After Plymouth, early settlements in what is now Massachusetts included two on Boston Harbor - Wesagusset/Weymouth and Mount Wollaston/Braintree/Quincy. The leader of the Mount Wollaston settlement, Thomas Morton, got into trouble for partying with the local Native Americans and trading firearms for furs. The partying included a May Day Pole at a place still called Merry Mount or Merrymount.
Morton’s Merrymount property was seized and ended up as part of Weymouth-born daughter of a minister Abigail Smith’s dowry when she married her third cousin, Braintree (now Quincy) attorney, farmer and future U.S. President John Adams.
Sure, May Day was a British spring festival of long standing before the Bolsheviks appropriated it. There are only 366 days in a year for history to happen on, so many of them get double-booked with memorable events. Same as how some people remember Patriots’ Day as Patriots' Day, others as the day the FBI committed arson of an occupied church in Waco, and still others as the day the Murrah Building in OKC was destroyed.
I think he wrote “humanity” when he meant to write “mortality.” It’s a common mistranslation committed by writers whose native language is Idiocy.
ReplyDeleteAfter Plymouth, early settlements in what is now Massachusetts included two on Boston Harbor - Wesagusset/Weymouth and Mount Wollaston/Braintree/Quincy. The leader of the Mount Wollaston settlement, Thomas Morton, got into trouble for partying with the local Native Americans and trading firearms for furs. The partying included a May Day Pole at a place still called Merry Mount or Merrymount.
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Morton_(colonist)
http://www.newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/maypole-infuriated-puritans/
http://www.oldenwilde.org/srasmus/oldentext/merrymount.html
http://www.oldenwilde.org/srasmus/oldentext/more_merrymount.html
Morton’s Merrymount property was seized and ended up as part of Weymouth-born daughter of a minister Abigail Smith’s dowry when she married her third cousin, Braintree (now Quincy) attorney, farmer and future U.S. President John Adams.
Sure, May Day was a British spring festival of long standing before the Bolsheviks appropriated it. There are only 366 days in a year for history to happen on, so many of them get double-booked with memorable events. Same as how some people remember Patriots’ Day as Patriots' Day, others as the day the FBI committed arson of an occupied church in Waco, and still others as the day the Murrah Building in OKC was destroyed.
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