Common Era wasn’t started by anything. It’s just a name change on a dating system that was wrong when it was invented.
Any idea who invented it?
The Church, basically.
Don’t worry. When we fix everything the year 1 will be retroactively set to 1969. Not only is it the year we set foot on the moon, but also the year the first message was sent over ARPANET among a zillion other things worthy of making it year 1.
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I’m partial to the just set everything back 10000 years, dating system. Make the current year 12019.
I think it’s the anniversary of a really big building being built by ancient standards.
We’ve already got the unix epoch at 1970. Counting starts at 0, of course.
This Reddit post got me thinking, I find it weird that people hate James Buchanan for not achieving the impossible by securing national unity past 1860 and don’t hate James Buchanan for trying to preserve slavery for all time to come. The key events that sparked conflict between 1856 and 1860 were Dred Scott, the Kansas Constitution, and John Brown’s Raid. Buchanan’s influence on Dred Scott was limited to the difference between a 5-2 sectional ruling and the 6-1 ruling we got, which I don’t think would have made any different an impact on the national politics. Kansas, as the Redditor points out, is a damned if you do damned if you don’t situation for Buchanan, and there was nothing he could have done to prevent John Brown’s Raid. Once you enter the Secession Winter, he took every step possible to avoid war, including passing the “unamendable amendments” that would have protected slavery had the States ever ratified them (one of which was symbolically signed by Buchanan, making it one of two Amendments to receive a Presidential signature with the other being Lincoln’s on the 13th). So, from the perspective of the “Union above all” perspective so many conventional American historians have, he did everything right and got screwed by circumstance. If we look at it from the more woke perspective that a union with slavery is no union worth preserving, we see that he sought to maintain a nation not worth living in.
Honestly I think Buchanan is a lower-mid tier President. He was a heinous human for reasons listed above, but the net effect of his actions as President (as opposed to the magnitude of events that happened to happen while he was President) were so minute he sits alongside John Tylers and Chester A Arthurs, not the Andrew Johnsons and the Richard Nixons.
Anyway I’ve been up for 24 hours now so I hope this is readable.
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So, I’m sure I don’t need to tell you John Brown was a little off his rocker, but I just read an account of his parenting written by John Brown Jr and reprinted by WEB DuBois in his (fantastic) biography of Brown that left me almost speechless. John Jr talks about how he’d slack off and his father would chastise him for it when he drops this bombshell:
"He finally grew tired of these frequent slight admonitions for my laziness and other shortcomings, and concluded to adopt with me a sort of book-account something like this:
“John, Jr.,
“For disobeying mother—8 lashes.
“For unfaithfulness at work—3 lashes.
“For telling a lie—8 lashes.
“This account he showed to me from time to time. On a certain Sunday morning he invited me to accompany him from the house to the tannery, saying that he had concluded it was time for a settlement. We went into the upper or finishing room, and after a long and tearful talk over my faults, he again showed me my account, which exhibited a fearful footing up of debits. I had no credits or offsets and was of course bankrupt. I then paid about one-third of the debt, reckoned in strokes from a nicely prepared blue-beach switch, laid on ‘masterly.’ Then to my utter astonishment, father stripped off his shirt and seating himself on a block gave me the whip and bade me lay it on to his bare back. I dared not refuse to obey, but at first I did not strike hard. ‘Harder,’ he said, ‘harder, harder!’ until he received the balance of the account. Small drops of blood showed on his back where the tip end of the tingling beach cut through. Thus ended the account and settlement, which was also my first practical illustration of the doctrine of the atonement."
So, in review, John Brown didn’t just beat his kids, but forced his kids to beat him as well…
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George Washington fought the British because they were going to redistribute the land he was speculating in Ohio to French and Indian War veterans, Thomas Jefferson was afraid the Sommerset Case would abolish slavery in the Empire, Alexander Hamilton really just wanted power in the new nation, James Madison believed the purpose of government was “to protect the opulent minority from the majority,” and the only signer of the Declaration of Independence who wasn’t born into property was Robert Morris who would die in jail in the 1800s. The Insurrection of 1776 was no revolution but a bourgeois coup to protect the property and expand the power of the aristocracy.
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“Tyranny is tyranny let it come from whom it may.”
I don’t actually like… know history, not like some people around here (Lizzie) but the more I read about William Tecumseh Sherman the more I like general.
He’s… overrated. He tried to sign a peace treaty with Johnston that would have kept slavery intact in much of the Confederacy, was very much against African Americans in his army, and he was a savage racist against Native Americans, as evidence by his Western campaigns. Field Order 15 was the most progressive act by the Federal government in the treatment of the Freedmen, but it was also issued so that black people would get out of Sherman’s army.
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Agree with you here. Grant is under-rated, Sherman is over-rated.
Yeah and all of this is totally valid and makes me rethink my sentiments.
That said, his racism wasn’t really what drew me to him. It was his… I guess I’ll not mince words, hatred of the war, maybe even just the south as a whole, and belief that he had to destroy infrastructure and supply lines to defeat them. The neckties, along with the sheer efficiency of the destruction he did on his… rampage through the south.
There’s something I like in there. Though, I guess that really only appeals to my inner six-year-old.
Not saying he’s not overrated. You’re probably right he probably is.
Have you read his address to LSU before his departure? He explains exactly how the War is going to go for them on the eve of secession. Then he becomes General Sherman.
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I haven’t, in fact I don’t think I’ve read any of his writings/addresses. Just his wiki page, and a few memes on twitter.
Though perhaps I’m not parsing you what you said right. He said they’d win the war shortly before it started? Then he became a general? So he was wrong about the war beginning?
Typo. He predicted the savage beating the South would go through, then made good on it.
Oh, that’s pretty cool actually. Guy talked a big game then followed through.
So JFK was tweaking off his ass during the televised Nixon debates. He received shots of amphetamines, animal pheromones, human placenta, and a few other things (nobody really knows because the sample sent to the FBI to analyze was too small for conclusive results) from a doctor Max Jacobson to combat his severe back pain. He received the shots before the debates with Nixon, and at the Vienna summit with Khrushchev. When the FBI analyzed it, they found the amphetamines and RFK pleaded with Jack to stop taking the shots, to which Jack said “I don’t care if it’s horse piss.” Jack eventually stopped when doctors told him that no one with access to deploy nuclear warheads should be on that level of stimulants.
For those curious, here’s the first 1960 debate. Kennedy stutters a bit and his eyes look kinda funny but if I was gonna guess what drug he was on I’d say weed rather than any sort of stimulant.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdVHFESjTsE