I believe I mentioned this in class, but I find it to be rather signifigant, so I'm going to stress it again.
Puritanism was all William Bradford knew. He and his fellow Puritans were willing to abandon their established lives in England in order to pursue a fresh, pious life elsewhere. This group of people was set on its own system of thinking. If Bradford felt so powerfully about this lifestyle, his writing is inevitably bound to include mounds of bias. This is an excerpt from the introduction:
"While not historical compositions as such, their books are [referring to Bradford and Winthrop], in vivid and sustained human interest, as well as in the power of depicting the conditions of the first settlements, a most adequate and successful kind of history." (The Historians, 1607-1783)
In general, wouldn't anything written for "human interest" be completely soaked in bias from the outset?
"They [Bradford and Winthrop] seem to have considered it a document to be kept for the use of future historians." (The Historians, 1607-1783)
He meant for this to be read, to influence its audience. It is a possibility that this document was written to inspire others to become neophytes. Maybe History of Plymouth Plantation was written in order to keep the faith alive, and this is why it has aspects of a narrative.
Writers of textbooks are well-rounded in the area of history (for the most part). Yes, they too cannot completely avoid bias, yet they have an almost complete picture of how things fit together. They observe the past and present, and find a meaningful way to relate the two. The separatist movement exhibited by the Puritans was rather new during its time and thus seems to have been attempted almost recklessly. Correct me if I'm wrong. The bottom line is that the Puritans knew little about how their actions would fit into the scope of history, or how it would affect the world, and so they continued on somewhat blindly. Their own history, therefore, seemed to take presidence over all other forms. This could be the reason that Bradford felt he had the right to convey his story in the way that he did.
I hope this post isn't too jumbled.. These are just ideas I didn't get to fully explain in class.
(Samantha Maliha)
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
Well, it's true that the Puritans could not have truly known how their history would fit into the world later on. But that's what makes Bradford's writings so effective as histories, as they are primary documents without any hindsight bias. After all, we've all heard that history is written by the winners. And yet Bradford has provided us a chance to learn about history from the perspective of a group that may not have "won", but still influenced our nation tremendously.
Undoubtedly bias is present in his work, but we can learn just as much from how he writes as what he writes about. To read a primary document like this is to immerse ourselves in the culture and mindset of the writer, an opportunity that reading a textbook cannot fully provide us.
But let me just mention that we, currently, classify Puritans as the "losers" because we have fully studied the results of the Separatist movement, but Bradford may have been convinced that he had finally met victory. Is knowledge really power? I guess it is.
Because we learn from text books where bias comes in smaller doses than it would in primary documents, such as Bradford's writing, we have more of a neutral outlook on history. I believe that this is reason why we classify the Puritans in the way that we do.
(Sam Maliha)
I must disgree with what Sam said in the above post: "Let me just mention that we, currently, classify Puritans as the "losers" because we have fully studied the results of the Separatist movement."
First of all, I don't believe such strong language does justice to the Puritans. Puritanism, as a whole, may have ended, but, if I may steal from the cliche idea, "losers" are those that fail to learn from their mistakes. I am sure the Puritan history has been studied by many theologians (and non-theologians), and errors, shortcomings, mistakes, etc., have been analyzed and corrections (or attepts to make corrections) have been made. Just because Puritanism no longer exists as a religion, does not mean it has failed, if for no other reason than the fact that it left behind its history and its literature.
Emily T.
P.S. I guess it all depends on how we define "failure" or "loser"...
Emily T.
Post a Comment