The City Commission will be briefed Wednesday on the proposed 2011-12 city budget in a workshop at 9 a.m. in the Alcazar Room at City Hall. The proposed budget is on the city website.

   City department heads will review the current year and outline needs for the fiscal year beginning October 1. Thursday at 9 a.m. is a second workshop date, but traditionally the process is wrapped up in one day.

   The commission last month rejected a proposed millage rate increase after Assistant City Manager Tim Burchfield said the city can operate under the current 7.5 millage, though declining property values will reduce its revenue $725,000.

   Among city services potentially on the chopping block: the Colonial Spanish Quarter, with a projected $706,000 deficit next year. City officials are seeking an "equity partner" to keep the living history museum open.

   The budget will go to public hearings September 8 and 22. 

   The History Channel's latest offering - You Don't Know Dixie - continues the theme successfully adopted by the Jamestown 400 team (and a very effective propaganda campaign started four centuries ago).

   That theme is America's beginning at Jamestown in 1607, just up the road from St. Augustine, which at the time was a 42-year-old bustling settlement with church, hospital, government buildings, plaza, the first town plan in today's America -  and cultural diversity.

   Jamestown 400's theme was diversity - of Indians, Africans, and Europeans - "for the first time" at Jamestown.

   (Four centuries ago it was anti-Spanish propaganda by Northern European Protestant countries, to justify their imperial ambitions as opposed to Spain's. It was dubbed the Black Legend.)

   The Jamestown 400 Official Commemorative Publication includes:

• The Queen of England: "At Jamestown three cultures came together for the first time - Native American, African and European."
• Honorary Chair Justice Sandra Day O'Connor: "... the unifying legacies of democracy, free enterprise and cultural diversity that first took root at Jamestown ..."
• Virginia Governor Timothy Kaine: "... where the American legacies of free enterprise, representative government and cultural diversity began" and
• Colonial Williamsburg's James Horn: "At Jamestown, the peoples of America, Europe and Africa first encountered one another, lived and worked alongside each other, traded and fought one another, survived and persisted."

   Jamestown had a head start pushing its claims in its anniversary. Planning began ten years ahead of 2007, a seasoned support team included the Historic Triangle of Jamestown, Yorktown, and Williamsburg, and the commemorative publication lists more than 400 organizations, committees, volunteers, and donors.

   "Black Legend" is the accumulated traditions of propaganda and Hispanophobia accord­ing to which Spanish imperialism is regarded as cruel, bigoted, exploitative and self-righteous in excess of the reality. Dr. Charles Gibson (1958)

   St. Augustine, survivor of bombardments, sieges, fires and weather was, finally, sacked by politics - a propaganda campaign that has continued for four centuries, la Leyenda Negra, the Black Legend.

   The term was coined by Julián Juderías in his 1914 book La leyenda negra y la verdad histórica (The Black Legend and Historical Truth), to describe the allegedly biased depiction of Spain and Spaniards as "cruel", "intolerant" and "fanatical" in anti-Spanish literature starting in the 16th century.

   One of the strongest and earliest supporters for the Legend was the Englishman John Foxe, author of the Book of Martyrs (1554). Other critics of Spain included Antonio Pérez, the fallen secretary of King Philip II of Spain. Pérez fled to England, where he published attacks on the Spanish monarchy under the title Relaciones (1594).

   These books were extensively used by the Dutch during their fight for independence from Spain, and taken up by the English to justify their piracy and wars against the Spanish.

   Foxe's book was among Sir Francis Drake's favorites; Drake himself was and is regarded by the Spaniards as a cruel and bloodthirsty pirate.

The Dutch and English were not only emerging as Spain's rivals for worldwide colonialism, but were also strongholds of Protestantism while Spain was the most powerful Roman Catholic country of the period.

   Former Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall, a scholar of Spanish colonial history, in his Coronado and our Spanish Legacy: To the Inland Empire, noted, "Only once since the invention of the printing press has a successful campaign of defamation lasting centuries been waged against an entire people.

   "That nation is Spain, and that campaign of calumny - known to modern historians as the 'Hispanophobia Black Legend' - made Span­iards pariahs and demeaned the character of the Spanish people. This myth, I am convinced, has influenced earlier generations of Americans to cast a cold eye on the achievements of our Spanish pioneers."