Cards of Liberty

Hello Fans of Liberty!  We’ve reached our goal!  Thank you so much for making Cards of Liberty a reality!!  We’re so excited to share our game with you, whether you pledged for the digital or hard copy versions.  We’re sorry we can’t send you all a thank you gift of a giant wheel of cheese like the Marquis de Lafayette once received, but the cost of shipping that from Hawaii looked daunting.

We’ll update again very soon with more information—we have some more big news to share with all of you—but for now, thank you all for your support!  Please continue to share Cards of Liberty with your friends and family for the last few days of our campaign!

Three cards from the sample deck we printed and took to Broadway!  There’s nothing quite like getting LMM to sign a sex joke about the historical guy he now embodies in pop culture.  (The look on his face was pretty great, too.)

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/300507683/cards-of-liberty

We're half funded! Huzzah!

Thank you to everyone for your support! As a reminder, the game is already complete, we just need your help to print and ship! (That means that you don't have to worry what's happening with your money, unlike when Alexander Hamilton spent a quarter of his annual salary on a marble bust of himself and then demurred in his personal ledger that it was "charity.") Don't forget to share our Kickstarter with anyone you think might be interested!

One of our personal favorites included in Cards of Liberty is the good Baron von Steuben, the military officer famous for whipping Washington’s troops into shape at Valley Forge.  Von Steuben had a very colorful history--he bounced around between countries in Europe, up and leaving whenever rumors of his sexuality threatened to get him in hot water, then was hired by the fledgling United States.  Now he’s remembered as the writer of the military officers’ drill manual still in partial use today, but we’d like to remind people that a few weeks into his time with the army he threw a party so lit that they were doing flaming shots and you weren’t allowed in with your pants on.

Washington’s Headquarters State Historic Site in Newburgh, NY is not only the country’s first publicly owned national site, it is also one of the many places George Washington used as his headquarters during (and, in this case, shortly after) the Revolutionary War!

We were fortunate enough to be able to visit several of Washington’s headquarters, and we learned that they were private homes either taken from British sympathizers or turned over by local revolutionary families (who were then reimbursed).  Because of this, the headquarters were an odd mix of personal bedrooms and spaces to entertain guests, right next to private rooms for the general and his aides-de-camp to get work done (although effort was made to keep these areas a little more secluded).  These rooms often had to share functions, with a dining room becoming a guest bedroom in a pinch, and so on.

To some extent, if you’ve seen one of Washington’s headquarters you’ve seen them all (although we certainly learned something new at each one and enjoyed being able to visit multiple!), because they brought their own furnishings with them.  The set up, while not uniform, followed the same logic, and the people staying there would have slept in the same beds and sat in the same chairs.

It was at Newburgh that Washington put down the Newburgh Conspiracy and famously showed his officers that he too had suffered during the war, rejected the idea that he should become king, and created the honor that would go on to become today’s Purple Heart. All this while staying in a small stone house overlooking the Potomac!

The final resting place of Aaron Burr, the man who once overpaid for a coconut--I mean, who killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel in 1804 (that’s the one he’s more known for, right?).  

Aaron Burr’s grave stands in a corner of the Princeton Cemetery, not far from the entrance.  That said, we had a hard time finding it when we tried to visit and pay our respects!  Judging by the coins left on the grave and its placard, we were not the first to stop by and I imagine he started receiving a lot more attention after Hamilton took off on Broadway, ironic as that may be. 

The Marquis de Lafayette is buried in Picpus Cemetary in Paris, a little grassy nook currently hidden away behind construction and close to where the Bastille once stood. Visitation isn’t free–it costs a few euros to get in–, but the grounds are quiet and well maintained. Behind the church is a rose-lined open space, then a small park with trees with an opening in the wall shielding a little cemetary from view. The Marquis de Lafayette’s tomb is in the back corner, under the American flag (this picture was taken shortly after the Fourth of July, so he was even more decked out than usual!) and next to his wife’s and other family members’.

Did you know that commemorative dinnerware was popular in the 1800s?  People bought and sold dishes, cups, pitchers, etc that were decorated with themes from the American Revolution.  They were often sold on anniversaries of  important events or to mark significant dates.  

From a crush on that guy on the ten to meeting a Ten Dollar Founding Father Without A Father, find out how Cards of Liberty came to be!

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