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  3. Surprisingly enough, modern historians have rarely interested themselves in the history of the American South in the period befo

Surprisingly enough, modern historians have rarely interested themselves in the history of the American South in the period befo

admin2010-05-25  58
问题       Surprisingly enough, modern historians have rarely interested themselves in the history of the American South in the period before the South began to become self-consciously and distinctively "Southern"—the decades after 1815. Consequently, the cultural history of Britain’s North American Empire in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has been written almost as if the Southern colonies had never existed. The American culture that emerged during the Colonial and Revolutionary eras has been depicted as having been simply an extension of New England Puritan culture. However, Professor Davis has recently argued that the South stood apart from the rest of American society during the early period, following its own unique pattern of cultural development. The case for Southern distinctiveness rests upon two related premises: first, that the cultural similarities among the five Southern colonies were far more impressive than the differences, and second, that what made those colonies alike also made them different from the other colonies. The first, for which Davis offers an enormous amount of evidence, can be accepted without major reservations; the second is far more problematic.
     What makes the second premise problematic is the use of the Puritan colonies as a basis for comparison. Quite properly, Davis decries the excessive influence ascribed by historians to the Puritans in the formation of American culture. Yet Davis inadvertently adds weight to such ascriptions by using the Puritans as the standard against which to assess the achievements and contributions of Southern colonials. Throughout, Davis focuses on the important, and undeniable, differences between the Southern and Puritan colonies in motives for and patterns of early settlement, in attitudes toward nature and native Americans, and in the degree of receptivity to metropolitan cultural influences.
     However, recent scholarship has strongly suggested that those aspects of early New England culture that seem to have been most distinctly Puritan, such as the strong religious orientation and the communal impulse, were not even typical of New England as a whole, but were largely confined to the two colonies of Massachusetts and Connecticut. Thus, what in contrast to the Puritan colonies appears to Davis to be peculiarly Southern—acquisitiveness, a strong interest in politics and the law, and a tendency to cultivate metropolitan cultural models—was not only more typically English than the cultural patterns exhibited by Puritan Massachusetts and Connecticut, but also almost certainly characteristic of most other early modern British colonies from Barbados north to Rhode Island and New Hampshire. Within the larger framework of American colonial life, then, not the Southern but the Puritan colonies appear to have been distinctive, and even they seem to have been rapidly assimilating to the dominant cultural patterns by the last Colonial period.
The depiction of American culture during the Colonial and Revolutionary eras as an extension of New England Puritan culture reflects the fact that ______.
选项 A、historians have overestimated the importance of the Puritans culture
B、early American culture was deeply influenced by the strong religion
C、Massachusetts and Connecticut served as cultural models of the other colonies
D、colonial America resisted assimilating typically English cultural patterns
答案A
解析 事实细节题。从文章第一句话可知历史学家对美国早期南方文化不感兴趣，第二句话说美洲 17、18世纪历史无视南方文化的存在，以至于殖民和大革命时期的文化被看成新英格兰清教徒主义的直接延伸。作者主要是说明历史学家夸大了清教徒文化的影响，Davis教授也证明了南方文化独立发展的特征，选项A 为正确答案，这在第二段第二句话中得到证实。选项D 实际上可以根据选项A 被排除，不符合事实，实际上清教徒文化影响不大；选项C 根据第三段第一句话说清教徒文化仅仅在这两个州盛行，不合题意，排除；选项D 文中没有提到。
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