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The only way to make a library safe is to lock people out of it. As long as they are allowed to read the books 'any old time they have a mind to,' libraries will remain the nurseries of heresy and independence of thought. They will, in fact, preserve that freedom which is a far more important part of our lives than any ideology or orthodoxy, the freedom that dissolves orthodoxies and inspires solutions to the ever-changing challenges of the..
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libraries
freedom
ideas
thought
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Edmund S. Morgan |
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What, then, of the liberated slaves and Indians? The saddest part of the story and perhaps the most revealing is that no one bothered to say. None of the accounts either of Drake's voyage or of the Roanoke colony mentions what became of them.
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Edmund S. Morgan |
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And he wanted no more of those other Puritan specialties: schools and books. In Virginia, he said, "I thank God, there are no free schools nor printing, and I hope we shall not have these hundred years; for learning has brought disobedience, and heresy, and sects into the world, and printing has divulged them, and libels against the best government. God keep us from both!"
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Edmund S. Morgan |
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How, then, did Virginia gentlemen persuade the voters to return the right kind of people to the House of Burgesses? How could patricians win in populist politics? The question can lead us again to the paradox which has underlain our story, the union of freedom and slavery in Virginia and America.
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Edmund S. Morgan |
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These numbers gave Virginia's population about six times as large a proportion of gentlemen as England had. Gentlemen, by definition, had no manual skill, nor could they be expected to work at ordinary labor.
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Edmund S. Morgan |
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There is no denying that Francis Drake was a pirate and that the enterprise he conducted four years later in Panama was highway robbery, or at best, highjacking. But it was on the scale that transforms crime into politics.
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Edmund S. Morgan |
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the great and fundamental principles of their policy are, that every man is naturally free and independent, that no one ... on earth has any right to deprive him of his freedom and independency, and that nothing can be a compensation for the loss of it." Robert Rogers, A Concise Account of North America (London, 1765),"
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Edmund S. Morgan |
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014d66b
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Libraries are the great hothouses of change, where new ideas are nursed into being and then turned loose to do their work.
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Edmund S. Morgan |
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Many of the persons convicted at Salem were found to have dolls in their possession, a piece of circumstantial evidence that in itself was almost sufficient to convict them. But there were other ways if determining whether a person was a witch or not. Witches were thought to have witch-marks on some part of their bodies, an area of skin that was red or blue or in some way different from the rest. Furthermore, at some time during a twenty-fo..
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Edmund S. Morgan |
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This diatribe was not mere youthful exuberance. In one of his last tracts, written when he was fifty-four, he described his opponent as a "snake-in-the-grass" and then specified what kind, a rattlesnake." (William Penn)"
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Edmund S. Morgan |