Its placement right before the advertisements suggests to me that this breaking news was most likely a last minute addition to the July 2, 1776 edition of the Pennsylvania Evening Post.
hey angel or perfect? drag me down or history? infinity or end of the day? if i could fly or love you goodbye? long way down or a.m.? never enough or olivia? what a feeling or walking in the wind? temporary fix or wolves?
you wanna see some badass shit from the early 20th century?? The Lumière brothers created the first full color photograph… in fucking 1903! So these dudes dyed potatoes (in red, blue, and green), mashed them down into just pure fuckin’ starch, and used these dyed potato starches as filters to block out/let in certain wavelengths of light. They coated one side of a glass plate with the starches and sensitized the other side with a mixture of gelatin and light sensitive materials (silver nitrate) and loaded these plates in their cameras.. This is a really simple explanation of the process and I may have missed some things
Ok, here’s my two cents on why I don’t understand people who think that telling the whole story of the American Revolution is “desanctification” (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, please refer to this article):
I do sort of understand where this comes from – we have a mythology about American exceptionalism that forms the cornerstone of our patriotism. We’re taught as children not an American history, but an American legend, about how a group of practically mythological Founding Fathers were brought forth on this continent through Manifest Destiny to invent democracy and make America a freedom-loving superpower. To doubt those legends is to doubt the greatness of our country, and thus ourselves. And that scares people. How can we be proud of ourselves if our country is flawed?
Look at George Washington. We, as children, are taught four things about him: that he said “I cannot tell a lie” after chopping down a cherry tree, that he crossed the Delaware, that he was our first president, and that he had wooden teeth.
Only two of those things are true, and only one, the last one, is negative in any way. Even then it’s not a true negative, more of a throwaway joke. We joke, but we never talk about the real effect that having no teeth would have on your life in the 18th century. How the constant pain from (not wooden) dentures would have effected you constantly. We also don’t talk about his many losses in battle, his fear of public speaking, or his conflicting views about slavery. Those things would truly make George Washington human.
The people who complain about revisionist history, I think, view the story as a zero-sum game. If a mistake or a character flaw of a historical figure gets mentioned, then that must be taking away from the good things they did. If time is given to talk about the experience of a minority figure, less time must have been taken to talk about a more typical figure. That’s where the “Won’t Someone Think of the Dead White Males” rhetoric comes from – we’re talking about them less (supposedly), and we’re talking about them less favorably, therefore the American public will no longer see their accomplishments, and America, as exceptional. If Washington isn’t sacred, then nothing is.
Me, I feel just the opposite. What good does it do to put this select group on a pedestal? If the founders were truly gods, sent down from Heaven to save us all, then what they did wouldn’t have been exceptional. And what lesson could we mortals learn from that, if we are so little in comparison? I much prefer my historical figures down on earth: they laugh, they cry, they insult each other, they oppress others, they make mistakes. A group of living, breathing, completely ordinary people were able to cobble together a new country and somehow make it function. How amazing is that? That’s the lesson we should be teaching each other: that if these ordinary citizens managed to work together to overcome impossible odds despite their differences and despite their flaws, then we can too.
326 Miles 