Today's reading showed me something about the beginning of the United States that I had never thought of before. I've taken quite a few classes on American history, and I'm glad to have had the opportunity to learn about our country as much as I have; but today's reading put things in a new perspective. I knew that one of the things that brought the American colonies together was the oppression they felt from Great Britain, but I never thought about how influencial language was to the banding together of so many cultures. The textbook talks about how many different cultures and religions were present in the New World-- there were Dutch, Germans, English, Protestants, Catholics, Puritans, Native Americans-- and they all had different sets of values to live by. They all had separate newspapers and ways of communicating through the written word. However, once the British began taxing them outrageously for the products essential to spreading information, they realized that the overarching goal they all had was the same. They wanted to be free from the constraints and exploitation of Britain.
It amazed me that language was so important to them that so many people put their beliefs, their cultures, and their pride in the back seat and decided that the lines of communication should be open among all of the colonies. When they realized that their routes of communication were at the threat of being cut off because of a ridiculous tax, many of them decided that there were more important things to worry about than fighting among the diverse groups of people who came here. They all came here for a reason and they all were tired of being exploited and controlled by the British. And the power and the need for the written word is one fo the things that brought them together to fight for the nation that we still fight for today.
I too, have taken classes about US history, both in high school and in college, and it has amazed me so far about what I didn’t already know about American history. I always knew that America had wanted to separate from the English because the American people were tired of the oppression and exploitation of the English but I never knew about the language part of it. That part was completely new to me. And given what you said about how all of these different cultures came together to fight their shared oppression, that was incredible. The different cultures didn’t exactly respect each other either or care about the other as much as they did if they were from the same culture, but when the opportunity presented itself, they cared about each other enough that they would fight to keep the other safe from some monarch who didn’t care about them at all. It amazes me that we as a people were so ready to come together to defeat a “common enemy” when there had been such various responses and reactions to different cultures being in America and that the English were so ready to give up their own monarch whom they had clung to because he was the last part of their culture. But because of the way that they were treated, they ultimately sided with their new countrymen and their alliances were adjusted.
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