Dec 26, 2009

Go Down, Moses | Historical Context

In many American history books, 1620 is singled out as an important date. That was the year when the Mayflower landed at Plymouth colony, bringing a shipload of Pilgrims who had left their homes and set sail for a new world hoping to find the religious freedom which had been denied them in Europe. Those same books seldom record an equally momentous event which occurred one year earlier: in 1619, a Dutch man-of-war arrived in Jamestown, bringing the first African slaves to the land which would become the United States. These two events prefigure a divisive split in our nation’s history:...