CH203---Essay: John Winthrop and the Pequot War--UNIVERSITY OF NEVADA, RENO FALL 2018

CORE HUMANITIES 203 SECTION 1002 //DR STEVEN P.  //SUBJ: CITY UPON THE HILL 


(The Roundabout)--Sailing from England fearing possible action taken against the Calvinist-Puritan group, John Winthrop organized nearly a dozen ships, crossed the Atlantic and arrived in Salem in the summer of 1630. But there wasn't enough room or water there so the band of Puritans eventually settled what is now present day Boston. During the Atlantic crossing, Winthrop gave a high-winded speech on board the Arabella about God, duty and the (soon to be) American way of life in which he alluded to building a city upon a hill that would be the envy of the world. But the city would eventually be built on land taken from the Native Americans who had lived there for at least two centuries.

     Pequot-Americans and other indigenous tribes had long been working the land, hunting and fishing and growing crops but all of that would change when, as Tocqueville called them, the "Europeans" arrived. There was a fundamental cultural outlook on life stemming from the strict Puritan code that disallowed other religious viewpoints, one of the principal reasons they left England in the first place. Confronted with the pagan rituals and loose moral codes of the Indians, it is no wonder that soon the Puritans would begin to question why the natives were allowed to keep all the fertile land much in need for plantations and exploitation. The colonists were not directly under any requirement from the homeland to make the New World profitable but were bound to a charter that would at least guarantee some sort of nafta with the King. Where the Indians stood in it became muddled in competition from other British settlers, numerous tribes all of whom could not get along, and the Dutch. The result was ultimately a war, the Pequot War of 1636-38 to be specific. The Pequots, by the way, was already faced with extermination due to that other great killer of Indian nations, smallpox.

     Speechmaker John Winthrop, if not a key player in the decision to go to war with the Pequots, certainly didn't climb back up on the pulpit of the Arabella with another lecture on treating everybody equal, with one of his "four things to be propounded," as;  " love one another with a pure heart fervently," and " bear one another's burdens."  That translated to love one another's land fervently and bear one another's crops and furs. Without going into the details of the outcome of the war, history reports the Pequots were massacred (Mystic River, 1637), women and children included. Those that survived were shipped off to the West Indies to become plantation slaves; except for a few that Winthrop adopted as household servants, in other words, slaves.

     Winthrop's city upon the hill was built on expropriated Indian land following the extermination of the tribe that owned it, with the help of turncoat Native-American allies, and became known as Boston, ground zero of the American Revolution.
   






Supporting Documents:
"A Model of Christian Charity," John Winthrop. https://www.coursehero.com/file/16242329/American-Exceptionalism1/
Sketch of Winthrop on Arabella at Salem--http://gerard-tondu.blogspot.com/2014/11/1630-puritans-found-boston.html
Mystic River Massacre-1637--https://worldhistoryproject.org/1637/5/26/the-mystic-massacre
Image:  http://gerard-tondu.blogspot.com/2015/03/1637-pequot-war.html
Indian-Pilgrim Image--https://www.accessgenealogy.com/native/the-narragansetts-and-pequot-indians.htm
Background Notes--https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Winthrop

CORE HUMANITIES 203 SECTIO1002// DR STEVEN P.  //SUBJ: CITY UPON THE HILL

ERAC, CHASE & 3.0 GPA-- by JC Langelle--(C) 2018 EYELESS ON CAMPUS

ATTN CD//TACNET   VIA COMMO//JC   SUBJ//AMBUSH PATROL

(KB HQ)-- If the new page Duong Son (2) isn't impressive enough, it was formerly scotlandyard.blogspot.com but all of that changed today, or rather sometime last week.
     The first event was the employment offer from Hertz as a driver at the Reno airport. I jumped through all the hoops and finally got on board the previous Tuesday. By the time Wednesday rolled around I texted and backed out of the position, citing

"Regrettably, I will be unable to take the job at the Reno airport as planned, due to an excess of other responsibilities..." 

There was plenty of reason to back out although the "excess of other responsibilities" still aren't exactly clear. About the same time I applied for the Hertz driver job, I asked for a transfer from my Enterprise service agent job from the Truckee airport into Reno. The objective here was to make the upcoming Fall schedule at the University of Nevada a bit more in line with employment. As it turned out, all of the chess moves made turned out to be right.
     FoIlowing some back and forth between HR at Roseville, for the Truckee branch, and Las Vegas, for the Reno branch, the transfer was rejected. HR in Roseville; Coreen McGregor and  HR in Las Vegas, Francine Mazza; the latter I had prior dealings with, most of them with negative results. I nixed the Hertz position and instead went back to work on five-hour shifts at the Truckee for two weekends. With finances getting tight, I expected at least a reasonable enough paycheck to make the car payment to Chase. I checked the payroll page on Wednesday and found having worked twenty hours on four separate weekend days, one was bumped to the next pay period, $200 was taken and applied to some medical benefit deduction and the payroll showed $37. I texted Enterprise submitting an immediate resignation. It was Air Show weekend at the Truckee airport, one of the biggest rental weekends of the year. Payroll must have had a blinking light on the dashboard of its rental to hand me a check for $37, quick, take Shannon over there to Auto Doctor. It suddenly dawned on me just how treacherous working for a corporation can be and realized how different it might have been if I was in a union.
     So the Hertz thing was out, the ERAC job vaporized in one fast direct deposit of a check that wasn't there, and I get a call from Chase today telling me my car payment was two weeks behind, something I was already painfully aware of. I had bought the car under some troublesome circumstances and only recently I thought about how nice it would be to lose the car, the insurance and Chase. AAA went up $30 a month to $117 citing some local statistics for the necessity, not my perfect driving record for 20 years, it should have dropped. I struggled to make the last two payments and have been living on $10 a day as the result. I called Chase and explained in no uncertain terms that I could not make a payment and it just didn't sink in. I called back and they suggested some alternative payment plan which after a long repeated explanation of all of the above plus the expectation of having enough to pay the car by the third week in August, they rejected the alternative plan. I told them to come and get the car.
    As for the 3.0 GPA, UNR texted and said financial aid requirements for the Fall 2018 session is 15, not 12, credits, which is just short of impossible. That takes another $700 out of the FAFSA refund needed to cover various expenses from the start of the semester to Christmas.  But the future is now wide open, I stood my ground against the corrupt, greedy, soulless corporations that I had promoted with such confidence and find myself as a result, broke and no car. It would have been simpler to take the $37 loss, go back to the Air Show, call Chase and set a payment and live on $5 a day instead of $10. What have I discovered because of all of this? Time.
     Time to write, to record, to get blogs inventoried, look over discs full of recordings, web pages needing edited, stories to upload, others to delete. Time to open a new site like Duong Son (2), to add more songs to Spreaker, to park the car and walk, go next door and order pizza. Time to drop the CH212 class where the prof gave me a 40 on a very organized paper I submitted, time to drop the CH201 Core Humanities class for the summer, pulling back on the Pell Grant before that led to problems on the Fall financial aid.
     There is a basic law of nature,
" for every action there is an opposite and equal reaction."
I have noticed lately that this doesn't just apply to gravity or acceleration.

ATTN MERTZ SCULLERY//GI CAN DETAIL.....
You're pushin' too hard...."

     


   

CH 212-3001--University of Nevada, Reno//Summer 2018--RUMINATION 007--EVOLUTION & 5 QUESTIONS

CH 212-3001

University of Nevada, Reno

Prof A Thibault

Summer 2018  25 June 18

James C Langelle

Rumination 007:  Evolution

What do you think the role of scientific controversy is?

The question is not whether there is a role for controversy in science, but can it be constructively presented in the academic community. That is, without obstruction from the US Constitution or the Supreme Court as in the case of intelligent design.

Darwin's theories, perhaps more than any other in the past two centuries, have evoked strong camps in the US-- where is the line between debate of new ideas and ethical/moral repercussions and the type of entrenchment that Darwinian theory has seen?  

Intelligent design (ID) has been challenged in court due primarily to its failure to offer any scientific proof of its validity. If credibility of a theory in science is based on observation and experimentation, then other claims, such as the origin of man, need to be addressed using the same parameters.

How does scientific discovery then intersect with issues of freedom of speech or religion?

If the discovery becomes a paradigm that would infringe upon the rights guaranteed by the Constitution, then it needs to be challenged in a court of law; not just by bloggers on the internet or ignorant twitter trolls who have no desire to separate facts from fiction.

To that extent, is this knowledge "necessary" or could it be black-boxed to reduce controversy?

Do not take anything for granted without thorough understanding of the motives and the facts behind a controversy.

Furthermore, how does scientific "fact" shape or create worldview?

More so, the lack of scientific fact can greatly impede progress. This has been seen time and again in recurring epidemics such as ebola in Africa where, following an outbreak, certain procedures are followed, only to be ignored once the epidemic subsides.

From an anthropological perspective, this is just one worldview of a particular culture- a scientific culture. Anthropology would then argue for relativism. Do you think that the belief in scientific fact is relative?

Reduction of natural phenomena to an ethnocentric bias leads to confrontation when a crisis emerges, especially in underdeveloped countries where disease and epidemic occur. Anthropologists might prefer to see the witch doctor come up with a life saving elixir but the World Health Organization has other ideas. Often times, the WHO doctors and nurses are put at risk due to the very bias of the locals in an environment associated with anthropology.

Or, do you think that its enforcement is a type of scientific imperialism?

The reason there are such laws such as quarantine of an epidemic outbreak is to prevent it from spreading. There are always any number of so-called community groups that, for personal, religious or political motives, use means at their disposal to criticize what may be for the benefit of all.

Five Questions:

What evidence best supports evolution (Ex: geological, paleontological, anthropological)?

Is the geologic-fossil record adequate to explain gaps in evolution that have been placed into the “missing link” file?

Which geologic theory best supports evolution, young-earth or old-earth?

Is there any evidence in earth science to support spontaneous generation of a species?

How do you account for prehistoric remains of man appearing in various remote locations around the globe?