Will the "Sons of Liberty" be good history?
The “Sons of Liberty” mini-series premieres this Sunday on the History Channel. I have slowly come around to wanting see it. I think it might be a guilty pleasure because I’m not sure how good it will be as a history show. The trailer makes it seem like it will be an action epic. While that could be great television, my take is that there was great reluctance to take action among the Founding Fathers. They didn’t want to start a fight with their mother country. They just wanted to live in peace. Great Britain didn’t make it easy, though. Check out this article on Mental Floss about how much tax some common items would have added to their actual cost. For instance, a hundredweight of foreign coffee had nearly $351 in taxes added to it in order to make Read more…
Lawyers find that the Declaration of Independence was legal
That’s nice to know, isn’t it…235 years after the fact. Also, quite honestly, when you’ve got lawyers talking law, I half expected the decision to be that it wasn’t legal and that the United States still belongs to the British. I ran across this article yesterday and have been thinking about it since then. You’ve got British barristers and American lawyers debating the legality of Declaration of Independence. If the United States had tried to win its freedom in the courts, we would probably still be tied up in appeals. A couple of points hit me in this article: It is assumed that the British were the rightful owners of the country when the Declaration of Independence was written. If the group had found the Declaration of Independence illegal, then there probably would have needed to be a follow-up debate Read more…
Becoming American "citizens" in the Declaration of Independence
Thomas Jefferson was a thinker. He knew that words mean things and he always tried to capture the best word to represent the message the was trying to send. Recently, scientists at the Library of Congress found that in writing his most-famous work, the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson “even in the act of declaring independence from England, had trouble breaking free from monarchial rule,” reported the Associated Press. While drafting the Declaration, Jefferson initially called Americans “subjects.” Then apparently he realized the implications of the word. He was crafting a statement of freedom while at the same time saying the free people were still subject to someone’s rule. He wisely struck the word and chose the more-appropriate “citizens” instead. “It shows the progress of his mind. This was a decisive moment,” James Billington, Librarian of Congress, said. “We recovered a Read more…
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