"...the commotions in America..."

A war by any other name....

It seems not everyone in London languished in post-war pain for years and years after the American colonists won the Revolutionary War.

Shortly after the November 20, 1785, death of Sir James Wright, the last British royal governor of the colony of Georgia, a London newspaper commented on his colonial service in his obituary:

“… As he presided in [Georgia] for two and twenty years with distinguished ability and integrity, it seems to be a tribute justly due to his merit as a faithful servant of his king and Country. Before the commotions in America, his example of industry and skill in the cultivation and improvement of Georgia was of eminent advantage…”

We call it the “Revolutionary War.”

The late 18^th century obituary writer in the Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser called it “the commotions in America.”

I guess there was some small comfort in taking that point of view….

"We, the people..."....ummm

Book review: Lafayette: Lessons in Leadership...

Who wasn't a patriot?

History, memory....what really happened?

Book review: Lafayette

The 3 Rs...a bit of history

Lexington, we hardly knew ye

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2016

Let’s put one more thing in context….

In America in 1877, 101 years after the Declaration of Independence:

Minor league baseball was organized

The first Easter “egg roll” was held on the White House lawn

President Hayes withdrew federal troops from New Orleans, ending military involvement in Reconstruction in the South

A horse named Baden-Baden won the 3^rd Kentucky Derby

10 members of the Molly Maguires were hanged in coal country in Pennsylvania

The San Francisco Public Library opened

The New York Athletic Club staged the first American amateur swim meet

Thomas Edison announced his “talking machine” (phonograph) invention

The first issue of the American Bicycling Journal was published in Boston

Sketch of Crazy Horse

 ….and a U. S. soldier with a bayonet murdered the Oglala Sioux chief, Crazy Horse, outside a cell in an Army prison at Fort Robinson, Nebraska. Crazy Horse was one of the Sioux leaders whose warriors wiped out Custer’s Seventh Calvary at the Little Bighorn in 1876.

Before comic books there were....

"Blood-and-thunder" for only 10 cents

"What's for dinner, Mom?"

When the next step is a jump....

Chautauqua, revisited....

....another 3rd grade tour

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2016 All rights reserved.

“…ain’t no protest song.”

Maybe it’s been a while since you said to yourself “Oh gosh, I’m getting old.”

It’s been 54 years since Bob Dylan introduced “Blowin’ In The Wind” in Greenwich Village. He recorded this iconic song a couple weeks later, and it was released in 1963. Dylan claimed he wrote the song in 10 minutes. The Beatles claimed it was one of the songs that altered their early musical development.

I can mention my personal experience of hearing “Blowin’ In The Wind” sung by just about every band that played for the troops in Vietnam, more or less at the same time they were belting out “Leaving On A Jet Plane.”

Dylan blandly claimed “this here ain’t no protest song.” Of course it was.

Maybe you forget some of the words. Here they are:

How many roads must a man walk down
before you call him a man?
How many seas must a white dove sail
before she sleeps in the sand?
Yes, and how many times must the cannon balls fly
before they're forever banned?

The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind
The answer is blowin' in the wind.

Yes, and how many years can a mountain exist
before it is washed to the sea?
Yes, and how many years can some people exist
before they're allowed to be free?
Yes, and how many times can a man turn his head
and pretend that he just doesn't see?

The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind
The answer is blowin' in the wind.

Yes, and how many times must a man look up
before he can see the sky?
Yes, and how many ears must one man have
before he can hear people cry?
Yes, and how many deaths will it take 'til he knows
that too many people have died?

The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind
The answer is blowin' in the wind.

"A Man of Feeling..."

The boob tube....

Your great-grandmother didn't have a teddy bear

How many are enough?

Homework....think again....

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2016 All rights reserved.

“…led by donkeys…”

At the outbreak of World War I, Britain had a relatively small professional army (247,000 men). Close to half of them were stationed overseas throughout the British Empire.

Thus, on the home island in August 1914, Britain’s generals mustered about 150,000 men to be the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) that crossed the English Channel, to join the French in fighting the German attackers.

Within three months, that half of Britain’s professional army was gone. Most of the men in the BEF were dead.

p.s. Britain’s total WWI casualties: 673,375 dead and missing, 1,643,469 wounded

Reference:

Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, 1492- Present (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2005), 360.

See also:

Clark, Alan. The Donkeys (London: Pimlico, 1994)

Technology 'R" Us

What it doesn't say....

Donkey and elephant enter politics

Book review: America Ascendant

Book review: Classic Writings in Poetry

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2016 All rights reserved.

First flight—unbelievable

For many people around the world, it was literally unbelievable.

On December 17, 1903, Orville Wright cranked up the biplane that he and his brother had built in the back room of their Ohio bike shop, and did what no man had done before: he traveled through the air, perched on a machine.

That first flight wasn’t much to write home about: 120 feet, lasting 12 seconds. Orville and Wilbur flew four times that day, and Wilbur handled the last, spectacular feat: he traveled 852 feet in 59 seconds.

A lot of folks thought it was impossible, or at least impossible for two Dayton bicycle mechanics to pull off.

The Wright brothers were deliberate in their strategies to develop and patent their airplane, so they didn’t talk it up much. The world-wide press was not largely impressed in the early years. Five years after the first flight, Orville and Wilbur went to France and did the first highly publicized demonstrations of their heavier-than-air craft. The world went nuts.

da Vinci's flying machine

Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci (1452-1519) had the idea for a flying machine back in the 16^th century, but he couldn’t get the thing to work.

                          

David McCullough's book on the Wright brothers

A good step

Can 13 words be a palace?

"We the People..."?....hold on

Book review: St. Ives

The other British colonies....

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2015 All rights reserved.

The Revolutionary War didn’t end at Yorktown

If you’re interested in early American history you probably recall that the British surrendered to George Washington and the Marquis de Lafayette at Yorktown on October 19, 1781.

Hold it. The Revolutionary War didn’t end there.

In the two years following Yorktown, there were hundreds of skirmishes and combat encounters, largely in the American South, between soldiers of the Continental and British armies, and among pro-American and pro-British militias and many native American warriors.

King George III didn’t get around to issuing his Proclamation of Cessation of Hostilities until February 3, 1783.

On the high seas, after Yorktown, there were continuing naval encounters involving privateers and both Continental Navy and Royal Navy vessels as late as March 1783.

George Washington enters New York City in November 1783

The war ended officially when the Treaty of Paris was finally signed in September 3, 1783.

News traveled slowly in those days. The last contingent of British troops in North America left New York City on November 26, 1783.

 Read about the last British soldiers leaving New York here on History.com

Read this review of Don Glickstein’s book After Yorktown: The Final Struggle for American Independence:

Keeping track of time

Mr. Grumpy

Children at work

Book review: Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Spiritual Life

Seeing far

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2015 All rights reserved.

Guacamole is an Aztec word

Long before Jamestown, long before the Roanoke Colony (“Lost Colony”), long before the first English attempts to gain a foothold in the Americas, Spanish explorers and adventurers were hard at work trying to plant the royal flag of Spain in Central America and South America.

On August 13, 1521, Hernán Cortés and his small force captured Tenochtitlán, the capital of the Aztec empire, on the site of present-day Mexico City. This conquest marked the downfall of the Aztecs’ far-flung domain, as Cortés became the de facto ruler.

Before the fall of their capital, the Aztecs’ empire embraced almost 500 small “states” with a population of 5-6 million people. At the pinnacle of Aztec power, the capital city had more than 140,000 inhabitants and was the most densely urban city that ever existed in Mesoamerica.

Disease played a role in the transition of power, as it did later in the conflict of European settlers and Native Americans in North America. An outbreak of smallpox among the Aztecs in 1520 substantially weakened their ability to resist the Spanish conquistadors. Almost 250,000 Aztecs died in the fighting for Tenochtitlán.

By 1530, the Spanish conquerors had renamed the Aztecs’ domain and called it “New Spain.”

The Aztecs had an advanced culture, including sophisticated science and highly developed commerce and arts. Familiar words in our modern conversations can be traced to Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs: these include avocado, chocolate, coyote and guacamole.

Book review: The Reader (Der Vorleser)

Poor folks buy unhealthy food

No surprise here

Natick Historical Society summer update

Woodstock: that was a music thing, right?

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2015 All rights reserved.

Miep Gies saved Anne Frank's diary

Annelies Marie "Anne" Frank

On August 4, 1944, Anne Frank and her family were arrested by the Gestapo in Amsterdam and sent to their deaths in German concentration camps. Only her father, Otto, survived.

No one knows the name of the Dutch informer who revealed the Franks’ hiding place.

Few people know the name of the brave woman who helped hide and shelter the family before they were captured, and who saved Anne’s heartbreaking diary.

Miep Gies before WWII

Miep Gies (1909-2010)) was one of many stalwart Dutch resisters who hid Jews during World War II in the Netherlands. She was born Hermine Santruschitz in Austria. As a child, she adopted the surname of her foster family in Amsterdam. With her husband and three others who protected Anne and her family, Miep worked for Otto’s father in the building where the Franks hid from July 1942 to August 1944. After the Gestapo raid, she found the 15-year-old girl’s diary in the ransacked rooms where the family had desperately survived.

Miep kept the diary—but never read it—and gave it to Otto when he made his way back to Amsterdam after the war ended.

Here’s a chilling note: Anne had innocently written in her diary the names of all the resisters who concealed and fed her family for so many months. After it was published, Miep told Otto that if she had read the diary after Anne disappeared, she would have destroyed it to protect herself and the other Samaritans of No. 263 Prinsengracht in Amsterdam.

Miep Gies was a brave and wonderful woman. If she had been a curious lady, Anne Frank’s name would have died with her at Bergen-Belsen in early 1945.

The only known video of Anne Frank, as a young girl looking out a second-floor window at the wedding of a neighbor in 1941, see it here

  

Beguiled by speed....

"...inter librorum copias."

Masters of war, revisited

The Canadians are coming!

Book reviewing, the dubious career path....

Bicycle what?

Plugging the meter....

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2015 All rights reserved.

The Canadians are coming!

Well, not really, but almost 100 years ago American military planners weren’t so sure.

You may have heard or learned in school that Canada is the only country for which the United States doesn’t have a standby war plan in case hostilities become imminent.

In the 1920s the Canadian military feared that their country might become a battleground if Britain and the United States were to escalate their competition for dominance around the world. So, as explained in a Boston Globe book review, the Canadians developed a plan to preemptively invade and conduct a holding operation to give British troops time to come over and pile on.

On our side, military planners cooked up “War Plan Red” (yeah, they did pick snazzy code names back then) to stop Canadian invaders in their tracks.

World War II got started a short time later and the Canadians and British and Americans found themselves on the same side and the war plans were ultimately pigeonholed.

Now, let’s be frank: today Canada has the world’s third-largest petroleum reserves and it has 20% of the planet’s fresh water supply. Not insignificant treasure.

Still, I don’t think any Americans are going to be heading to Toronto in a troop carrier any time soon.

Book reviewing, the dubious career path....

Bicycle what?

Plugging the meter....

Colonization: it didn't work out....

Trash is old news

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2015 All rights reserved.

Only 40 hours!

Almost 90 years ago, the Ford Motor Co. became the first high-profile company to offer its assembly workers a five-day, 40-hour workweek in May 1926. A few months later, the unprecedented work schedule was extended to Ford’s white collar workers.

Henry Ford previously had shocked his big business peers by nearly doubling his assembly workers’ pay to $5 for an eight-hour day in 1914.

Before 1926, a six-day work week had been common throughout America. In the middle of the 19^th century, American manufacturing workers put in about 65 hours a week, and the average workweek had dropped a bit to 60 hours by the end of that century. The number of hours on the clock dropped significantly in the first several decades of the 20^th century.

The five-day workweek didn’t become standard until 1940, when provisions of the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act were implemented.

Let’s note for the record that cellphones did not exist in the early 20^th century, so those workers more or less actually did have two weekend days off from their labors.

Edsel Ford, the son of Henry Ford and president of Ford Motor Co. in the 1920s, explained the rationale for the five-day workweek: “Every man needs more than one day a week for rest and recreation….The Ford Company always has sought to promote [an] ideal home life for its employees. We believe that in order to live properly every man should have more time to spend with his family.”

Amen to that.

Change is hard

Long distance....a different concept

The Great War....not

Bonnie and Clyde, redux

First woman to run for president? Think 1872....

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2015 All rights reserved.

The Great War....not

“FLASH: More than 6,000 American soldiers killed yesterday in Afghanistan.”

Of course it’s not true. It’s not even remotely imaginable, either.

100 years ago, that kind of body count was completely imaginable, In fact, it was so routine it wasn’t even reported in large headlines.

Niall Ferguson’s The Pity of War: Explaining World War I makes plain what we can’t understand today: in almost 4½ years of desperately bloody fighting, the good guys (Entente) and the bad guys (German-dominated Central Powers) killed about 9 million men, more than 6,000 per day, every day, for roughly 1,500 days.

Here’s a specific: on July 1, 1916, British and French troops went over the top at the Somme River. At day's end, the British had almost 60,000 casualties, including about 20,000 dead. Almost 2 out of 3 British officers who led the assault were killed.

They would have had trouble keeping up with the burials during WWI if massive artillery barrages hadn’t literally blown to bits so many of the dead.

A survivor recalled that the repeatedly churned earth around the trenches and in No Man’s Land was almost impossibly fetid because it was actually saturated with bits of decomposing human flesh.

What kept the men in those deadly trenches? Ferguson says ”…men stuck by their pals or mates…But the crucial point is that men fought because they did not mind fighting…murder and death were not the things soldiers disliked about the war…revenge was a motivation…Others undoubtedly relished killing for its own sake…men underrated their own chances of being killed…most men assumed the bells of hell would not ring for them…”

Of course now we can say it was not “a lovely war.” It should have been unendurable, but it wasn’t….

Source:

Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War: Explaining World War I (New York: Basic Books, Perseus Books Group, 1998, repr. 1999), 436, 446-47.

Bonnie and Clyde, redux

First woman to run for president? Think 1872....

Direct to California, c. 1869

Dial "1" for White House

The Kent State thing

Sleep tight!

A good thing in 1854

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2015 All rights reserved.

The Kent State thing

Tip: If the guy has a loaded gun, don’t throw stones at him.

The average American living today hadn’t been born when Ohio State National Guard troops killed four student protesters and wounded eight on the campus of Kent State University on May 4, 1970.

Campus rallies against the Vietnam War had been banned by the college, but about 2,000 students defied the ban and turned out to throw rocks and shout insults at the fully-armed Guardsmen, who had arrived on campus the previous day and had already used tear gas to disperse protesters.

Around noon, the National Guard again ordered students to disperse, fired tear gas and advanced with fixed bayonets. With. Fixed. Bayonets. Within minutes, the young Guardsmen fired more than 60 rounds into the student crowds. Four years later, a federal court threw out all charges against the shooters.

As it happened, I was in Vietnam at the time, serving our country. When I heard the grisly Kent State news, in US Army headquarters in Danang, my first reaction was: why would angry young men and angry young women provocatively throw stones at scared young men in uniform who are holding loaded guns with fixed bayonets? I also remember wondering where they got the stones—next time you go to a college campus, count the number of stones you see lying on the ground. I didn’t actually feel sympathetic toward the student protesters.

Today, I feel somewhat more sympathetic. I’m real sure that no student in that mob at Kent State was seriously afraid that the guys with helmets and guns would shoot at them. Kent State is part of America, right!?

Today, I feel sad that on May 4, 1970, some Americans who thought they were doing the right thing decided to piss off other Americans who were carrying loaded guns, and some Americans who thought they were doing the right thing aimed their rifles at other Americans and pulled the triggers.

Today, I spend a fair amount of time thinking about how hard it is for all of us, separately and together,  to figure out what is “the right thing.”

Sleep tight!

A good thing in 1854

A 1912 graduation test for 8th graders

"Blood-and-thunder" for one thin dime

Long line at the ticket window....

The 1896 Olympics cost $50,000 or so

Lest we forget....

"Check's in the mail" -- Pony Express style

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2015 All rights reserved.

Lest we forget….

On this date in 1865, General Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to General Grant. 

Nearly all of the fighting and killing in the American Civil War was done.

I have ancestors who fought—and one who died—in the Civil War. I hope all of them, and their brothers in arms, rest in peace.

Requiescat in pace.

"Cultural authenticity"....huh?

Corwin Amendment to protect slavery

"...all the king's horses..."

"Liberty"?....what do you mean?

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2015

“…the commotions in America…”

A war by any other name....

It seems not everyone in London languished in post-war pain for years and years after the American colonists won the Revolutionary War.

Shortly after the November 20, 1785, death of Sir James Wright, the last British royal governor of the colony of Georgia, a London newspaper commented on his colonial service in his obituary:

“… As he presided in [Georgia] for two and twenty years with distinguished ability and integrity, it seems to be a tribute justly due to his merit as a faithful servant of his king and Country. Before the commotions in America, his example of industry and skill in the cultivation and improvement of Georgia was of eminent advantage…”

We call it the “Revolutionary War.”

The late 18^th century obituary writer in the Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser called it “the commotions in America.”

I guess there was some small comfort in taking that point of view….

"We, the people..."....ummm

Book review: Lafayette: Lessons in Leadership...

Who wasn't a patriot?

History, memory....what really happened?

Book review: Lafayette

The 3 Rs...a bit of history

Lexington, we hardly knew ye

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2014

Columbus didn’t “discover” America

Yeah, I know what I learned in school, and you know what you learned….

Fact is, though, Columbus never set  foot on the North American mainland—strictly speaking, he didn’t “discover” America.

He “discovered” Cuba, Haiti/Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, other islands in the Caribbean, Central American and South America during his four voyages from Europe in 1492-1504.

Strictly speaking, as far as we know, Ponce de Leon was the first European to put a footstep in the sand on a North American shore, in what we now call Florida, in 1513.

….and, strictly speaking, none of the Spanish conquistadores discovered America.

The First Peoples of  the American hemisphere got there first.

There were tens of millions of Native Americans in the North, Central and South Americas at the time of the first Spanish contact and conquests. In the Viceroyalty of New Spain—including Florida, the American Southwest, Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean—an estimated 25 million indigenous people had already created advanced cultures and civilizations. Perhaps there were a similar number in the South American Empire of the Incas before the advent of the Spaniards. Within 100 years, 95% of these original people of America were dead as a result of war and disease.

The Spanish adventurers did not invade an empty wilderness. They conquered and killed millions of the original inhabitants, and took their riches and their land.

Let’s call it as it was.

Source:

Bernard Bailyn, Robert Dallek, David Brion Davis, David Herbert Donald, John  L. Thomas and Gordon S. Wood, The Great Republic: A History of the American People, 4^th ed. (Lexington, MA: D. C.  Heath and Company, 1992), vol. 1, 7-14. 

Chautauqua, revisited....

....another 3rd grade tour

Gee willikers, six miles an hour!

Women who pioneered electronic music

"Blood-and-thunder" for only 10 cents

"...the peregrines..."

The umbrella thing....

Global climate change: ka-ching!

Chautauqua, revisited....

....another 3rd grade tour

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2014 All rights reserved.