Architecture Here and There

Can't really say. Jim Egan, who runs the Newport Tower Museum, on Mill Street across from the tower in Touro Park, has studied the origins of the tower that has variously been attributed to the Vikings, the Knights Templar, the Chinese, the Portuguese and the first governor of colonial Rhode Island, Benedict Arnold (great grandfather of ...).

Egan's theory, which is based in part on the discoveries of University of Rhode Island astronomer William Penhallow, embraces much of what mankind knew, or thought it knew, during the Renaissance, in the reign of Elizabeth I. In my column on Thursday I try to pack as much of it into my officially prescribed 104 lines (at 17 picas in width), but my effort fell woefully short. As I put it in a note to Egan, he can drive trucks through the gaps in my description of his theory.

Perhaps tops among those is that religious freedom, of a sort, in Rhode Island might have happened even without Roger Williams. The queen had informed her court philosopher, John Dee, who in the 1580s was pushing her to colonize America, that he could populate a new colony with Catholics banned in England and that, even if the colony's official creed was to be Anglican, they could worship Rome unreservedly.

Well, that's what Dee said she said to him, and Egan takes this as a sort of First Amendment wannabe. But not exactly. For Catholics to be tolerated in a colony with an official state religion is not exactly the same as "the government shall make no law respecting the establishment of a religion" (U.S. Bill of Rights) or Rhode Island's "livelie experiment" with "full liberty of religious concernments" (1663 royal charter).

Still, it would have been a beginning. Read more on Thursday about all sorts of other things at the center of a proposed Elizabethan colonization of New England.

 Tags  Bill of Rights Catholics Constitution David Brussat Jim Egan John Dee Newport RI Newport Tower Newport Tower Museum Queen Elizabeth I Religious Freedom Renaissance William Pennhallow

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Csubt said:

Cortez,We are not really sure about the timnig or depth of the crash .Generally these things start on the fringes and the market eats away from the bottom.We are looking at it and saying the fundamentals of the housing market are unsound.When we talked about the fundamentals of internet companies or telecom companies being unsound it came across as being a bunch of losers who didn't buy in to the tech market. That was until it became unhinged and crashed in 2000-01. Then people suddenly understood the PE of 1000 meant there would NEVER be a decent ROI and it was a pyrmid scheme. Poof, people watched a lot of wealth disolve.We will see the same constriction in housing but the time it takes will be longer. The feedback mechanisms to the general economy are already in place. It just will keep hitting us wave after wave for years.Your going to see zero appreciation and lower and lower sales. Then more forclosures less consumer spending as mortgage equity slows

Link | April 30, 2012 9:11 PM
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