More things I never knew..............

 

     Many Frenchmen served in America during the Revolution.  There were more French combatants at Yorktown than Americans.*  Lafayette personified all his countrymen in the American mind because he had come early, before the formal alliance, and stayed late.  His French comrades were professionals and, to the extent they had opinions, realpolitikers, serving in obedience to orders and to advance French interests, Lafayette was a volunteer and an enthusiast.  He had the ability to engage and impress people, which might be called a talent if that did not suggest skill and practice, whereas with him the effect was as artless as his intentions were sincere.

-Richard Brookhiser, The Hero Returns: Lafayette and the Legacy of Revolution

*If one queries ChatGPT, one reads that the numbers of foot soldiers at Yorktown were fairly even between French and American (and, combined, significantly outnumbered the British).  When adding the number of French sailors, who blockaded the British and prevented their escape, then ChatGPT says the statistic is correct.

In the spring of 1824................

 

     Congress, in issuing the invitation Monroe transmitted, reflected a national willingness to see the young hero, now old, one more time.  In looking at Lafayette, Americans could look back.  When men invented calendars they invented anniversaries, with all the mental freight that anniversaries carry.  The Battles of Lexington and Concord had been fought in April 1775, the Battle of Bunker Hill that June.  Their fiftieth anniversaries were approaching.  Congress had commissioned John Trumbull, America's most eminent artist, to decorate the Rotunda of the Capital with four huge paintings celebrating the Revolution; Lafayette would appear in one of them.  Only three signers of the Declaration of Independence—Adams, Jefferson, and Charles Carroll of Carrolton—still lived.  Only one major general of the revolutionary army still lived—Lafayette.  Revolutionary War veterans survived in every city and many towns, but now they were all gray.  If one wanted to see and celebrate the Revolution as a living event, now was the last opportunity.

-Richard Brookhiser, The Hero Returns: Lafayette and the Legacy of Revolution

The Surrender of Lord Cornwallis
John Trumbull    oil on canvas  1819-20

We....................

 

     "These wounds are my pride," he said.  "I received them fighting for the independence of my country.  Your blood, my general, flowed the same day . . . where we were so unfortunate."  At Brandywine, the enemy had outflanked the defenders and forced them to flee in confusion.  Lafayette, faint from loss of blood, had been led from the field but had stayed at a bridge on a road behind the lines in Chester, Pennsylvania, to make order among the retreating men.

     "It was indeed a rough day," Lafayette said now, forty-eight years later, "but have we not since been deeply indemnified?"

     Whom did he mean by we?  Lafayette had a gift—shown hundreds of times on his American tour—of connecting quickly and warmly with the people before him, no matter their age or sex, class or race.  These bursts of spontaneous fraternity were especially strong with veterans of the Revolution.  In that moment in Natchez, we meant, first and foremost, the two comrades of 1777.  Young once, they had lived to old age; wounded, they were now whole; mementoes of pain had become souvenirs of glory.  This was simple indemnification for them, for any old soldier:  We struggled, sometimes we lost, but we have prevailed and endured.

     But Lafayette's we was also meant to encompass the American people, among whom he always included himself.  This we had won independence from their colonial masters and had maintained it through decades of international upheaval, including a second shooting war with Britain.  The country Americans had created and passed on to a new generation was, or seemed, united, prosperous, orderly, free, and self-ruled.  Once children of a royal patriarch, cogs in an imperial machine, they now ran their own affairs—and evidently ran them well.  This was indemnification, not for two men but for millions.

-Richard Brookhiser, The Hero Returns: Lafayette and the Legacy of Revolution

Although, understanding the past would be a good place to start.......................

 

     It is no longer sufficient for Johnny to understand the past.  It is not even enough for him to understand the present, for the here-and-now environment will soon vanish.  Johnny must learn to anticipate the directions and rate of change.  He must, to put it technically, learn to make repeated, probabilistic, increasing long-range assumptions about the future.  And so must Johnny's teachers.

-Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (1976)

Re-thinking Rockefeller....................

 

Monopolists raise prices. Standard Oil cut prices. Ironically, it was Rockefeller’s successful determination to cut costs and prices that led economically uninformed historians to cast him as a villain. He did indeed make life difficult for his competitors, but in the process he also made life better for millions of consumers worldwide.

-Donald J. Boudreaux, from this post

Let's blame Napoleon...........

 

For most of human history, children learned by living.  A mother's hand guiding yours through bread dough.  A father's voice teaching songs that carried ancestral memory.  Village elders telling stories that encoded wisdom.  Learning was intimate, immediate, and integrated with life itself.  No grades, no bells, no sitting still for six hours.  Knowledge flowed through relationship and practice.

Then Prussia lost a war.  1806.  Napoleon crushed the Prussian army at Jena-Auerstedt.  The Prussian government blamed their people.   Too undisciplined, too free-thinking, too human.  So they built a machine to manufacture better humans.

The created the first compulsory state-run school system in history.  Children were sorted by age like industrial products.  Marched between classes at the sound of bells like factory workers, forced to sit in rows like soldiers, and taught to memorize and repeat, never question or create.

The goal was to produce citizens who obeyed reflectively, solders who followed orders without thinking, and workers who showed up on time and did what they were told.  Humans began confusing obedience with morality and conformity with intelligence.

It worked so well that America imported it wholesale.  Horace Mann, the "Father of American Education," traveled to Prussia in 1843 and came back evangelical about their system.  He called it "the perfect system for shaping citizens."

-Stan Taylor

An important..........................

 

.........................................history lesson.

precedented............................

 

            via

As experiments go................

 

     How Tocqueville settled on this plan is unclear, but there was a widespread sense in Restoration intellectual circles that the Old World could learn from the grand American "experiment" of democratic governance.  George Washington was revered in France as a virtuous general who lived humbly, fought only when necessary, and relinquished his power at the end of his term—a kind of anti-Napoleon.  Nobody drew the contrast better than Chateaubriand in his Voyage en Amerique, published in 1827 and widely excerpted in the French press.  "Washington and Buonaparte both emerged from the republic's bosom; both were the children of freedom," Chateaubriand remarked but added, "Washington remained loyal to freedom, but Buonaparte betrayed it.

-Olivier Zunz, The Man Who Understood Democracy: The Life of Alexis de Tocqueville

Religious freedom, or not...............

 

............More stuff I never learned as a history major:

     In 1768, with dissenting religion continuing to grow, the Anglican establishment—both a political and religious entity—resorted to arrests.  Baptists faced the brunt of arrests.  By the time of the American Revolution, more than half the Baptist ministers in Virginia had been jailed for preaching without a license or disturbing the peace. (Some ministers responded that they had a license from "King Jesus" and recognized no other authority over their calling.) . . .

     Facing the most formidable military of the eighteenth century, and with dissenters accounting for 20 to 33 percent or more of Virginia's white population, patriot leaders realized quickly that they needed dissenters' support in the war effort. (Government documents noted, for example, the need for support from those marksmen in the heavily Presbyterian Shenandoah Valley with the extraordinarily accurate long rifles who eventually mad up the core of Daniel Morgan's riflemen at the Battle of Saratoga.)  This recognition led to a remarkable negotiation—support for the war effort being offered by dissenters in return for religious freedom.

     Dissenters' earlier pleas for some limited relief were replaced by demands for equal treatment: an end to the church tax; an end to Anglican control of marriage, orphans, and poor relief; exemption from military service for dissenting ministers.  Religious freedom was tied to the sought-after support for the war.

-John A. Ragosta, from his essay, What Does the American Revolution Mean to Me? in The American Revolution at 250: Twenty-Four Historians Reflect on the Founding

Letters...................

 

From my infancy I was taught to love humanity and liberty. Enquiry and experience have since confirmed my reverence for the lessons then given me, by convincing me more fully of their truth and excellence. Benevolence toward mankind excites wishes for their welfare, and such wishes endear the means of fulfilling them. These can be found in liberty only, and therefore her sacred cause ought to be espoused by every man, on every occasion, to the utmost of his power. As a charitable but poor person does not withhold his mite because he cannot relieve all the distresses of the miserable, so should not any honest man suppress his sentiments concerning freedom, however small their influence is likely to be. Perhaps he “may touch some wheel” that will have an effect greater than he could reasonably expect.  

-John Dickinson, from his first Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania

Been reading The American Revolution at 250: Twenty-Four Historians Reflect on the Founding.  More than a few historians are troubled by the contradiction between the sentiments of liberty inherent in the Founding and the reality of enslavement.  250 years and a bloody civil war later, we are still dealing with the echoes of that contradiction.  Reading  Dickinson's first letter, the question arose, "was Dickinson a slave owner?"  Google says yes.  Dickenson College puts it this way: "The founders of Dickinson College believed in the principles of the enlightenment and yet still found ways to rationalize ownership of other human beings."

Yep....................

 

I think perhaps we have collectively been too eager to deny the relevance of 1776 to us today, too sure of our own superiority to listen to revolutionary leaders' advice about society, human nature, and government, and too quick to disparage or simply ignore the national past that began in those desperate and idealistic days 250 years ago.

-Brendan McConville, from his essay in The American Revolution at 250:  Twenty-Four Historians Reflect on the Founding

writing a different story.................

 

Not everyone who supported the Revolution would necessarily see it as an opportunity to make wide-ranging changes in society.  Dissolving the connections to Great Britain would be enough.  People go go about their business in pretty much the same way as they had before.  Of course, some changes would necessarily have to take place because the basic structure of a republic differs from that of a monarchy.  Subjects become citizens with new responsibilities that would alter the contours of society.  Men, though certainly not all of them, would have to get used to voting. . . .

If the Americans were not really operating with a tabula rasa after breaking from the British Empire, there was substantial opportunity to write a different story for the newly created United States, one that would help transform the world.  Jefferson sounded this theme throughout his political career and until his death.

-Annette Gordon-Reed from her essay "Thomas Jefferson, Optimistic Visionary", as found in The American Revolution at 250:  Twenty-Four Historians Reflect on the Founding

Many great speeches...................

 

.............have been totally forgotten or ignored.  None more so than this read-worthy one.    A brief snippet:

Another factor in maintaining balance involves the element of time. As we peer into society's future, we - you and I, and our government - must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.

thanks Michael

Don Surber..................

 

................lays out the impact of wealth, both its creation and its spending, on the U. S. of A.

Yes...................

 

History teaches you to avoid overconfidence.

-Ben Carlson

Inclinations...................

 

     We are inclined to see history through the lives of great men.  That inclination blinds us to the real complexity of politics, business and finance.  So we find intentionality and design where there is only chance and improvisation; directness where there is obliquity.

-John Kay, Obliquity:  Why our goals are best achieved indirectly

the interplay.......................

 

     History was a favorite genre for the rest of Swift's life.  What mainly interested him was the interplay of personalities, with their complicated motives, covert betrayals, and heavily masked truth.  He would undoubtedly have agreed with Voltaire's conclusion to his massive Essai sur les moeurs: "Since nature has placed self-interest, pride, and all the passions in the human heart, it is not surprising that we have viewed, over a span of ten centuries, an almost continuous succession of crimes and disasters."

-Leo Damrosch, Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World

Learned something new today............

 

Uruguay had been established with the help of Britain as a buffer state between Argentina and Brazil and formally declared independence in 1830.  The remainder of the nineteenth century was bloody as those of European descent first massacred the Indigenous peoples and then fell to a series of civil wars between the Blancos, the conservative champions of the rights of landowners, and the Colorados, the liberals based largely in Montevideo.  Although the Colorados won every election held between 1865 and 1958, it took a long time for that to equate to stability.  By 1900, Uruguay had suffered around fifty coups and uprisings.

-Jonathan Wilson, The Power and The Glory:  The History of the World Cup

A pretty fair speech..................

 

"For nearly two centuries before the revolution, this land was settled and forged by men and women who bore in their souls the blood and noble spirit of the British. Here on a wild and untamed continent, they set loose the ancient English love of liberty and Great Britain’s distinctive sense of glory, destiny, and pride. And that’s what it is: glory, destiny, and pride. The American patriots who pledged their lives to independence in 1776 were the heirs to this majestic inheritance. Their veins ran with Anglo-Saxon courage. Their hearts beat with an English faith in standing firm for what is right, good, and true. In recent years, we’ve often heard it said that America is merely an idea. But the cause of freedom did not simply appear as an intellectual invention of 1776. The American founding was the culmination of hundreds of years of thought, struggle, sweat, blood, and sacrifice on both sides of the Atlantic."

-as cut-and-pasted from here