Category: History

Spirit Of The Declaration–Part 1

AS we begin the countdown to the 250th anniversary of the DoI and the founding of this nation I feel that too many people have little knowledge of the document other than the vague stuff they are taught in school.

There was more that went into this document other than Jefferson spending a couple of days in solitude writing the document….

So please let me help those that want to know as much as possible about the founding of this country and the thoughts behind them….

The members of the Continental Congress knew that their Declaration left much unsaid and unfinished. They had heavily edited Jefferson’s draft, though they refrained from adding new sections. In what Jefferson bemoaned as “mutilations” but were really judicious edits, Congress cut about a quarter of the text before adopting the document on the morning of July 4, 1776. In truth, the Declaration was not seen as the epochal event later generations attributed to it. To the delegates in Philadelphia, that step had been taken two days earlier, on July 2, when Congress voted to separate from Great Britain, King George III, and Parliament. Moreover, the Declaration was important insofar as it paved the way for two more important moves: forming foreign alliances, primarily France and Spain, and forming some kind of confederated government to guide relations among the now sovereign States. No public readings, fireworks, or celebrations occurred on July 4, though they would break out in coming days as America’s new citizens listened to the Declaration read on hastily printed broadsheets sent around the country.

By design, the Declaration avoided any discussion, or even suggestion, of the type of government the colonies should establish. Formally, that was the responsibility of Connecticut delegate Roger Sherman’s committee to draft articles of confederation, which ultimately created a uniquely weak central government. The more fundamental questions of governance were to be left to the new States, eight of which would draft and adopt constitutions in 1776 alone. Indeed, for many delegates, the business of writing state constitutions was far more important than Congress’s declaration. Even Thomas Jefferson would rather have been back in Williamsburg working on a constitution for Virginia, a draft of which he had already composed earlier in the year, and parts of which he now re-purposed for the declaration.

https://reason.com/volokh/2026/05/05/the-spirit-of-the-declaration-part-1/

The more history you learn the more care you will take in the votes you put in….there is so much more to our country than the mindless dribble of the MAGA twats…

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I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

As We Approach Our 250th

Each day we draw closer to the day when we Americans declared our independence from Mother England….

What is happening around this anniversary?

At 250 many Americans are losing confidence in democracy…..

https://apnews.com/article/ap-poll-america-250-democracy-exceptional-474874cbb88c08908c8b6c01e386ba91

Speaking of Democracy….

As the United States marks its 250th anniversary, one question at the heart of the American experiment feels more urgent than ever: What does democracy mean to the people it is meant to serve?

https://thefulcrum.us/democracy/us-democracy-250-closing-gap-reality-ideal

America is a disappointing experiment and it needs to grow up…..

https://www.npr.org/2026/06/15/nx-s1-5856348/america-250-eddie-glaude

It all comes down to the Constitution and what better way to understand the document than the Federalist…..

https://theconversation.com/as-america-approaches-its-250th-anniversary-the-federalist-remains-an-indispensable-guide-to-understanding-the-constitutional-system-and-the-nations-enduring-independence-282201

There is so much happening around our 250th anniversary….time to use your internet access for something other than let some dweeb influence you into buying a yellow lipstick.

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Be a good American!

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Old Professor’s Classroom

Think about he richest cities in the US today….now think back over a hundred years ago….the richest city in the US was Natchez, Mississipppi

If asked to name the richest county in America in 1860, most people would guess New York, Massachusetts, or Pennsylvania.

They’d be wrong.

On the eve of the Civil War, that distinction belonged to Adams County, Mississippi – home to Natchez. According to 1860 census data, Adams County ranked at or near the top nationally in per-capita wealth, a remarkable distinction for a county on what was then America’s southwestern frontier. Contemporary accounts and historians have often described Natchez as having more millionaires per capita than any other American city. At a time when one million dollars represented an almost unimaginable fortune, an extraordinary concentration of wealth sat atop a bluff overlooking the Mississippi River.

That fact surprises us not simply because it involves Mississippi, but because it challenges an assumption many Americans hold about economic history: that today’s centers of wealth have always occupied the top tier of the nation’s economy. But Natchez tells a different story. Economic power is rarely permanent. It follows transportation networks, technology, markets, and opportunity – often leaving yesterday’s boomtowns behind.

To understand Natchez’s rise, start with the Mississippi River. Long before railroads, interstate highways, and commercial aviation connected the nation, rivers served as America’s primary transportation system. The Mississippi and its tributaries formed the most important commercial network on the continent, linking vast stretches of the interior to New Orleans and international markets. Goods that might take weeks to move overland could be transported efficiently by water, making river towns natural centers of trade and investment.

Natchez occupied one of the most strategic locations along that network. Rising high above the floodplain on dramatic bluffs, it offered protection from flooding while maintaining direct access to river commerce. By the early nineteenth century, steamboats moved constantly along the Mississippi, carrying passengers, mail, manufactured goods, agricultural products, and information. Communities along this watery highway enjoyed advantages that would later belong to railroad junctions, interstate crossroads, and major airports.

Geography provided the opportunity. Cotton created the fortune.

https://www.realclearhistory.com/2026/06/10/when_americas_richest_city_was_in_mississippi_1187096.html

That’s right the nation poorest state today was once one of the richest.

My my how things have gone wrong.

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“lego ergo scribo”

150 Years Ago Today

The nation is celebrating our 250th birthday and I would be remiss if I failed to include the anniversary 150 years, of the Little Big Horn….since my grandfather was full blood Choctaw he would haunt me if I neglect to stick to Custer.

A little history….

The Battle of the Little Bighorn, fought on June 25, 1876, near the Little Bighorn River in Montana Territory, pitted federal troops led by Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer (1839-76) against a band of Lakota Sioux and Cheyenne warriors. Tensions between the two groups had been rising since the discovery of gold on Native American lands. When a number of tribes missed a federal deadline to move to reservations, the U.S. Army, including Custer and his 7th Cavalry, was dispatched to confront them. Custer was unaware of the number of Indians fighting under the command of Sitting Bull (c.1831-90) at Little Bighorn, and his forces were outnumbered and quickly overwhelmed in what became known as Custer’s Last Stand.

https://www.history.com/articles/battle-of-the-little-bighorn

The day is important in American history….

On June 25, 1876, Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer and an entire battalion of the 7th Cavalry Regiment rode to their deaths and into American legend on the ridges north of Montana’s Little Bighorn River. The battle was decided in a few hours. Its meaning remains contested 150 years later.

Little Bighorn stands alongside Yorktown, Gettysburg, and D-Day in the pantheon of iconic American battles. But it is a curious addition there, in that it was a small engagement, fought by just a few hundred men on a compact piece of terrain. More curiously still, it was a loss. Not just a loss — a disaster. And more than any other American battle, it has become identified with a single man. Most Americans know it not by its place, but by its protagonist: “Custer’s Last Stand.”

Relative to those multi-corps- and army-sized battlefields, its small scale and remarkable preservation make Little Bighorn an excellent staff ride for junior leaders, allowing participants to study leadership, terrain, and small-unit combat at a very human level. Yet the closer one looks at Little Bighorn, the larger it becomes.

https://warontherocks.com/the-importance-of-the-battle-of-the-little-bighorn/

The Nations that took part in the attack are doing a job on history so that the affair will not be forgotten.

The 150th anniversary of the Battle of the Little Bighorn is weeks away, and tribal leaders are working to ensure their perspective of one of the most significant battles in American history is preserved and shared with the public.

Northern Cheyenne Tribal Vice President Assistant Eugene Little Coyote said the spot marks where four Cheyenne warriors and five Lakota warriors first engaged Custer’s troops on June 25, 1876. He named the four Cheyenne warriors as Bobtail Horse, Dull Knife, Roan Bear, and Calf.

Tribal leaders said the marker will explain how a small group of Cheyenne and Lakota warriors prevented the 7th Cavalry from crossing the river and reaching the nearby village.

“Had they not engaged them and stopped their advance across the river, Custer’s troops would have gotten into our villages and just killed a lot of people,” Little Coyote said. “So this was a pivotal moment at the beginning of this, the Custer side of the battle.”

Watch the story below:

The Nations took it to the ‘man’ (if he could be called that) and did what needed to be done.
I Read, I Write, You Know
“lego ergo scribo”

From Utopian Dreams To Zombie Incrementalism

My regulars know that I am not a fan of the Democratic Party or Dems in general.  In my opinion they are nothing more than the other side of the conservative coin.

The only Dems I have any respect for are those that are of a different party but caucus with the Dems….

But what went wrong?

The Democratic Party once imagined itself as the engine of meaningful American transformation. First FDR revamped the relationship between the government and the people, then, in 1944, in his “Second Bill of Rights,” he proposed economic guarantees that would have rewritten the country’s legal and economic foundations. This would have entailed a huge structural change as the role of government would have moved further from a mere defender of freedoms to a guarantor of economic well-being.

Every American was to have the right to a job, the right to housing, the right to medical care, the right to education and the right to protection from economic fear. FDR stated that people in economic need could not fully participate in a democracy and we needed economic reform to ensure everyone had the economic security to participate in democratic governance and move the country in a humane direction.

But the Second Bill of Rights died with Roosevelt, so Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society then attempted to attack poverty, racial segregation/injustice and inequality at their structural roots, closely following many of Roosevelt’s proposals. The Great Society was however, hampered by congressional resistance, the budgetary and political drain of Vietnam and white backlash to civil rights.

There were victories, however: the creation of Medicare and Medicaid, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which sent federal funding into public schools serving low‑income children; Head Start; the Voting Rights Act and Civil Rights Act enforcement mechanisms, which dismantled Jim Crow; the Higher Education Act, which opened college access to working‑class students through grants and loans; the creation of public broadcasting; the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities and major environmental laws like the Clean Air and Water Quality Acts.

Yet, despite these victories, we did not see real structural change because the Great Society was only allowed to alter the symptoms of American inequality without changing the underlying power arrangements that produced those symptoms. It expanded services but did not redistribute power and it created programs for the poor but left the economic order that manufactured poverty fully intact. The result was apparent progress without real transformation and reforms that improved lives while leaving the basic mechanisms of injustice standing.

https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/what-the-democratic-party-has-become-from-utopian-dreams-to-zombie-incrementalism/

At one time the Dems were considered the “Left”….and in some less informed circles they still refer to them as the Left…but they are far from any representation of a true Left ideology.

Why?

Many years ago they abandoned the class struggle…..the working class.

That tradition began with a sharp diagnosis. Karl Marx argued that capitalism rests on a class relationship in which those who own the means of production extract surplus value from those who own only their labor power. One did not have to accept the inevitability of revolution to accept the centrality of class, and Bernstein did not. He kept the analysis and changed the method, betting that universal suffrage could be turned into economic democracy.

That bet defined what the old left stood for. It was not merely taxing the rich and redistributing the proceeds, the liberal project of John Stuart Mill and later John Maynard Keynes, but democratizing economic decision making itself. The New Deal and the Great Society were humane achievements, yet they were state capitalism for the benefit of the many and left the boardroom intact. The democratic socialist asked a harder question: who decides what gets built, where capital flows, and whose work disappears?

Put most simply, the socialist project was about extending democracy into the economy. We accept that the people should govern the state, that no king or boss may rule a polity by private right. The socialist asked why the same principle stops at the factory gate, why the firm that shapes a person’s waking life should remain a little monarchy exempt from the democratic rule we demand everywhere else.

https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/what-is-wrong-with-the-american-left-the-abandonment-of-class/

We need a true Left in this country…..what we have now is just two corrupt parties that are for sale….the people meant absolutely nothing the the Congress as a whole.

We need a Left Party!

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

What We Do Not Know Constitutionally

AS we near the first step to our independence it comes to light that we know very little about the US Constitution…..

These are the 10 most common mistakes….

The phrase “it’s unconstitutional” gets thrown around in American political life the way people invoke “the rules” in an argument they’re losing: with great confidence and very little specificity. Most Americans have a working sense of what the Constitution does. It protects rights, limits government, sets up three branches. But the gap between that general outline and what the document actually says, and crucially what it doesn’t say, is wider than most people realize.

10 Things Most Americans Get Wrong About the Constitution

Now you know.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Preparedness And The Working Class

We know how bad the working class is taking it from the policies of Donny and his Band of Lunatics….but what can be done?

This is an opinion written by Eugene V. Debs in 1916….it could well have been written yesterday….

‘Preparedness and the Working Class’ by Eugene V. Debs from The National Ripsaw. Vol. 13 No. 3. May, 1916.

Just to let you know this fight we are having today is NOTHING new.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

A Historically Ignorant President

Our brainless Donny has a full schedule of ‘celebrations’ for our 250th anniversary….a UFC cage match. a street race, a county fair, etc etc etc…..all the mind numbing crap and little about what this country went through in that 250 years.

But what can we expect from a historically ignorant president?

Last week, Donald Trump’s rolling assault on the physical landscape of the capital set its sights on yet another historical landmark. The fountain in the World War II memorial, Trump declared, looked “in pretty bad shape on the bottom,” in need of a makeover “duplicating” that for the nearby Reflecting Pool, though “maybe with a slightly different color … a lighter blue.”

But as we head toward Trump-led celebrations of our country’s semiquincentennial featuring a UFC cage fight in a 5,000-person arena thrown up on the White House lawn, we need to recognize that his onslaught against our history has also extended far beyond the physical.

Not long ago, two watchdog groups sued the Trump administration over the White House’s internal guidance that email exchanges between executive branch officials could be peremptorily deleted, escaping preservation for the historical record. A blatant violation of the Presidential Records Act of 1978, the memo leaned on a Justice  Department move declaring this act itself unconstitutional. While this time, a court then ruled in favor of the watchdogs, this administration’s efforts to vanish its own public record advance its sweeping campaign to expunge realities as well as richness from American history, to reduce it to tales of untethered “heroes” that will drain its democratic lifeblood.

In April, the Organization of American Historians convened its annual conference in Philadelphia. New York Times reporter Jennifer Schuessler described the tone of this gathering of American historians as “anxious.” This attendee felt a more widespread emotional undercurrent: anger. That feeling has been stirred far more by the Trump administration’s designs on American history than by other worries reported by Schuessler, including historians’ “declining authority” as growing numbers of Americans take up history telling via TikTok, YouTube, and other media that are available to everyone.

I, along with many other historians, am far less bothered by TikTok history than by the sheer scope and brazenness of this top-down White House–led assault on history.

https://newrepublic.com/article/211170/trump-250-commemorating-history-ignorant-president

As a political historian I am disgusted with the gaudy display of insensitivity shown by this idiot that claims to be a ‘stable genius’ and yet he cannot see past the infantile cheap tricks he calls ‘celebrations’.

Anything to say?

Something to think about../..this is how the 1876 celebrations went….

In the summer of 1876, the United States was preparing for its 100th birthday with patriotic celebrations. In its first century, the country had grown from 13 states to 37, with Colorado poised to become the 38th state weeks after July 4.

But while Americans felt proud, many were also worried. “The country was filled with anxiety for the future,”

https://www.history.com/articles/american-centennial-1876-celebrations

A little history goes a long way.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Rep. Massie Is The Only Hero To Tackle The USS Liberty

This is a video of a speech given on the House floor by Rep. Massie…watch the speech and learn something.

Thomas Massie: June 8, 2026 Speech in Congress Blows Up 1967 U.S.S. Liberty Crime Scandal.

It is about damn time that the US demand Israel stand up and take responsibility for killing and injuring American sailors.

Israel has gotten a free ride for over 50 years and now is time for them to be held accountable for their actions on the day.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

America At 250

We are less than a month away from the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence….a time when the nation should be proud of its history instead of trying to tear it apart…..but that thought is so yesterday.

As the nation approaches its 250th Anniversary, Americans should be entering a moment of pride, reckoning, and aspiration — honoring our founding ideals, confronting our injustices, and committing to a shared, inclusive future. But millions cannot reach that place. They are living in a country where the most basic democratic promise — that no one, not even the president, is above the law — is no longer true. And they are asking a question no democracy should ever force its people to ask: How do you confront injustice when leaders erase the history, hide the evidence, excuse the wrongdoing, and protect the perpetrators?

People are watching January 6 perpetrators not only be pardoned, but now discussed as victims deserving compensation — while others who committed far lesser offenses remain in prison. They are watching families who lost loved ones, officers who were attacked, and judges who were threatened receive no acknowledgment, while those who carried out the violence are elevated. They are watching Epstein victims still seeking closure while Maxwell lives comfortably. And they are watching Congress and the courts fail to check a president who intimidates, retaliates, enriches himself, and bends institutions to serve him.

This is not a moment of national pride. It is a moment of national disorientation. People are trying to live their lives, raise their families, and hold onto hope while watching the guardrails of democracy bend in plain sight. They see a president who rewards loyalty over law, who uses public office for personal gain, who threatens opponents, and who treats institutions as tools for retribution. They see leaders in Congress who enable it, courts that hesitate to confront it, and a political culture that shrugs at behavior that would once have ended careers.

Selective accountability. Truth rewritten. History sanitized. Wrongdoing reframed as patriotism. Victims forgotten. Perpetrators elevated. This is the opposite of the ideals the nation claims to honor.

Power corrupts — not only through threats and retaliation, but through the steady misuse of public authority for personal benefit. In this administration, corruption is carried out in public view: foreign payments and business entanglements that raise emoluments concerns, political loyalty rewarded with pardons, critics targeted with state power, and federal agencies pressured to serve the interests of one individual rather than the nation. This is what happens when power goes unchecked — when institutional guardrails are weakened, ignored, or deliberately dismantled, and the public is taught to expect impunity rather than accountability.

https://thefulcrum.us/democracy/january-6-pardons

There is nothing to be proud about in the displays of ignorance and ego feeding that Donny is calling the 250 anniversary celebrations.

It is a far cry from the 200th anniversary celebrations from 1976….

This anniversary will be remembered for the tacky and infantile displays from a president with the IQ of his shoe size.

It will be disappointing when it should be memorable.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”