival augmented by the redirection of thanks towards the Indians and the assertion that "Pilgrims" was a name not used by the colonists, has become widely accepted. What's to be done? Fake it! Instead of simply pointing out that this version of the past fails to account for the Pilgrims' habitual piety and is thoroughly inconsistent with the documentary evidence, someone has felt it necessary to invent a document that replaces the 1621 purported non-thanksgiving with a celebration that does include all the sentiments and specifications that Winslow's description lacks. Many websites whose authors would like to maintain an emphasis on the Pilgrims' religious attitudes to support their own, quite different convictions now tell a fake story instead.

The cute text, widely circulated on internet sites (or excerpted, for example), is: "William Bradford's Thanksgiving Proclamation (1623)

Inasmuch as the great Father has given us this year an abundant harvest of Indian corn, wheat, peas, beans, squashes, and garden vegetables, and has made the forests to abound with game and the sea with fish and clams, and inasmuch as he has protected us from the ravages of the savages, has spared us from pestilence and disease, has granted us freedom to worship God according to the dictates of our own conscience.

Now I, your magistrate, do proclaim that all ye Pilgrims, with your wives and ye little ones, do gather at ye meeting house, on ye hill, between the hours of 9 and 12 in the day time, on Thursday, November 29th, of the year of our Lord one thousand six hundred and twenty-three and the third year since ye Pilgrims landed on ye Pilgrim Rock, there to listen to ye pastor and render thanksgiving to ye Almighty God for all His blessings.

— William Bradford Ye Governor of Ye Colony"

["Ravages of the savages" indeed! Ye, ye, ye, ye!]

This is demonstrably spurious, as my friend Jim Baker pointed out in 1999. His remarks are repeated by various people - usually without credit to Baker - Dennis Rupert, for example.

The false proclamation does not appear in any 17th-century source - not in Bradford, not in Winslow, not in Morton's New England's Memorial, not anywhere. Internal evidence suggests it is a 20th-century fraud. No mention of Plymouth Rock exists before it was pointed out in the mid-18th century, and the term "great Father" (for God) is a 19th-century romantic quasi-Native term that Bradford never used in his acknowledged writings. There are further anachronisms. For example, in 1623 there was no pastor in Plymouth Colony. Pastor John Robinson was still in Leiden, so services were led by the deacon, Elder William Brewster. William Bradford never referred to himself as "your magistrate" in years when he was governor. Bradford dated documents "in the year of our Lord" - sometimes adding the year of the monarch's reign. He never referred to landing on Plymouth Rock (not even as "Pilgrim Rock") and certainly did not use it as a date-base. The Pilgrims did not imagine themselves as seeking "freedom to worship God according to the dictates of our own conscience." They wanted freedom to worship according to their interpretation of biblical commands, which they thought was exclusively correct - and correct externally to any dictates of their own consciences. Finally, it's amusing that the 29th of November 1623 (Old Style) was not a Thursday but a Saturday (according to the tables in H. Grotefend's Taschenbuch der Zeitrechnung des Deutschen Mittelalters und der Neuzeit (ed. Th. Ulrich, Hannover: Hahnsche Buchhandlung, 1960).

While it is often impossible to locate the ancient origin of such internet myths, this fraud is relatively recent. Samuel Eliot Morison was unaware of it when editing Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation (New York: Knopf, 1952); Eugene Aubrey Stratton does not mention it in his Plymouth Colony, Its History & People, 1620-1691 (Salt Lake City: Ancestry Publishing, 1986). I have not discovered whether it appears anywhere before it made its way into William J. Federer's America's God and Country: An Encyclopedia of Quotations (Coppel, TX: Fame, 1994) and the source Federer gives - David Barton's The Myth of Separation (Aledo TX: Wallbuilder Press, 1991), p. 86. The text has been dropped from recent editions of Barton's book, but that doesn't put an end to repetition of the nonsense, especially on internet sites. A request to David Barton for information on this remains unanswered. On Barton's historical inventiveness, see:

Rob Boston, "Sects, Lies and Videotape: Who Is David Barton, And Why Is He Saying Such Awful Things About Separation of Church And State?" (Originally published in Church & State, 46, Nr. 4, April 1993, pp. 8-12).

Rob Boston, "David Barton's 'Christian Nation' Myth Factory Admits Its Products Have Been Defective." (Originally published in Church & State, 49, No. 7, July/August 1996, pp. 11-13).

Jim Allison, "An Index to Factual Information About David Barton And His Books".

Nicholas P. Miller, "Wallbuilders or Mythbuilders".

That people stressing the religious attitude of the Pilgrims use this invented 1623 "Thanksgiving Proclamation" is ironic. They might have been satisfied with the truth. The 1621 event did express the Pilgrims' religious attitude of thankfulness for God's providence and therefore should be adequate for their modern purposes. Moreover, in the summer of 1623 the Pilgrims held another special day of thanksgiving to God when they considered that their prayers for rain were answered, a drought ended, and their crops were saved. It wasn't in November and no stirring proclamation is preserved. Yet the "secular" interpretive ignorance that denies that the 1621 event was a thanksgiving had triumphed to the extent that someone from among the fundamentally disgruntled must have thought it clever to fight back. It is another question entirely, what the relation of the Pilgrims' religious attitude bears to modern understanding, that would make it urgent to use faked evidence to prove the Pilgrims were thanking God. Obviously the Pilgrims were religious - but what has this to do with anything other than an honest understanding of the past? Their religiosity scarcely provides support for any particular doctrinal viewpoint now; and no one is likely to become religious because it has been proven that the Pilgrims were.

Bartonis interest is to paint a picture of America as a particular sort of Christian nation since the beginning of its colonization. To make the Pilgrims even more religious than is indicated by their own words is dishonest. Removing the spurious quotation is a commendable step in the right direction. Considering that the Pilgrims interpreted their religion to mean that the Christian community bore responsibility to treat the Indians with respect and legal equality (see my book Indian Deeds, Land Transactions in Plymouth Colony, 1620-1699 (Boston: NEHGS, 2002)); noticing that the Pilgrims' laws proclaim that the community bore responsibility for the care of widows, orphans, the poor, and the infirm; and discovering that the Pilgrims' minister John Robinson argued in favor of cautious religious toleration and asserted that the church had no special authority over the magistrate, which he said was required to deal equitably with non-believers as well as believers, I'd be happy to see such Christian principles applied to modern America. Good luck to Mr. Barton and his colleagues in ensuring this happens!

The Libertarian's First Thanksgiving

Fred E. Foldvary has picked up the false 1623 date eagerly and given it a different twist. "The rains came and the harvest was saved. It is logical to surmise that the Pilgrims saw this as a sign that God blessed their new economic system, because Governor Bradford proclaimed November 29, 1623, as a Day of Thanksgiving." That's the opinion of Foldvary, Editor (1998) of The Progress Report and Lecturer in Economics, Santa Clara University.

So - the Pilgrims weren't thankful to God for a bounteous harvest as such, nor were they expressing gratitude to the Indians for help received. They were congratulating themselves on the discovery of the benefits of individualist capitalism!

The Ludwig von Mises Institute in 1999 published Richard J. Maybury's article "The Great Thanksgiving Hoax" (originally seen in The Free Market, November, 1985). Maybury (self-styled business and economic analyst) wants to correct our idealized view of the Pilgrims: "[T]he harvest of 1621 was not bountiful, nor were the colonists hardworking or tenacious. 1621 was a famine year and many of the colonists were lazy thieves." [...] "they refused to work in the fields. They preferred instead to steal food." [...] "The prevailing condition during those years was not the abundance the official story claims, it was famine and death. The first 'Thanksgiving' was not so much a celebration as it was the last meal of condemned men." Then it all changed: "in 1623 Bradford abolished socialism. He gave each household a parcel of land and told them they could keep what they produced, or trade it away as they saw fit. In other words, he replaced socialism with a free market, and that was the end of famines." [...] "Before these free markets were established, the colonists had nothing for which to be thankful." [...] "Thus the real reason for Thanksgiving, deleted from the official story, is: Socialism does not work; the one and only source of abundance is free markets, and we thank God we live in a country where we can have them." So there you have it - neither God's providence nor helpful Indians, just materialistic private profit.

The theme recurs in numerous imitative articles online. In 2004, Gary M. Galles, professor of economics at Pepperdine University, ended his praise of Pilgrim property with a political admonition: "Though we have incomparably more than they did, we can learn much from their 'way of thanksgiving.' But we should also remember that our material blessings are the fruits of America's system of private-property rights and the liberties they ensure, including the freedom to choose our employment and spend money as we see fit. Those rights are under constant assault today, from limits on people's ability to contract as they wish, especially in labor relationships, to abuses of government's eminent domain." Robert Sheridan, who teaches constitutional law at the San Francisco Law School, quotes the full text (from the San Francisco Chronicle) and expertly dissects Galles' underlying assumptions about modern society, in his own article "Thanksgiving Nonsense and Propaganda".

A slightly abbreviated version of Galles' remarks is published by the Ludwig von Mises Institute.

The Independent Institute's website has a similar article that was published for Thanksgiving in 2004 in the Charlotte Observer and in the San Diego Union-Tribune. "The economic incentives provided by private competitive markets where people are left free to make their own choices make bountiful feasts possible," says Benjamin Powell, professor of economics at San Jose State University. "That's the real lesson of Thanksgiving."

Elaborating on Maybury's view of Thanksgiving, Newsmax columnist Geoff Metcalf becomes even more definite: "[A]n economic system which grants the lazy and the shiftless some 'right' to prosper off the looted fruits of another man's labor, under the guise of enforced 'compassion,' will inevitably descend into envy, theft, squalor, and starvation. Though many would still incrementally impose on us some new variant of the 'noble socialist experiment,' this is still at heart a free country with a bedrock respect for the sanctity of private property - and a land bounteous precisely because it's free. It's for that we give thanks - the corn and beans and turkey serving as mere symbols of that true and underlying blessing - on the fourth Thursday of each November."

True history? Does it make any difference? As Kamensky says, "It's true to its purposes."

For the purposes of historical accuracy, nevertheless, I think it's worth mentioning that the Pilgrims' initial system of working the land by changing field assignments each year had nothing at all to do with socialism - it was the consequence of an early and unrestrained form of capitalism whereby the colony, its products, and the colonists' productive labor were absolutely and entirely mortgaged to the London investors, whose loans had to be paid off before any of the Pilgrim colonists could own free-hold property. The colony as a whole and its colonists were indentured. Their contract is now lost; probably it was among the missing first 338 pages of William Bradford's letter-book. The shift away from rotating field assignments did not result in private property, just a modification of the organization of the indentured labor. Private real property came for these colonists in 1627 when a small group among the colonists - the "Purchasers" - bought the debt and the responsibility to pay it off. A temporary monopoly on the fur trade was reserved to them as compensation for their higher personal responsibility and financial exposure.

A Cornucopia of Grievances

So if Thanksgiving was not about the discovery of private property's profitability, not about help offered to the colonists by the Wampanoag Indians, not about God's providence - what was it?

"The first day of thanksgiving took place in 1637 amidst the war against the Pequots. 700 men, women, and children of the Pequot tribe were gathered for their annual green corn dance on what is now Groton, Connecticut. Dutch and English mercenaries surrounded the camp and proceeded to shoot, stab, butcher and burn alive all 700 people. The next day the Massachusetts Bay Colony held a feast in celebration and the governor declared 'a day of thanksgiving.' In the ensuing madness of the Indian extermination, natives were scalped, burned, mutilated and sold into slavery, and a feast was held in celebration every time a successful massacre took place. The killing frenzy got so bad that even the Churches of Manhattan announced a day of 'thanksgiving' to celebrate victory over the 'heathen savages,' and many celebrated by kicking the severed heads of Pequot people through the streets like soccer balls." So says Tristam Ahtone, at 13Moon.com. There were preliminary events before this celebration of atrocity, according to Ahtone. Although the 1621 harvest festival in Plymouth was not in his opinion a thanksgiving, he informs us that "Two years later the English invited a number of tribes to a feast 'symbolizing eternal friendship.' The English offered food and drink, and two hundred Indians dropped dead from unknown poison." This echoes the words of James Loewen (quoted by Jackie Alan Giuliano in "Give Thanks - Un-Turkey Truths"): "The British offered a toast 'symbolizing eternal friendship,' whereupon the chief, his family, advisors, and two hundred followers dropped dead of poison." Loewen places this event in Virginia.

Ahtone's remarks connecting the "First Thanksgiving" with the Pequot War are frequently copied or excerpted, with slight variations. Sometimes it's not Massachusetts Bay responsible, but the Pilgrims. "The next day, the English governor William Bradford declared 'a day of Thanksgiving', thanking God that they had eliminated the Indians, opening Pequot land for white settlement." That proclamation was repeated each year for the next century." This was posted by "Ecuanduero" on the Discovery Channel.com, in 2003.

William Loren Katz, author of Black Indians, A Hidden Heritage, writes that, "In 1637 Governor Bradford, who saw his colonists locked in mortal combat with dangerous Native Americans, ordered his militia to conduct a night attack on the sleeping men women and children of a Pequot Indian village. To Bradford, a devout Christian, the massacre was imbued with religious meaning."

Clearly we should realize that these people were not nice, but just exactly how bad? "Not even Charles Manson and Jim Jones combined could compare with that murderous Doomsday cult — the Pilgrims," says a website article called "The Pilgrims, Children of the Devil: Puritan Doomsday Cult Plunders Paradise." The site calls itself the Common Sense Almanac, Progressive Pages (and claims to be a project of the Center for Media and Democracy).

The story forms the foundation for stirring generalizations. "It is a serious mistake to practice holidays based on a false history," one site admonishes us. "The young people find out on their own that they are involved in a lie, and it makes them rage with fury and contempt. [...]It should surprise no one that after raising children honoring the memory of the Pilgrim fathers, that they grow up to hate freedom as much as the Forefathers did. It should surprise no one that a society that worships the Pilgrims — who ruthlessly scalped the Indians (teaching them how to do it), who indiscriminately torched Indian villages, and murdered their women, children and elders in the precursors of total war, and holocaust — should produce children who grow up to join street gangs, and who seek the experience of murdering other human beings for kicks."

The story told by Ahtone, Katz, and others is derived from a report that surfaced in the 1980's. "According to William B. Newell, a Penobscot Indian and former chairman of the anthropology department at the University of Connecticut, the first official Thanksgiving Day commemorated the massacre of 700 Indian men, women and children during one of their religious ceremonies. [...]"

This version in First Nations News is from an article by Karen Gullo that first appeared in Vegetarian Times, 1982. Newell's material is quoted over and over. Newell, who is described in one site as having degrees from two universities [wow! Fancy that!], was convinced about the solidity of his research: ""My research is authentic because it is documentary," Newell said. "You can't get anything more accurate than that because it is first hand. It is not hearsay." http://www.s6k.com/real/thankstaking.htm

What's not authentic is the claim that William Newell was head of the anthropology department at the University of Connecticut, whose faculty cannot recall him at all. When the department was founded in 1971, Newell was 79 years old. See the letter by department chair Jocelyn Linnekin. And what is completely untrue is the idea that the Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony participated in the 1637 Pequot massacre. Although asked to send military assistance, the Plymouth court did not respond until two weeks after the slaughter had been carried out by a mixed force of soldiers from Connecticut, Massachusetts Bay, and the Narragansett tribe (no "Dutch and English mercenaries"). As Bradford himself reports, the Pilgrims were told their aid was too little, too late; they could stay home. (See my book,

Pilgrim Edward Winslow: New England's First International Diplomat (Boston: NEHGS, 2004), pp. 164-168.)

Is this important? Or is the lie "true to its purposes"?

Thanksgiving on the Net:  Roast Bull with Cranberry Sauce Part 3

The National Day of Mourning

The purposes can best be understood as fitting in with the description of the Pilgrims that animates the so-called National Day of Mourning sponsored by the United American Indians of New England. "The pilgrims (who did not even call themselves pilgrims)" [yes, that again] "did not come here seeking religious freedom; they already had that in Holland. They came here as part of a commercial venture. They introduced sexism, racism, anti-lesbian and gay bigotry, jails, and the class system to these shores. One of the very first things they did when they arrived on Cape Cod — before they even made it to Plymouth — was to rob Wampanoag graves at Corn Hill and steal as much of the Indians' winter provisions of corn and beans as they were able to carry. [...] The first official "Day of Thanksgiving" was proclaimed in 1637 by Governor Winthrop. He did so to celebrate the safe return of men from the Massachusetts Bay Colony, who had gone to Mystic Connecticut to participate in the massacre of over 700 Pequot women, children, and men."

This characterization of the Pilgrims was written in 2003 by UAINE leaders Mahtowin Munro and Mooanum James, whose father Frank James (Wamsutta) made the 1970 protest speech that started the Day of Mourning at Plymouth, Massachusetts. Wamsutta spoke out against decades of inequality in words historically vague and not entirely accurate. He clearly announced the continued presence of Wampanoag Indians to a society that he thought had too often treated them as bygone relics. But his measured anger at real injustice bore little of the demonizing divisiveness championed by UAINE in later years.

From the repetition of Mahtowin Munro's and Mooanum James' remarks in countless websites associated with Native American interests, it would appear that the Wampanoag tribes consider themselves best represented by the UAINE protests. The words of Russell Peters published by Pilgrim Hall Museum contradict this.

Russell Peters, A Wampanoag leader, died in 2002. Who was he? "Mr. Peters [M.A., Harvard] has been involved in Native American issues at a state, local and national level. He [was] the President of the Mashpee Wampanoag Indian Tribal Council, a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights from 1976 to 1984, a member of the Harvard Peabody Museum Native American Repatriation Committee, a member of the White House Conference on Federal Recognition in 1995 and 1996, a board member of the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities, a board member of the Pilgrim Society, and the author of Wampanoags of Mashpee (Nimrod Press), Clambake (Lerner Publications), and Regalia (Sundance Press)." Russell Peters expressed regret at the deterioration of the social potential of the Day of Mourning. "While the day of mourning has served to focus attention on past injustice to the Native American cause, it has, in recent years, been orchestrated by a group calling themselves the United American Indians of New England. This group has tenuous ties to any of the local tribes, and is composed primarily of non-Indians. To date, they have refused several invitations to meet with the Wampanoag Indian tribal councils in Mashpee or in Gay Head. Once again, we, as Wampanoags, find our voices and concerns cast aside in the activities surrounding the Thanksgiving holiday in Plymouth, this time, ironically, by a group purporting to represent our interests."

The 1970 event at which Wamsutta spoke was organized by the American Indian Movement, whose leader Russell Means wrote, in his autobiography Where White Men Fear to Tread (with Marvin J. Wolf, New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995), "Americans today believe that Thanksgiving celebrates a bountiful harvest, but that is not so. By 1970, the Wampanoag had turned up a copy of a Thanksgiving proclamation made by the governor to the colony. The text revealed the ugly truth: After a colonial militia had returned from murdering the men, women, and children of an Indian village, the governor proclaimed a holiday and feast to give thanks for the massacre. He also encouraged other colonies to do likewise - in other words, every autumn after the crops are in, go kill Indians and celebrate your murders with a feast. In November 1970, their descendants returned to Plymouth to publicize the true story of Thanksgiving and, along with about two hundred other Indians from around the country, to observe a national day of Indian mourning."

One of the odder results of the "Day of Mourning" is the appearance in a couple of Thanksgiving Day sermons of the unfounded claim that some Pilgrims considered having a day of mourning to commemorate those who had died the previous winter, but that instead they chose to thank God for their continued preservation. This colonization of the protest rhetoric can be seen at Presbyterian Warren [excerpted at] Trinity Sermons.

Genocide

That's a mild contrast to Mitchel Cohen's "Why I Hate Thanksgiving" (2003), now re-duplicated incessantly. "First, the genocide. Then the suppression of all discussion about it. What do Indian people find to be Thankful for in this America? What does anyone have to be Thankful for in the genocide of the Indians, that this 'holyday' commemorates? [...] all the things we have to be thankful for have nothing at all to do with the Pilgrims, nothing at all to do with Amerikan history, and everything to do with the alternative, anarcho-communist lives the Indian peoples led, before they were massacred by the colonists, in the name of privatization of property and the lust for gold and labor. Yes, I am an American. But I am an American in revolt. I am revolted by the holiday known as Thanksgiving. [...] I want to go back in time to when people lived communally, before the colonists' Christian god was brought to these shores to sanctify their terrorism, their slavery, their hatred of children, their oppression of women, their holocausts. But that is impossible. So all I look forward to [is] the utter destruction of the apparatus of death known as Amerika � not the people, not the beautiful land, but the machinery, the State, the capitalism, the Christianity and all that it stands for. I look forward to a future where I will have children with Amerika, and ... they will be the new Indians." See, for some sanity, Guenter Lewy's "Were American Indians the Victims of Genocide?"

Mr. Cohen is co-editor of "Green Politix," the national newspaper of the Greens/Greens Party USA. He's annoyed. (Who wouldn't be - loving nature and living in Brooklyn?) He's also a romantic with an ideal view of Natives living in a pristine environment, rather like the peaceful, ecologically wonderful place imagined by Plimoth Plantation's Anthony Pollard (known as Nanepashemet). "The Wampanoag way of life fostered a harmonious relationship between the People and their natural environment, both physical and spiritual. [...] fighting was just part of the search for harmony when conditions had become intolerable or justice was denied."

Lies My Teacher�s Telling Me Now

The annual clamor of the aggrieved finds significant expression in website materials aimed at providing school teachers with a balanced (meaning non-colonial) view of Thanksgiving. One of the most important and widely copied articles is an introduction to "Teaching About Thanksgiving" written by Chuck Larson of the Tacoma School District.

Originally issued in 1986 by the Superintendent of Public Instruction of the State of Washington, "Teaching About Thanksgiving" is no longer available from that State. It continues to be distributed by the Fourth World Documentation Project and the Center for World Indigenous Studies, among others. I hope it has been withdrawn by the state in response to the withering criticism it received from Caleb Johnson, whose Mayflower topics website presents much documentary material about the Pilgrims.

"The author of the 'Fourth World Documentation Project' lesson plan on Thanksgiving, published all over the internet as well as distributed in printed form, claims to have a strong background in history," writes Johnson. "But nearly every sentence of the entire lesson plan has a significant factual error, or is simply story-telling (making up stories and details to fit within a set framework of given historical facts)." Johnson's detailed, devastating line-by-line corrections attracted the attention of the New York Times. I have seen only one website for teachers that carries the Larson material and that also includes a reference to Johnson's work, and then only as if to provide an alternative to the nonsense they continue to present as the main material. But Johnson definitively destroyed the credibility of the lesson plan - why keep on providing it? Are the lies true to some purpose?

Mentioning that Johnson's work is worth looking at is, nonetheless, at least more generous than the ad hominem attack on Johnson that was mounted by Jamie McKenzie of the Bellingham, Washington, School District.

McKenzie complained in 1996 that Caleb Johnson did not list his own academic credentials that would suggest his website should be considered authoritative. Johnson had, after all, cast doubt on the value of Larson's "strong background in history." McKenzie, on the other hand, did not take the time to compare Johnson's careful quotations of source materials with the slipshod work of his academically qualified colleague down in Tacoma. (Although Johnson's essays are typically not footnoted, having only a source list at the end, Johnson has taken the trouble to re-publish the texts of many of the original documents on his site.) But McKenzie's major complaint in 1996 was that the internet in general did not provide much information about Thanksgiving, and that scholars with credentials were not creating the sites. There's certainly more now, and some of it is provided by professors. If one has doubts about the professor of anthropology William B. Newell, who's been forgotten by the University of Connecticut, there's the University of Colorado's Professor of Ethnic Studies, Ward Churchill, asking us, "what is it we're supposed to be so thankful for? Does anyone really expect us to give thanks for the fact that soon after the Pilgrim Fathers regained their strength, they set out to dispossess and exterminate the very Indians who had fed them that first winter? Are we to express our gratitude for the colonists' 1637 massacre of the Pequots at Mystic, Conn., or their rhetoric justifying the butchery by comparing Indians to 'rats and mice and swarms of lice'"?

And there's the late Professor James Deetz, who thought Thanksgiving only became associated with the Pilgrims around 1900, evidently disregarding the implications of Winslow Homer's famous Thanksgiving Day illustrations in Harper's Weekly, Nov. 27, 1858, Dec. 1, 1860, Nov. 29, 1862, and Dec. 3, 1864, as well as Thomas Nast's "Thanksgiving Day, 1863" (published as a double-page center illustration in Harper's Weekly, Dec. 5, 1863). Nast includes a vignette in the lower right corner labelled "country," whose main praying figure is recognizably derived from the representation of the Pilgrims' minister John Robinson in Robert Weir's painting "The Embarkation of the Pilgrims," completed in 1843 in the rotunda of the Capitol in Washington.

Despite its filiopietistic motivations, the huge desert of misinformation has left Caleb Johnson's work as one of a small number of oases of calm study, equalling the level of the so-called Plymouth Colony Archive Project established by James Deetz, Patricia Scott Deetz, and Christopher Fennell (which, however, despite valuable information about the colony, says nothing significant about Thanksgiving).

McKenzie also objects to Johnson�s "failing to mention some of the information which other sites provide about the Pilgrims taking the Native American corn and digging up and taking things from grave sites." In fact, Johnson publishes all the evidence there is about those issues. Because no evidence supports the inflated claims, McKenzie thinks that the Pilgrims have been "sanitized."

Unsanitized would be the word for Brenda Francis's version. She says that she "read on Binghamton University's website that the Pilgrims were starving and even went so far to dig up some remains of the Wampanoag people and eat them as a means to survival."

This directly contradicts William Bradford, who, after repeating the second-hand rumor that some Spanish colonists had been reduced to eating "dogs, toads, and dead men," proclaims that "From these extremities the Lord in his goodness kept these his people [the Pilgrims], and in their great wants preserved both their lives and healths; let his name have the praise." (Bradford's History "Of Plimoth Plantation" (Boston: Wright & Potter, 1901), p. 165: [subscribers].

The Binghamton site that is Brenda Francis' source has a student newspaper article (Nov. 21, 2003) by Rachel Kalina, who relays that the "Pilgrims were able to survive their first winter partially because of guidance by the natives and because they dug up the deceased Wampanoags to eat the corn offerings in the graves." That's not quite the same as necro-cannibalism.

Quoting from James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), p. 91, the teacher of a course in "Debunking and Dissent" - Colby Glass of Palo Alto College (TX), maintains that "...the Pilgrims continued to rob graves for years."

There are three points of interest here: first, Winslow's description of examining graves (our only source of information) does not support these assertions; second, the corn found by the Pilgrims was not found in graves; third, I'm unaware of any evidence so far found to indicate that corn was included in graves on Cape Cod at all. Let alone that the Pilgrims were cannibals!

In the book now called Mourt's Relation, Edward Winslow wrote that the Pilgrims, exploring, found a path that took them to "certain heaps of sand, one whereof was covered with old mats, and had a wooden thing like a mortar whelmed on the top of it, and an earthen pot laid in a little hole at the end thereof. We, musing what it might be, digged and found a bow, and, as we thought, arrows, but they were rotten. We supposed there were many other things, but because we deemed them graves, we put in the bow again and made it up as it was, and left the rest untouched, because we thought it would be odious unto them to ransack their sepulchres." Passing through several fields recently tended, they came upon a house, from which they removed a European ship's kettle. Next to the house was a heap of sand, which when excavated yielded two baskets filled with Indian corn. One contained thirty six ears, "some yellow, and some red, and others mixed with blue [...] The basket was round, and narrow at the top; it held about three or four bushels." Filling the kettle with loose corn, two of the Pilgrims suspended it on a stick and carried it away. The rest of the corn they re-buried. Two or three days later, they returned for the remaining corn, also finding and taking some beans and more corn, totaling around ten bushels. The following morning they found a much larger mound, covered with boards. It turned out to be the grave of a man with blond hair, whose shroud was a "sailor's canvas cassock" and who was wearing a "pair of cloth breeches." The body was accompanied by a "knife, a packneedle, and two or three iron things." Clearly this was the body of a European. An infant's body was buried together with this man. Reburying the bodies (as was customary in Europe), they continued to look for corn but found nothing else but graves, which, considering their desire not to "ransack their sepulchres," they presumably did not disturb once it was clear the mounds did not contain baskets of corn. Having learned to recognize graves, three days later the Pilgrims avoided disturbing a cemetery. They "found a burying place, one part whereof was encompassed with a large palisade, like a churchyard [...] Within it was full of graves [...] yet we digged none of them up, but only viewed them and went our way." Mourt's Relation (1622) has been republished numerous times. Caleb Johnson has made it available online at Mayflower History.com.

Winslow's words are our only evidence. Nothing impels us to doubt his information that the Pilgrims opened the grave of a European sailor and his child, reburying them after removing from the grave a few items that to a European would not have been considered grave offerings having any symbolic significance. The Pilgrims exhibited memorable sensitivity in refraining from disturbing Indian graves, once they learned to recognize them. They did not dig up graves in order to eat corn buried as grave offerings. There is no indication they removed corn from any graves. The corn was found in baskets whose shape when packed in earth would result in domed pit spaces. There is nothing to support the idea that corn was placed in graves as offerings, although small gifts of corn have been found in graves excavated by archaeologists working hundreds of miles away (the American southwest and Peru, for example).

The amount the Pilgrims found in storage baskets - two or three bushels in the first, and three or four in the second - is a large, bulky quantity. From 1986-1991, I was Chief Curator of Plimoth Plantation. The collections at that time included all the archaeological material from excavations of burial sites in the Plymouth Colony area carried out by Harry Hornblower II and James Deetz, and others with whom they worked. I carried out a detailed examination of the thousands of items in the collections, specifically looking for corn - in hopes of having it studied scientifically so we could replicate the exact type of corn growing in the area in the early 17th century. Although some floral remains had been saved from excavations that included burial sites, there was no corn, not a single kernel. Had it been the practice to bury bushels of corn as grave offerings, surely there would have been some in the materials carefully excavated from these ten Native burials. There was nothing. Neither was any discovery of corn recorded in the careful notebooks kept by Hornblower (there were no Deetz notebooks present, and no published reports). This absence is consistent with the absence of corn among grave goods from several Cape Cod Native burials, recently transferred to Native authorities for reburial, from the Robert S. Peabody Museum of Archaeology, Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts.

Throughout the accounts of these discoveries of storage baskets of Indian corn, Winslow repeats the intention to try to meet the Indian owners and negotiate repayment for the corn that had been taken That was an intention to provide compensation for what the Pilgrims understood would be considered theft if no payment were made. (During the first year, Pilgrims stole corn; Indians stole abandoned tools.) Establishing that neither side would steal from the other was an important part of early negotiation between them. Attempts to locate the specific owner of the corn were ultimately successful and repayment was made (see Pilgrim Edward Winslow, p. 36).

In "Deconstructing the Myths of 'The First Thanksgiving,'" Judy Dow and Beverly Slapin contradict the documentary evidence. They base their comments largely on information provided to them by Margaret Bruchac, an "Abanaki scholar" working in collaboration with Plimoth Plantation's Wampanoag Indian Program. "There is no record that restitution was ever made for the stolen corn, and the Wampanoag did not soon forget the colonists� ransacking of Indian graves, including that of Massasoit's mother."

One may surmise that Bruchac was confused in making the reference to the grave of Massasoit's mother, which is undocumented. Probably what is meant is the removal later of two bearskin rugs from over the grave of the mother of Chickatabut, sachem of the Massachusetts (see my book Indian Deeds, p. 13). It is meretriciously clever, nonetheless, to turn Winslow's statement of respect for the Indians and their graves into a pronouncement about the Wampanoags' long memory of "the colonists' ransacking of Indian graves." The up-to-date construction of "memory" and "oral history" to fit the needs of current political concerns is blatant.

Dow and Slapin end their deconstruction with the remark that "As currently celebrated in this country, "Thanksgiving" is a bitter reminder of 500 years of betrayal returned for friendship."

Alternatively, Russell Peters said, "The time is long overdue for the Pilgrims and the Wampanoags to renew a meaningful dialogue about our past and look towards a more honest future."

Does it matter what of this is true? Was that the wrong question? Who do we want to be in the ever-changing Now? Intrepid demolishers of straw-man myths? Inventors of new myths to serve new political purposes? Historians?

[ahz-associates]

University of Winchester

Overview of University of Winchester

A publicly funded, research-oriented educational institution is the University of Winchester. Despite being a brand-new university, Winchester has already become well-known for its top-notch offerings and dedication to the success of both its community and its students. Large-scale ideas can now be developed in a setting of academic independence, ensuring the future success of every student. The university's motto is "Wisdom and Knowledge," which is the same.

Rankings and Achievements

Ranked 106- Complete University Guide 2021

Ranked 92- Guardian 2021

Ranked 98- Times / Sunday Times 2021

For Innovation and Engagement achieved Green Impact National Award (Marshall Rose Library) 2016

Green Impact Gold Award – Winchester City Council scheme 2018

82% of Winchester’s research was considered to be recognized internationally in the most recent Research Excellence Framework (REF 2014).

NSS 2021 Rank-117

Impact Ranking- 301–400th

The Guardian-107

History of University of Winchester

In 1840, the University of Winchester originally began its history. In the beginning, the Winchester Diocesan Training School was formed by the Church of England to train primary school teachers. Following that, the institute underwent a lot of modifications. It was renamed Winchester Training College in 1847, and by 1862, it had purchased a brand-new home on Cathedrals' property known as University's Alfred Quarter. We currently refer to this structure as the Winton Building. King Alfred's College was the name of the institution from 1928 to 2003. The college began to offer a lot of new degrees during this time. The Quality Assurance Agency (QAA), which recognised the level and calibre of the institutions' curriculum in 2003, changed the name of the institution to University College Winchester in 2004.

After achieving full university status in 2005, the institution changed its name to the University of Winchester. In 2008, the institution was granted Research degree issuing authority by the Privy Council. Only 10 students attended the institute in 1840, but today it proudly serves 8,000 students.

Faculties at University of Winchester

Faculty of Arts

Faculty of Business, Law and Digital Technologies

Faculty of Health and Wellbeing

Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences

Degree apprenticeships

Breakdown of fee structure

The international fee range starts from £11,600

Scholarships at University of Winchester

Vice chancellor’s scholarship (international)

International taught masters scholarship

International students scholarship

External scholarships – Undergraduate

Helena Kennedy Foundation – The HKF Award

Chevening Scholarships

Commonwealth Scholarships For Masters And Ph.d. Study – Developing Commonwealth Country Citizens Euraxess UK

Aga Khan Foundation Scholarship Programme

The Beit Trust Scholarships

Great Britain-china Educational Trust

The Charles Wallace India Trust

The Charles Wallace Pakistan Trust

Fulbright Commission – All-disciplines (Open) Postgraduate Award And So On

Facilities and Services

With the required facilities, the University of Winchester provides high-quality services. Students can use everything, including the contemporary library, the gym, and the sports facilities. Among the services offered by the university:

Wellbeing

Student Life Advice

Disability and learning diversity

Health and medical advice

Academic skills related guidelines

International student support

Information for needs assessors

Students and money

Scholarships, bursaries, and awards

Registration and induction

Parent and student looking through a prospectus booklet

Information for parents and careers

University of Winchester Music Centre

Student life

Every domestic and international student is treated equally in Winchester's welcoming environment. With several supports and instructions, students can begin to enjoy their time here right away. Here, the Student Union has a significant impact. It can be found inside the University Centre. The University Centre venue's 550 spaces include bars, a movie theatre, and other amenities. The Winchester Students Union manages a variety of organisations, shops, sports, and organises various programmes and events. The Union is continually working to help students and inspire them to express their ideas and abilities. It operates a variety of student media. Additionally, Winchester is a fantastic city. The city was named "The Best Place to Live" by The Sunday Times in 2016, and it placed higher in the 2019 Royal Mail Happiness Index. Students may simply go from school to the city's major attractions and take in the scenery.

Living Accommodation

The student housing programme at the University of Winchester excels and enjoys a solid reputation. There are both off-campus and on-campus housing options. Strong security is provided by each hall, along with spacious rooms that are well-furnished with WIFI, telephones, laundry facilities, and other amenities. From several of the halls, students may take in the breath taking vistas. The facilities are:

West Downs Student Village

Alwyn Hall

St Elizabeth’s Hall

Beech Glade

Queens Road Student Village

Burma Road Student Village

According to the Times Higher Education Student Experience Survey, Winchester was placed 15th out of 116 universities in 2018 for the calibre of its housing options. Additionally, it came in at number 10 on The Student Crowd's list of the best UK universities for housing in 2018.

Transport

Students' trips are now simple thanks to the University of Winchester. For both staff and students, it ensures a green transportation system. Additionally, local transportation can be discounted for them. There are places for students to store their bicycles, service them, and receive discounts with their university ID cards. The college is only ten minutes from the rail station, and local buses are conveniently located nearby. Regular users of these services, such as faculty and employees, can take advantage of substantial ticket reductions. The institution also maintains a Winchester automobile club and offers great facilities including car sharing, an electric vehicle charging station, and green transportation loans.

[morienmacbain]

My Life As a Short Work-Oct. 2021 Edition

       I grew up in a house filled with books, records, toys, comics, dogs, cats, games, tools, and bright light.  My parents were teachers, and strong enough and good enough to raise my brother and me well, and our childhoods went on longer than most people’s. In my memory, it was always Halloween, Christmas, Easter, summer vacation, or a birthday.  We played, and the games we played were wondrous.

     We visited with cousins, aunts and uncles, and grandparents, who were decent and who loved us.  The more I see of the world and all the kinds of families in it, the more grateful I am for the one I grew up with.

    In junior high and most of high school, I spent every day crazed with fear. I did all the plays, and found out to my shock that I could talk to girls.  In tenth grade, I found out that I was failing geometry, and I didn’t take it well.  I decided to kill myself before by parents saw my grade.  I wound up playing in the woods instead, and then went home.  I got a massive scholarship to Bethany, put on armor for the first time and loved it, and kept on fighting even though I lost all the time.

    I made out with a flamenco dancer and went to England. I went to Glastonbury and Stonehenge, drank from the fountain where the Holy Grail had been hidden, had a very strange experience involving an angel, and climbed a mountain in Scotland. I got sort of engaged to a woman who liked to start fires. I fell in love; I got my heart broken. I was almost killed by terrorists. Some weird and possibly occult stuff happened with bugs. I met a great girl. I graduated with honors and moved in with the great girl.

    I kept on fighting in really bad armor, and started graduate school at WVU. I read some amazing books that opened up my head, and met the people that were going to become my best friends. I relearned that I could sing and tell stories, and that people liked it. I got squired to the best knight I know, and graduated with honors again.

    I married the great girl, moved into my parent’s basement, and worked my butt off for nine months substituting, teaching homebound, and working for a security and detective agency (I almost got savaged by a dog and a group of townie cops when we were investigating their chief's adultery.). I took a job on the Bayou Teche, and we had a strange year in Louisiana. I hated the school, and at the end of the year I was ready to flee back into academia. We found a dog that we loved very much, but it wasn’t like having a kid.  We got to see Mardi Gras, and see a pig face in a jar. Sunshine and I were good to and for each other, and loved each other, and were happy together for many years.

    We went back to Morgantown, began running up truly staggering student loan debt, and we threw parties people will remember forever; I fell out of love with my academic discipline, and joined the army. I requested demolition training and liked it. I went to Guatemala for a hurricane relief mission,  was there cursed by a witch, and saw a woman smoke a cigarette in a way I’ll never forget. I was also busted by the MP’s for dealing black-market reading material to the locals.

     My friends and I hunted Mothman, the Ogua, and other creatures. We stayed in haunted hotels, took stupid risks, and dragged people back and forth over the lair of a lake monster with their swim trunks full of jerky.

    I got back to Morgantown, left my Ph.D. unfinished, and went to work in industrial construction, wandering around the country on jobs for eighteen months. Sunny and I split up at this time. I got blown up on the job and nearly died another time, but avoided the really bad stuff. I jumped out of an airplane over Palatka, Florida.

    I met a wonderful woman and fell in love again, and she with me, but it ended there. I took teaching work again, and moved to the coal fields. I was invited to a snake handling church, and saw a guy lose part of his hand to a rattlesnake for Jesus.

     My mother handcuffed herself to a famous actor and got arrested. I was, and remain, incredibly proud of her.

    Then I moved to Berkeley Springs. Sunny and I tried to make it work again. Then I was deployed for Operation Noble Eagle, and I became a bike cop in Georgia for a year. I got to protect a president I didn’t like. I killed and ate an alligator, mostly out of pity. I defused a brawl using my words and an apple pie. Sunny and I filed the divorce papers. Then I came home.

    I dated for a while, performed Shakespeare, got engaged to a minister, and then she came to her senses and backed out.

     My armor gradually got better and better, until it became the suit on my favorite toy knight when I was a kid.  It’s heavy and hot, but that’s another dream I get to live out. My brother and I get to put on our great armor and fight together, and that’s very good.

    Then I met The One. I asked her to marry me in Venice. I moved in, we got married,  have been happy and  good to one another, and we had the best baby I’ve ever seen.

     Chloe is a gifted, sweet, honest, loud, energetic, and wildly creative kid with a twisted sense of humor. She's our girl, all right! She's way braver and emotionally healthier than I was at her age. We go camping and geocaching together, and sometimes we hunt the ghost dog of Turner's Gap, run 5k's, or explore tunnels and caves!

      I got to travel to Spain, and make a pilgrimage by bicycle along the Camino de Santiago, which may or may not have erased my sins.  I laid a stone on top of the Mountain of Mercury, and saw the Grail in a chapel on top of a mountain, where I threw up.

      I went through a bad patch when my world went dark.  I was close to the edge again, but Melissa was there to catch me.  I got the help I needed, and am well again.

     I started a charity that encourages food donations to local pantries. It really took off, and it has done some real good over the years.

     I came to horsemanship late in my forties. I won a few tourneys, tried jousting, and adopted a horse named Luna. We didn't hit it off at first, but now she's a sweetheart. I took a bad fall off of her a couple years ago and got concussed, but that was my fault. She's a gorgeous gem, and the right horse for me.

      I discovered my face had been missing a beard that it desperately needed for years. Now it's firmly in place, and both my face and I feel much better in ourselves (although it does have more than a bit of gray in it, truth be told).

     My father beat pancreatic cancer in his fifties, and lived another eighteen years, in which he realized every day was gravy. The cancer came back a few years ago, and he died. My mother was next to him at the end. I'm glad we got to say all the stuff I didn't have the sense to say when I was a kid. I'm proud of his life and how he faced its end, not once, but again and again.

      We went to France, and took Chloe with us. We drank champagne at the top of the Eiffel Tower, did a bike tour through the streets of Paris which I am amazed didn't result in fatalities, saw the Roman Area of Lutece, the stones of Carnac, the Bayeux Tapestry, Chartres, Notre Dame, and wander the streets and battlements of Mont Saint-Michel by moonlight. We drank from the Spring of Barenton in the Forest of Broceliande, and hiked through the Val Sans Retour, where Morgan Le Fay tested Lancelot!

      The next year we flew to England (first class--the only way to fly!) and got to stay in the clock tower of St. Pancras Station. We stayed the night in a king's chamber in Warwick Castle, walked the Ridgeway from the White Horse of Uffington to Dragon Hill and Wayland's Smithy. We saw the Avebury Stones, Canterbury, and I spent the night on top of Glastonbury Tor, where I listened to someone snoring inside St. Michael's Tower. Was it Arthur? I didn't check.

      I realize now I've gotten to live out some version of most of my childhood aspirations (teacher, soldier, cop, knight, father, husband, traveler, writer, storyteller, minister, horseman, actor, explorer, private detective, ghost/monster hunter). I get to play Dungeons & Dragons with my family and friends. and can buy any minis and game books I want. I'm living the dream!

     Part-time I get to be Morien, who is a  far braver, stronger, tougher, more resourceful, gracious, uncompromising,  devout,  stoic, and  passionate version of myself.  He allows me to play at being, and perhaps more nearly approach, a better version of myself.

     We have a treasure trove in our friends, and in our families, and  I’ve never known any man as richly blessed with the women in his life as I have been.

    Now I teach in a great school, and come home to my two favorite girls every day. I’d take another fifty-three years like those in a heartbeat!

[didanawisgi]

For Heller, thank the scholarship of Joyce Lee Malcolm

Arlington, Va.– In the hours after February’s school massacre in Parkland, Fla., Joyce Lee Malcolm watched the response with growing annoyance:

“Everybody seemed to leap upon it, looking for a political benefit, rather than allowing for a cooling-off period.” As a historian, Malcolm prefers to take the long view. As a leading scholar of the Second Amendment, however, she is also expected to have snap opinions on gun rights, and in fact she often has engaged in the news-driven debates about violence and firearms. “Something deep inside of me says that people never should be victims,” she says. “And they never should be put in the position of being disarmed by their government.”

Malcolm looks nothing like a hardened veteran of the gun-control wars. Small, slender, and bookish, she’s a wisp of a woman who enjoys plunging into archives and sitting through panel discussions at academic conferences. Her favorite topic is 17th- and 18th-century Anglo-American history, from the causes of the English Civil War to the meaning of the American Revolution. Her latest book, due in May, is The Tragedy of Benedict Arnold, a biography of the infamous general. She doesn’t belong to the National Rifle Association, nor does she hunt. She admits to owning an old shotgun, but she’s unsure about the make or model. “I’ve taken it out a couple of times, but the clay targets fall safely to earth,” she says in an interview at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School in Virginia, where she’s a professor who teaches courses on constitutional history as well as on war and law.

She is also the lady who saved the Second Amendment — a scholar whose work helped make possible the Supreme Court’s landmark Heller decision, which in 2008 recognized an individual right to possess a firearm. “People used to ask, ‘How did a nice girl like you get into a subject like this?’” she says. “I’m not asked that anymore.” She smiles, a little mischievously. “Maybe they don’t think I’m a nice girl anymore.”

Back when Malcolm was a girl, she lived in Utica, N.Y. A state scholarship sent her to Barnard, the women’s college tied to Columbia University, where she majored in history. “It was a process of elimination,” she says. “I took calculus and chemistry, but history seemed the least narrow. You could study the history of math or the history of science. It had the widest scope.” She got married as an undergraduate — “people did that in those days” — and by the time she was 23, she was both a college graduate and a mom.

Malcolm wanted to continue her education. Living outside Boston, she applied to graduate school at Brandeis University, thinking that she might attend part-time. Administrators, however, talked her into the normal, full-time option. So she launched into a Ph.D. program, focusing on England in the early modern era. “I really liked the period,” she says. “It was wonderfully complex, with divisions between the rights of the state and the rights of individuals.” For her dissertation, she moved to Oxford and Cambridge, with children in tow. Now separated from her husband, she was a single mother. “It took some balancing. I’m not sure I was the best parent I could have been, but my kids grew up seeing what you can do when you put your mind to working.” (One of them is Mark Johnson, a Pulitzer Prize–winning health and science journalist at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.) In Britain, she met a Scotsman who became her second husband. She brought him back to the United States and took his surname.

Malcolm’s doctoral dissertation focused on King Charles I and the problem of loyalty in the 1640s, and much of her scholarship has flowed from this initial work. The Royal Historical Society published her first book, and she edited a pair of volumes for the Liberty Fund, totaling more than 1,000 pages, on political tracts in 17th-century England. As she researched and wrote on the period, she noticed something peculiar. “During the English Civil War, the king would summon the local militia to turn out with their best weapons,” she says. “Then he would relieve them of their best weapons. He confiscated them. Obviously, he didn’t trust his subjects.”

At a time when armies were marching around England, ordinary people became anxious about surrendering guns. Then, in 1689, the English Bill of Rights responded by granting Protestants the right to “have Arms for their Defence.” Malcolm wasn’t the first person to notice this, of course, but as an American who had studied political loyalty in England, she approached the topic from a fresh angle. “The English felt a need to put this in writing because the king had been disarming his political opponents,” she says. “This is the origin of our Second Amendment. It’s an individual right.”

As she researched, Malcolm taught at several schools and worked for the National Park Service. In 1988, she took a post near Boston, at Bentley College, a school best known for business education (and now called Bentley University). Fellowships allowed her to pursue her interest in how the right to bear arms migrated across the ocean and took root in colonial America. “The subject hadn’t been done from the English side because it’s an American question, and American constitutional scholars didn’t know the English material very well,” she says. Some Americans even resisted looking to English sources because they wanted to stress their country’s uniqueness. Moreover, law-school textbooks and courses skimmed over the Second Amendment. “The subject was poorly covered.”

Her research led to a groundbreaking book on the history of gun rights, To Keep and Bear Arms. Before it went to print, however, she faced something she had not expected: political resistance. “I had a hard time finding a publisher,” she says. After several years in limbo, To Keep and Bear Armscame out in 1994, from Harvard University Press — an excellent result for any scholar in the peer-reviewed world of publish-or-perish professionalism. “The problem was that I had come up with an answer that a lot of people didn’t like.”

The Second Amendment, she insisted, recognizes an individual right to gun ownership as an essential feature of limited government. In her book’s preface, she called this the “least understood of those liberties secured by Englishmen and bequeathed to their American colonists.” Confusion reigned: “The language of the Second Amendment, considered perfectly clear by the framers and their contemporaries, is no longer clear.” The right to keep and bear arms, Malcolm warned, “is a right in decline.”

She aimed to revive it at a time when governments at all levels imposed more restrictions on gun ownership than they do today. Many legal scholars claimed that the Second Amendment granted a collective right for states to have militias but not the individual right of citizens to own firearms. With To Keep and Bear Arms, which received favorable reviews and went through several printings, Malcolm joined a small but increasingly influential group of academics with different ideas. Her allies included Robert J. Cottrol, of George Washington University, and Glenn Reynolds, of the University of Tennessee (and best known for his Instapundit website). “I was so naïve,” she says. “I thought the idea of research was that you find information and people say, ‘Good! Now we know the answer!’”

She learned the truth in 1995, when House Republicans invited her to testify before a subcommittee on crime. The subcommittee’s ranking member was Representative Charles Schumer, Democrat of New York (and today’s Senate minority leader). In his opening remarks, Schumer scoffed at Malcolm and other witnesses. “The intellectual content of this hearing is so far off the edge that we ought to declare this an official meeting of the Flat Earth Society,” he said. “Because the pro-gun arguments we will hear today are as flaky as the arguments of the tiny few who still insist that the Earth is flat.”

Malcolm still bristles at those words. “I was a Democrat at the time,” she says. “I was raised a Democrat. I was just there to tell them what I had found out. It wasn’t a political issue for me. But the Democrats were nasty. Schumer was nasty.” After the hearing, Malcolm came to a realization: “For some people, opposition to individual gun rights is an article of faith, and they don’t care about the historical evidence.” Ever since, she has received regular reminders of this fact. In 1997, for example, Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia praised Malcolm’s “excellent study” but also erroneously called her “an Englishwoman.”

The unfortunately named legal scholar Carl T. Bogus jumped at the blunder: “Malcolm’s name may sound British, and Bentley College, where Malcolm teaches history, may sound like a college at Oxford, but in fact Malcolm was born and raised in Utica, New York, and Bentley is a business college in Massachusetts.” This irritates Malcolm. “They’re always trying to write me off because of Bentley, this ‘business college,’” she says. “It reminds me of the saying that if you don’t have the law, argue the facts; if you don’t have the facts, argue the law; and if you don’t have either, attack your opponent. The attacks have helped me grow a really thick skin.”

Along the way, the popular historian Stephen Ambrose provided Malcolm with inspiration. “He spent most of his career at the University of New Orleans,” she says, noting that it’s not considered a top-flight school. “He said he wanted to write himself to the top of his profession. It doesn’t matter where you teach. So I tried to write and write and write. You can lift yourself.”

Even so, some people continue trying to keep Malcolm down. The latest slight occurred at a symposium sponsored by the Campbell University School of Law in February, when the legal scholar Paul Finkelman equated the Supreme Court’s Heller decision with its notorious 1857 ruling in Dred Scott, which denied citizenship to blacks. Right after this provocative claim, Finkelman raised the old canard about Bentley in a bid to damage Malcolm’s credibility moments before she addressed their audience.

It didn’t matter to Finkelman that Malcolm had written her way up in the academic world’s pecking order: In 2006, she left Bentley and became a professor at George Mason’s law school, now named for Scalia. By this time, not only had Scalia praised her work, but so had other judges, including Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, who cited To Keep and Bear Arms in an opinion.

Then, in 2008, came Heller, arguably the most important gun-rights case in U.S. history. A 5–4 decision written by Scalia and citing Malcolm three times, it swept away the claims of gun-control theorists and declared that Americans enjoy an individual right to gun ownership. “If we had lost Heller, it would have been a big blow,” says Malcolm. “Instead, it gave us this substantial right.” She remembers a thought from the day the Court ruled: “If I have done nothing else my whole life, I have accomplished something important.”

A simple idea has motivated her work: “For me, trust in the common man is such a basic principle. Few governments actually allow it. They want to keep their people vulnerable and disarmed. I find it awful that people wouldn’t be allowed to protect themselves.” She also calls attention to a cultural aspect: “City people who grew up without guns think it’s just a bunch of rednecks.” She recalls an incident at Bentley, years before Heller: “I was in my office one day and a groundskeeper came up. ‘I just want to shake your hand and thank you,’ he said. What else could I have been writing about that anyone would want to thank me for?” She pauses. “There’s just so much vilification of the people who want to ‘cling’ to their guns,” she says, echoing the words of Barack Obama, who as a presidential candidate in 2008 said of rural and working-class whites — future Trump Republicans — that “they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them.”

Malcolm is now a Republican herself. When she hears gun-control advocates say they don’t want to ban all guns — “just the ones that look scary,” as she puts it, with a tone of contempt — her thoughts turn back to Britain. In 2002, she published Guns and Violence: The English Experience. It showed, among other things, that crime rates were low in the 19th century, a period with few gun restrictions. Things are different today: Crime has worsened in the United Kingdom, while gun ownership is rare. “Britain has gone down the road of taking away guns,” she says. “And look where it got them.”

She points to a website of the U.K.’s Police National Legal Database, which includes an online forum called “Ask the Police.” One question inquires about self-defense products. Are any legal? The answer: Only one, a “rape alarm” that looks like a car remote. Its panic button emits a screeching sound. The website also warns against using nontoxic sprays against assailants. If “sprayed in someone’s eyes,” such a chemical “would become an offensive weapon.” In other words, potential rape victims can push panic buttons but must not dare to injure attackers — not with sprays, let alone knives or guns. “Can you believe it?” asks Malcolm. “They don’t let people protect themselves.”

Americans probably won’t face such a predicament, even in the aftermath of the Parkland killings and whatever reforms are enacted as a result. State legislatures have taken strong steps over the last generation to protect gun rights, and the Supreme Court has clarified the language of the Second Amendment. Even so, Malcolm is worried. “Some judges are ignoring Heller, and unless the Supreme Court agrees to hear these cases and overturn them, we’ll see an erosion,” she says. Liberals in the media and at law schools cheer on the renegades. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has called for the overturning of Heller itself, and if a single seat now held by a conservative were to flip to a liberal, she could get her way.

In the meantime, however, the right to bear arms will not be infringed — thanks in part to the pioneering scholarship of Joyce Lee Malcolm.

[admissify-blog]

New Changes in UK Post Study Work Visa 2022 January Intake | New Rules & Updates for Indian Students

What is a Graduate route?

The Graduate route is meant in such how that international student who have attained their degree from a recognized university within the UK to remain here and can appear for work for a minimum of 2 years. Easily Consult with the best Overseas Education Consultant in Delhi.

Graduates needn't have employment provide to use for a post-study work visa. Also, there are not any minimum regular payment caps on numbers that enable students to figure flexibly and build their careers within the UK.

Students aiming to begin their studies later this year or early next year got to be within the UK by April six, 2022.

To use beneath the new Graduate route, international students should have completed their course (undergraduate or higher level) from a recognized UK institute. Graduates who can apply through the new route are eligible to figure or explore for work for the most time of 2 years once finishing their degree. Ph.D. students are eligible for 3 years' keep back. Get in touch with the study abroad consultants Guwahati.

The UK has invariably been a charming study destination for Indian students, however, staying within the UK once you end your course may be tough. Viewing the recent developments, students who register for courses beginning 2020/21 will keep back for 2 years once the course completes.

Previously, bachelor or degree holders will keep for less than four months within the UK to seem for employment. this is often an extension of visa rule changes that allowed PhDs to remain within the UK once graduation. The United Kingdom administration desires to grow and create its STEM-related fields. Talk to the best overseas education consultants in Delhi for the UK.

Now international students WHO register from 2020/21 will stay awaken to 2 years before they're needed to vary their visa or leave the country. International Students Square measure needed to seek out employment with a minimum regular payment of £20,800 with a Tier a pair of sponsor licenses. Also, students following Ph.D. square measure allowed to remain up to twelve months once finishing their degree. You can also start building a good relationship with the best UK consultants in Delhi.

UK post-study work visa for graduates

The UK post-study work visa permits international students to remain within the UK to look for work for two years once finishing their graduate studies.

Who are eligible for the UK post-study work visa?

Any international student having a Tier-4 visa and is listed in an exceedingly recognized Britain instruction from Sep 2020 is eligible for keep back amount after their graduation. Also, get your abroad study scholarship.

Post-study work visa for graduates within the UK?

The new visa rules that have been applicable from Sep 2020 or later enable international students to remain within the UK after graduation for up to 2 years. Build quality relationships with the best UK education consultants in Delhi.

Here are the principles for international students to travel from country.

Vaccination is the vital criterion for school students to attend offline lectures on campuses.

Indian students will shortly begin coming up with their travel international study destinations, with the time of year session of the 2022 academic year set to begin from August ahead. Hire the best UK consultants in Delhi.

This means that students insusceptible with the Indian vaccine of COVAX may not be allowed entry.

Travel Rules Ease, Indian Students See Record Entries to United Kingdom Universities.

London:

The Universities and schools Admissions Service (UCAS) acceptance figures, discharged on Tues, come back days once Asian country was affected by the Red List COVID-19 travel ban on to Amber. Start knowing in detail through study abroad consultants in Delhi.

This would have a giant impact on Indian students aiming to visit the United Kingdom to require up their courses as they now do not have to be compelled to quarantine in an exceedingly government-managed facility for ten days at a goodly further price. Contact with Study Abroad Consultant.

Instead, they will quarantine for the desired ten days at a selected destination, which for several are their university accommodation, or a follower or family home address. Talk to the best UK education consultants in Delhi.

India was affected by the Red List at four am time on Sunday and below the Amber List rules, all immunized travelers should fill within the obligatory traveler surveyor type to supply Associate in Nursing address wherever they might be undergoing the 10-day self-isolation.

All Amber List arrivals can have to be compelled to have a negative COVID-19 take a look at before move, moreover, as to take a COVID to take a look at on Day a pair of and Day eight of their quarantine. In England, there's the choice of paying for a take a look at on Day five, that if negative, can enable students to finish their quarantine early.

Learn From Admissify

Admissify, a UK & India-based company having offices across countries. Our international presence permits the USA to provide in-country support post-arrival, at the side of the state of affairs facilitate & immigration or job services. You would possibly conjointly get the abroad study scholarship for a smooth admission process.

[forstudy]

University of New England Scholarship 2021 in Australia [Fully Funded]

University of New England Scholarship 2021 in Australia [Fully Funded]

University of New England Scholarship 2021 in Australia: Good News, Welcome to our website We are pleased to announce that applicants are now invited to apply for the University of New England Scholarship 2021 in Australia. Scholarships are Fully-Funded and baptismal candidates from all over the world are eligible to apply. University of New England the opportunity to study for a Master & Ph.D.…