Thoughts on “Tw Colonial Frontiers’, ‘Albion’ Seed’ and ‘Th Revolution’…

Thoughts on “Tw Colonial Frontiers’, ‘Albion’ Seed’ and ‘Th Revolution’…

The concept of ‘American Exceptionalism’ is difficult to trace, however the maturation of this peculiar American ethos, as perceived by the American populace, can be outlined through the relationships formed between British colonists, the indigenous groups they encountered and displaced and the cousins they left behind in the old monarchial system of Western Europe; moreover, the self-perception of Americans has always been connected to the system they left behind, indeed “Americans have been concerned with their special relationship to the rest of the world from the time of the revolution itself, and indeed since the first settlement of the country.”
The attitudes carried by British subjects into the ‘new world’ were shaped and conditioned by the system they emerged from; these colonists were predominately Protestant in their faith, thus the model that they employed in populating and spreading their new settlements was a manifestation of their faith. The faith they brought was one that set them apart from the peoples they met; the new arrivals saw the open land and vast forests as a promised land and an inheritance of their Christian faith. This mindset conflicted with the bands of peoples already spread across the ‘inheritance’ of the arriving settlers; the new population centers hugged the coast for decades as the relationships between native peoples and Europeans shifted back and forth, it was a “vacillation between accommodation and coercion that characterized this earliest phase of Indian-white relations in British North America was due to less to confusion about whether the ‘savages’ were well-disposed and tractable or naturally hostile and unreliable than to the actual state of power relationships between the two peoples.” These power relationships characterized the relations that existed between the two groups until the present age. These relationships were not only religious in nature; relations that were both, conflictive and beneficiary in their...

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