week two readings and my thoughts

I really enjoyed the weeks readings becuase it helped me better understand the Puritan ways of thinking. In school you are never really taught that much about it, so it was refreshing to read Anne Bradstreet. Also, she was a sucessful woman writer and at that time it was rare. I enjoyed the images from her poem "The Author to Her Book". I found it refreshing in a time that I feel seemed lacking in interesting writing. I liked her writing more so than Mary Rowlandson even though I respect them both for being early female writers. Mary Rowlandson dipicts the Indians as a savage tribe, but I do think it is ironic that they also got along with them. In trading and buying and selling. I feel that each had their own ideas of what is right and wrong, both different and similar to eachothers. I find the speech of Tecumseh a point against the savages that were painted in Mary Rowlandson's account. In his first lines, "Brothers we all belong to one family; we are all children of the Great Spirit; we walk in the same path; slake our thirst at the same spring; and now affairs of the greatest concern lead us to smoke the pipe around the same council fire," I find they are wanting to be a peaceful people. They don't go around killing just for the heck of it, and the Puritan view is to make it seem that way. Later in the speech when he talks about the white people bascially pillaging THEIR land he is telling us why they are going to wage war.
I REALLY like Benjamin Franklin's writings. His autobiography and moral virtues are really great. I do want to kind of make a positive affermation in my everyday life to try to follow them.He was very successful as a person spiritually as well as publicly, so it must have worked for him. Although i feel that Socrates was a woman hater which I really don't want to immitate him at all! LOL!

-Rachael-