A Nation of Nations

Remember our long talk when we first met in 1938? Somehow it took us no time at all to get acquainted. Soon you were telling me about the diaries and letters recently come into your possession after lying for a century or more in a trunk in the attic of your family home in western Massachusetts. They gave a vivid picture of life in a New England town before the Revolution, and I liked the warmth and excitement with which that picture filled you. I asked if you had heard of the “America letters” written by Scandinavian, Dutch, Polish and other immigrants to relatives in their old countries. You said you had not, and I described them. You were interested, which was all I needed. Presently I went on to say that the whole of American history could stand rethinking, rewriting… that the Negroes’ American tradition of fighting for liberty dates from 1526; that a handful of Polish, German and Armenian workers at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619 staged one of the first rebellions in the New World; that John Peter Zenger, a German printer in the 1730s whom the governor of New York jailed for publishing attacks on his regime, fathered the American ideal of freedom of the press; that Philip Mazzei, the Italian friend and neighbor of Thomas Jefferson, influenced the Revolution of 1776; that the Irish were the backbone of the political-military movement that won American Independence…