Colonial Williamsburg: Where the Tea Party gets schooled (Salon.com)

[Bucky]

http://www.salon.com/2013/04/07/colonial_williamsburg_where_the_tea_party_gets_schooled/

This might sound far-fetched, but Colonial Williamsburg, in its subtly transformed 21st-century mode, feels like a covert battleground in America’s culture wars. It’s where an overwhelmingly white and conservative audience meets the post-Howard Zinn cutting edge of history. (How much attention they pay, and how much they like it, is another question altogether.) If your ideas about the place are based on that grade-school trip you took with your grandparents, I can assure you that the effect is pretty different now. Beneath its manicured and bewigged surfaces, Colonial Williamsburg is trying to break free of its stodgy traditions and bring its visitors face to face with the internal conflicts and contradictions of the Revolutionary War era and their ripple effects across politics and society today.

That wrenching scene backstage at the slave auction was the second of two episodes we watched about how the Revolutionary period affected the lives of African-Americans in Williamsburg, a city where black people, both free and enslaved, made up more than half the population in the 1770s. Later that day, we watched the second of two scenes about American Indians, in which warriors from the Chillicothe Shawnee people, who are holding the famous frontiersman Daniel Boone as a hostage, engage in a failed parley with an officer from George Washington’s Continental Army. The Shawnee men leave the gathering vowing to wage war against the perfidious “long knives,” or white American settlers, for control of the Ohio Valley, although they understand that the outcome might well be the destruction of their people.

{schnip}

Beyond the glaring racial hypocrisy, other “Revolutionary City” episodes bring up uncomfortable contrasts. When Benedict Arnold and the Redcoats “take” the town (as they briefly did, in 1781), the infamous traitor scoffs at our boos and catcalls. You losers threw away British security over a few pennies in taxes on tea, he demands, wrecking your economy and leading to all this death and suffering. What was that all about? No one in the crowd can come up with anything good. “Religious freedom!” someone shouts. “Worship whatever deity you please,” Arnold retorts, as long as you tithe to the Church of England. “We’re taxed too much!” says someone else. Your taxes under the Continental Congress are 100 times higher than under the king, he tells us. You can almost feel the anxiety of the crowd: If the Revolution was about something bigger than church or taxes, what was it?

[ZRT2209]

1. time to go back and visit again

[MotherPetrie]

2. Thanks, that was really interesting. Makes me want to visit again.

[bluedigger]

3. Williamsburg made a lasting impression on me when I visited in 1968.

Time to go back!

[jerseyjack]

4. What was it about? That is an interesting question with many answers.

Most people had little contact with the king or his agents. They probably couldn't have cared less about the revolution.

Some people cared a lot. It was no accident that the person with the biggest signature on the Declaration of Independence was also the largest tea dealer in the colonies. He stood to lose a lot if the Tea Act was a success.

Lawyers, newspaper men and others who were able to read and make money off of that ability also stood to lose a lot if the Stamp Act remained. But the Stamp Act had little, if any effect on the dolt in the street.

The Revolution was favored with probably less than 1/10th of 1% of participation by the citizens.

[SunSeeker]

5. When I was there 12 years ago I saw no references to slavery.

Glad to see it getting more accurate.