250 and Counting

Tag: US History

  • July 25, 1775: Early Drafts of History

    Cover art for July 25, 1775: Portrait of Thomas Jefferson. 1791, by Charles Wilson Peale

    First off, let me note that sometime this week we cracked the 1,000-download mark, and we have you to thank for that, especially inasmuch as 40% of that took place in the last 30 days or so. We’re grateful that you’re giving us this little slice of your life each day. We’re also happy to see that the number of daily downloads has grown, slowly but surely, so consider yourself ahead of the curve. You’ve got bragging rights, my friend.

    In yesterday’s episode, Mike teased the commandeering and re-outfitting of a British ship, but further research revealed that that took place on a different date, so we went with this short story plus my longer rant about historical documents.

    Okay…it’s not so much a rant as it is a hissy fit.

    It’s not even that. Look, just listen to it, all right?

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  • July 24, 1775: A Leaked Letter From Someone Who Knows Better

    Cover art for July 24, 1775: Engraving of John Dickinson, approximately mid-1770s, from the New York Public Library Digital Collection.

    Even when it’s Mike’s voice you hear on the episode, it’s Claude who takes the blame for the episode titles.

    It wasn’t a bad thing for members of the Continental Congress to disagree, but some level of decorum was still expected from those members. And almost certainly, one of the commandments was Thou Shalt Not Trash Talk Thy Fellow Delegate. (I may have softened the language a little bit, there.)

    Still, Adams had a right to express whatever frustration he had with John Dickinson, unfortunately the letter in which he did it got intercepted by the British and publicly published; the mere suggestion that there was some dissention among the ranks of a group that typically presented its work as a united front was certainly a Big Deal.

    And it certainly didn’t grease the skids between Adams and Dickinson, nor was that rift ever truly healed.

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  • July 23, 1775: John Adams Has Opinions

    Cover art for July 23, 1775: Portrait of John Adams by Mather Brown, 1788.

    John Adams wrote to his wife twice on this day in 1775. What did you do for your spouse that was such a big deal?

    In these letters, the sparks don’t fly the way they do in many others, but the affection he feels for her is still present nonetheless. That he took the time to write a second, more thoughtful letter after dashing off the first one is a nice measure of his esteem for her, and his ability to use her as a sounding board, even when she’s 300 miles and several days’ travel apart.

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  • July 22, 1775: Lord North’s Motion

    Cover art for July 22, 1775: portrait of Frederick North, 2nd Earl of Guilford by Nathaniel Dance, 1773.

    Lord North gets kind of a bad rap for being the Prime Minister who “lost the colonies.” But the fact is, he mostly understood their concerns and was sympathetic to them. However, Parliament was itching for a fight and not making life easy for anyone involved.

    Lord North put forth a proposal to the Colonies that, to be honest, didn’t offer a lot of change from the status quo. But once again, the slowness with which messages moved from one place in the world to another doomed its delivery to a date after the shooting started, and Congress deemed it as not worthy of serious consideration.

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  • July 21, 1775: Isaac McKim

    Cover art for July 21, 1775: The McKim School, now a community center in eastern Baltimore. This is a public domain photo (via Wikipedia), and while it looks a little dreary here, it's actually quite nice.

    We know: when an episode is a biography, we typically use a portrait of the person born on this day 250 years ago.

    But this time around is special: the artwork on today’s episode is a building that was erected by the subject of the episode. The McKim Free School is now the McKim Community Center, and it’s just around the corner from McKim Park. In fact, between the time recording this episode and writing this, I learned that the McKim Center was a stop on the Underground Railroad, and while the neighborhood itself is officially called Jonestown, the residents refer to themselves as the McKim Community Association.

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  • July 20, 1775: A Tradition Begins

    Cover art for July 20, 1775: a copy of the original broadside proclaiming the day of fasting, humiliation and prayer.

    As long as we’ve had a Constitution, the United States has had a nominal separation between church and state. What that means is that Congress isn’t able to establish a state-sanctioned religion.

    For longer than we’ve had a Constitution, Congress has proclaimed days of prayer of some kind or another.

    For a long time, these days were announced not as a National Day of Prayer (the current nomenclature), but rather as “a day of fasting, prayer and humiliation.” Now, this isn’t the old Christian kind of humiliation in which haircoats are worn, or self-flagellation is necessary. In this context, “humiliation” refers to self-reflection and expression of sorrow or remorse before God.

    In 1988 televangelist Jimmy Swaggert (who died just a couple of weeks ago) was caught with a prostitute. When he cried on television and gave his “I have sinned” speech, he was humiliating himself before God. Even if he hadn’t done it in front of an audience, it would still be an act of humiliation. Oddly enough, the national presbytery wasn’t buying it as genuine and stripped him of his credentials anyway. And they were right, considering that he was busted a second time with a prostitute a few years later.

    Anyway.

    “Fasting” and “prayer” retain their meanings to this day, so explanations probably aren’t necessary here. It’s worth noting, however, that fasting is meant to have a spiritual purpose and again, can show some level of humility.

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  • July 19, 1775: John Andrew Shulze

    Cover art for July 19, 1775: photo of John Andrew Shulze, date and photographer unknown. via Wikimedia Commons.

    John Andrew Shulze was the sixth governor of Pennsylvania and a member of the Muhlenberg political clan. So this was a guy with some heavy firepower behind him, and he managed to use some of it in righteous ways.

    Shulze wasn’t completely successful with all of his endeavors, but even when he failed, he laid the groundwork for someone after him to succeed at it.

    After retiring from his job as governor, he was a delegate to the Whig Party’s first convention in 1839 and was president of Pennsylvania’s Electoral College in 1840, when William Henry Harrison became President of the United States.

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  • July 18, 1775: The Burning of Fort Johnston

    Cover art for July 18, 1775: Photo of Fort Johnston taken in 2008, via Wikipedia. Photographed by User Dincher and available under Creative Commons Attribution.

    Although Fort Johnston was originally a British fort, a few years into the Revolutionary War, the Colonies recognized that it could be a valuable place to have a fort, and in 1778 they appropriated the money to have it rebuilt. That fort was also destroyed and, although reconstruction began in 1794, it took many years to complete the project.

    Time and again Fort Johnston was destroyed or abandoned, and then repaired or refurbished. The fort regained importance during the Civil War but was officially removed from seacoast defense in 1881. For many years it held multiple military-adjacent agencies or tasks, until it was finally decommissioned altogether in 2004.

    Today it holds the North Carolina Maritime Museum at Southport.

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  • July 17, 1775: The Third Virginia Convention

    Cover art for July 17, 1775: an 1860 photo of St. John's Church in Richmond, site of the Second and Third Virginia Conventions. Photo by Matthew Brady.

    Given the fact that the existing government of Virginia was technically extra-legal, it’s a little amusing to think that they themselves felt the need to conduct extra-legal activities of their own. A more cynical mind would think that they were hedging their bets, so that if anything Revolutionary were to come up and the British started rounding up people, they could say, “That wasn’t us…it was that Virginia Convention crowd!”

    A more cynical mind would think that. Heh.

    But the various conventions, while not having large agendas, did have important ones, and they managed to help the colony get their act together and improve their overall effectiveness during the Revolution.

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  • July 16, 1775: Abigail and George

    Cover art for July 16, 1775: Portrait of Abigail Adams by Benjamin Blyth, 1766.

    As noted a couple of days ago, Abigail and John Adams wrote to each other quite frequently. Their relationship was not only deep with love, but with admiration for one another. If you get an opportunity, read David McCullough’s biography of John or, better yet, the Library of America’s volume of Abigail’s letters (not just to John but to many others). Their writing is florid without being mawkish. There’s a LOA volume of John’s correspondence as well.

    In today’s episode, they’re not pining for one another (as they so frequently are). Abigail is relaying to John the details of her meeting with George Washington. Spoiler alert: she found him impressive, despite what she knew about him before meeting him.

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