Archive for the ‘american revolution’ Tag

06/01/2024 NEW REVOLUTION, “Y” or “N”   Leave a comment

I have three statements to make to start this post: I love T-shirts, I’m a proud American, and I have little or no use for politicians. That being said I wore one of my favorite T-shirts while food shopping yesterday. I have at least eighty T-shirts with all sorts of designs concerning musical groups to chintzy advertising logos, and I love them all. Yesterday’s shirt stated plainly “I love my country, but I fear my government”. I often get comments from passersby about the messages on my shirts, but this one apparently caught the attention of a number of people. They weren’t upset with me for wearing it, they were patting me on the back for wearing it proudly. Our founding fathers were very open about the responsibility of the citizenry to keep an eye on the government. Unfortunately, in recent years that is no longer the case. These days everyone can complain until their blue-in-the-face but unless your part of the politically elite you’re wasting your breath. Maybe it’s time to review some of the history of this country and the revolution that spawned it.

  • On June 12, 1775, the British offered a pardon to all colonists who would lay down their arms. There would be only two exceptions to this amnesty: Samuel Adams and John Hancock, if captured they were to be immediately hanged.
  • “July 4th” could just as easily have been celebrated on July 2nd. It was on that date in 1776 that the Second Continental Congress voted our independence from England. John Adams, in fact, wrote: “The Second Day of July 1776, will be the most memorable epoch in the history of America.” He believed that it would be celebrated, by succeeding generations, as the great anniversary festival. “It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires and Illuminations from one end of this continent to the other from this day forward forever more.”
  • On July 4, 1776, King George III wrote in his diary, “Nothing of importance happened today.” He had no way of knowing what had just occurred that day in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
  • And one signatory of the Declaration of Independence appended his address: Charles Carroll “of Carrollton,” Maryland. He wanted to be sure that the British, if they wanted to hang him, knew full well where to look for him.
  • It wasn’t until January 19, 1777, that the national Congress made public all of the names of the men who affixed their signatures to the Declaration of Independence. One reason for the delay may have been the knowledge that if the war effort failed, the signatories would have sealed their fate as traitors.

I’m willing to bet you couldn’t find five current politicians in this country that would even consider doing half of the things the Founders dealt with at that time. Their pride in this country during its formation in the 1700’s seems to be a long dead memory. I wonder what would happen if tomorrow the British decided to retake America and threatened to hang all of our politicians who refused to surrender. I fear the roads to Canada would be clogged with carloads of fleeing representatives from this great nation. What do you think? I also wonder how long it would take the Canadians to close their borders for their own protection.

VETERANS ALWAYS FIRST

POLITITIONS ALWAYS LAST

03/07/2024 “Women’s Rights”   Leave a comment

Here’s a collection of facts concerning some of the history of the battle for women’s rights. Some good ones, some bad ones, but all are certainly interesting.

  • Epicurus (341-241 BC), to whom good and pleasure were synonymous, was the first important philosopher to accept women as students.
  • In 17th and 18th century America, women were employed in all of the same occupations that men worked, and men and women earned equal pay. A female blacksmith charged the same as a man to shoe a horse. Women sextons and printers were paid at the same rate as men. Women were also silversmiths, gunsmiths, shipwrights, and undertakers.
  • The first woman governor in U.S. history was Mrs. Nelly Taylor Ross. She was elected governor of Wyoming in 1925.
  • $10,000 was offered by Marion Hovey, of Boston, to the Harvard Medical School, to be used to educate women on equal terms with men. A committee approved the proposal, but the Hovey offer was rejected by the board of overseers. The year was 1878.
  • Though she was a Nobel Prize winner (and soon would become the first person to win two), Marie Curie (1867-1934) was denied membership in the august French Academy simply because she was a woman.

  • A woman agreed in 1952 to play in organized baseball, with the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Senators of the Interstate League. However, minor league commissioner George Trautman, with the support of major league baseball commissioner Ford Frick, unilaterally voided Mrs. Eleanor Angles contract.
  • During the American Revolution, many brides did not wear white wedding gowns; instead, they wore red as a symbol of the rebellion.
  • She was 87 years old when she became the first woman U.S. Senator, and she served for only one day, November 21, 1922. Rebecca Lattimer Felton, a Democrat and the widow of a Georgia representative who had opposed reactionary machine politics, had long worked for women’s suffrage, which became national law in 1920. She was appointed for a day to the Senate in a token gesture by the governor of Georgia, who had opposed the suffrage movement. “The word ‘sex’ has been obliterated from the Constitution,” Mrs. Felton said on excepting her appointment. There are now no limitations upon the ambitions of women.
  • There are 15 nations that had given women the right to vote before the U.S. did in 1920. The earliest were New Zealand, in 1893, Australia, in 1902, and Finland, in 1906.
  • Abigail Adams wrote to her husband, John, in 1776: “If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.”

ONE IS NOT BORN A WOMAN, ONE BECOMES ONE