单项选择题

5
Surprisingly enough, modern historians have rarely interested themselves in the history of the American South in the period before the South began to become self-con sciously and distinctively "Southern" —the decades after 1815. Consequently, the cuhural history of Britain’s North American empire in the seventeenth and eighteech centuries has been written almost as if the Southern colonies had never existed. The American culture that emerged during the Colonial and Revolutionary eras 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 South ern distinctiveness rests upon two related premises: first, that the cultural similarities among the five Southern colonies were far more impressive than the differences, and sec ond, that what made those colonies alike also made them different from the other colo nies. The first, for which Davis offers an enormous amount of evidence, can be accepted without major reservations; 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 decries the excessive influence ascribed by his torians to the Puritans in the formation of American culture. Yet Davis inadvertently adds weight to such ascription by using the Puritans as the standard against which to assess the achievements and contributions of Southern colonials. Throughout, Davis focuses on the important, and undeniable, differences between the Southern and Puritan colonies in mo tives for and patterns of early settlement, in attitudes toward nature and Native Ameri cans, and in the degree of receptivity to metropolitan cultural influences.
However, recent scholarship has strongly suggested that those aspects of early New England culture that seem to have been most distinctly Puritan, such as the strong reli gious orientation and the communal impulse, were not even typical of New England as a whole, but were largely confined to the two colonies of Massachusetts and Connecticut. Thus, what in contrast to the Puritan colonies appears to Davis to be pecul iarly Southern—acquisitiveness, a strong interest in politics and the law, and a tendency to cultivate metropolitan cultural models--was not only more typically English than the cultural patterns exhibited by Puritan Massachusetts and Connecticut, but also almost cer tainly characteristic of most other early modern British colonies from Barbados north to Rhode Island and New Hampshire. Within the larger framework of American colonial life, then, not the Southern--but the Puritan colonies appear to have been distinctive, and even they seem to have been rapidly assimilating to the dominant cultural patterns by the late Colonial period.
According to the author, the depiction of American culture during the Colonial and Revolutionary eras as an extension of New England Puritan culture reflects the______.