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In this episode you’re going to learn a bunch of things about the general geography of the Bronx, and how some places got their names.
It’s actually interesting enough that may have to take some cameras up there and show you just how much the area has changed, and not just in a “what was wilderness then is city blocks now” way. It’s more like a “we needed to make this waterway safer for navigation, so we changed its path” kind of way.
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The Minutemen are among the more romantic images that many people have of the Revolution.
Around this time in 1975, the comic strip Doonesbury did a couple of series that were set in the Revolutionary War days. They focused on an ancestor of Zonker’s named Nate Harris, who was a Minuteman.
In one strip, Paul Revere shows up with the alarm “The British are coming!”
Nate asks, “How much time do you think we have?” Paul Revere says maybe fifteen or twenty minutes, and Nate replies “I only need one, you know.”
“Really?” asks Revere.
Nate’s wife Amy chips in, “Nate’s been specially trained.”
Nate Harris was a fun character; it’s kind of a shame that Doonesbury is a weekly strip now. It would be fun to see him return for America’s 250th anniversary.
Anyway: check out the story of the real Minutemen.
Minuteman statue photo by Donovan Reeves via Unsplash.
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Awhile back we talked about a Loyalist who wrote an opinion piece under the pen name “Massachusettensis” (which we may have mocked a little bit but it’s just the Latin word for the Colony/State). His rhetoric angered John Adams to the point where he felt compelled to respond in kind, and he did so using a pen name of his own: Novanglus.
We’ll learn about Adams’ first response to Massachusettensis, but we’ll also discover that there may be another reason this particular essayist caught Adams’ imagination.
Also on this day, Mercy Otis Warren opens a new play whose plot may lie a little too close to real life.
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It’s Cake and Candles today for Abraham Henry Schenck, State Assemblyman and then Congressman from New York State.
But despite being from New York, and being a member of Congress, during his tenure as State Assemblyman he had something going on back at home. It wasn’t common in New York, but it wasn’t unheard of—nor was it illegal until several years later.
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As we’ve noted a few times, the Colonists in general didn’t want war with Britain; in fact most of them were pretty sure they were going to get wiped out should it come to that.
Even our most famous Patriots of the time, such as John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and others, spent enormous amounts of time trying to engage the British peacefully. For a long time, any petitions sent to King George III had some form of “Hey, we’re totally loyal to you, can you please address this for us, your loyal subjects? Please?” somewhere in the document.
Thus it was that John Adams composed a letter to a friend of his in London, whose identity remains unknown to modern-day historians. He pinpoints the day he thinks things started to go wrong, and he notes that there’s a spirit on this side of the pond which shouldn’t go ignored.
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Note: we inadvertently posted the January 20 episode yesterday. That episode has been replaced with the correct one, so if you want to hear the real January 19th episode, scroll down to the previous post and listen “again.” Apologies for the error and any confusion.
It’s Cake and Candles today for André-Marie Ampère. He was an advanced mathematician by the time he turned 12, and when he was 18 he estimated that he’d learned everything there was to learn about electricity and electromagnetism at that time.
So, as one does, he continued his studies and expanded that branch of science, and beccame a full professor of physics at the Polytechnical school in Paris, even though he had very little formal education to that point. Many of his discoveries led to enormous breakthroughs in the use of electricity and electromagnetism for generations to come.
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Most people (we think) have this popular notion of American history involving the British imposing taxes and massacreing people in Boston and the Colonists responding with an indignant “Oh, we need to dump some tea and write a Declaration of Independence and take up arms and shoot those red-coated monsters right now!”
But if you’ve been listening to this show for the past couple of weeks, you already know that wasn’t the case. There were many, many attempts to seek out a peaceful solution to the troubles going on. Some of them were rather covert: backchannel people talking to one another, negotiating quietly, Others, of course, were overt. And today we’ll be talking about one of those. It was an attempt by the First Continental Congress to bring up their issues, ask for relief and simultaneously affirm their allegiance to the King.
(Spoiler Alert: it didn’t work.)
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When the Provincial Congress of Georgia met in the city of Savannah, the natural place for them to meet was a place called Tondee’s Tavern.
Georgians were no fans of British activities such as the Intolerable Acts, but they otherwise prospered under British rule and remained largely indifferent to the mother country. However, while the Provincial Congress didn’t want to join the other colonies in their association (which became the First Continental Congress), they were willing to support that association’s ban on trade with Britain, although they didn’t enforce it right away.
Tondee’s Tavern was ultimately destroyed in 1796, in a fire that took out more than half of Savannah. The next building on that spot was a bank which dealt heavily in the slave trade. As a result, in recent years the building was said to be haunted and appears on most of Savannah’s Ghost Tours.
The building reopened as a modern-day Tondee’s Tavern in 2013, but unfortunately it appears to have closed down sometime in the past year.
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In the early 1770s, the American colonies began feeling the need to defend themselves against British pressures. In some cases the activity was political, but there were plenty of people who saw that there could conceivably be a need to take up arms at some point, especially given the way they interpreted the Intolerable Acts. Although in popular culture, Boston was the center of attention for this sort of thing, the fact is that small, informal militias began springing up all the way up and down the Eastern Seaboard. These soon gave way to more formalized groups which were funded by their respective governments. And when hostilities finally broke out, these militias quickly reorganized themselves into official Regiments. Today we’ll learn about the militias in South Carolina.
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We suppose there’s something kind of heroic and–dare we say it, romantic–about the idea of a bunch of men dressing up as Native Americans, sneaking onto a boat and throwing 342 chests of tea into Boston Harbor. And as an overt act of rebellion, it certainly made a splash (you should excuse the expression).
But Boston wasn’t the only city holding tea parties. Edenton, North Carolina had a tea party of its own, and it’s notable for several reasons:
First, who was involved in it;
Second, the fact that it launched an interesting fashion trend (it’s not like everybody was dressing up like Native Americans after the Boston event, right?),
And Third, that it actually got some attention.
And while all of these are unusual, what’s more unusual is that it didn’t capture the imagination of people enough to endure in popular culture the way Boston did. Maybe becuase it was done in a more genteel manner, maybe because there was something special about the participants…it’s hard to tell froma modern-day standpoint. But we think you’ll agree that it’s a fascinating story.
Guest Voice: Lorene Childs
