what to read before the Read?

[Mark Kohut]

Seconded by this reader, weak in history reading although I am now of an
historic age,  who learned of it in this stenciled way as well.

It can make you think of M & D in a kind of Where's Waldo? way or as if
they are the invisible Zeligs of this history, so to speak.

On Tue, Oct 31, 2017 at 12:14 PM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> What's added most for me since first time through M&D has been reading in
> the history of the French and Indian War (1754-1763), which was the North
> American trigger for the Seven Years War (1756-1763)... ending less than a
> year before Mason & Dixon's arrival in America, and still reverberating
> loudly throughout the book.
>
> It's a historical truism that the Seven Years War was "the first world
> war." In terms of statecraft and big battles, it was mostly European --
> George II of England (and Hanover) allied with Frederick the Great of
> Prussia against Austria, Russia, France and Spain. But it also led to
>
> (1) England ending the French presence (and competition) in India,
> settling in for almost 200 years of domination there
> (2) English conquest of Canada, ending the French colonial (if not
> cultural) presence in Canada and claims from the Great Lakes down into the
> Mississippi and Ohio valleys -- leaving the Louisiana territory accessible
> only via New Orleans, unsupportable and ripe for American purchase 40 years
> later
> (3) English acquisition of Florida and some rich Caribbean islands from
> Span and France
>
> So Mason and Dixon, caught up in the "global" naval conflict early in the
> book, spend most of it as citizens of an England dazed with its own
> success, trying to manage a vastly enlarged colonial empire. In America,
> they emcounter important *local* consequences:
>
> (4) after more than a century of playing off the English and French
> against each other (often in service of their own inter-tribal wars), the
> Native Americans -- from the Micmac and Abnaki in northern New England,
> through the Iroquois Five Nations and Huron in north/west New York and the
> Great Lakes, down through Midwestern tribes to the Cherokee in South
> Carolina and Georgia -- now had to deal with only the English.
> (5) But now the English themselves split more openly between the
> colonists, relentlessly pressing westward (and dealing furiously in land
> that might or might not be legal tor safe to settle, like
> soldier/surveyor/speculator George Washington) and London, which from its
> PoV had saved their bacon from both French and Indians and was tired of
> sending more redcoats every time settlers provoked Indian attacks. The
> colonists, of course, thought *they* had done the heavy lifting in the war.
> They had little taste for London's limits on expansion -- and less for new
> customs duties or other taxes intended to pay down the war's enormous debt
> and rationalize the financial administration of the new, bigger empire.
>
> So in the late 1760s, while M&D were hacking their way west, and coastal
> city mobs were rioting against the Stamp Act, the colonial elites were
> talking to each other more often and systematically than they ever had
> before about common grievances and a united front against London... and the
> rest is history. Not the retrospectively packaged "ideological" history of
> democracy and "no taxation without representation," but a very
> up-close-and-personal history of a Zone recently wracked by war, under the
> eye of a new global empire, with nobody certain about the new rules, and
> the Indians and remaining Frenchmen up to god-knows-what out in the
> endless, tempting, terrifying hinterland.
>
> The Wikipedia article on the Seven Years War is enough background for that
> (and M&D's occasional glances at something new and fearsome in Prussia),
> but as before I recommend Fred Anderson's work on the French and Indian
> War, available in longer and shorter versions (both also in Kindle)
> https://www.amazon.com/Crucible-War-British-America-
> 1754-1766/dp/0375706364/ref=mt_paperback?_encoding=UTF8&me=
>
> https://www.amazon.com/War-That-Made-America-History/dp/
> 0143038044/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=
>
>
>
> On Mon, Oct 30, 2017 at 2:40 PM, Gene DA <genevievej.da at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Having not yet read M&D, what other literature is alluded to? If there
>> are recurring ones or major ones, that would be helpful.
>>
>> Also, I have read a number of the essential articles of Federalist
>> Papers, but there's a lot, any specific ones you suggest? Or are the key
>> ones good enough for a primer?
>>
>> Any such suggestions are appreciated.
>>
>> On Mon, Oct 30, 2017 at 12:17 PM, Jochen Stremmel <jstremmel at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> There is a wonderful book by Henry Miller about the books in his life
>>> where
>>> he says something like: you shouldn't read more, you should read less.
>>>
>>> 2017-10-30 17:32 GMT+01:00 Arthur Fuller <fuller.artful at gmail.com>:
>>>
>>>> Last thing I binged was Sons of Anarchy; I watched seven seasons in one
>>>> week, a season a day. I remember saying to a friend of mine, this is not a
>>>> biker story, this is Shakespeare on wheels, and I was proved correct in the
>>>> credits of the last episode, a quote from King Lear, the best play ever
>>>> penned.
>>>>
>>>> I read a shocking stat last week, and it made me realize how little I
>>>> know and how uneducated I am. Last year, 180,000 books were publlished in
>>>> England alone. At 3 per week, and sometimes it's slower going, depending on
>>>> the depth. Let's calculate this; 3 per week time 52 weeks equals 156 books
>>>> per annum, which is a miniscule fraction of the books published in England,
>>>> let alone the USA, Canada, etc. In other words, I am just slightly better
>>>> than illiterate. I've read every word from Thomas Pynchon and William
>>>> Gaddis and a few others, including J.S. Mill, Jeremy Bentham and Werner
>>>> Heisenberg. But there remain the couple of hundred thousand books per year
>>>> that I have not read.
>>>>
>>>> Arthur
>>>> ​
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>
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