4th of July ~ History 101

VIDEOS OF PEOPLE WHO DO NOT KNOW HISTORY…

FOLLOWED BY SOME HISTORY,

PATRIOTISM, REMEMBREANCE

Just a quick word regarding Mark Dice — who is the guy in the first video (and 3rd n 4th):

While I like their rants (Paul Watson, Mark Dice, and others) and these commentaries hold much truth in them, I do wish to caution you… he is part of Info Wars/Prison Planet network of yahoos, a crazy conspiracy arm of Alex Jones shite. Also, I bet if I talked to him he would reveal some pretty-crazy conspiratorial beliefs that would naturally undermine and be at-odds-with some of his rants. Just to be clear, I do not endorse these people or orgs.

Media analyst Mark Dice asks beachgoers in San Diego, California some basic questions about America’s 4th of July Independence Day celebration and their answers are quite disturbing.

MORE SADNESS:

FOR THE HISTORICAL RECORD:

The signers of the Declaration of Independence (ALL BIOS HERE)

Delaware

George Read | Caesar Rodney | Thomas McKean

Pennsylvania

George Clymer | Benjamin Franklin | Robert Morris | John Morton | Benjamin Rush | George Ross | James Smith | James Wilson | George Taylor

Massachusetts

John Adams | Samuel Adams | John Hancock | Robert Treat Paine

New Hampshire

Josiah Bartlett | William Whipple | Matthew Thornton |

Rhode Island

Stephen Hopkins | William Ellery |

New York

Lewis Morris | Philip Livingston | Francis Lewis | William Floyd |

Georgia

Button Gwinnett | Lyman Hall | George Walton |

Virginia

Richard Henry Lee | Francis Lightfoot Lee | Carter Braxton | Benjamin Harrison | Thomas Jefferson | George Wythe | Thomas Nelson, Jr. |

North Carolina

William Hooper | John Penn |

South Carolina

Edward Rutledge | Arthur Middleton | Thomas Lynch, Jr. | Thomas Heyward, Jr. |

New Jersey

Abraham Clark | John Hart | Francis Hopkinson | Richard Stockton | John Witherspoon |

Connecticut

Samuel Huntington | Roger Sherman | William Williams | Oliver Wolcott |

Maryland

Charles Carroll | Samuel Chase | Thomas Stone | William Paca |


Reagan, Cash, and Harvey



Dennis Prager


Video Description:

Dennis Prager reads from the popular leftist website, VOX. From newspapers such as the N.Y. TIMES, the L.A. TIMES, and the N.Y. DAILY NEWS. These mainstream opinion pieces bemoan and degrade America to the point of hatred. Anti-Americanism is growing on the Left, and in taking these positions these people benighted themselves as our cultural commissars… dishing out their version of history to those unintelligent lap-dog readers they call customers.


Some More History


I want to thank Israel Matzav for the following, good stuff!

With thanks to the Heritage Foundation:

During the 1700s, Philadelphia was an unpleasant place in the summer. Malaria and yellow fever were rampant. There were no cures and no known ways to prevent infection. Most people of means tried to escape the city, if they could.

But in the scorching summer of 1776, scores of our country’s leading men remained behind closed doors in Philadelphia. They were kept there by their work. And what a monumental work it turned out to be.

The 56 leaders, representing all 13 British colonies, signed a declaration that would birth a great nation and illuminate the very future of humankind. It’s this Declaration of Independence that Americans celebrate each July 4.

The document’s first job was to officially announce to the world that all the colonies had decided to declare themselves free and independent states, absolved from any allegiance to Great Britain. That was momentous enough for the years ahead, since in order to make good on that declaration, the colonies would have to defeat the British in a war that stretched until 1783.

But the greater meaning of the Declaration — then as well as now — is as a statement of the conditions that underlie legitimate political authority and as an explanation of the proper ends of government.

The signers proclaimed that political power would spring from the sovereignty of the people, not a crowned hereditary monarch. This idea shook Europe to its very core.

The Declaration appealed not to any conventional law or political contract but to the equal rights possessed by all men and “the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and nature’s God” entitled them.

What is revolutionary about the Declaration of Independence is not that a particular group of Americans declared their independence under particular circumstances. It’s that they did so by appealing to –and promising to base their particular government on — a universal standard of justice.

It is in this sense that Abraham Lincoln praised “the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times.”

Of course, it required another war to extend those rights to all Americans, but the fact that they were written down in the Declaration was crucial in 1865, in 1965 and remains so today as well.

“If the American Revolution had produced nothing but the Declaration of Independence,” wrote noted historian Samuel Eliot Morrison, “it would have been worthwhile.”

As Thomas Jefferson, lead author of the Declaration, put it in 1821, “The flames kindled on the 4th of July 1776, have spread over too much of the globe to be extinguished by the feeble engines of despotism; on the contrary, they will consume these engines and all who work them.”

Those flames, the flames of freedom and opportunity, continue to spread. That’s a truth worth celebrating on the Fourth — and all year ’round.

From, The Spirit of the American Revolution:

Even the Minutemen reflected strong religious involvement. While they are generally recognized for their exploits as a group, few today know many specifics about them. For example, these men who stood to fight for their liberties and defend their town were often groups of laymen from local congregations led either by their pastor or a deacon!  Records even indicate that it was not unusual that following their militia drills they would go to church “where they listened to exhortation and prayer.”

The spiritual emphasis manifested so often by the Americans during the Revolution caused one Crown-appointed British governor to write to Great Britain complaining that:

If you ask an American who is his master, he’ll tell you he has none. And he has no governor but Jesus Christ.

Letters like this, coupled with statements like that delivered by Ethan Allen, and sermons like those preached by the Reverend Peter Powers (“Jesus Christ the King”), gave rise to a motto of the American Revolution. Most of us are unaware that the American Revolution even had a motto, but most wars do (e.g., World War II—”Remember Pearl Harbor”; the Texas’ war for independence—”Remember the Alamo”; etc.). The motto of the American Revolution was directed against King George III—considered the primary source of the conflict; for it was he who was arbitrarily, capriciously, and regularly violated “the laws of nature and of nature’s God.” The motto was very simple and very direct:

No King but King Jesus!