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Colony of Virginia

The Colony of Virginia was an English, later British, colonial settlement in North America between 1606 and 1776.

The first effort to create an English settlement in the area was chartered in 1584 and established in 1585; the resulting Roanoke Colony lasted for three attempts totaling six years. In 1590, the colony was abandoned. But nearly 20 years later, the colony was re-settled at Jamestown, not far north of the original site. A second charter was issued in 1606 and settled in 1607, becoming the first enduring English colony in North America. It followed failed attempts at settlement on Newfoundland by Sir Humphrey Gilbert in 1583 and the Roanoke Colony (in modern eastern North Carolina) by Sir Walter Raleigh in the late 1580s.

The founder of the second colony was the Virginia Company, chartered by King James I, with its first two settlements being in Jamestown on the north bank of the James River and Popham Colony on the Kennebec River in modern-day Maine, both in 1607. The Popham colony quickly failed because of famine, disease, and conflicts with local Native American tribes in the first two years. Jamestown occupied land belonging to the Powhatan Confederacy; it was also on the brink of failure before the arrival of a new group of settlers and supplies by ship in 1610. Tobacco became Virginia's first profitable export, the production of which had a significant impact on the society and settlement patterns.

In 1624, the Virginia Company's charter was revoked by King James I, and the Virginia Colony was transferred to royal authority as a crown colony. After the English Civil War in the 1640s and 1650s, the Virginia colony was nicknamed "The Old Dominion" by King Charles II for its perceived loyalty to the English monarchy during the era of the Protectorate and Commonwealth of England.

From 1619 to 1775/1776, the colonial legislature of Virginia was the General Assembly, which governed in conjunction with a colonial governor. Jamestown remained the capital of the Virginia Colony until 1699; from 1699 until its dissolution, the capital was in Williamsburg. The colony experienced its first significant political turmoil with Bacon's Rebellion of 1676.

After declaring independence from the Kingdom of Great Britain in 1775, before the Declaration of Independence was officially adopted, the Virginia Colony became the Commonwealth of Virginia, one of the original thirteen states of the United States, adopting as its official slogan "The Old Dominion". The entire modern states of West Virginia, Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois, and portions of Ohio and Western Pennsylvania were later created from the territory encompassed, or claimed by, the colony of Virginia at the time of further American independence in July 1776.

Virginia
"Virginia" is the oldest designation for English claims in North America. In 1584, Sir Walter Raleigh sent Philip Amadas and Arthur Barlowe to explore what is now the North Carolina coast. They returned with word of a regional king (weroance) named Wingina, who ruled a land supposedly called Wingandacoa. "Virginia" was originally a term used to refer to England's entire North American possession and claim along the east coast from the 34th parallel (close to Cape Fear) north to 45th parallel. This area included a large section of Canada and the shores of Acadia.

The name Virginia for a region in North America may have been originally suggested by Raleigh, who named it for Queen Elizabeth I in approximately 1584. In addition, the term Wingandacoa may have influenced the name Virginia." On his next voyage, Raleigh learned that while the chief of the Secotans was indeed called Wingina, the expression wingandacoa heard by the English upon arrival actually meant "What good clothes you wear!" in Carolina Algonquian and was not the name of the country as previously misunderstood.

The colony was also known as the Virginia Colony, the Province of Virginia, and occasionally as the Dominion and Colony of Virginia or His Majesty's Most Ancient Colloney and Dominion of Virginia.

Old Dominion
According to tradition, in gratitude for the loyalty of Virginians to the crown during the English Civil War, Charles II gave it the title of "Old Dominion". The colony seal stated from Latin en dat virginia quintum, in English 'Behold, Virginia gives the fifth', with Virginia claimed as the fifth English dominion after England, France, Scotland and Ireland.

The Commonwealth of Virginia maintains "Old Dominion" as its state nickname. The athletic teams of the University of Virginia are known as the "Cavaliers", referring to supporters of Charles II, and Virginia has a public university called "Old Dominion University".

History
Although Spain, France, Sweden, and the Netherlands all had competing claims to the region, none of these prevented the English from becoming the first European power to colonize successfully the Mid-Atlantic coastline. The Spanish had made earlier attempts in what is now Georgia (San Miguel de Gualdape, 1526–1527; several Spanish missions in Georgia between 1568 and 1684), South Carolina (Santa Elena, 1566–1587), North Carolina (Joara, 1567–1568) and Virginia (Ajacán Mission, 1570–1571); and by the French in South Carolina (Charlesfort, 1562–1563). Farther south, the Spanish colony of Spanish Florida, centered on St. Augustine, was established in 1565, while to the north, the French were establishing settlements in what is now Canada (Charlesbourg-Royal briefly occupied 1541–1543; Port Royal, established in 1605).

Colonization attempts in the New World (1583–1590)
In 1583, Sir Humphrey Gilbert established a charter in Newfoundland. Once established, he and his crew abandoned the site and returned to England. On the return trip, Gilbert's ship capsized, and all aboard perished. The charter was abandoned.

In 1585, Raleigh sent his first colonization mission to Roanoke Island (in present-day North Carolina) with over 100 male settlers. However, when Sir Francis Drake arrived at the colony in the summer of 1586, the colonists opted to return to England because there was a lack of supply ships, abandoning the colony. Supply ships arrived at the abandoned colony later in 1586; 15 soldiers were left behind to hold the island, but no trace of these men was later found.

In 1587, Raleigh sent another group to attempt to establish a permanent settlement. The expedition leader, John White, returned to England for supplies that same year but was unable to return to the colony because of the war between England and Spain. When he finally did return in 1590, he found the colony abandoned. The houses were intact, but the colonists had disappeared. Although there are numerous theories about the fate of the colony, it remains a mystery and has come to be known as the "Lost Colony". Two English children were born in this colony; the first was named Virginia Dare (Dare County, North Carolina, was named in her honor), who was among those whose fate is unknown. The word Croatoan was found carved into a tree, the name of a tribe on a nearby island.

Virginia Company (1606–1624)
Following the failure of the previous colonization attempts, England resumed attempts to set up colonies. This time, joint-stock companies were used rather than giving extensive grants to a landed proprietor such as Gilbert or Raleigh.

Charter of 1606
King James granted a proprietary charter to two competing branches of the Virginia Company, which investors supported. These were the Plymouth Company and the London Company. By the terms of the charter, the Plymouth Company was permitted to establish a colony of 100 mi square between the 38th parallel and the 45th parallel (roughly between Chesapeake Bay and the current U.S.–Canada border). The London Company was permitted to establish between the 34th parallel and the 41st parallel (approximately between Cape Fear and Long Island Sound) and also owned a large portion of Atlantic and Inland Canada. In the area of overlap, the two companies were not permitted to establish colonies within one hundred miles of each other. During 1606, each company organized expeditions to establish settlements within the area of their rights.

The London company formed Jamestown in its exclusive territory, while the Plymouth company formed the Popham Colony in its exclusive territory near what is now Phippsburg, Maine. The Popham colony quickly failed because of famine, disease, and conflicts with local Native American tribes in the first two years.

Jamestown
The London Company hired Captain Christopher Newport to lead its expedition. On December 20, 1606, he set sail from England with his flagship, the Susan Constant, and two smaller ships, the Godspeed, and the Discovery, with 105 men and boys, plus 39 sailors. After an unusually long voyage of 144 days, they arrived at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay and came ashore at the point where the southern side of the bay meets the Atlantic Ocean, an event that has come to be called the "First Landing". They erected a cross and named the point of land Cape Henry in honor of Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales, the eldest son of King James.

They were instructed to select a location inland along a waterway where they would be less vulnerable to the Spanish or other Europeans seeking to establish colonies. They sailed westward into the Bay and reached the mouth of Hampton Roads, stopping at a location now known as Old Point Comfort. Keeping the shoreline to their right, they then ventured up the largest river, which they named the James, for their king. After exploring at least as far upriver as the confluence of the Appomattox River at present-day Hopewell, they returned downstream to Jamestown Island, which offered a favorable defensive position against enemy ships and deep water anchorage adjacent to the land. Within two weeks, they had constructed their first fort and named their settlement Jamestown.

In addition to securing gold and other precious minerals to send back to the waiting investors in England, the survival plan for the Jamestown colonists depended upon regular supplies from England and trade with the Native Americans. They selected a location largely cut off from the mainland with little game for hunting, no natural fresh drinking water, and minimal ground for farming. Captain Newport returned to England twice, delivering the first and second supply missions during 1608 and leaving the Discovery for the colonists' use. However, death from disease and conflicts with the Native Americans took a fearsome toll on the colonists. Despite attempts at mining minerals, growing silk, and exporting the native Virginia tobacco, no profitable exports had been identified, and it was unclear whether the settlement would survive financially.

The Powhatan Confederacy was a confederation of numerous linguistically related tribes in the eastern part of Virginia. The Powhatan Confederacy controlled a territory known as Tsenacommacah, which roughly corresponded with the Tidewater region of Virginia. It was in this territory that the English established Jamestown. At the time of the English arrival, the Powhatan were led by the paramount chief Wahunsenacawh, known to the English as Chief Powhatan.

Popham Colony
On May 31, 1607, about 100 men and boys left England for what is now Maine. Approximately three months later, the group landed on a wooded peninsula where the Kennebec River meets the Atlantic Ocean and began building Fort St. George. By the end of the year, limited resources caused half of the colonists to return to England. The remaining 45 sailed home late the next year, and the Plymouth company fell dormant.

Charter of 1609 – the London company expands
In 1609, with the abandonment of the Plymouth Company settlement, the London Company's Virginia charter was adjusted to include the territory north of the 34th parallel and south of the 40th parallel, with its original coastal grant extended "from sea to sea". Thus, according to James I's writ, the Virginia Colony in its original sense extended to the coast of the Pacific Ocean, in what is now California, with all the land in between belonging to Virginia. For practical purposes, though, the colonists rarely ventured far inland to what was known as the "Virginia Wilderness."

Third supply
For the third supply, the London Company had a new ship built. The Sea Venture was designed to emit additional colonists and transport supplies. It became the flagship of the admiral of the convoy, Sir George Somers. The third supply was the largest, with eight other ships joining the Sea Venture. The captain of the Sea Venture was the mission's Vice Admiral Christopher Newport. Hundreds of new colonists were aboard the ships. However, the weather was to affect the mission drastically.

A few days out of London, the nine ships of the third supply mission encountered a hurricane in the Atlantic Ocean. They became separated during the three days the storm lasted. Admiral Somers had the Sea Venture, carrying most of the mission's supplies, deliberately driven aground onto the reefs of Bermuda to avoid sinking. However, while there was no loss of life, the ship was wrecked beyond repair, stranding its survivors on the uninhabited archipelago, to which they laid claim for England.

The survivors at Bermuda eventually built two smaller ships, and most of them continued to Jamestown, leaving a few on Bermuda to secure the claim. The company's possession of Bermuda was made official in 1612 when the third and final charter extended the boundaries of Virginia far enough out to sea to encompass Bermuda.

Upon their arrival at Jamestown, the survivors of the Sea Venture discovered that the 10-month delay had greatly aggravated other adverse conditions. Seven of the other ships had arrived carrying more colonists but little in the way of food and supplies. Combined with drought and hostile relations with the Native Americans, the loss of the supplies that had been aboard the Sea Venture resulted in the Starving Time in late 1609 to May 1610, during which over 80% of the colonists perished. Conditions were so adverse it appears, from skeletal evidence, that the survivors engaged in cannibalism. The survivors from Bermuda had brought few supplies and food with them, and it appeared to all that Jamestown must be abandoned, and it would be necessary to return to England.

Abandonment and fourth supply
Samuel Argall was the captain of one of the seven ships of the third supply that arrived at Jamestown in 1609 after being separated from the Sea Venture, whose fate was unknown. Depositing his passengers and limited supplies, he returned to England with word of the colonists' plight at Jamestown. The king authorized another leader, Thomas West, 3rd Baron De La Warr, later better known as "Lord Delaware", to have greater powers, and the London Company organized another supply mission. They set sail from London on April 1, 1610.

Just after the survivors of the Starving Time and those who had joined them from Bermuda had abandoned Jamestown, the ships of the new supply mission sailed up the James River with food, supplies, a doctor, and more colonists. Lord Delaware was determined that the colony was to survive, and he intercepted the departing ships about 10 mi downstream of Jamestown. The colonists thanked Providence for the colony's salvation.

West proved far harsher and more belligerent toward the Indians than any of his predecessors, engaging in wars of conquest against them. He first sent Gates to drive off the Kecoughtan from their village on July 9, 1610, then gave Chief Powhatan an ultimatum to either return all English subjects and property, or face war. Powhatan responded by insisting that the English either stay in their fort or leave Virginia. Enraged, De la Warr had the hand of a Paspahegh captive cut off and sent him to the paramount chief with another ultimatum: Return all English subjects and property, or the neighboring villages would be burned. This time, Powhatan did not respond.

First Anglo-Powhatan War (1610–1614)
On August 9, 1610, tired of waiting for a response from the Powhatan, West sent George Percy with 70 men to attack the Paspahegh capital, burning the houses and cutting down their cornfields. They killed 65 to 75 Powhatan and captured one of Wowinchopunk's wives and her children. Returning downstream, Percy's men threw the children overboard and shot out "their Braynes in the water". The queen was put to the sword in Jamestown. The Paspahegh never recovered from this attack and abandoned their town. Another small force sent with Argall against the Warraskoyaks found that they had already fled, and they destroyed an abandoned Warraskoyak village and the surrounding cornfields. This event triggered the first Anglo-Powhatan War.

Among the individuals who had briefly abandoned Jamestown was John Rolfe, a Sea Venture survivor who had lost his wife and son in Bermuda. He was a businessman from London with some untried seeds for new, sweeter strains of tobacco he brought from Bermuda and some novel marketing ideas. It would turn out that Rolfe held the key to the colony's economic success. By 1612, Rolfe's strains of tobacco had been successfully cultivated and exported, establishing a first cash crop for export. Plantations and new outposts sprung up starting with Henricus, initially both upriver and downriver along the navigable portion of the James and thereafter along the other rivers and waterways of the area. The settlement at Jamestown could finally be considered permanently established. A period of peace followed the marriage in 1614 of colonist Rolfe to Pocahontas, the daughter of Chief Powhatan.

Another colonial charter was issued in 1611.

Second Anglo-Powhatan War (1622–1632)
The relations with the Natives took a turn for the worse after the death of Pocahontas in England and the return of Rolfe and other colonial leaders in May 1617. Disease, poor harvests, and the growing demand for land to cultivate tobacco caused hostilities to escalate. After Chief Powhatan died in 1618, he was succeeded by his own younger brother, Opechancanough. On the surface, he maintained friendly relations with the English, negotiating with them through his warrior Nemattanew. Still, by 1622, after Nemattanew had been slain, Opechancanough was ready to order a limited surprise attack on the colonists, hoping to persuade them to move on and settle elsewhere.

Chief Opechancanough organized and led a well-coordinated series of surprise attacks on multiple English colonial settlements along both sides of a 50 mi long stretch of the James River, which took place early on the morning of March 22, 1622. This event resulted in the deaths of 347 colonists (including men, women, and children) and the abduction of many others. The massacre caught most of the Virginia Colony by surprise and virtually wiped out several entire communities, including Henricus and Wolstenholme Towne at Martin's Hundred. Jamestown was spared from destruction because an Indian boy named Chanco learned of the planned attacks from his brother and warned colonist Richard Pace with whom he lived. Pace, after securing himself and his neighbors on the south side of the James River, took a canoe across the river to warn Jamestown, which narrowly escaped destruction. However, there was no time to warn the other settlements.

A year later, Captain William Tucker and John Pott worked out a truce with the Powhatan and proposed a toast using liquor laced with poison. 200 Virginia Indians were killed or made ill by the poison, and 50 more were slaughtered by the colonists. For over a decade, the English settlers attacked the Powhatan, targeting their settlements as part of a scorched earth policy. The settlers systematically razed villages, captured children, and seized or destroyed crops.

By 1634, a six-mile-long palisade was completed across the Virginia Peninsula. The palisade provided some security from attacks by the Virginia Indians for colonists farming and fishing lower on the Peninsula from that point. On April 18, 1644, Opechancanough again tried to force the English to abandon the region with another series of coordinated attacks, killing almost 500 colonists. However, this was a smaller proportion of the growing population than had been killed in the 1622 attacks.

Crown colony (1624–1652)
In 1620, a successor to the Plymouth Company sent colonists to the New World aboard the Mayflower. Known as Pilgrims, they successfully established a settlement in what became Massachusetts. The portion of what had been Virginia north of the 40th parallel became known as New England, according to books written by Captain John Smith, who had made a voyage there.

In 1624, the charter of the Virginia Company was revoked by King James I, and the Virginia Colony was transferred to royal authority in the form of a crown colony. Subsequent charters for the Maryland Colony in 1632 and to the eight lords proprietors of the Province of Carolina in 1663 and 1665 further reduced the Virginia Colony to roughly the coastal borders it held until the American Revolution. (The border with North Carolina was disputed until surveyed by William Byrd II in 1728.)

Third Anglo-Powhatan War (1644–1646)
After twelve years of peace following the Indian Wars of 1622–1632, another Anglo–Powhatan War began on March 18, 1644, as a last effort by the remnants of the Powhatan Confederacy, still under Opechancanough, to dislodge the English settlers of the Virginia Colony. Around 500 colonists were killed, but that number represented a relatively low percentage of the overall population, as opposed to the earlier massacre (the 1622 attack had wiped out a third; that of 1644 barely a tenth).

This was followed by an effort by the settlers to decimate the Powhatan. In July, they marched against the Pamunkey, Chickahominy, and Powhatan proper; and south of the James, against the Appomattoc, Weyanoke, Warraskoyak, and Nansemond, as well as two Carolina tribes, the Chowanoke and Secotan. In February–March 1645, the colony ordered the construction of four frontier forts: Fort Charles at the falls of the James, Fort James on the Chickahominy, Fort Royal at the falls of the York and Fort Henry at the falls of the Appomattox, where the modern city of Petersburg is located.

In August 1645, the forces of Governor William Berkeley stormed Opechancanough's stronghold. All captured males in the village over age 11 were deported to Tangier Island. Opechancanough, variously reported to be 92 to 100 years old, was taken to Jamestown. While a prisoner, Opechancanough was shot in the back and killed by a soldier assigned to guard him. His death disintegrated the Powhatan Confederacy into its component tribes, whom the colonists continued to attack.

Treaty of 1646
In the peace treaty of October 1646, the weroance Necotowance and the subtribes formerly in the confederacy each became tributaries to the King of England. At the same time, a racial frontier was delineated between Indian and English settlements, with members of each group forbidden to cross to the other side except by a special pass obtained at one of the newly erected border forts.

The extent of the Virginia Colony open to patent by English colonists was defined as: All the land between the Blackwater and York rivers, and up to the navigable point of each of the major rivers – which were connected by a straight line running directly from modern Franklin on the Blackwater, northwesterly to the Appomattoc village beside Fort Henry, and continuing in the same direction to the Monocan village above the falls of the James, where Fort Charles was built, then turning sharp right, to Fort Royal on the York (Pamunkey) river. Necotowance thus ceded the English vast tracts of still-uncolonized land, much of it between the James and Blackwater. English settlements on the peninsula north of the York and below the Poropotank were also allowed, as they had already been there since 1640.

English Civil War and Commonwealth (1642–1660)
While the newer Puritan colonies, most notably Massachusetts, were dominated by Parliamentarians, the older colonies sided with the Crown. The Virginia Company's two settlements, Virginia and Bermuda (Bermuda's Puritans were expelled as the Eleutheran Adventurers, settling the Bahamas under William Sayle), Antigua and Barbados were conspicuous in their loyalty to the Crown and were singled out by the Rump Parliament in An Act for prohibiting Trade with the Barbadoes, Virginia, Bermuda and Antego in October 1650. This dictated that: "[D]ue punishment [be] inflicted upon the said Delinquents, do[es] Declare all and every the said persons in Barbada's, Antego, Bermuda's and Virginia, that have contrived, abetted, aided or assisted those horrid Rebellions, or have since willingly joyned with them, to be notorious Robbers and Traitors, and such as by the Law of Nations are not to be permitted any maner of Commerce or Traffique with any people whatsoever; and do[es] forbid to all maner of persons, Foreiners, and others, all maner of Commerce, Traffique and Correspondency whatsoever, to be used or held with the said Rebels in the Barbada's, Bermuda's, Virginia and Antego, or either of them."

The act authorized Parliamentary privateers to act against English vessels trading with the rebellious colonies: "All Ships that Trade with the Rebels may be surprized. Goods and tackle of such ships not to be embezeled, till judgement in the Admiralty; Two or three of the Officers of every ship to be examined upon oath."

Virginia's population swelled with Cavaliers during and after the English Civil War. Under the tenure of Crown Governor William Berkeley (1642–1652; 1660–1677), the population expanded from 8,000 in 1642 to 40,000 in 1677. Despite the resistance of the Virginia Cavaliers, Virginian Puritan Richard Bennett was made governor answering to Oliver Cromwell in 1652, followed by two more nominal "commonwealth governors". Nonetheless, the colony was rewarded for its loyalty to the Crown by Charles II following the Stuart Restoration when he dubbed it the Old Dominion.

With the Restoration in the English colonies in 1660, the governorship returned to Berkeley. In 1676, Bacon's Rebellion challenged the political order of the colony. While a military failure, its handling resulted in Governor Berkeley being recalled to England. In 1679, the Treaty of Middle Plantation was signed between King Charles II and several Native American groups.

Williamsburg era
Virginia was the most prominent, wealthiest, and most influential of the American colonies, where conservatives controlled the colonial and local governments. At the local level, Church of England parishes handled many local affairs, and they, in turn, were controlled not by the minister but rather by a closed circle of wealthy landowners who comprised the parish vestry. Ronald L. Heinemann emphasizes the ideological conservatism of Virginia while noting some religious dissenters were gaining strength by the 1760s:

"The tobacco planters and farmers of Virginia adhered to the concept of a hierarchical society that they or their ancestors had brought with them from England. Most held to the general idea of a Great Chain of Being: at the top were God and his heavenly host; next came kings...who were divinely sanctioned to rule, then an hereditary aristocracy who were followed in descending order by wealthy landed gentry, small, independent farmers, tenant farmers, servants....Aspirations to rise above one's station in life were considered a sin."

In actual practice, colonial Virginia never had a bishop to represent God nor a hereditary aristocracy with titles like 'duke' or 'baron'. However, it had a royal governor appointed by the king and a powerful landed gentry. The status quo was strongly reinforced by what Thomas Jefferson called "feudal and unnatural distinctions" that were vital to the maintenance of aristocracy in Virginia. He promoted laws such as entail and primogeniture by which the oldest son inherited all the land. As a result, increasingly large plantations, worked by white tenant farmers and by enslaved Black people, gained in size, wealth, and political power in the eastern ("Tidewater") tobacco areas. Maryland and South Carolina had similar hierarchical systems, as did New York and Pennsylvania. During the American Revolution ary era, all such laws were repealed by the new states. The most fervent Loyalists left for Canada or Britain or other parts of the British Empire. They introduced primogeniture in Upper Canada in 1792, lasting until 1851. Such laws lasted in England until 1926.

Relations with Natives
As the English expanded out from Jamestown, encroachment of the new arrivals and their ever-growing numbers on what had been Indian lands resulted in several conflicts with the Virginia Indians. For much of the 17th century, English contact and conflict were mainly with the Algonquian peoples that populated the coastal regions, primarily the Powhatan Confederacy. Following a series of wars and the decline of the Powhatan as a political entity, the colonists expanded westward in the late 17th and 18th centuries, encountering the Shawnee, Iroquoian-speaking peoples such as the Nottoway, Meherrin, Iroquois and Cherokee, as well as Siouan-speaking peoples such as the Tutelo, Saponi, and Occaneechi.

Iroquois Confederacy
As the English settlements expanded beyond the Tidewater territory traditionally occupied by the Powhatan, they encountered new groups with which there had been minimal relations with the colony. In the late 17th century, the Iroquois Confederacy expanded into the western region of Virginia as part of the Beaver Wars. They arrived shortly before the English settlers and displaced the resident Siouan tribes.

Lt. Gov. Alexander Spotswood made further advances in policy with the Virginia Indians along the frontier. In 1714, he established Fort Christanna to help educate and trade with several tribes with which the colony had friendly relations and to help protect them from hostile tribes. In 1722, the Treaty of Albany was signed by leaders of the Five Nations of Iroquois, Province of New York, Colony of Virginia, and Province of Pennsylvania.

Geography
The geography of the Virginia settlement expanded as the boundaries of European colonization extended over time. Its cultural geography gradually evolved, with various settlement and jurisdiction models employed. By the late 17th century and the early 18th century, the primary settlement pattern was based on plantations (to grow tobacco), farms, and some towns (mostly ports or courthouse villages).

Early settlements
The fort at Jamestown, founded in 1607, remained the primary settlement of the colonists for several years. A few strategic outposts were constructed, including Fort Algernon (1609) at the entrance to the James River. Early attempts to occupy strategic locations already inhabited by natives at what is now Richmond and Suffolk failed owing to native resistance.

A short distance farther up the James, in 1611, Thomas Dale began the construction of a progressive development at Henricus on and about what was later known as Farrar's Island. Henricus was envisioned as a possible replacement capital for Jamestown and was to have the first college in Virginia. (The ill-fated Henricus was destroyed during the Indian massacre of 1622). In addition to creating the settlement at Henricus, Dale also established the port town of Bermuda Hundred, as well as "Bermuda Cittie" in 1613, now part of Hopewell, Virginia. He began the excavation work at Dutch Gap, using methods he had learned while serving in Holland.

"Hundreds"
Once tobacco had been established as an export cash crop, investors became more interested, and groups of them united to create largely self-sufficient "hundreds." The term "hundred" is a traditional English name for an administrative division of a shire (or county) to define an area that would support one hundred heads of household. In the colonial era in Virginia, the "hundreds" were large developments of many acres, necessary to support tobacco crops. The "hundreds" were required to be at least several miles from any existing community. Soon, these patented tracts of land sprang up along the rivers. The investors sent shiploads of settlers and supplies to Virginia to establish the new developments. The administrative centers of Virginia's hundreds were essentially small towns or villages and were often palisaded for defense.

An example was Martin's Hundred, located downstream from Jamestown on the north bank of the James River. The Martin's Hundred Society, a group of investors in London, sponsored it. It was settled in 1618, and Wolstenholme Towne was its administrative center, named for John Wolstenholme, one of the investors.

Bermuda Hundred (now in Chesterfield County) and Flowerdew Hundred (now in Prince George County) are other names which have survived over centuries. Others included Berkeley Hundred, Bermuda Nether Hundred, Bermuda Upper Hundred, Smith's Hundred, Digges Hundred, West Hundred, and Shirley Hundred (and, in Bermuda, Harrington Hundreds). Including the creation of the "hundreds", the various incentives to investors in the Virginia Colony finally paid off by 1617. By this time, the colonists were exporting 50,000 pounds of tobacco to England per year and were beginning to generate enough profit to ensure the economic survival of the colony.

Cities, shires, and counties
In 1619, the plantations and developments were divided into four "incorporations" or "citties", as they were called. These were Charles Cittie, Elizabeth Cittie, Henrico Cittie, and James Cittie, which included the relatively small seat of government for the colony at Jamestown Island. Each of the four "citties" (sic) extended across the James River, the main conduit of transportation of the era. Elizabeth Cittie, known initially as Kecoughtan (a Native word with many variations in spelling by the English), also included the areas now known as South Hampton Roads and the Eastern Shore.

In 1634, a local government system was created in the Virginia Colony by order of the King of England. Eight shires were designated, each with local officers. Within a few years, the shires were renamed counties, a system that has remained to the present day.

Later settlements
In 1630, under the governorship of John Harvey, the first settlement on the York River was founded. In 1632, the Virginia legislature voted to build a fort to link Jamestown and the York River settlement of Chiskiack and protect the colony from Indian attacks. In 1634, a palisade was built near Middle Plantation. This wall stretched across the peninsula between the York and James rivers and protected the settlements on the eastern side of the lower peninsula from Indians. The wall also served to contain cattle.

In 1699, a capital was established and built at Middle Plantation, soon renamed Williamsburg.

Northern Neck Proprietary
In the period following the English Civil War, the exiled King Charles II hoped to shore up the loyalty of several of his supporters by granting them a significant area of mostly uncharted land to control as a proprietary in Virginia (a claim that would only be valid were the king to return to power). While under the jurisdiction of the Virginia Colony, the proprietary maintained complete control of the granting of land within that territory (and revenues obtained from it) until after the American Revolution. The grant was for the land between the Rappahannock and Potomac Rivers, which included the titular Northern Neck, but as time went on, also would include all of what is today Northern Virginia and into West Virginia. Due to ambiguities of the text of the various grants causing disputes between the proprietary and the colonial government, the tract was finally demarcated via the Fairfax Line in 1746.

Government and law
In the initial years under the Virginia Company, the colony was governed by a council, headed by a council president. From 1611 to 1618, under the orders of Sir Thomas Dale, the settlers of the colony were under a regime of civil law that became known as Dale's Code. Under a charter from the company in 1618, a new model of governance was put in place in 1619, which created a House of Burgesses. On July 30, 1619, burgesses met at Jamestown Church as the first elected representative legislative assembly in the New World. The legal system in the colony was thereafter based around the English common law.

For much of the history of the royal colony, the formally appointed governor was absentee, often remaining in England. In his stead, a series of acting or lieutenant governors who were physically present held actual authority. In the later years of its history, as it became increasingly civilized, more governors made the journey.

The first settlement in the colony, Jamestown, served as the capital and main port of entry from its founding until 1699. During this time, a series of statehouses (capitols) were used and subsequently consumed by fires (accidental and intentional in the case of Bacon's Rebellion). Following such a fire, in 1699, the capital was relocated inland, away from the swampy clime of Jamestown, to Middle Plantation, renamed Williamsburg. The capital of Virginia remained in Williamsburg until it was moved further inland to Richmond in 1779 during the American Revolution.

Economy
The entrepreneurs of the Virginia Company experimented with several means of making the colony profitable. The orders sent with the first colonists instructed that they search for precious metals (specifically gold). While no gold was found, various products were sent back, including pitch and clapboard. In 1608, early attempts were made at breaking the Continental hold on glassmaking through the creation of a glassworks. In 1619, the colonists built the first ironworks in North America.

In 1612, settler John Rolfe planted tobacco obtained from Bermuda (during his stay there as part of the third supply). Within a few years, the crop proved extremely lucrative in the European market. As the English increasingly used tobacco products, the production of tobacco in the American colonies became a significant economic driver, especially in the tidewater region surrounding the Chesapeake Bay. From 1616 to 1619, the only exports of the colony were tobacco and sassafras.

Colonists developed plantations along the rivers of Virginia, and social/economic systems developed to grow and distribute this cash crop. Some elements of this system included the importation and use of enslaved Africans to cultivate and process crops, which included harvesting and drying periods. Planters would have their workers fill large hogsheads with tobacco and convey them to inspection warehouses. In 1730, the Virginia House of Burgesses standardized and improved the quality of tobacco exported by establishing the Tobacco Inspection Act of 1730, which required inspectors to grade tobacco at 40 specified locations.

Ethnic origins
England supplied most colonists; a later migration of Scots-Irish filled the backcountry. The Virginia Colony was always predominantly British in ethnic descent, with only minor contributions from other ethnic groups, particularly Palatinate Germans. In 1608, the first Poles and Slovaks arrived as part of a group of skilled craftsmen. In 1619, the first Africans arrived. Many more Africans were imported as enslaved people, such as Angela. In the early 17th century, French Huguenots arrived in the colony as refugees from religious warfare.

In the early 18th century, indentured German-speaking colonists from the iron-working region of Nassau-Siegen arrived to establish the Germanna settlement. Scots-Irish settled on the Virginia frontier. Some Welsh arrived, including some ancestors of Thomas Jefferson.

Servitude and slavery
With the boom in tobacco planting, there was a severe shortage of laborers to work the labor-intensive crop. One method to solve the shortage was using indentured servants.

By the 1640s, legal documents started to define indentured servants' changing nature and status as servants. In 1640, John Punch was sentenced to lifetime servitude as punishment for trying to escape from his enslaver, Hugh Gwyn. This is the earliest legal sanctioning of slavery in Virginia. After this trial, the relationship between indentured servants and their masters changed, as planters saw permanent servitude a more appealing and profitable prospect than seven-year indentures.

As many indentured workers were illiterate, especially Africans, there were opportunities for abuse by planters and other indenture holders. Some ignored the expiration of servants' indentured contracts and tried to keep them as lifelong workers. One example is with Anthony Johnson, who argued with Robert Parker, another planter, over the status of John Casor, formerly an indentured servant of his. Johnson argued that his indenture was for life and Parker had interfered with his rights. The court ruled in favor of Johnson and ordered that Casor be returned to him, where he served the rest of his life as an enslaved person. Such documented cases marked the transformation of Black Africans from indentured servants into slaves.

In the late 17th century, the Royal African Company, which the King of England established to supply the great demand for labor to the colonies, had a monopoly on providing enslaved Africans to the colony. As plantation agriculture was established earlier in Barbados, in the early years, enslaved people were shipped from Barbados (where they were seasoned) to the colonies of Virginia and Carolina.

Religion
In 1619, the Anglican Church was formally established as the official religion in the colony and would remain so until shortly after the American Revolution. Establishment meant that local tax funds paid the parish costs and that the parish had local civic functions such as poor relief. The upper-class planters controlled the vestry, which ran the parish and chose the minister. The church in Virginia was controlled by the Bishop of London, who sent priests and missionaries, but there were never enough, and they reported deficient standards of personal morality. By the 1760s, dissenting Protestants, especially Baptists and Methodists, were proliferating and started challenging the Anglicans for moral leadership.

All 26 churches with regular services in Virginia in 1650 were Anglican, which included all but 4 of the 30 Anglican churches in the colonies at the time (with the remainder located in Maryland). Following the First Great Awakening (1730–1755), the number of regular places of worship in Virginia grew to 126 in 1750 (96 Anglican, 17 Presbyterian, 5 Lutheran, 5 German Reformed, and 3 Baptist), with the colony gaining an additional 251 regular places of worship to a total of 377 by 1776 (101 Baptist, 95 Presbyterian, 94 Episcopal, 42 Friends, 17 Lutheran, 14 German Reformed, 10 Methodism, 2 German Baptist Brethren, and 2 Mennonite).

Education and literacy
The first printing press used in Virginia began operation in Jamestown on June 8, 1680, though within a few years, it was shut down by the Governor and Crown of England for want of a license. It was not until 1736 that the first newspaper, the Virginia Gazette, began circulation under printer William Parks of Williamsburg.

The Syms-Eaton Academy, started in 1634, became America's first free public school. Private tutors were often favored among those families who could afford them.

For most of the 17th century, a university education for settlers of Virginia required a journey to England or Scotland. Such journeys were undertaken by wealthy young men. In the early years, many settlers received their education before immigrating to the colony.

In 1693, the College of William & Mary was founded at Middle Plantation (soon renamed Williamsburg). The college included a common school for Virginia Indians, supplemented by local pupils, which lasted until a 1779 overhaul of the institution's curriculum. The college, located in the capital and heart of the Tidewater region, dominated the colony's intellectual climate until after independence.

After 1747, some Virginians began to attend institutions at Princeton and Philadelphia. Generations began to move west into the Piedmont and Blue Ridge areas. In this region of Virginia, two future Presbyterian colleges trace their origins to lower-level institutions founded in this period. First, what would become Hampden–Sydney College was founded in 1775, before the American Revolution. Likewise, Augusta Academy was a classical school that would evolve into Washington and Lee University (though it would not grant its first bachelor's degree until 1785).

title: Colony of Virginia


text:
Gangs of New York

Gangs of New York is a 2002 American historical drama film directed by Martin Scorsese and written by Jay Cocks, Steven Zaillian, and Kenneth Lonergan, based on Herbert Asbury's 1927 book The Gangs of New York. The film stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Daniel Day-Lewis, and Cameron Diaz, along with Jim Broadbent, John C. Reilly, Henry Thomas, Stephen Graham, Eddie Marsan, Brendan Gleeson and Liam Neeson in supporting roles.

The film is set in 1863, when a long-running Catholic–Protestant feud erupts into violence, just as an Irish immigrant group is protesting against the threat of conscription during the Civil War. Scorsese spent twenty years developing the project until Miramax Films acquired it in 1999. Principal photography took place in Cinecittà, Rome and Long Island City, New York City.

Gangs of New York was completed by 2001 but its release was delayed due to the September 11 attacks. The film was theatrically released in the United States on December 20, 2002, and grossed over $193 million worldwide. It was met with generally positive reviews and Day-Lewis's performance was highly acclaimed. It received ten nominations at the 75th Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director for Scorsese and Best Actor for Day-Lewis.

Plot
In the 1846 slum of the Five Points, two rival gangs, the Anglo-Protestant Confederation of American Natives, led by William "Bill the Butcher" Cutting, and the Irish Catholic immigrant Dead Rabbits, led by "Priest" Vallon, engage in their final battle to determine which faction will hold sway over the territory. At the end of the fight, Bill kills Vallon and declares the Dead Rabbits outlawed. Having witnessed this, Vallon's young son hides the knife that killed his father and is taken to an orphanage on Blackwell's Island.

Sixteen years later in 1862, Vallon's son, "Amsterdam" returns to the Five Points seeking revenge and retrieves the knife. An old acquaintance, Johnny Sirocco, familiarizes him with the local clans of gangs, all of whom pay tribute to Bill, who remains in control of the territory. Amsterdam is introduced to Bill but keeps his past a secret as he seeks recruitment into the gang. He learns many of his father's former lieutenants are now in Bill's employ, despite his deep anti-Irish views. Each year, Bill celebrates the anniversary of his victory over the Dead Rabbits and Amsterdam secretly plans to kill him publicly during this celebration. Amsterdam soon becomes attracted to pickpocket and grifter Jenny Everdeane, with whom Johnny is also infatuated. Amsterdam gains Bill's confidence and becomes his protégé, involving him in the dealings of corrupt Tammany Hall politician William M. Tweed. Amsterdam saves Bill from an assassination attempt and is tormented by the thought that he may have done so out of honest devotion.

On the evening of the anniversary, Johnny, in a fit of jealousy over Jenny's affection for Amsterdam, reveals Amsterdam's true identity and intentions to Bill. Bill baits Amsterdam with a knife throwing act involving Jenny. As Bill toasts Priest Vallon, Amsterdam throws his knife, but Bill deflects it and wounds Amsterdam with a counter throw. Bill then beats him and burns his cheek with a hot blade before banishing him, believing Amsterdam to not be worthy of death. Going into hiding, Jenny implores him to escape with her to San Francisco. Amsterdam, however, returns to the Five Points seeking vengeance and announces his return by hanging a dead rabbit in Paradise Square in front of several Irish gangs that were allied with the Dead Rabbits indicating that the gang has returned. Bill sends corrupt Irish policeman and former Dead Rabbit Mulraney to investigate, but Amsterdam garrotes him to death and hangs his body in the square. In retaliation, Bill has Johnny beaten and run through with a pike, leaving it to Amsterdam to end his suffering. When Amsterdam's gang beats McGloin, a former Dead Rabbit and one of Bill's lieutenants, Bill and the Natives march on the church and are met by Amsterdam and the Dead Rabbits. No violence ensues, but Bill promises to return soon. The incident garners newspaper coverage, and Amsterdam presents Tweed with a plan to defeat Bill's influence: Tweed will back the candidacy of Monk McGinn for sheriff and Amsterdam will secure the Irish vote for Tammany. Monk wins in a landslide, and a humiliated Bill murders him with his own club. McGinn's death prompts an angry Amsterdam to challenge Bill to a gang battle in Paradise Square, which Bill accepts.

The Civil War draft riots break out just as the gangs are preparing to fight, and Union Army soldiers are deployed to control the rioters. As the rival gangs fight, cannon fire from ships is directed into Paradise Square, interrupting their battle shortly before it begins. Many of the gang members are killed by the naval gunfire, soldiers, or rioters. Bill and Amsterdam face off against one another until Bill is wounded by shrapnel. Amsterdam then uses his father's knife to kill Bill.

Amsterdam buries the knife next to his father in a cemetery in Brooklyn, erecting a makeshift headstone with the name William Cutting over it now alongside the actual tombstone of Priest Vallon. As Amsterdam and Jenny leave, the skyline changes as modern New York City is built over the next century, from the Brooklyn Bridge to the Empire State Building to the World Trade Center, and the cemetery becomes overgrown and forgotten.

Production
Martin Scorsese had grown up in Little Italy in the borough of Manhattan in New York City during the 1950s. At the time, he had noticed there were parts of his neighborhood that were much older than the rest, including tombstones from the 1810s in Old St. Patrick's Cathedral, cobblestone streets and small basements located under more recent large buildings; this sparked Scorsese's curiosity about the history of the area: "I gradually realized that the Italian-Americans weren't the first ones there, that other people had been there before us. As I began to understand this, it fascinated me. I kept wondering, how did New York look? What were the people like? How did they walk, eat, work, dress?"

Development
In 1970, Scorsese came across Herbert Asbury's book The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld (1927) about the city's nineteenth-century criminal underworld and found it to be a revelation. In the portraits of the city's criminals, Scorsese saw the potential for an American epic about the battle for the modern American democracy. Scorsese immediately contacted his friend Jay Cocks, a film critic for Time magazine. "Think of it like a western in outer space," Scorsese had told him. Cocks recalled they had considered Malcolm McDowell in the lead role and framing the narrative with quotations from Bruce Springsteen, but otherwise they intended to keep the period vernacular authentic. At the time, Scorsese was a young director without prestige; by the end of the decade, with the success of crime films such as Mean Streets (1973), about his old neighborhood, and Taxi Driver (1976), he was a rising star. In June 1977, producer Alberto Grimaldi ran a two-page ad in Daily Variety, announcing the film's production with Scorsese set to direct. That same year, Scorsese and Cocks wrote the first draft, but Scorsese decided to direct Raging Bull (1980) instead.

In 1979, Scorsese acquired the screen rights to Asbury's book; however, it took twenty years to get the production moving forward. Difficulties arose with reproducing the monumental cityscape of nineteenth-century New York with the style and detail Scorsese wanted; almost nothing in New York City looked as it did in that time, and filming elsewhere was not an option. In 1991, Grimaldi and Scorsese resumed development on the project with Universal Pictures on a budget of $30 million. At one point, Robert De Niro was set to portray Bill the Butcher. However, the studio transferred the rights to the project to Disney in 1997, whose then-chairman Joe Roth turned down the film due to its excessive violence, which was "not appropriate for a Disney-themed movie".

Scorsese took the film to Warner Bros., being contractually obligated to make a film for the studio; the film was however declined by Warner Bros. as well, and afterward declined similarly by 20th Century Fox, Paramount Pictures and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM). Eventually, in 1999, Scorsese was able to find a partnership with Harvey Weinstein, noted producer and co-chairman of Miramax Films. As the film had a large budget of nearly $100 million, Weinstein then sold international distribution rights to the project to Graham King's Initial Entertainment Group for about $65 million to secure the required funds. Shortly after, Touchstone Pictures joined Miramax in funding the film, in exchange for a portion of the proceeds from domestic distribution. That same year, Cocks was retained by Scorsese for the screenplay adaptation, which underwent nine revised drafts. However, Weinstein was not pleased with the shooting script and wanted other screenwriters brought in for more rewrites. To placate Weinstein, Scorsese called Cocks into a room and fired him. Telling The Globe and Mail, Cocks recalled the situation: "You ever been fired? It's terrible. Terrible. Even if it's a job you don't like, it pisses you off, right? Well you can extrapolate from that, exponentially." Due to this, the final shooting script was not fully completed when filming began. Hossein Amini was hired and wrote the last two drafts, but he was uncredited for his work.

Set design
In order to create the sets that Scorsese envisioned, the production was filmed at the large Cinecittà Studio in Rome, Italy. Production designer Dante Ferretti recreated over a mile of mid-nineteenth century New York buildings, consisting of a five-block area of Lower Manhattan, including the Five Points slum, a section of the East River waterfront including two full-sized sailing ships, a thirty-building stretch of lower Broadway, a patrician mansion, and replicas of Tammany Hall, a church, a saloon, a Chinese theater, and a gambling casino. For the Five Points, Ferretti recreated George Catlin's 1827 painting of the area.

Rehearsals and character development
Particular attention was also paid to the speech of characters, as loyalties were often revealed by their accents. The film's voice coach, Tim Monich, resisted using a generic Irish brogue and instead focused on distinctive dialects of Ireland and Great Britain. As DiCaprio's character was born in Ireland but raised in the United States, his accent was designed to be a blend of accents typical of the half-Americanized. To develop the unique, lost accents of the Yankee "Nativists" such as Daniel Day-Lewis's character, Monich studied old poems, ballads, newspaper articles (which sometimes imitated spoken dialect as a form of humor) and the Rogue's Lexicon, a book of underworld idioms compiled by New York's police commissioner, so that his men would be able to tell what criminals were talking about. An important piece was an 1892 wax cylinder recording of Walt Whitman reciting four lines of a poem in which he pronounced the word "Earth" as "Uth", and the "a" of "an" nasal and flat, like "ayan". Monich concluded that native nineteenth-century New Yorkers probably sounded something like the proverbial Brooklyn cabbie of the mid-20th century.

Filming
Principal photography began in New York and Rome on December 18, 2000, and ended on March 30, 2001. Due to the strong personalities and clashing visions of director and producer, the three-year production became a story in and of itself. Scorsese strongly defended his artistic vision on issues of taste and length while Weinstein fought for a streamlined, more commercial version. During the delays, noted actors such as Robert De Niro and Willem Dafoe had to leave the production due to conflicts with their other productions. Costs overshot the original budget by 25 percent, bringing the total cost over $100 million. The increased budget made the film vital to Miramax Films' short-term success.

Post-production and distribution
After post-production was nearly completed in 2001, the film was delayed for over a year. The official justification was after the September 11, 2001, attacks, certain elements of the picture may have made audiences uncomfortable; the film's closing shot is a view of modern-day New York City, complete with the World Trade Center's towers, despite them having been destroyed by the attacks over a year before the film's release. However, this explanation was refuted in Scorsese's own contemporary statements, where he noted that the production was still filming pick-ups even into October 2002. The filmmakers had also considered having the towers dissolved out from the shot to acknowledge their disappearance, or remove the entire sequence altogether. It was ultimately decided to keep the towers unaltered.

Weinstein kept demanding cuts to the film's length, and some of those cuts were eventually made. In December 2001, film critic Jeffrey Wells reviewed a purported workprint of the film as it existed in the fall of 2001. Wells reported the work print lacked narration, was about 20 minutes longer, and although it was "different than the [theatrical] version ... scene after scene after scene play[s] exactly the same in both." Despite the similarities, Wells found the work print to be richer and more satisfying than the theatrical version. While Scorsese has stated the theatrical version is his final cut, he reportedly "passed along [the] three-hour-plus [work print] version of Gangs on tape [to friends] and confided, 'Putting aside my contractual obligation to deliver a shorter, two-hour-and-forty-minute version to Miramax, this is the version I'm happiest with,' or words to that effect."

In an interview with Roger Ebert, Scorsese clarified the real issues in the cutting of the film. Ebert notes, "His discussions with Weinstein, he said, were always about finding the length where the picture worked. When that got to the press, it was translated into fights. The movie is currently 168 minutes long, he said, and that is the right length, and that's why there won't be any director's cut — because this is the director's cut."

Soundtrack
Robbie Robertson supervised the soundtrack's collection of eclectic pop, folk, and neo-classical tracks.

Historical accuracy
Scorsese received both praise and criticism for historical depictions in the film. In a PBS interview for the History News Network, George Washington University Professor Tyler Anbinder said that the visuals and discrimination of immigrants in the film were historically accurate, but both the amount of violence depicted and the number of Chinese, particularly female, immigrants were greater in the film than in reality.

Asbury's book described the Bowery Boys, Plug Uglies, True Blue Americans, Shirt Tails, and Dead Rabbits, who were named after their battle standard, a dead rabbit on a pike. The book also described William Poole, the inspiration for William "Bill the Butcher" Cutting, a member of the Bowery Boys, a bare-knuckle boxer, and a leader of the Know Nothing political movement. Poole did not come from the Five Points and was assassinated nearly a decade before the Draft Riots. Both the fictional Bill and the real one had butcher shops, but Poole is not known to have killed anyone.

Anbinder said that Scorsese's recreation of the visual environment of mid-19th-century New York City and the Five Points "couldn't have been much better". All sets were built completely on the exterior stages of Cinecittà Studios in Rome.

As early as 1839, Mayor Philip Hone said: "This city is infested by gangs of hardened wretches" who "patrol the streets making night hideous and insulting all who are not strong enough to defend themselves." The large gang fight depicted in the film as occurring in 1846 is fictional, though there was one between the Bowery Boys and Dead Rabbits in the Five Points on July 4, 1857, which is not mentioned in the film. Reviewer Vincent DiGirolamo concludes that "Gangs of New York becomes a historical epic with no change over time. The effect is to freeze ethno-cultural rivalries over the course of three decades and portray them as irrational ancestral hatreds unaltered by demographic shifts, economic cycles and political realignments."

In the film, the Draft Riots of July 1863 are depicted as both destructive and violent. Records indicate the riots resulted in more than one hundred deaths, including the lynching of 11 free African-Americans. They were especially targeted by the Irish, in part because of fears of job competition that more freed slaves would cause in the city. The bombardment of the city by Navy ships offshore to quell the riots is wholly fictitious. The film references the infamous Tweed Courthouse, as "Boss" Tweed refers to plans for the structure as being "modest" and "economical".

In the film, Chinese Americans were common enough in the city to have their own community and public venues. Although Chinese people migrated to America as early as the 1840s, significant Chinese migration to New York City did not begin until 1869, the time when the transcontinental railroad was completed. The Chinese theater on Pell St. was not finished until the 1890s. The Old Brewery, the overcrowded tenement shown in the movie in both 1846 and 1862–63, was actually demolished in 1852.

Release
The original target release date was December 21, 2001, in time for the 2001 Academy Awards but the production overshot that goal as Scorsese was still filming. A twenty-minute clip, billed as an "extended preview", debuted at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival and was shown at a star-studded event at the Palais des Festivals et des Congrès with Scorsese, DiCaprio, Diaz and Weinstein in attendance.

Harvey Weinstein then wanted the film to open on December 25, 2002, but a potential conflict with another film starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Catch Me If You Can produced by DreamWorks, caused him to move the opening day to an earlier position. After negotiations between several parties, including the interests of DiCaprio, Weinstein and DreamWorks' Jeffrey Katzenberg, the decision was made on economic grounds: DiCaprio did not want to face a conflict of promoting two movies opening against each other; Katzenberg was able to convince Weinstein that the violence and adult material in Gangs of New York would not necessarily attract families on Christmas. Of main concern to all involved was attempting to maximize the film's opening day, an important part of film industry economics.

After three years in production, the film was released on December 20, 2002, a year after its original planned release date. While the film has been released on DVD and Blu-ray, there are no plans to revisit the theatrical cut or prepare a "director's cut" for home video release. "Marty doesn't believe in that", editor Thelma Schoonmaker stated. "He believes in showing only the finished film."

Gangs of New York was released on VHS and a 2-disc DVD on July 1, 2003 by Buena Vista Home Entertainment (under the Miramax Home Entertainment label), the film was split on both discs. A Blu-ray version of the film was released July 1, 2008.

Box office
The film made $77,812,000 in Canada and the United States. It also took $23,763,699 in Japan and $16,358,580 in the United Kingdom. Worldwide the film grossed a total of $193,772,504.

Miramax losses were offset that year by the success of Chicago (2002), the musical, whose domestic box office zoomed to $170 million and which captured a Best Picture Oscar. Although Harvey Weinstein said Miramax lost no money on Gangs, an internal Disney memo reported that the true bottom line for Gangs is that it lost $6 million.

Critical reception
On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 73% based on 215 reviews, with an average rating of 7.10/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "Though flawed, the sprawling, messy Gangs of New York is redeemed by impressive production design and Day-Lewis's electrifying performance." Metacritic gave the film a score of 72 out of 100, based on 39 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B" on an A+ to F scale.

Roger Ebert praised the film but believed it fell short of Scorsese's best work, while his At the Movies co-host Richard Roeper called it a "masterpiece" and declared it a leading contender for Best Picture. Paul Clinton of CNN called the film "a grand American epic". In Variety, Todd McCarthy wrote that the film "falls somewhat short of great film status, but is still a richly impressive and densely realized work that bracingly opens the eye and mind to untaught aspects of American history." McCarthy singled out the meticulous attention to historical detail and production design for particular praise.

Some critics were disappointed with the film, with one review on CinemaBlend feeling it was overly violent with few characters worth caring about. Norman Berdichevsky of the New English Review wrote in a negative critique that some locals in Spain who had watched Gangs of New York had several anti-American beliefs "confirmed" afterwards, which he felt was due to the film's gratuitous violence, historical inaccuracies, and general depiction of American society "in the worst possible light". Others felt it tried to tackle too many themes without saying anything unique about them, and that the overall story was weak.

Cameron Diaz's divisive performance as Irish immigrant pickpocket Jenny Everdeane has been cited as an example of poor casting and one of the worst Irish accents in film.

Top ten lists
Gangs of New York was listed on many critics' top ten lists of 2002.

 * 1st – Peter Travers, Rolling Stone
 * 1st – Richard Roeper, Ebert & Roeper
 * 2nd – Richard Corliss, Time
 * 2nd – Ann Hornaday, The Washington Post
 * 3rd – F. X. Feeney, L.A. Weekly
 * 3rd – Scott Tobias, The A.V. Club
 * 5th – Jami Bernard, New York Daily News
 * 5th – Claudia Puig, USA Today
 * 6th – Mike Clark, USA Today
 * 6th – Nathan Rabin, The A.V. Club
 * 6th – Chris Kaltenbach, Baltimore Sun
 * 8th – A.O. Scott, The New York Times
 * 9th – Stephen Holden, The New York Times
 * Top 10 (listed alphabetically) – Mark Olsen, L.A. Weekly
 * Top 10 (listed alphabetically) – Carrie Rickey, Philadelphia Inquirer

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Gangs of New York


text:
Talk:Antisemitism and the New Testament/Archive 1

Untitled

 * There was a lengthy discussion on religious pluralism and whether Christianity should change itself to be less anti-Semitic, and similar issues. Wikipedia is not a discussion forum, and the discussion distracted attention "from writing articles to writing about articles" (LMS). Two of the participants in the discussion agreed (RK, Wesley), and the talk was first archived, then deleted. We pick up the story with Wesley's "first constructive suggestion"...

...the article should state exactly what it means by anti-semitism. If it refers to the anti-semitism article, it should probably specify that theological anti-semitism is meant, as described in that article. But the definition is crucial enough that I'd rather repeat it here, rather than rely on the cross link. The reason is that if the main anti-semitism article ever gets edited, the change could have unintended ramifications for this article. There should also be a cross link to Christian anti-semitism if there isn't already. That's not all I would want covered, but let's start with just that. --Wesley

 * This entry does not limit itself to only theological anti-Semitism. It covers any form of anti-Semitism, whether economic, mystical, magical, racial or theological. The same is true of the other anti-Semitism related entries. RK

 * So in the opening paragraph: "These verses have historically been used to incite violence against Jewish people and are widely viewed by Jews, and by many historians, as anti-Semitic." This should be interpreted to mean that the the verses are viewed as anti-semitic in every sense of the word, including all five of the forms you just listed?? --Wesley

 * Oh, I see what you mean. I was mistakenly thinking of this entry as a sub-page of "Christian anti-Semitism".  It is that specific entry which covered multiple forms of anti-Semitism. This particular sub-page only covers one form, theological anti-Semitism.  RK

Although I am not Catholic nor Christian, however i do live in Poland, and i am wondering what RK meant by:
 * Actually, I don't think that the text of the New Testament would need to be changed at all to achieve this goal. Rather, one only needs to teach about the origin of the NT in its historical context, and to interpret the verses differently than they used to be interpreted. This is already done by the Catholic Church in some countries (but not by all Catholics, especially in Poland), and it is done by a few Protestant Christian denominations. SR discusses this in more detail below.  RK

Emphasis is mine. Are you implying that Catholic Church in Poland teaches antisemitism now? Or i just misunderstand you? If so, please say what you mean and what basis you have for what you wrote. Is this just example of something which i saw so many times that i begin to call that Poles-are-milking-antisemitism-with-milk-of-theirs-mothers attitude? (i wish i would remember which Israeli prime minister said that) szopen

 * Yes, that is what I mean. Some Catholic priests in Poland still teach that Jews are evil, and must be considered as "dangers" to Poland. Some Polish Catholics believe that Jews should be forbidden from serving in the Polish government, and at least one Catholic priest has repeatedly publicly preached this. (Well, I know of one, and I haven't bveen looking for quotes. There probably are quite a few.) There was the incident where Catholic priests and nuns publicly accused American Jews of attempting to murder Christians, when in fact these pacifist Jews were peacefully protesting the use of Auschwitz as a Christian religious site. (The only violence, in fact, was when the same nuns incited Polish Catholic workers to beat up the peacefully protesting Jews. This disturbing event was reported in US newspapers, and I met one of the victims.) I have some specific material on this topic which I will be adding. Sadly, what many Americans consider beyond the pale, is considered acceptable by more than a few people in Poland today. RK

 * You do realise that "some Catholic priests teaches" (which BTW were condemned, as Jankowski, by bishops) is quite different from "Catholic church teaches" ? Official teaching of Catholic Church in Poland isn't antisemitic, and individual priests who say something do not constitute official opinion of Catholic Church (although bishops and archbishops by my opinion are far too tolerant for those priests who are antisemitic, since condemning them from time to time is not enough). About use of Auschwitz as religious site, i would like to point out that Jewish protests in Poland were totally non-understandable (i mean, i understand them, and i agree that Auschwitz shouldn't have religious marks, and many other Poles understand them too, but:), since praying for souls of dying people is good deed, one can say that it is one of duties of catholic to try to save souls of dead by praying for them, and putting crosses in places where people died (e.g. in car accidents, if you ever was in Poland and wonder why there are small crosses with candles near roads you know now) is also way of giving peace to souls of dead. Since also Catholics, and in great number, died in Auschwitz, including many nuns, monkms and priests, for many simple people (and i know such people) someone who is trying to forbide praying for them and putting cross for them is, hm, i don't know how to explain that, is behaving hostile not peacefuly. They just can't understand why anyone could be abused because of cross (which they consider symbol of love, forgiveness, presence of God, ethic), or because of prayer. They instead think that someone is trying (again, like communists before) to oppress Catholicism. This is cultural thing you know. You can't change it with protests, no matter how peacefull, only by education and explanations. Another thing is people living in places like Auschwitz are quite touchy, since they feel like everyone is trying to forbade them normal living, so they overreact everytime they see anyone protesting against anything related to Church or Auschwitz. I am also sure that percentage of antisemites in Poland and in US isn't so different (depends however how you define antisemitism - is common saying "let's love like brother, but let's count as Jews" antisemitic? Or saying "drinking Jewish way" (without glasses) - i guess no, since Polish Jokes in America and USA isn't called antipolonism, neither people who are laugh at that jokes are called Anti-Poles)

 * Again, I don't like phrase "especially in Poland", because it implies that somehow Poland is totally different from Ukraine, Czech, Slovakia, Germany, or USA.

szopen

Well, I've made the first tentative edit, trying to fairly incorporate some of our recent discussion. I'm not completely happy with the current form, but it doesn't pay to change too much at once. Concerning this sentence:
 * While their Jewish background makes it unlikely that they were racist in the modern sense of that word, their background does not make it any less likely that they may have displayed religious or theological prejudice against Jews who remained followers of Judaism rather than become Christians.

Is my use of the word "Judaism" anachronistic? As I understand it, Jews were just making the transition from Israelite monotheism to something that resembles modern Judaism, and I'm not sure how best to describe the religion in that context. Other correctives will be welcome too, of course. --Wesley

 * This sounds right. Historians speak of these people at these times as Jews practiving Judaism. The rabbinic/pharisaic Judaism that was canonized in the Mishnah (about 200 CE) is a compilation of teachings from about 200 years before the time of Jesus to about 150 years after. RK

- I changed "A few Christians still hold the classical Christian understanding of these verses." back to "Many Christians still hold..." The "classical Christian understanding" of these verses is still maintained in Eastern Orthodoxy, and I would suspect in Roman Catholicism. In Protestantism, it's sure to be a mixed bag. Those first two groups comprise the two largest groups of Christians today, which surely is still sufficient to justify using the word "Many". I would be glad to hear any reasons to the contrary. Wesley

I changed this sentence:
 * It should also be noted that Jesus' disciples, Paul, and the first Christians were Jews and that the New Testament was written by Jews, although by the time that most of the Christian Bible was being written, they had turned away from the Jewish community and were looking to Gentiles as potential converts.

by deleting the phrase "...had turned away from the Jewish community and..." It would be my opinion, based on the New Testament and other early Christian writings, that the apostles did not turn away from the Jewish community as such, but rather found it prudent to hide from them. Rather than state both sides of the claim, it seemed simpler to just delete the phrase, as the sentence is smoother this way. I didn't intend to drastically changed the thrust of the sentence.
 * Hi Welsey, I think I wrote, ar at least at some point modified, the sentence in question.  My intent was simply to communicate that there was a shift in their energies, from seeking to convert Jews to seeking to convert gentiles.  I think the fact that they started expending less energy in attempts to speak to Jews is important.  WHY this ocurred is as you say a separate issue -- one that certainly belongs in some article, but as you suggest perhaps not here.  Do you think that you can come up with an acceptable way to phrase this in the article?  Rather than revert, I would be content if you could come up with something that makes the point in a form congenial to you, Slrubenstein

 * I agree that in the context of this article, the focus should be on WHAT was happening rather than on WHY, since this paragraph is attempting to give an historical context for the passages that follow. I'm not sure how well I've succeeded at doing that. Certainly there was a time when attention shifted to gentiles, for a variety of reasons. It doesn't necessarily follow that Jews were entirely ignored. I think that most biblical scholars would agree that the Gospel of Matthew and the Epistle to the Hebrews were written primarily with a Jewish audience in mind, if not other New Testament books as well. Such a shift did not happen in a single year, nor was the New Testament was written in a single year. It's been a while since I looked at dating the books, but it seems there was enough variation in possible dates for many of them, that being certain of their exact sequence of authorship is unlikely.

 * RK and I have both edited the main page since I made the above change to this Talk page; I'm not sure the present form is best, even though I think I last edited it. It does strike me as significant that during close to the same time frame that Christians were growing more distinct from Judaism, Judaism itself was changing from Temple focused to synagogue focused and making related changes, so that by 150 C.E. or so, both had changed considerably from what Judaism was in 50 B.C. or so. I'm not sure whether I should have introduced that here, or whether it belongs elsewhere. Wesley

 * Well, I think that both of you have done a pretty good job; I really don't mean to be too picky. I think your point that Judaism too was changing during that period is an excellent point.  Nevertheless, most of the versus critical of "Jews" in the NT are -- as some have pointed out, more precisely critical of "Pharisees."  But the point, is, the major change to which you allude was the "Phariseization" of Judaism, that the Judaism that emerged in say 150 was primarily different from the Judaism of 50 in that the Pharisees, once one faction of Jews among several, emerged as the definers of normative Judaism.

 * As for changes among Christians, I still take issue with this sentence,
 * At this time Christians were looking to both gentiles and Jews as potential converts.

NOT because it is wrong, but because I think it is just a little to general. As far as I know, Christians have ALWAYS sought to convert Jews, even long after the completion of the NT. My point is not that they stoipped doing so, but: 1) that at a certain point they began exerting relatively more energy pursuing gentile converts, and 2) that this shift had an effect on the way Christianity was represented, including an effect on at least some of the NT.
 * I am not sure how to express this in a consise and proportionate way, and in a way that is consistent with the wurrent article; the last thing I want to do is screw up what you have already accomplished. So if what I just wrote makes sense and seems fair to you, I would be happy to leave it to you to make any appropriate changes. Slrubenstein

I appreciate your comments, Slrubenstein, and I've done my best to incorporate them. I hope they reflect your intent. I also added a 'historical context' heading to the paragraph to hopefully guide any future editors, at least as to the paragraph's topic.

Regarding the Pharisees, it appears to me that the Pharisees are more heavily targeted in the Gospel parables, but the Sadducees are also "criticised", especially around the time of Jesus' trial and in the Book of Acts. In addition to the Pharisees becoming the dominant sect, I don't think that's all that was happening. They also had to replace the emphasis on Temple sacrifices with regular prayer and righteous behaviour, and I think the Masorete's reform began... in the second century? I'm speaking here of the effort to consolidate the various Hebrew texts of the Tanach, add the vowel points and incorporate more discipline among the scribes to avoid copying mistakes. Could be wrong about that one though. Wesley

Forgot to explain why I deleted the Samaritan bit. Basically, the Good Samaritan story isn't primarily about the fact that the good guy was a Samaritan, but about loving your neighbor and defining even bitter enemies (a Jew and a Samaritan) to be neighbors. In John 4, Jesus tells the Samaritan woman that soon, it won't be important to worship on their mountain, which was at least one defining distinction of Samaritanism. I'm sure some could construe such a statement as being "anti-Samaritan", although the woman he was talking to did not appear to be offended. Wesley

I cut this phrase (following the mention of Christians seeking converts among gentiles)
 * , especially amongst pagans

for a few reasons. What does "pagan" mean? Today, it means something specific; there are people who self-identify as neo-pagans. But to project back in time a group that identified themselves a "pagans" is inachronistic. Before the rise of a group self-identifying as pagans, the word pagan was used derisively to refer to anyone not belonging to a particular religion. So I object in part because for many this is imply an insulting term. Moreover, I think it is redundant. From a Jewish point of view, the term pagan is meaningless; gentiles (goyim) have by definition a religion other than Judaism. So what? From a Christian point of view, I think one can make the same point -- obviously, before people are converted to Christianity, they are non-Christians. So what? I do not see what is gained by adding this phrase. Slrubenstein

Regarding this recently added statement:
 * The handful of Jews who had believed in Jesus' significance were wiped out during the Roman destruction of the Jewish state.

This seems highly unlikely, since Jewish converts to Christianity were also to be found in Alexandria, throughout Asia Minor, and perhaps even further West. Also, there continued to be a Patriarch of Jerusalem for some time, which church probably included Jewish converts. Any contrary evidence or reasoning?
 * Err... sorry, problems in phrasing. What I meant to say was that the community of Jews in Palestine that believed in Jesus was -scattered-, not eradicated, and ceased to exist as a community. This seems reasonable enough, no? Graft
 * Well, that at least sounds more plausible, although I don't know nearly enough about the history of the church in Jerusalem to say whether it's accurate. One or two of Paul's epistles talk about raising funds to help the Christians in Jerusalem; I'm sure it would be interesting to see if those are dated before or after the Temple's destruction, though I suspect there are suggested dates both before and after. Any suggested reading so I can better educate myself? Thanks, Wesley

 * Removed the statement, as it was plain wrong as stated, and doubtful that they left Jerusalem entirely as there continued to be a church there for some time. Wesley 07:55 Aug 21, 2002 (PDT)

 *  In the later history of the Church, to ingratiate itself with the Roman empire undoubtedbly also played a role in reshaping the role of Jews in the New Testament.

Is this a suggestion that books of the New Testament were first written one way, and later rewritten to make Jews look worse? Any textual evidence? Seems unlikely; the Romans' chief complaint regarding the Christians was that they refused to sacrifice to the Roman gods (which is why the Romans called them "atheists"), and were rapidly gaining converts. Jews also refused such sacrifices, of course, but were not expanding the way Christians were. Wesley

 * Removed as unsupported. At best, this is a controversial claim. Wesley 07:55 Aug 21, 2002 (PDT)

Wesley, I agree it is a weak claim. But other historians have made a similar but more sophisticated claim and although it may be controversial (and would be rejected out of hand by fundamentalists) I think it needs to be in the article. The claim goes something like this: the later books of the Gospel were written in a way that cast an interpretation of Jesus' life (and a selective account) that would be less threatening to the Roman authorities, and more congenial to Gentiles.

Obviously the Gospels provide selective accounts of Jesus' life -- they are short books and surely Jesus did and said much that is not in the Gospels, and people around Jesus said and did much that is not in the Gospels. Also, some of the books were written by Gentiles and for, I believe, a Gentile audience, some time after the events they describe. I would not be surprised if some things Jesus said or did, or that Pharisees said or did, that were clear in meaning to Jewish contemporaries were not quite as clear -- so I find this claim quite plausible... Slrubenstein

 * My biggest objections to the sentence were the use of the words undoubtedly, and reshaping. The latter suggested that either the Gospel writers deliberately lied about history, or that the Gospels were first written in a way favorable to the Jews and unfavorable to the Romans, and then later massively rewritten to give the reverse effect. Making the claim in the more sophisticated version you gave, and describing it as just that, a claim or historical speculation, would be fine. I agree that the Gospel accounts are very selective. Near the end of John it explicitly says he (John) only recorded a fraction of the things Jesus said and did. It still seems implausible that they were trying to appease Roman authorities though; if they were, the attempt failed miserably. That's just my own opinion, but I'm sure the early Christians would say the Gospels were written to convey theology and history, not to avoid persecution, and can find support for that if you like. Wesley 12:23 Aug 21, 2002 (PDT)

I will put what I wrote in the article -- but I appreciate your sensitivies both about the language and scope of the claims, so I hope you will edit what I put in appropriately, Slrubenstein

 * SR -- well written. I just changed "books of the Gospel" to "Gospels", since each book is a separate Gospel, e.g., "the Gospel according to St. Matthew", "the Gospel according to St. Mark", etc.

 * On a separate note, I wonder whether it's true that most theological critiques of Christianity came from the Jews early on, as it says a paragraph below your changes. Irenaeus gave a considerable systematic listing and description of various heresies in Against Heresies; that would probably be as good a source as any to verify this, would it not? Wesley 13:40 Aug 21, 2002 (PDT)

 * I am glad you liked it; your change is obvious, I do not know what I was thinking. As for theological critiques of Christianity, I just do not know (I do not know enough of the literature).  Personally, I am not sure if I would even characterize the Jewish response as a critique.  I am sure that back in the years 40, 50, 80, 100, there were some great dinner-table arguments and some perhaps sophisticated critiques, but I do not think we have any record of them.  Personally, I would characterize the collective and traditional Jewish response to be more in the line of "Huh?" or "No Way!" than anything more sophisticated -- at least, until the Enlightenment or even 20th century when it became both safe, and perhaps even necessary for some Jewish thinkers (maybe Franz Rosenzweig) to start talking about what they did/didn't like about Christianity.  I am sure that there are Roman critiques of Christianity (did Tertulian write stuff on iintolerance?  I am not sure, I am no scholar on Roman history but I have a vague memory of an historian telling me about this).  Of course, these critiques are relatively late, I think only after Christianity had really spread around the empire. Slrubenstein

I have rewr-tten the end of the section in question (most theological critiques of Christianity came from the Jews) -- I think it was unclear and I THINK I figured it out -- but if my interpretation was right there were two things wrong with it. First, the point is not that Jews proposed ANY critique of Christianity. The point is that Jews, just be "being Jewish" (praying "Our God and God of our fathers" emphasis on OUR; reading the Scripture and, despite all the prohecies Christians see there, just goiing on to obey Rabbinic law while ignoring Jesus, is at least for some Christians inherantly a rejection, an attack, a critique. It isn't that Jews are articulating any critique; merely by not being Christian they are a living critique.  Does this make sense?  Second, the article had something about Jews being closest to Christianity which not only rubs me the wrong way since Jews were here first (no offense), I think it misses the point.  It is not that Judaism is close to Christianity.  It is that Christians bases the legitimacy of the New Testament largely on a reading of the Scriptures that are sacred to Jews.

 * I think I hear what you're saying. I certainly agree that the bit about Jews being closes to Christianity was a bit odd; no doubt that Jews were 'here first'. Christians certainly base their legitimacy on what they call the Old Testament, and early on made that claim even to Greeks and Romans. This was not because the Romans had any special respect for the OT, but in order to show that their faith had ancient foundations and was not a "modern" invention.

 * Jews did present a threat to Christianity just by continuing to be Jews, as you say. However, I think that Jews were also threatened by Christianity, if only because Jews were converting, especially in the early decades. And, I think they may have been threatened by the alternative interpretations of their own scriptures. I haven't researched this enough to write anything up formally, but some sources seem to suggest that prior to Christianity, the Septuagint's translation was widely regarded as inspired, as well as the original Hebrew prophets. Even Josephus reports the story of the 70 independent translations being found identical. But when Christians used it to prove that Jesus was the messiah, Jews abandoned it, and attempted three other translations from Hebrew to Greek before abandoning Greek in favor of Hebrew and Syrian translations. Debates concerning passages like Isaiah 7:14 ("virgin" vs. "young woman") have been going on since at least the second century, and don't appear to have changed much in all this time.

 * After skimming Against Heresies, I found that Jews were addressed only very briefly; Irenaeus spent the vast majority of that work addressing variations of gnosticism and mystery religions. When he did address Jews, he recounted the story of the Septuagint's inspired translation and relied on that for his authority. Justin Martyr wrote an entire book, Dialogue with Trypho, consisting of a friendly debate with Trypho, a Jew. In it, he addresses at length the question of whether Jesus is the Messiah, why gentiles are included, why Christians don't obey the Mosaic law, and similar subjects. It ends with Justin and Trypho parting on friendly terms, with neither having been persuaded to the other's viewpoint. At the very least, this does confirm that these were questions Justin found to be worth addressing, which supports what you said. Wesley 09:50 Aug 22, 2002 (PDT)

I think that here we somehow get to the crux of the issue, one that was discussed on these pages many months ago (or perhaps on another page) -- how Jews can consider Christians anti-semetic even when Christians do not intend to be or even think they are in any way.

 * Yep. Here we are again. Wesley

i hope other participants will read over the changes I made, as well as my explanation here, carefully, and help ensure that the article deals with these issues clearly while maintaining NPOV, thanks Slrubenstein

Well (to respond to Wesley's recent responses), I am sure that there were moments when Jews were seriously threatened by Christianity. The questions are, how did they perceive this threat, and for how long? Frankly, I suspect that it wasn't very long at all. Also,I suspect that Jews felt threatened by other things besides the competing interpretation. In the very early years, Jewish converts to Christianity may not have been thought of as "lost" to the Jewish community. The crux of the matter is, at what point did Christians start preaching more to Gentiles than to Jews? At this point (and I think it happened fairly soon), Jews would not be threatened by the competing interpretation of scriptures or the possibility of "losing" Jews. I do think that they felt politically threatened in front of the Roman authorities (by people prophesizing that a Jewish King would return and bring a new kingdom, i.e. risking more accusations of sedition by Roman authorities who did not fully understand the split between Jews and Christians or Christian theology). In any event, perhaps some of what I have written here belongs in the article, but I would rather let other people (e.g. Wesley) make that decision, Slrubenstein

 * Justin Martyr lived from 110 to 165, so at least as late as mid-second century, he and probably other Christians were still concerned with converting Jews or answering accusations from Jews, or both, however you want to interpret the motivations behind Dialogue with Trypho. The end of the threat to the Jews would come when they were no longer targeted for evangelization, not when others were targeted more. As for Romans confusing Christians and Jews, is there any real evidence of this? Weren't the Jews targeted because there were real Zealots among them who were really trying to break free of Roman rule? Or any records of Christians being accused of political sedition, aside from not sacrificing to Roman gods? I probably need to leave this subject for a while and come back when I can focus on actually improving the article, instead of debating these minutiae. Wesley

 * okay, but I honestly am not trying to debate anything. I still consider 110-165 relatively early; nevertheless, the question is not whether Christians stopped trying to convert Jews; the question is at what point did they begin to spend more time proselytizing among Gentiles, and meeting with more success.  As for Romans confusing Jews and Christians, I am referring to that early period (even during the life of Paul) when Christians Jews may have preached in synagogues.  Of course the Romans had their hands full with Jewish zealots.  The question is, were early Christians also rebels?  I think the answer is no -- but I also think that claims that Jesus was the messiah (king of the jews), would come back and bring about the kingdom could easily have been misunderstood as a new kind of zealotry.  This would explain why the pharisees (like Saul/Paul) persecuted Christians.  This is not my argument, it is Paula Fredriksen's.  I am sorry you do not think any of this could help improve the article; that was my only intention Slrubenstein