The John Batchelor Show

Saturday 10 October 2015

Air Date: 
October 10, 2015

Photo, left: The Iron Blood 18-star Wuhan flag (1911-1928) of the Wuchang Uprising.
October 10, 2015 is Double-Ten Day, as initiated by Sun Yat-sen. father of modern China. An important historical footnote: The Wuchang Uprising served as the catalyst to the Xinhai Revolution, ending the Qing Dynasty -- and two millennia of imperial rule -- and ushering in the Republic of China (ROC). It began with the dissatisfaction of the handling of a railway crisis. The crisis then escalated to an uprising where the revolutionaries went up against Qing government officials. The uprising was then assisted by the New Army in a coup against their own authorities in the city of Wuchang, Hubei province, on October 10, 1911. The Battle of Yangxia led by Huang Xing would be the major engagement in the uprising.
 
JOHN BATCHELOR SHOW
Hour One
Saturday 10 October 2015  / Hour 1, Block A: Between Two Worlds: How the English Became Americans, by Malcolm Gaskill (1 of 16)
Saturday 10 October 2015  / Hour 1, Block B: Between Two Worlds: How the English Became Americans, by Malcolm Gaskill (2 of 16)
Saturday 10 October 2015  / Hour 1, Block C: Between Two Worlds: How the English Became Americans, by Malcolm Gaskill (3 of 16)
Saturday 10 October 2015  / Hour 1, Block D: Between Two Worlds: How the English Became Americans, by Malcolm Gaskill (4 of 16)
Between Two Worlds review from The Guardian:  The 17th-century prologue to American history holds a deep significance well beyond offstage scene-setting. Thanksgiving – a commemoration of the pilgrim fathers’ first harvest in 1621 – remains a binding quasi-religious ritual in a nation that lacks a formal state church. Moreover, the claim that the original thanksgiving meal was attended by both pilgrims and Native Americans provides modern multiracial America with a convenient founding legend of friendly cross-cultural encounter. A similarly selective reading of events at the Jamestown colony in early 17th-century Virginia reinforces this message. Here the welcoming Pocahontas, daughter of a Native American chief, assisted the colonists and went on to marry a tobacco planter named John Rolfe. The early colonial era also features prominently in the political realm. Presidents and aspiring presidents routinely invoke the rhetorical trope of America as “a city upon a hill”, first deployed by John Winthrop, the leader of the Puritan migration to Massachusetts in the 1630s.
But this is England’s past as much as America’s, notwithstanding the tendency of Americans to treat English history as “backstory” to the making of their nation. Malcolm Gaskill’s absorbing account of 17th-century English colonisation in various parts of North America works against the grain of preconception to restore “a neglected dimension of the history of England”. The myth of daring innovators who set out “to build a new world” cannot withstand careful scrutiny of the restless homeland left behind. As often as not, Gaskill notes, colonists had a defensive mission – “to recreate a world felt to be vanishing at home”. Nostalgia – contrary to received assumption – predominated in this brave New World. Landowners wanted to revive old-style feudal estates, farmers aspired to “small holdings”, Puritans wanted to restore the uncorrupted practices of “the early church”, and everybody wished to recover the “good fellowship” and communal warmth of
Merry England, however, was more controversial. The pilgrim fathers’ colony at Plymouth was riven over the erection in 1628 of an 80ft maypole, which offended killjoys as a species of heathen idolatry. As Gaskill is keen to remind us, the antagonisms of the old world did not vanish in America, but were rekindled in new settings, with the failure to realise nostalgic dreams intensifying disappointment and unpleasantness.
However, higher-level social frictions of this sort only flared up when society itself had passed the threshold of bare survival; and this was sometimes a long time coming. We are all too accustomed to viewing North American colonisation in retrospect as a glorious success story for all but the native Americans and their environment. In Gaskill’s account, we are reminded that it was a close run thing, for the native Americans and a hostile environment – ice storms, humidity, diseases – almost saw off the colonists. The population of Roanoke colony on an island on the outer banks of what is now North Carolina vanished without trace in 1590, their quarters ransacked. The frozen colonists at Sagadahoc in Maine were more fortunate to be repatriated in 1608. Indeed, from the start, there was plenty of “reverse migration”, back to the motherlandAlthough New England and Virginia provide the focal points of Gaskill’s study, he does not neglect a wider culture of English colonisation in the north Atlantic – from nearby Ulster, the primal scene of colonial dispossession, to Newfoundland, Bermuda and Barbados. Each setting brought its own distinctive hazards, sometimes environmental, but arising too from the prickly differences of the settler population.
The religious and political divisions which took the motherland to civil war in the 1640s were not only replicated across the colonial world, but – untrammelled by tradition or conventions of church discipline – assumed poisonously exaggerated forms. During the 1640s, . . . 
Hour Two
Saturday 10 October 2015  / Hour 2, Block A: Between Two Worlds: How the English Became Americans, by Malcolm Gaskill (5 of 16)
Saturday 10 October 2015  / Hour 2, Block B: Between Two Worlds: How the English Became Americans, by Malcolm Gaskill (6 of 16)
Saturday 10 October 2015  / Hour 2, Block C: Between Two Worlds: How the English Became Americans, by Malcolm Gaskill (7 of 16)
Saturday 10 October 2015  / Hour 2, Block D: Between Two Worlds: How the English Became Americans, by Malcolm Gaskill (8 of 16)
Hour Three
Saturday 10 October 2015  / Hour 3, Block A: Between Two Worlds: How the English Became Americans, by Malcolm Gaskill (9 of 16)
Saturday 10 October 2015  / Hour 3, Block B: Between Two Worlds: How the English Became Americans, by Malcolm Gaskill (10 of 16)
Saturday 10 October 2015  / Hour 3, Block C: Between Two Worlds: How the English Became Americans, by Malcolm Gaskill (11 of 16)
Saturday 10 October 2015  / Hour 3, Block D: Between Two Worlds: How the English Became Americans, by Malcolm Gaskill (12 of 16)
Hour Four
Saturday 10 October 2015  / Hour 4, Block A: Between Two Worlds: How the English Became Americans, by Malcolm Gaskill (13 of 16)
Saturday 10 October 2015  / Hour 4, Block B: Between Two Worlds: How the English Became Americans, by Malcolm Gaskill (14 of 16)
Saturday 10 October 2015  / Hour 4, Block C: Between Two Worlds: How the English Became Americans, by Malcolm Gaskill (15 of 16)
Saturday 10 October 2015  / Hour 4, Block D: Between Two Worlds: How the English Became Americans, by Malcolm Gaskill (16 of 16)
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