Summer History & Heritage — #12 (week of August 29)
Veritas history students will take our Summer 2011 History & Heritage Quiz in class
this Friday, September 2. Faculty and families will receive the bright yellow hard copy of
the test in their folders the week after. It will subsequently be posted on our website.
What follows is commentary on this weekʼs Almanac readings. Please note that this is
the 12th-and-final installment of Summer H&H for this year.
August 23 — “The Poet”
The New England transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson gave a noteworthy lecture
by this title in New York City in the summer of 1842, a talk that inspired a young Walt
Whitman to write his acclaimed Leaves of Grass (1855)? Emerson called for a uniquely
American artistry to celebrate everyday life in the U.S. with its small farms, factorytowns,
and railroads. Whitman, who heard Emerson speak that day, later claimed his
creative juices had been “simmering” until Emerson brought them “to a boil.”
August 25 — Thomas Chatterton (1752–1770)
William Wordsworth (1770–1850) called him “the marvelous boy;” other English literary
giants couldnʼt help but laud his astonishing ability to craft poetry, essays, journal
accounts, and stories. Chatterton claimed to be merely translating the works of
medieval monks from “brittle old manuscripts,” but that seemed fanciful to many.
Like many child prodigies of our day, too much success too early, along with severe
character flaws, proved his undoing.
Some words from the sketch that you should be able to define include scrivener,
elegies, eclogues, neophyte, precocious, profligately, unimpeachable. (Do not
merely consult a dictionary, but try to use the clues yielded by the context.)
Hereʼs a sentence worthy of careful attention: “Though most of the medieval academics
of the day questioned the authenticity of the manuscripts, the undeniable beauty and
stunning maturity of the pastoral eclogues made them doubt that a neophyte like
Chatterton could have manufactured such an elaborate ruse much less have written
such magnificent literature.”
Lastly, students of history should note when the teen prodigy lived: Chatterton passed
from this world (1770) just before the struggle of the American colonies for
independence from Great Britain heated up.
August 30 — Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826): Americaʼs Farmer
Jefferson, in Baltimore during his vice-presidential term (1797–1801), finds thereʼs no
room for him in the inn and proves his personal connection to everyday people and
everyday work (“democratic solidarity”).
As Americaʼs foremost agrarian theorist, Jefferson believed the land was the chief
material asset, and proper care of it the chief virtue, of a people. His words on this
matter bear repeating: “Widespread distribution and careful stewardship over property
is the most tangible attribute of liberty. The faith of a people, the vision of a people, the
destiny of a people may be divined by its corporate concern for the soil.”
Perhaps it behooves us today to consider the contrast between, and the relative
importance of, “corporate concern for the soil” and corporate concern for money.
Whereas the former nudges us closer to nature and a more enduring bond with our
geographic place in the world, our community and our neighbors, the latter typically
does not. With money, as they say, itʼs easy come and easy go. The earthʼs a bit
harder to move and take with us when we seek greener pastures.
For Jefferson, as with all thoughtful agrarians, the land not only belongs to us (under
Godʼs rule and ordination, of course), but we belong to the land. If there is some truth to
this, and the ancient Israelites would probably concur with it, then what lies beneath our
feet is our vital physical and “tangible” link to one another and across generations.
Suffice it to say that any spiritual link we have with each other (and with our ancestors
and descendants) is much harder to preserve without a solid and stable material one.
August 30 — The “Apostle to the Indians”
Highlighted in this entry are the remarkable achievements of John Eliot (1604–1690), a
Puritan clergyman who migrated from England to Massachusetts Bay in 1631 (part of
the “Great Migration”). Eliot, teacher of the church in Roxbury, Massachusetts, for
nearly 60 years (1632–1690), made strenuous efforts to reach the Algonquin Indians
with the gospel. His translations of the Old and New Testaments into the language of
the Algonquins formed the first printed Bible in North America.
