Lyle Browning wrote:

>snips happen<

>what got the ball rolling with Berkeley was the somewhat arrogant
>insistence on that typically American need to demonstrate "firstness" of the
>New Englanders, not the Pilgrim mythology with which I agree with Eric that the
>Pilgrim/Puritan images predominate. Lots of firsts are steamrolled by the later
>arrivals.

Lyle's right.

Yesterday, on NPR, some Philadelphia intellectual repeated the erroneous
claim that the "first penitentiary in America" is located there.

Sorry.

Latrobe's Virginia penitentiary at Richmond was already a quarter-century
old when the Philadelphia prison was built. But Virginia had the decency to
demolish the first penitentiary in America after it became obsolete. So
Philadelphia is left with a crumbling old dungeon that until recently
housed prisoners.

That's not the only Yankee false claim of primacy.

I am constantly annoyed by claims that New England mental hospitals were
"first," as in the Discovery of the Asylum. I suppose they never heard of
the one in Williamsburg, which has been reconstructed as a gallery.

Silly Northern claims of primacy generally result from the fact that Yankee
schoolmasters controlled the market for history textbooks during the
Federal period.

Ned Heite
Delawarean by birth
Virginian by curious accident



               Ned Heite  ([log in to unmask])
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*  A young lass with a bucket of waste            *
*  attempted to hurl it in haste.                 *
*  Bits of cabbage and pumpkin                    *
*  blew back on this bumpkin,                     *
*  missed the compost, and splashed in her face!  *
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