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In this week’s reading, chapters 7 and 11, Taylor discussed the colonial practices of Georgia, the Carolinas, and the Chesapeake. To start, I disliked the lack of information the author gave about Georgia. Granted, as mentioned in class, Georgia history is boring. But I am from Atlanta, and I am biased. I want my state to be represented as much as the others. My suggestion to the author, without any credibility of course, would be to include more detail about the issues in Georgia and the native peoples involved. However, I was born in Greenville and also lived 9 years in York, SC so I was moderately pleased with the history of the Carolinas. One of the main arguments Taylor presents includes the white sense of solidarity versus the fractioned Indian identities. I found this particularly interesting and wondered the outcome had the Native peoples banded together and fought as an American nation. Would we all still be in Europe? Would it have taken decades or centuries more to conquer the “New World”? In just about all of the cases on the eastern coast of the North American mainland, Indians fought side by side with colonists against rival tribes. The Europeans would play the nations against each other and take advantage of the rivalries. Later, when convenient, the colonists would find an excuse to massacre the former partners. One of the very few chiefs to promote a nation combining tribes was executed for his ideas, not by a European, but by a fellow native. A few differences between the colonies include the attempt by Georgians to create a colony without slave while the Chesapeake and Carolinas relied heavily on slave trade and labor to prosper. The explanation about trying to keep whites motivated to work by avoiding slave labor rang bells in my head because I have taken AP US history but this idea was never addresses in the textbook I read before. It makes sense that whites would find physical labor degrading because it made them feel like slaves and that was definitely depressing in the time period.
