Just giving you fellers a heads up that I’m foregoing our Saturday livestream today for the reason that I just published two back-to-back videos over the past couple of days, and I want to give people plenty of opportunity to see them. If I did a livestream today I’m afraid it would upset the algorithm, and those videos would be shown to fewer people.
Sooo… instead of heaping on more new content, I’m going to allow the two recent videos to sit out there and gain a bit of traction for themselves.
How are you all doing out there today? How’re you Canadians doing up there? Are you still under snow?
The school textbooks tell you the settlers crossed the Atlantic for religious freedom.
Some of them did, partly. What the textbooks leave out is the thing that sits in the actual letters, in the sailors' accounts, in the merchant pamphlets circulating in English ports from the 1580s onwards: a major reason people came to America was the wild game. Meat you could take. Meat nobody owned. Meat that walked into camp.
For a population legally separated from the animal for five hundred years, this was the whole pitch.
Consider what they were leaving.
A family in a Devon cottage in 1618 eats pottage. Oats, barley, an onion, whatever greens grew near the back door. No meat in it this week. No meat in it last week. There will be meat in it on Christmas Day, God willing, if the chicken is still alive by then. The deer in the forest at the end of the lane have been the king's property under the Forest Laws since 1066. Taking one is a hanging offence. The father has never taken one. His father never took one. The institutional...
