Writing Assignment

 Writing Assignment
Noeleen McIlvenna’s work A Very Mutinous People: The Struggle for North Carolina,
1660-1713 is a book that describes a very important passage in the history of the U.S.A., the one
that deserves to be known and understood by everyone who wants to know American history.
The author demonstrates profound knowledge and insightfulness required for analyzing such a
complex and multifaceted layer of historical experience of the nation. Painstakingly, McIlvenna
unfolds for the readers a panorama of life of people in North Carolina in the late seventeenthearly eighteenth centuries, with its many hazards, challenges, and hardships and, on top of these,
the heady air of freedom. Courageous attempts of North Carolina residents to construct their own
political and social system of administration based on equality and justice and develop the
egalitarian society were the first example of pursuing the ideals later implemented by the
American Revolution. The author of the book demonstrates how a small part of what would be a
great American nation spared no effort in establishing a just social system and fair representative
governments, the antipode of the rigorous hierarchical governing system imposed by the British
government and its Virginian and South Carolina advocates. The portrait of North Carolina’s
society of that period represented in the book is a story of the first steps taken by those who
wanted a government by the people and for the people, believed in its feasibility and were ready
to give their lives for that goal. Although crushed by the stronger system that favored unjust
social relations based on cruel exploitation and slavery, the North Carolina’s historical
experience remains a model of the social ideals that later became the basic part of the American
national identity.
The two parts of the book, The First Generation and The Second Generation, tell the
story of North Carolina’s historical experience in the years 1660-1713 in a consistent and
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Sample: History - A Very Mutinous People
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detailed manner, against the political background of that period. This historical and political
landscape enables readers to get a comprehensive view of the complex conditions and
circumstances that brought about various events and resulted in developing controversial trends.
The book starts with the analysis of the life in different colonies along the American Atlantic that
were greatly dependent on events taking place in England. The author’s references to the English
Revolution and events in its aftermath that were instrumental for English policies towards its
colonies in the New World give readers an extra benefit of learning more about the historical
trends of the period and the relation between social, political and cultural features that jointly
shaped the historical reality.
The author of the book demonstrates how “more than a century before wealthy Virginia
slave owners debated the meaning of liberty, the Dismal Swamp country sheltered the most free
society in the European purview” (McIlvenna 5). People who flocked to the Great Dismal
Swamp area in North Carolina made their conscious decision to settle down in the most
inaccessible Atlantic coastline of North America pursuing the goal of founding the society free
of rigorous social hierarchy so much disdained by them. These people who differed in their
views and experience – misfits, social outcasts, pirates, smugglers, religious dissidents, Quakers
and others shared something that united them, which was the quest for a free and just social
order, basically different from the social practice of the neighboring Virginia and South Carolina.
Many of North Carolina’s residents were indentured servants and other people who escaped the
cruel oppression of Virginian landlords and plantation owners whose personal interests were
deeply rooted in the socially unjust hierarchical society. Therefore, the story of the mutinous
people of North Carolina is the story of the fight of the free people against the tangible strategies
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developed by southern planters to counter resistance to their social order and to fortify their
wealth and privilege based on slavery and cruel exploitation.
McIlvenna takes the readers of the book, step by step, from the history of the first
generation of settlers in 1660s to the second generation and the final defeat of those mutinous
people who were forerunners of the egalitarian society but had no chance of maintaining it at that
time. The author demonstrates how different participators of that remarkable period and
experience contributed to the process. The role of Quaker ideology and practice was instrumental
for North Carolina’s colony; it was integrated with actions against Navigation Acts introduced
by the British Empire and Culpeper’s Rebellion that followed. Quakers’ wor