Captain John Smith (c. January 1580 – June 21, 1631) Admiral of New England was an English soldier, explorer, and author. He was knighted for his services to Sigismund Bathory, Prince of Transylvania. He is remembered for his role in establishing the first permanent English settlement in North America at Jamestown, Virginia, and his brief association with the Virginia Indian[1] girl Pocahontas during an altercation with the Powhatan Confederacy and her father, Chief Powhatan. He was a leader of the Virginia Colony (based at Jamestown) between September 1608 and August 1609, and led an exploration along the rivers of Virginia and the Chesapeake Bay.His books and maps may have been as important as his deeds, as they encouraged more Englishmen and women to follow the trail he had blazed and to colonize the New World. He gave the name New England to that region, and encouraged people with the comment, "Here every man may be master and owner of his owne labour and land...If he have nothing but his hands, he may...by industrie quickly grow rich." His message attracted millions of people in the next four centuries.
Captain John Smith was widely believed to be a liar .. he was also, arguably, the first American historian,” says the recent New Yorker article where I first learned the (cynical and condescending, hence surely pomo) term for autobiographical writing, “self-fashioning.”
marxModern taste in biography enjoys debunking but sniggers at “inspiration.” (Middle-schoolers who wouldn’t know Trenton from Bunker Hill can tell you that George Washington owned slaves and badly-fitted false teeth.) One non-modern and inspiring antidote to this trend can be found at the Nobel Prize website, where untrendy and innocent new Nobel laureates try to create a brief history of the family and lifetime behind their AWARDS.
Can one think of a more ridiculous and more stupidly obvious neo-lib lefty prize than the nobel to obama who really is a modern uncle tom but through little fault of hios own.
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