9/20/2023 0 Comments Middle colonies activitiesThese schools trained their pupils in the latest dances from both France and England, including the minuet, the cotillion, and the allemande. Almost before there was sufficient population to sustain them, dancing schools sprang up throughout the colonies in cities as varied as Boston, Newport, Philadelphia, Charleston, Williamsburg, Annapolis, and Savannah. Yet social dancing formed an important part of the colonists' repertoire of diversions. Dancing InstructionÄancing was one of the first forms of entertainment to be publicly condemned in the northern colonies, in Increase Mather's 1684 An Arrow Against Profane and Promiscuous Dancing Drawn Out of the Quiver of the Scriptures. The recreational activities and leisure entertainments of the colonists, from the earliest settlement of the country up to the age of the Revolution, reveal a great deal about how Americans understood their local cultural identity, and how they shaped that identity into a broader American character. Their northern counterparts seem to have preferred tea parties or other more sedate pastimes. For example, women in rural Virginia or North Carolina favored horseback riding, an activity not considered unwomanly in a culture where hunting and outdoor sports were common. Beyond regional, religious, and ethnic differences, gender and community relationships necessarily guided the way in which leisure activities would be enjoyed and understood in specific cultures. Religious and ethnic differences also played an important role in shaping the popular culture of each colony, as the Scots-Irish Presbyterians or the staunch Quakers of Pennsylvania banned certain entertainments in which their Anglican brothers to the South felt free to indulge. Though many colonists enjoyed seemingly similar forms of entertainment-whether it was music, dancing, or sport-significant regional distinctions reflected the varying settlement patterns. Many had roots in Europe, but their form underwent a sea change in the movement across the Atlantic. Yet up until the Revolution, the colonists continued to enjoy a wide variety of entertainments. So prevalent were these activities throughout the colonies that when the Continental Congress met in 1774 to pass resolutions for the governance of the new nation, they expressly forbade the practice of gaming, cock fighting, horse racing, theatergoing, and all other diversions calculated to distract the minds of the colonists from the seriousness of the impending war with Great Britain. His diary catalogs the most popular entertainments that the colonists enjoyed prior to the Revolution, including gaming, dancing, and cock fighting. In his copious diaries from the early years of the eighteenth century, Virginian William Byrd II, one of the colonies' most prominent landed citizens, kept a daily chronicle of the events that he attended, the activities in which he partook, and the recreations that he observed.
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