Culture

This article continues in the vein of my previous piece, The events described in both happen in roughly the same timespan, yet this one looks at impacts individuals can have. These articles share a common theme, that being; what are among the greatest assets of our country have come about as byproducts of our worst behavior. This is less a case of finding a silver lining, I prefer to see it as recognizing a lotus emerging from the muck. 

We know plenty about Henry David Thoreau’s famous retreat, and his legendary wanderings. However were it not for the meeting and influence of his Penobscot friends, Joe Aitteon and Joe Polis, Thoreau’s time at Walden pond might have been a singular episode rather than the start of a lifelong obsession. It was these friendships that took HDT from admirer of Nature to avid student, from a pastoral pastime to a central compulsion. 

Rich Holschuh serves on the Vermont Commission on Native American Affairs and spends his nights and weekends investigating the story of Brattleboro and its peoples, dating to a time 12,000 years before William Brattle was even a twinkle…

In this podcast, Rich talks about his work uncovering the history of Brattleboro’s first peoples and reconnecting modern peoples to that heritage.

135-65 Million years ago, shallow seas covered much of what would later be constellated as the Southern States.  More specifically, the ancient North American coastline corresponded with what is now termed the Mississippi Delta. As a result, the soil there, in a fairly narrow crescent, was particularly fertile due to the deposits of chalk and other alkaline elements. So fertile, in fact, that cotton production flourished to a greater degree there than anywhere else on the planet. 

Early Vermont histories portrayed this area’s aboriginal peoples as transients who occasionally passed through southern Vermont, en route to and from Northern New York and Canada, but were ultimately not residents of the area and therefor had little claim on these lands.

In this podcast Joe Rivers and his intrepid band of middle school historians show that those early Vermont histories were very much mistaken.

The founding of a nation-state must decide where its powers belong. In a nation where the dichotomy of centralization and decentralization proponents exists it is confronted with black or white propositions that actually create shades of gray tugging on both trends.

The United States Constitution was written to be a strongly centralist document with a smattering of decentralist characteristics. Some of the founding members thought that it lacked balance until the Bill of Rights satisfied their arguments against ratification.