Happy July 4th! 🇺🇸 I know my getup is giving Dallas-Cowboys..

Happy July 4th! 🇺🇸

I know my getup is giving Dallas-Cowboys-cheerleaders-circa-1970 but for today’s lesson we’re going way back in the Time Machine to the American Revolution. We’ll make a pit stop in the 1970s real quick on our way there.

So, if you haven’t seen the show Mrs. America about the Equal Rights Amendment for women between Gloria Steinham and Phyllis Shlafly in the 1970s, it’s a fantastic look into the dynamic between traditional values for women versus those seeking more independence than the generations of women before them. Also, the them, A Fifth of Beethoven, is the catchiest disco-put-to-classic-music you’ll hear.

Okay, to end our lesson way back in time: Paul Revere is known as the man of the midnight ride. Wadsworth-Longfellow wrote an epic poem of his journey that night to alert the American colonists that “The British Are Coming!” He was also coincidentally same poet who penned the epic poem of Evangeline which is set here in the swamps of Louisiana.

Paul Revere is revered (get it???) as helping kick off our advantage in winning the American Revolution. However, he was a total maverick who created the first piece of propaganda to sway sentiment in the colonies strongly against the British.

It’s evening in early March, 1770. American colonists, annoyed with the state of things, aggravate a lone British soldier, and things quickly escalate. More British soldiers come to his aide, ready to take aim unless the Americans, engaging heatedly with ice, stones and such, stop.

We all know how the tale ends. The colonists continued, the British engage, and five Americans are recognized as the first to succumb to the beginning to the new revolution.

Immediately, Paul Revere jumps on this opportunity to influence support to get out from under the thumb of King George and carves an engraving, entitling it The Boston Mass Acre. It depicts the British as angry with angular expressions as they take on the soft-featured, gentlemanly, un equipped Americans and features the famous Bostonian Custom House in front of which it occurred as “But Cher’s House.” It spread wildly, inciting a far and wide reaction from colonists to spring into action and the event forever referred to as the British’s unprovoked engagement on American colonists.

The kicker? Archeologists are pretty sure that Paul Revere wasn’t even the one who made the engraving despite pawning it off as his own and making a name for himself with it! It’s hard to imagine how those same decisions made today would be acceptable but if the real King George was anything like the one in Bridgerton then I guess I get it!

I’m trading and hope y’all know it’s a tale told in good fun some 200-something years later. UK subs, I hope you’ll forgive this one! 😘