liberty, equality, history

A soldier helped him get back on his horse. Lafayette and the other soldiers kept fighting. Soon, however, the British began winning the battle. The Americans had to retreat to save themselves. They moved back 12 miles. Lafayette stayed with them, trying to keep his soldiers together. He had only a few moments to stop and wrap a bandage around his leg to stop the bleeding.

The soldiers were frightened. “In the midst of this horrible confusion, and with the growing darkness of the night,” Lafayette wrote, “it was impossible to recognize anybody.” Finally they came to a bridge. Soon Washington rode up. It was only then that Lafayette agreed to let a doctor look at his wound.”

Tolerance Training For Civil Rights Activists

Mark Hignett, owner of Oswestry Museum, obtained a number of letters from World War Two. Upon studying the letters closely, he discovered they were a collection of wartime love letters between men. The letters are special because most love letters from homosexuals at the time would have been burned because if they had of been found, they would have been used as evidence. The letters are from Gordon Bowsher, writing to Gilbert Bradley, who was fighting in the Second World War. Homosexuality was illegal in Britain until 1967 and the letters speak about keeping their relationship a secret and travelling to California after the war. 

[Marat] was short of stature, scarcely five feet high. He was nevertheless of a firm, thick-set figure, without being stout. His shoulders and chest were broad, the lower part of his body thin, thigh short and thick, legs bowed, and strong arms, which he employed with great vigor and grace. He had a large and bony face…the mouth medium-size and curled at one corner by a frequent contraction; the lips were thin, the forehead large, the eyes of a yellowish grey color, spirited, animated, piercing, clear, naturally soft and ever gracious with a confident look, the eyebrows thin, the complexion thick and skin withered, chin unshaven, hair brown and neglected.

He was accustomed to walk with head erect, straight and thrown back with a measured stride that kept time with the movement of his hips. His ordinary carriage was with two arms firmly crossed upon his chest. In speaking in society he always appeared much agitated, and almost invariably ended the expression of a sentiment by a movement of the foot, which he thrust rapidly forward, stamping it at the same time on the ground, and then rising on tiptoe, as though to lift his short stature to the height of his opinion. The tone of his voice was thin, sonorous, slightly horse, and of a ringing quality. A defect of the tongue rendered it difficult for him to pronounce clearly the letters c and l, to which he was accustomed to give the sound g. There was no other perceptible peculiarity except a rather heavy manner of utterance; but the beauty of his thought, the fullness of his eloquence, the simplicity of his elocution, and the point of his speeches absolutely effaced the maxillary heaviness. At the tribune, if he rose without obstacle or excitement, he stood with assurance and dignity, his right hand upon his hip, his left arm extended upon the desk in front of him, his head thrown back, turned toward his audience at three-quarters, and a little inclined towards his right shoulder.

If on the contrary he had to vanquish on the tribune the shrieking of chicanery and bad faith or the despotism of the president, he awaited the reestablishment of order in silence and resuming his speech with firmness, he adopted a bold attitude, his arms crossed diagonally upon his chest, his figure bent forward to the left. His face and his look at such times acquired an almost sardonic character, which was not bellied by the cynicism of his speech. He dressed in a careless manner; indeed, his negligence in this respect announced a complete neglect of the conventions of custom and of taste and, one might almost say, gave him an air of uncleanliness.

what was it?

The Rebellion of 1916 or the Easter Rebellion was an armed rebellion during the easter week in Dublin. The rebellion was organised  by the Irish republicans to establish an independent Ireland while the United Kingdom was distracted by the first world war.

What caused the uprisings?

The root of the conflict can be traced back to the “acts of union 1800″ which united the Kingdoms of Great Britain and Ireland. This caused Irish parliament to be abolished leaving Ireland with one representative in British Parliament. From the get go many Irish nationalists were against the union that exploited their country leading to depopulation. Irish nationalists called for an Irish parliament in Ireland itself. Several bills to the effect had been discarded by the British parliament since the 1800′s. However in 1914 one such bill passed, but Irish home rule was put on the back burner with the outbreak of WWI.

The Easter Rising 

 In the mean time, a Irish radical revolutionary  group called the IRB ( Irish Republican Brotherhood )  believed that a home parliament wouldn’t be enough and demanded complete independence from Britain and started planning would would become the Easter risings. 

The risings were intended to take place all across Ireland on the 24th of April 1916 but due to various circumstances they occurred primarily in Dublin.  The rebel leaders and their followers ( About 1600 over the course of the risings many belonging to a Nationalist organisation called the Irish Volunteers, or a small radical militia group, the Irish Citizen Army) seized the city post office and the locations of importance. Patrick Pearse (1879-1916), one of the uprising’s leaders, read a proclamation declaring Ireland an independent republic and stating that a government (comprised of IRB members) had been appointed. 

Despite their best efforts the public didn’t support their cause and the British proclaimed martial law in Ireland a week later. The rebels were taken down by government forces. 450 people were killed  and some 2000 more (mostly civilians) were injured,  A large portion of Dublin’s city centre  was destroyed in the violence. 

Carpathia received Titanic’s distress signal at 12:20am, April 15th, 1912. She was 58 miles away, a distance that absolutely could not be covered in less than four hours.

(Californian’s exact position at the time is…controversial. She was close enough to have helped. By all accounts she was close enough to see Titanic’s distress rockets. It’s uncertain to this day why her crew did not respond, or how many might not have been lost if she had been there. This is not the place for what-ifs. This is about what was done.)

Carpathia’s Captain Rostron had, yes, rolled out of bed instantly when woken by his radio operator, ordered his ship to Titanic’s aid and confirmed the signal before he was fully dressed. The man had never in his life responded to an emergency call. His goal tonight was to make sure nobody who heard that fact would ever believe it.

All of Carpathia’s lifeboats were swung out ready for deployment. Oil was set up to be poured off the side of the ship in case the sea turned choppy; oil would coat and calm the water near Carpathia if that happened, making it safer for lifeboats to draw up alongside her. He ordered lights to be rigged along the side of the ship so survivors could see it better, and had nets and ladders rigged along her sides ready to be dropped when they arrived, in order to let as many survivors as possible climb aboard at once.

I don’t know if his making provisions for there still being survivors in the water was optimism or not. I think he knew they were never going to get there in time for that. I think he did it anyway because, god, you have to hope.

Carpathia had three dining rooms, which were immediately converted into triage and first aid stations. Each had a doctor assigned to it. Hot soup, coffee, and tea were prepared in bulk in each dining room, and blankets and warm clothes were collected to be ready to hand out. By this time, many of the passengers were awake–prepping a ship for disaster relief isn’t quiet–and all of them stepped up to help, many donating their own clothes and blankets.

And then he did something I tend to refer to as diverting all power from life support.

Here’s the thing about steamships: They run on steam. Shocking, I know; but that steam powers everything on the ship, and right now, Carpathia needed power. So Rostron turned off hot water and central heating, which bled valuable steam power, to everywhere but the dining rooms–which, of course, were being used to make hot drinks and receive survivors. He woke up all the engineers, all the stokers and firemen, diverted all that steam back into the engines, and asked his ship to go as fast as she possibly could. And when she’d done that, he asked her to go faster.

I need you to understand that you simply can’t push a ship very far past its top speed. Pushing that much sheer tonnage through the water becomes harder with each extra knot past the speed it was designed for. Pushing a ship past its rated speed is not only reckless–it’s difficult to maneuver–but it puts an incredible amount of strain on the engines. Ships are not designed to exceed their top speed by even one knot. They can’t do it. It can’t be done.

Carpathia’s absolute do-or-die, the-engines-can’t-take-this-forever top speed was fourteen knots. Dodging icebergs, in the dark and the cold, surrounded by mist, she sustained a speed of almost seventeen and a half.

No one would have asked this of them. It wasn’t expected. They were almost sixty miles away, with icebergs in their path. They had a responsibility to respond; they did not have a responsibility to do the impossible and do it well. No one would have faulted them for taking more time to confirm the severity of the issue. No one would have blamed them for a slow and cautious approach. No one but themselves.

They damn near broke the laws of physics, galloping north headlong into the dark in the desperate hope that if they could shave an hour, half an hour, five minutes off their arrival time, maybe for one more person those five minutes would make the difference. I say: three people had died by the time they were lifted from the lifeboats. For all we know, in another hour it might have been more. I say they made all the difference in the world.

This ship and her crew received a message from a location they could not hope to reach in under four hours. Just barely over three hours later, they arrived at Titanic’s last known coordinates. Half an hour after that, at 4am, they would finally find the first of the lifeboats. it would take until 8:30 in the morning for the last survivor to be brought onboard. Passengers from Carpathia universally gave up their berths, staterooms, and clothing to the survivors, assisting the crew at every turn and sitting with the sobbing rescuees to offer whatever comfort they could.

In total, 705 people of Titanic’s original 2208 were brought onto Carpathia alive. No other ship would find survivors.

At 12:20am April 15th, 1912, there was a miracle on the North Atlantic. And it happened because a group of humans, some of them strangers, many of them only passengers on a small and unimpressive steam liner, looked at each other and decided: I cannot live with myself if I do anything less.

Scottish percussion pistol crafted by Martin of Glasgow, mid 19th century.

There is no ‘good’ or ‘bad’ in history as there is in life itself, or if there is, it’s subjective and shifts with every new generation of society. Reducing an entire historical figure to two or three facts for fun and treating them as a whole who existed in their time, suspending present moral judgment, do not go together and only one makes you a better historian.