Why We Left: Untold Stories and Songs of America's First Immigrants JoannaBrooks. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.

Abstract

Why We Left: Untold Stories and Songs of America's First Immigrants Joanna Brooks. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.In Why We Left, Joanna Brooks presents us with an alternative view to the official narrative of why large numbers of sixteenth and seventeenth century Anglo English came to America. Although the official story of emigration focuses on America as a land of opportunity, many of the English who emigrated came because life in their homeland had become untenable. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, life, as many of these working poor knew it, changed as England began to transition into a mercantile capitalistic economy. Lands which for generations supplied livelihoods to subsistence farmers and their families were enclosed and operated as for-profit enterprises. result was widespread environmental disaster, which in turn impacted dramatically the culture entwined within it. As wetlands became drained to make for more arable lands, animal and fish populations, which previously had supplied additional food sources for families, began to disappear. Understandings surrounding the cutting of turf for fires or the gathering of resources, such as hazel nuts as a supplementary food source, became illegal. To support themselves, families had to sever their ties to lands which had been in their families for generations, dissolve their communal ties, and subject themselves to the financial uncertainties of market cycles for manufactured goods. record of this version of American immigration is found in the ballads which followed the Anglo English across the ocean.Golden Vanity or The Lonesome Lowland Low, for example, tells the story of a young boy who accepts the challenge of his captain to sink a pirate ship. As a reward for his courage, he is promised the captain's daughter as well as a handsome reward, but when he returns to his ship, after having sunk the enemy ship by boring holes in it with an auger, the captain refuses to let him reboard. Brooks argues that this story captures the cold-hearted cruelty and sense of betrayal felt by many sailors but also, in a broader sense, the notion of being expendable felt by those in service to colonial ventures. additional verse in some versions in which the young boy forebears endangering his comrades on the ship out of a sense of loyalty to them serves as a eulogy to a brave young man but also as a symbol of the moral superiority of those who serve, a counterpoint to figures of empire like the captain who use the talents and dedication of those who work for them but then dispose of them once their service ends. …