Surprisingly, modern historians have rarely been interested in the history of the American South in the period before the South began to become self-consciously “Southern”. Consequently, the cultural history of Britain’s North American Empire in the 17th and 18th centuries has been written almost as if the Southern colonies had never existed. The American culture that emerged during the Colonial periods has been depicted as having been simply an extension of New England Puritan culture. However, Professor Davis has recently argued that the South stood apart from the rest of American society during this early period, following its own unique pattern of cultural development. The case for Southern distinctiveness rests upon two related premises(前提): the first: the cultural similarities among the five Southern colonies were far more impressive than the differences; the second: what made those colonies alike also made them different from other colonies. The first, for which Davies offers an enormous amount of evidence, ; the second is far more problematic.What makes the second premise problematic is the use of the Puritan colonies as a basis for comparison. Quite properly, Davis condemns the excessive influence ascribed by historians to the Puritans in the formation of American culture. Yet Davis carelessly adds weight to such ascriptions by using the puritans as the standard against which to assess the achievements and contributions of Southern colonials. Throughout, Davis focuses on the important differences between the Southern and Puritan colonies in patterns of early settlement, in attitudes toward nature and Native Americans, and in the degree of receptivity (接受能力) to metropolitan cultural influences.
However, recent scholarship has strongly suggested that aspects of early New England culture that seem to have been most distinctly puritan, such as the strong religious orientation, were largely confined to the Massachusetts and Connecticut.
