Abstract:

This essay examines how nineteenth-century writers and orators made meaning and myth out of the arrivals of the Mayflower ship in Plymouth, Massachusetts, and the White Lion at Point Comfort, Virginia. The arrivals of these two ships, one carrying the vaunted Pilgrims and the other carrying the first enslaved Africans to British North America, were almost always misdated as 1620 and thus situated as rival ships representing divergent purposes. I show how this misdating was leveraged by very different groups, from Black ministers speaking in the midst of Civil War to white colonizationists fantasizing about a Black Plymouth. The fraught but tidy imagery of the dual 1620 arrivals also brought to the fore a deep historiographical divide between those that viewed the nation as the triumphant realization of the Pilgrim's mission and those who saw that mission as indistinguishable from the slaveholding planters' to the South. Finally, I turn to the significance of the 1619 dating of the White Lion and the New York Times Magazine's 1619 Project to illuminate why dates matter in the writing and righting of Black history in America and how the work of early Americanists might contribute to reorienting the stories we tell and their timelines.

摘要：

本文探讨了19世纪的作家和演说家如何利用五月花号船抵达马萨诸塞州普利茅斯和白狮号的来实现意义和神话在弗吉尼亚州的Point Comfort。这两艘船的到来几乎总是被误认为是1620年，因此它们是代表不同目的的敌对船舰，其中一艘载有自unt的朝圣者，另一艘载有第一批被奴役的非洲人到英属北美。我展示了这种错觉是如何被不同群体利用的，从在南北战争中发表演讲的黑人部长到在幻想着黑人普利茅斯的白人殖民主义者。1620年两次到达的那张充满生气但整洁的画面也突显了深刻的史学鸿沟，在那些将国家视为朝圣者使命的胜利实现的人与那些认为该使命与奴隶制种植者的南方是无法区分的人之间。最后，而纽约时报杂志的1619工程照亮为什么日期的书面物质和在美国的黑人历史以及如何年初美国问题的工作可能有助于重新调整了我们讲述的故事和他们的时间表扶正。