Let's Talk History

Rain

Being from the East Coast, I've always been interested in Roanoke and "The Lost Colony". I was reading up today on John White, and I'm convinced that he was an unlucky man. Per Wikipedia.. Misfortune struck White's return to England from the beginning. The anchor of the flyboat on which White was quartered could not be raised, and many crew members were severely injured during the attempt. Worse, their journey home was delayed by "scarce and variable winds" followed by "a storme at the north-east", and many sailors starved or died of scurvy Further bad news awaited White on his return to England. Just two weeks previously Queen Elizabeth I had issued a general "stay of shipping", preventing any ships from leaving English shores. The reason was the "invincible fleetes made by the King of Spain, joyned with the power of the Pope, for the invading of England" - the Spanish Armada. White's patron Sir Walter Raleigh attempted to provide ships to rescue the colony but he was overruled by the Queen. In early 1588 White was able to scrape together a pair of small pinnaces, the Brave and The Roe, which were unsuitable for military service and so could be spared for the expedition to Roanoke. Unluckily for White they were barely suited for the Atlantic crossing and the governor endured further bad luck as the ships were intercepted by French pirates who "playd extreemely upon us with their shot", hitting White (to his great embarrassment) "in the side of the buttoke". White and his crew escaped to England with their lives but "they robbed us of all our victuals, powder, weapons and provision", and the journey to Virginia had to be abandoned. By this stage White appears to have formed the view that he was born under "an unlucky star". Finally, in March 1590, with the immediate threat of a Spanish invasion by now abated, Raleigh was able to equip White's rescue expedition. Two ships, the Hopewell and the Moonlight set sail for Roanoke. The return journey was prolonged by extensive privateering and a number of sea battles, and White's eventual landing at the Outer Banks was further imperilled by poor weather. The landing was hazardous and was beset by bad conditions and adverse currents. During the landing on Roanoke, of the mariners who accompanied White, "seven of the chiefest were drowned".

jd50ae

I am gonna dig deep in my archives and see if I can find a very interesting "new" article on the ghosts of Roanoke. Its not really about ghosts, just a little literary license.

perkinke

If I remember correctly they have been doing some more excavations around the site and have found their dump/latrine with some interesting finds in there. I'll have to dig around and see if I can find that article. the BBC website usually has some really great reporting on historical items world wide.

Rain

The national holiday called Washington’s Birthday may have passed, but tomorrow is George Washington’s real 282nd birthday. Here are 10 interesting facts about the first president, including his amazing wealth, his career as a moonshiner, and the truth about those teeth. Washington served a unique role as a military leader during the Revolution, as president of the Constitutional Convention in 1787, and the nation’s first president under the Constitution. The void was great when Washington stepped down from office in 1797. The job description of president was pretty much written for Washington, and he ran mostly unopposed for office. As Washington’s second term was concluding, America saw the birth of political parties, those pesky rival factions that sprung up when the nation had to deal with life without George. Here are 10 Washington facts that put his incredible public career in context, and address a few legends (and myths). 1. What’s the deal with the wooden teeth? Research performed on a set of Washington’s dentures in 2005 showed they were made of gold, ivory, lead, and human and animal teeth. 2. OK, so the cherry tree story isn’t real either? Not exactly. The story about Washington chopping down a tree and confessing to his father was in an early biography of Washington written by Parson Mason Locke Weems after Washington’s passing. Weems is known as a teller of tall tales, so most people today consider the tree tale a fable. But there were no known eyewitnesses either way. In other words, if Washington cut down the cherry tree in a forest, did it make a sound? 3. Washington was the richest president ever Research from the website Wall Street 24/7 in 2010 listed Washington as the most wealthy president of all time, based on what his assets would be worth today: more than $500 million. Washington had significant land holdings and at least 800 slaves. But he also had some debt problems during his lifetime. 4. Did Washington really fire Aaron Burr during the Revolutionary War? The story goes that General Washington caught a nosy Aaron Burr looking through his personal papers, then had Burr transferred. Burr was appointed as an aide to Washington after showing heroism in the Battle of Quebec. After the transfer, Burr showed more heroism until he resigned from the army in 1779. Washington favored another one of his young aides, Alexander Hamilton. 5. Did Washington have to die when he did? On December 13, 1799, the 67-year-old Washington came down with a cold and sore throat. He was dead within 48 hours. One modern theory is that Washington had acute epiglottitis, a painful condition caused by a bacterial infection that blocked his throat’s airway. His doctors also bled Washington heavily, which didn’t help matters. Today, a tracheotomy would have helped Washington breathe for a while, and antibiotics probably would have stopped the infection. Those things weren’t part of the standard medical treatment in 1799. 6. Technically, Washington didn’t retire after he was president He came out of retirement in 1798 when war with France was a possibility. President John Adams asked Washington to take command of the nation’s military and put together a force to fight the French. The following fall, Washington retired again to private life after the situation calmed down. 7. Was Washington really a moonshiner? Washington made a style of whiskey we could consider “moonshine” today, except that he paid taxes and had a license. So we would consider him a distiller, since moonshiners don’t pay taxes. At one time, Washington’s distillery produced 11,000 gallons of whiskey in one year. As president, Washington sent military forces to western Pennsylvania to end the Whiskey Rebellion, when farmers refused to pay excise taxes. 8. And what’s the deal with George growing hemp? Like other farmers, Washington grew hemp as a cash crop, but it’s not what you think. The hemp wasn’t smoked for pleasure. It was used to make rope, paper, and other products. Washington also grew corn and wheat. He was actually quite an agricultural innovator; he introduced the concept of crop rotation. 9. What’s the story about Washington and mules? Washington, the farmer, introduced the mule to America when he bred donkeys from the King of Spain and the Marquis de Lafayette with his own horses. He had 57 mules at Mount Vernon at the time of his death. 10. Were there any “George haters” when he was president? Thomas Paine, the writer of Common Sense, wrote Washington in 1796 and said he prayed for Washington’s death. (Twenty years earlier, Washington had read Paine’s writings to his troops as they readied for battle.) Thomas Jefferson also criticized Washington publicly in a political war of words; in turn, Martha Washington hated Jefferson. The British also weren’t fond of Washington, but in a 2012 poll in Great Britain, General Washington was voted as the greatest military enemy to face the Empire–beating out Napoleon and German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel.http://news.yahoo.com/10-cool-washington-facts-george-real-birthday-105419868.html

Bigshizza

Love me some history! Thanks

perkinke

Nice Rain! Great to have the real stories told about our history, there's always too much legend that gets batted around as fact when often the facts are more interesting anyway. If I may add another, there was actually a fairly serious movement to declare Washington Emperor and rebuild a constitutional monarchy similar to the English system but Washington refused to take part.

webmost

perkinke

webmost:

I'm more of an ancient history guy,

You have a favorite era? I've always loved Ancient Egypt and Greek history. I sat in on an old professor's lecture a few weeks ago because I was waiting for a buddy for lunch whose office is in the same building and he began his class with "Anyone who argues something from Gladiator, 300, or Clash of the Titans is true WILL fail. Not just in class, but in life." Cracked me up.

webmost

0patience

perkinke

Thanatos0320

perkinke:

webmost:

I'm more of an ancient history guy,

You have a favorite era? I've always loved Ancient Egypt and Greek history. I sat in on an old professor's lecture a few weeks ago because I was waiting for a buddy for lunch whose office is in the same building and he began his class with "Anyone who argues something from Gladiator, 300, or Clash of the Titans is true WILL fail. Not just in class, but in life." Cracked me up.

Fun fact-When Xerxes came to Sparta and told the spartans to lay down their weapons king leonidas didn't really reply "Come and get them." He replied, "Come and take my balls," which would roughly translate to "come and take them." That's what's actually believed and it seems plausible because the Greeks today use many expressions with the word balls in them.

Thanatos0320

perkinke:

webmost:

I'm more of an ancient history guy,

You have a favorite era? I've always loved Ancient Egypt and Greek history. I sat in on an old professor's lecture a few weeks ago because I was waiting for a buddy for lunch whose office is in the same building and he began his class with "Anyone who argues something from Gladiator, 300, or Clash of the Titans is true WILL fail. Not just in class, but in life." Cracked me up.

Fun fact-When the Ottoman empire came to Sparta and told the spartans to lay down their weapons king leonidas didn't really reply "Come and get them." He replied, "Come and take my balls," which would roughly translate to "come and take them." That's what's actually believed and it seems plausible because the Greeks today use many expressions with the word balls in them.

Martel

raisindot

TwoThingism

perkinke

webmost

All this is why I say the closest you can get is first hand eyewitness accounts.

Amos Umwhat

webmost

perkinke:

You ever read "Lies my Teacher Told Me" or Howard Zinn? Both have a pretty decent take on historical events.

Thanks for the tip... bought the book

perkinke

No prob, read the Zinn book in high school and it really helped to reshape the way i think of history. I have always been troubled by the "great man" theory and I liked how Zinn focused more on the common person.

Rain

The Late Heavy Bombardment (commonly referred to as the lunar cataclysm, or the LHB) is a hypothetical event thought to have occurred approximately 4.1 to 3.8 billion years ago (Ga). During this interval, a disproportionately large number of asteroids apparently collided with the early terrestrial planets in the inner solar system, including Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars. The LHB happened "late" in the Solar System's accretion period when the Earth and other rocky planets formed and accreted most of their mass; it is a period still early in the history of the solar system as a whole.I find it fascinating that our solar system experienced such a cataclysmic event. I mean...no scale we have today can really describe the devastation.

raisindot

webmost

I know. I was there. I saw it happen.

clearlysuspect

Rain

Mutiny on the BountyEighteen mutineers set Bligh afloat in a small boat with eighteen of the twenty-two crew loyal to him. To avoid detection and prevent desertion, the mutineers then variously settled on Pitcairn Island or on Tahiti and burned Bounty off Pitcairn. In an extraordinary feat of seamanship, Bligh navigated the 23-foot (7 m) open launch on a 47-day voyage to Timor in the Dutch East Indies, equipped with a quadrant and pocket watch and without charts or compass. He recorded the distance as 3,618 nautical miles (6,701 km; 4,164 mi). He then returned to Britain and reported the mutiny to the Admiralty on 15 March 1790, 2 years and 11 weeks after his original departure. The British government dispatched HMS Pandora to capture the mutineers, and Pandora reached Tahiti on 23 March 1791. Four of the men from Bounty came on board soon after her arrival, and ten more were arrested within a few weeks. These fourteen were imprisoned in a makeshift cell on Pandora's deck. Pandora ran aground on part of the Great Barrier Reef on 29 August 1791, with the loss of 31 of the crew and four of the prisoners. The surviving ten prisoners were eventually repatriated to England, tried in a naval court, with three hanged, four acquitted, and three pardoned.

Rain

Operation Peter PanOperation Peter Pan (Operación Peter Pan or Operación Pedro Pan) is a codename of the CIA project, in course of which over 14,000 Cuban children were sent from Cuba to Miami by their parents after rumors were spread that the Cuban government led by Fidel Castro would soon begin taking children against the wishes of their parents to military schools and to Soviet labor camps. The operation took place between 1960 and 1962, and was designed to transport the children of parents who opposed the revolutionary government. With the help of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Miami and Monsignor Bryan O. Walsh, some children were placed with relatives, friends, foster care or group homes in 35 states

Rain

Mother’s Day might be a time to shower your mom with cards and gifts, but the woman responsible for the holiday would tell you not to bother. That’s because the late Anna Jarvis, who founded Mother’s Day (unofficially on May 10, 1906) to honor her own mother, grew to despise the day for its sappy commercialization. “A printed card means nothing except that you are too lazy to write to the woman who has done more for you than anyone in the world,” Jarvis famously told greeting card and candy executives. “And candy! You take a box to Mother — and then eat most of it yourself. A petty sentiment.” Mother’s Day, which, on May 11, will celebrate its 100th anniversary, didn’t begin with boxes of chocolate and prewritten greeting cards, but rather as a memorial for someone's mother. In 1906, one year after the death of Jarvis’s mother, well-known public health activist Ann Maria Reeves Jarvis, her daughter commemorated her death by throwing an honorary service at her home for her closest friends. Over the following two years, Jarvis continued holding memorial services for her mother on the anniversary of her death, even hosting an event at Philadelphia department store John Wanamakers (now operated by Macy's) in 1908, which 1,500 people attended. That same year, in Virginia, where the elder Jarvis had lived for most of her life, her church held a memorial service in her honor and distributed 500 white carnations (her favorite flower) to attendees. Anna Jarvis began to grow adamant that people set aside one day a year to honor mothers around the country, and she began campaigning on a local and state level to enact her idea into law. “Anna chose the second Sunday in May, because it was the closest day to her mother’s May 10th death and she also liked the idea of Sunday being a holy day,” Katharine Lane Antolini, PhD, a historian at West Virginia Wesleyan College, tells Yahoo Shine. “She called magazine and newspaper editors, governors — anyone who would help spread the word.” In 1912, Jarvis even quit her job at an advertising agency and founded the Mother’s Day International Association, an organization she ran out of her home with the goal of making Mother's Day a national holiday. By 1914, her efforts paid off. Mother’s Day was celebrated in every U.S. state, and President Woodrow Wilson declared the day an official (but not federal) holiday. It was a pretty impressive campaign in the days before social media. Jarvis was thrilled and wrote to Wilson to thank him, saying that the day would be “a great Home Day of our country for sons and daughters to honor their mothers and fathers and homes in a way that will perpetuate family ties and give emphasis to true home life.” Except it didn’t pan out that way. Greeting card and candy companies began using Mother’s Day in their advertising campaigns. White carnations — her mother’s favorite flower — were soon adopted as the holiday’s symbol, and charities used the holiday as part of their fundraising slogans. Naturally, this didn’t sit well with Jarvis. “She felt that Mother’s Day should be celebrated by staying home with one’s mom and thanking her for everything she does; if anyone couldn’t make it home, a short, simple letter would suffice,” says Antolini. “She especially disagreed with charities using the day to their advantage, since Anna didn’t want mothers — not even the poorest — to be pitied.” In an attempt to regain control over the holiday, Jarvis began organizing boycotts, staging demonstrations, and threatening companies with lawsuits over intellectual property theft. Eventually, Jarvis grew to despise the holiday she so lovingly created and rebelled against it. For example, while once dining at the Tea Room at Wanamakers in Philadelphia, the store that originally helped generate publicity for the holiday, Jarvis spotted a “Mother’s Day salad” on the menu. She ordered it, and when it arrived, she stood up, dumped it on the floor, left money on the table, and stormed out. In 1923, Jarvis crashed a candy confectioner’s conference, staging a protest, and two years later, she ambushed a convention hosted by the American War Mothers (a patriotic group that supports veterans) because it used "Mother’s Day" as part of its fundraising efforts. She was arrested on charges of disturbing the peace. Jarvis also routinely railed against Eleanor Roosevelt, who supported certain charities that Jarvis believed capitalized on her holiday. And she compared Frances Perkins, the first female secretary of labor, to Mussolini after discovering that Perkins supported a women’s health clinic that used Mother’s Day in its advertising campaign. “It wouldn’t be fair to call Anna ‘crazy,’ because so many women of this time were written off for fighting for what they believed in,” says Antolini. “She was passionate and determined.” Jarvis continued fighting for the abolishment of Mother’s Day until she died penniless in 1948 at the age of 84 at Philadelphia's Marshall Square Sanitarium, a now-closed mental asylum, where she lived out the last four years of her life. Jarvis didn't get the chance to restore Mother's Day to its original sentiment, but honoring your own mother with a heartfelt "thank you" and some quality time would, of course, be a nice gesture. Jarvis would approve.https://shine.yahoo.com/healthy-living/anna-jarvis-founder-mothers-day-231758034.html

perkinke

We had a free preview weekend and I caught a couple Showtime documentaries about WWII, specifically the relationships between FDR, Churchill and Stalin. It was very interesting when they compared the number of casualties and time in combat of the various nations along with some of the statements from the diaries and personal papers of the participants and aides at Yalta, Tehran and the other conferences as well as the politics behind the selection of Truman as VP for FDR's final term in office. If you get a chance I highly recommend watching them. They are produced and narrated by Oliver Stone so I was skeptical at first, but numbers don't lie, it seems that the larger story behind WWII has been largely been hidden by the Cold War animosities.

fla-gypsy

No one can ever know what really happened as every person interprets events in a unique way based on their experience. It's all speculation. Other than a few hard facts recorded for posterity the rest is oral tradition set to pen. A great example of this is the WBS. Greatly different tellings of what happened in different regions and other than the casualty numbers and the ultimate outcome the rest is told and retold only from the written documents of the time left by individuals who did not agree on what happened. Of course the victors view is usually the accepted or "taught" history but that doesn't make it true.