Thanksgiving Is Ruined |
|
|
February 11, 2017
refugees [6/7]
are us
or
rather, like slavery, were an essential
functional component of the foundational project of inventing the
USA:
The loyalists of the American Revolution, that is,
those who remained loyal to the British crown during the Revolutionary War,
have not gotten much of a fair shake from historians. They were, after all, the
losers in the Revolution, and history is usually not kind to losers, especially
exiles or refugees from a lost war. . . . Although the
loyalists had been raised to consider Britain as “home,” most of the refugees,
even those who were privileged, soon discovered that they were strangers in a
strange land. . . . . Like the other things the British government provided the
loyalists -- land grants, free passages, rations and supplies
-- awarding compensation for losses was truly remarkable, all part of the
British government’s Atlantic-wide program of refugee relief. The
government never believed that the loyalists had a right to reparations;
instead, it assumed that Britain had a moral and paternalistic responsibility
to provide aid to its loyal subjects.
from Gordon
S. Wood's "Good Losers," review of Maya
Jasanoff 's Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary
World
|