unvarnished

These are the same motherfuckers who were so sure that the show could continue without Nicole Beharie and without the predominantly Black female audience that had poured so much love and time and effort into keeping this show alive. 

So shut the fuck up about the #SleepyHollowIsOverParty and how we shouldn’t laugh at the poor racist showrunners who don’t have jobs.

We will laugh and rejoice.

Loved the first season, although it was not perfect. Season 2 was bad--why concentrate on the dull characters & sideline the interesting ones? To appeal to the white audience? Didn’t work for me. Season 3, not much better. Planned to catch the last episode on Hulu but skipped it when I heard of Abbie’s demise. Yes, the actress wanted to leave; they should not have mistreated her.  Skipped season 4 totally. 

Also I really need to talk about this sign that was under a wax replication of the duel that read

“O Burr, O Burr, what has thou done? Thou has shooted dead great Hamilton. You hid behind a bunch of thistle, And shooted him dead with a great boss pistol.”

I will go to my grave crying over that sign.

The problem, of course, is that it’s the only Joseph Warren portrait.   We ought to have several depictions by Charles Willson Peale--none of which resembled each other.  Perhaps a good portrait by Trumbull--and several stately profiles in Trumbull’s murals.  A bust by Houdon (or Ceracci) would have been useful.    Add a few paintings by Gilbert Stuart & the younger Peales.  

One particularly interesting answer: Alexander Hamilton!

“Alexander Hamilton makes the top of my list, simply because of his apparent hypocrisy. He argued and fought for American rights, and once independence was achieved, he wanted to make the United States a country similar to Britain, dominated by a ruling political and financial elite where the people had little voice in the government. He opposed the addition of the Bill of Rights to the Constitution and even suggested breaking up the large states into smaller entities so they could not challenge the national government’s power. He frequently expressed his admiration for the British system of government. If he liked it so much, and tried to recreate it in the United States, why did he bother to support the Revolution in the first place? - Jim Piecuch”

To add insult to injury, the British had invaded Virginia late in the war. Marauding soldiers had destroyed crops and livestock, including Jefferson’s own, torched the state capital at Richmond, and carried off hundreds of slaves to be set free. Virginia’s Anglophobia, and view of itself as the innocent victim, deepened. After the war, it was only natural for Virginians to use the loss of the slaves as an excuse not to pay their prewar British debts, totaling £2.3 million in 1790. What made Virginia distinctive, however, was that although it had suffered much, it had contributed relatively little in blood and treasure to the national cause, or even to its own defense. Virginians like Henry “Light Horse Harry” Lee (the father of Robert E. Lee), and John Marshall (the future chief justice), not to mention Washington, served with distinction in the Continental Army and became leading Federalists. But the efforts of Governor Jefferson to organize resistance at home had been notably ineffectual, provoking calls for an investigation into his conduct. 

A discerning European visitor, seeking to explain the Anglophilia of Federalists like Hamilton in the mid-1790s, observed that “resentments do not subsist when you have won. Satisfied pride reserves no desire for revenge.” Whether or not Talleyrand realized it, the same psychological principle applied in reverse to Virginia. There people did not have such a clear-cut sense of having won. The struggle for independence from the economic coils of the Mother Country continued after 1783. Nor could one really say that Virginia’s pride had been satisfied or its honor vindicated by its wartime performance. Hence the chip on the shoulder that Virginians carried vis-à-vis the British – let us call it the “Virginia syndrome” – and their recurrent urge to strike another blow.

Harper, John Lamberton. American Machiavelli: Alexander Hamilton and the Origins of U.S. Foreign Policy  

Dear America,

On the 4th July 1776, you declared yourselves independent from Britain and by 1783 you had claimed victory over us in the American Revolution, sealing your independence.

On the 30th April 1789, George Washington became the first President. 45 Presidents later and you are left with Donald Trump sat in the White House.

You have had your fun and have even come to our aid in the past. Now maybe we should return the favour. How many Americans today would prefer to turn loyalist rather than patriot and dream of ships full of Redcoats on the horizon, coming back to fight and burn the White House down again?

One of Jefferson’s main weapons in discrediting Hamilton was his own insatiable appetite for political intelligence. After noteworthy discussions, Jefferson scribbled down the contents on scraps of paper. In 1818, he collected these snippets of political chatter into a scrapbook he called his “Anas”— a compendium of table gossip. In these pages, Hamilton figures as the melodramatic villain of the Washington administration, appearing in no fewer than forty-five entries. These horror stories about Hamilton have been regurgitated for two centuries and are now engraved on the memories of historians and readers alike. Unfortunately, these vignettes often cruelly misrepresent Hamilton and have done no small damage to his reputation. Jefferson understood very well the power of laying down a paper trail....

What makes this story suspect, if not downright absurd, is that Hamilton’s collected papers are teeming with pejorative references to Julius Caesar. In fact, whenever Hamilton wanted to revile Jefferson as a populist demagogue, he invariably likened him to Julius Caesar. One suspects that if Hamilton was accurately quoted, he was joking with Jefferson.

 TJ had long years to burnish his reputation as The Sage of Monticello. And to demean Hamilton.  Who did not get those long years. 

Mount Vernon’s excellent website includes a page of Spurious Quotations.  Including this one:

This quote is partially accurate as the beginning section is taken from Washington's First Annual Message to Congress on the State of the Union. However, the quote is then manipulated into a differing context and the remaining text is inaccurate. Here is the actual text from Washington's speech: "A free people ought not only to be armed, but disciplined; to which end a uniform and well-digested plan is requisite; and their safety and interest require that they should promote such manufactories as tend to render them independent of others for essential, particularly military, supplies."

Washington was urging US manufacture of arms, among other enterprises.  To find his attitude toward rebellion against his government, look up the Whiskey Rebellion.  Or read this--if research is too difficult for you. 

As discovered by @bansshenanigans there’s a full American Revolution history in Lego, and it looks amazing. Like, inaccurate, but amazing. There are even atrocities depicted in full.

This guy is Tadeusz Kosciuszko and honestly he’s one of my favorite figures in the American Revolution, and in history in general. His story is very interesting and, in terms of his role in the American Revolution, he’s vastly underrated. Born in Poland, he happened to be in France when the American Revolution broke out and efforts were being made to recruit officers there. While the war appealed to many French nobles as an opportunity for military glory, Kosciuszko was drawn in because of his support for Enlightenment values, human rights, and national sovereignty, influenced by his experience of growing up in Poland during a time of civil war and encroaching foreign powers. As an engineer and colonel, his contributions to the revolution were invaluable. After the war he returned to Europe and led a failed but significant revolt in his own country. He became close friends with Thomas Jefferson, who wrote that Kosciuszko was “the purest son of liberty… that I have ever known”. In his will, he set aside the money he received for his contributions in the American Revolution so that Jefferson could free his slaves. Spoiler: Jefferson still didn’t free them and I’m quite angry about this. Sadly, Kosciuszko died exiled from his home country, unsuccessful in his efforts to prevent Russia’s conquest of the Polish-Lithuanian Conquest or emancipate his peasants (Tsar Alexander refused), but his work was not forgotten and inspired future generations. Like Lafayette, he was truly a hero of two worlds.

For @spooksymulder

Bob Dylan, simply masterful in his Banquet Speech:

Good evening, everyone. I extend my warmest greetings to the members of the Swedish Academy and to all of the other distinguished guests in attendance tonight.

I’m sorry I can’t be with you in person, but please know that I am most definitely with you in spirit and honored to be receiving such a prestigious prize. Being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature is something I never could have imagined or seen coming. From an early age, I’ve been familiar with and reading and absorbing the works of those who were deemed worthy of such a distinction: Kipling, Shaw, Thomas Mann, Pearl Buck, Albert Camus, Hemingway. These giants of literature whose works are taught in the schoolroom, housed in libraries around the world and spoken of in reverent tones have always made a deep impression. That I now join the names on such a list is truly beyond words.

I don’t know if these men and women ever thought of the Nobel honor for themselves, but I suppose that anyone writing a book, or a poem, or a play anywhere in the world might harbor that secret dream deep down inside. It’s probably buried so deep that they don’t even know it’s there.

If someone had ever told me that I had the slightest chance of winning the Nobel Prize, I would have to think that I’d have about the same odds as standing on the moon. In fact, during the year I was born and for a few years after, there wasn’t anyone in the world who was considered good enough to win this Nobel Prize. So, I recognize that I am in very rare company, to say the least.

I was out on the road when I received this surprising news, and it took me more than a few minutes to properly process it. I began to think about William Shakespeare, the great literary figure. I would reckon he thought of himself as a dramatist. The thought that he was writing literature couldn’t have entered his head. His words were written for the stage. Meant to be spoken not read. When he was writing Hamlet, I’m sure he was thinking about a lot of different things: “Who’re the right actors for these roles?” “How should this be staged?” “Do I really want to set this in Denmark?” His creative vision and ambitions were no doubt at the forefront of his mind, but there were also more mundane matters to consider and deal with. “Is the financing in place?” “Are there enough good seats for my patrons?” “Where am I going to get a human skull?” I would bet that the farthest thing from Shakespeare’s mind was the question “Is this literature?”

When I started writing songs as a teenager, and even as I started to achieve some renown for my abilities, my aspirations for these songs only went so far. I thought they could be heard in coffee houses or bars, maybe later in places like Carnegie Hall, the London Palladium. If I was really dreaming big, maybe I could imagine getting to make a record and then hearing my songs on the radio. That was really the big prize in my mind. Making records and hearing your songs on the radio meant that you were reaching a big audience and that you might get to keep doing what you had set out to do.

Well, I’ve been doing what I set out to do for a long time, now. I’ve made dozens of records and played thousands of concerts all around the world. But it’s my songs that are at the vital center of almost everything I do. They seemed to have found a place in the lives of many people throughout many different cultures and I’m grateful for that.

But there’s one thing I must say. As a performer I’ve played for 50,000 people and I’ve played for 50 people and I can tell you that it is harder to play for 50 people. 50,000 people have a singular persona, not so with 50. Each person has an individual, separate identity, a world unto themselves. They can perceive things more clearly. Your honesty and how it relates to the depth of your talent is tried. The fact that the Nobel committee is so small is not lost on me.

But, like Shakespeare, I too am often occupied with the pursuit of my creative endeavors and dealing with all aspects of life’s mundane matters. “Who are the best musicians for these songs?” “Am I recording in the right studio?” “Is this song in the right key?” Some things never change, even in 400 years.

Not once have I ever had the time to ask myself, “Are my songs literature?”

So, I do thank the Swedish Academy, both for taking the time to consider that very question, and, ultimately, for providing such a wonderful answer.

My best wishes to you all, Bob Dylan

Banquet speech by Bob Dylan, Nobel Laureate in Literature 2016, presented at the Nobel Banquet by the United States Ambassador to Sweden Azita Raji.

© The Nobel Foundation 2016

General permission is granted for immediate publication in editorial contexts, in print or online, in any language within two weeks of December 10, 2016. Thereafter, any publication requires the consent of the Nobel Foundation. On all publications in full or in major parts the above copyright notice must be applied.

Via the Nobel Prize FB page

At the museum of Texas history when we got the surprise of our life: a Deaf war hero whose picture was right next to Davey Crocket!!!

The Strange Case of George Washington’s Disappearing Sash

One winter day in December 1775, months after the battles at Concord and Lexington marked the beginning of the Revolutionary War, the nascent American military formally met its commander-in-chief. A group of Virginia rifleman found themselves in the middle of a massive snowball fight with a regiment of quick-talking New Englanders who ridiculed the strangely dressed Virginians in their “white linen frocks, ruffled and fringed.” The colonies were still strangers to each other at this point: The Declaration of Independence was months away, and the ragtag army representing the rebels was far from formally “American.” The meeting of nearly 1,000 soldiers quickly devolved into an all-out brawl on the snowy grounds of Harvard Yard.

But as quickly as it had begun, the fighting screeched to a halt. A man charged into the middle of the fray on horseback, seizing two men into the air with his bare hands and ordering the militiamen to stand down. Few of the assembled soldiers recognized him as George Washington: Most Americans barely knew what the untested general looked like, let alone anything about his mettle. But part of his uniform announced his identity: his sash. The blue-green shimmering ribbon of silk caught the afternoon light, a formal sign of his command and, according to historians, one of the earliest symbols of national identity in a nascent country that lacked a constitution and a flag. The snowball fight ceased immediately — the general was on the prowl.

George Washington’s sash remains one of the Revolutionary War’s most extraordinary artifacts. Like the unknown Virginian leading the rebellion against the British, the powder-blue ribbon became one of the earliest symbols of the United States. But for some reason, the sash has languished in relative obscurity, resigned to back rooms and dusty archives for decades— until now.