World War Two
Published 30 Aug 2023The Germans are assaulting London with waves of V-1 flying bombs. But Eddie Chapman, a career criminal, serial womaniser, and masterful double agent working for MI5’s Double Cross is fighting a secret battle to beat the bombs. When he’s done with that, he pulls the wool over the Reich’s eyes to help Britain beat the Kriegsmarine. This is Agent Zigzag.
(more…)
August 31, 2023
The Double Agent Saving London From the V-1 – WW2 Documentary Special
Comments Off on The Double Agent Saving London From the V-1 – WW2 Documentary Special
The sciences have replication problems … historians face similar issues
In the latest Age of Invention newsletter, Anton Howes considers the history profession’s closest equivalent to the ongoing replication crisis in the sciences:
… I’ve become increasingly worried that science’s replication crises might pale in comparison to what happens all the time in history, which is not just a replication crisis but a reproducibility crisis. Replication is when you can repeat an experiment with new data or new materials and get the same result. Reproducibility is when you use exactly the same evidence as another person and still get the same result — so it has a much, much lower bar for success, which is what makes the lack of it in history all the more worrying.
Historical myths, often based on mere misunderstanding, but occasionally on bias or fraud, spread like wildfire. People just love to share unusual and interesting facts, and history is replete with things that are both unusual and true. So much that is surprising or shocking has happened, that it can take only years or decades of familiarity with a particular niche of history in order to smell a rat. Not only do myths spread rapidly, but they survive — far longer, I suspect, than in scientific fields.
Take the oft-repeated idea that more troops were sent to quash the Luddites in 1812 than to fight Napoleon in the Peninsular War in 1808. Utter nonsense, as I set out in 2017, though it has been cited again and again and again as fact ever since Eric Hobsbawm first misled everyone back in 1964. Before me, only a handful of niche military history experts seem to have noticed and were largely ignored. Despite being busted, it continues to spread. Terry Deary (of Horrible Histories fame), to give just one of many recent examples, repeated the myth in a 2020 book. Historical myths are especially zombie-like. Even when disproven, they just. won’t. die.
[…]
I don’t think this is just me being grumpy and pedantic. I come across examples of mistakes being made and then spreading almost daily. It is utterly pervasive. Last week when chatting to my friend Saloni Dattani, who has lately been writing a piece on the story of the malaria vaccine, I shared my
mounting paranoiahealthy scepticism of secondary sources and suggested she check up on a few of the references she’d cited just to see. A few days later and Saloni was horrified. When she actually looked closely, many of the neat little anecdotes she’d cited in her draft — like Louis Pasteur viewing some samples under a microscope and having his mind changed on the nature of malaria — turned out to have no actual underlying primary source from the time. It may as well have been fiction. And there was inaccuracy after inaccuracy, often inexplicable: one history of the World Health Organisation’s malaria eradication programme said it had been planned to take 5-7 years, but the sources actually said 10-15; a graph showed cholera pandemics as having killed a million people, with no citation, while the main sources on the topic actually suggest that in 1865-1947 it killed some 12 million people in British India alone.Now, it’s shockingly easy to make these mistakes — something I still do embarrassingly often, despite being constantly worried about it. When you write a lot, you’re bound to make some errors. You have to pray they’re small ones and try to correct them as swiftly as you can. I’m extremely grateful to the handful of subject-matter experts who will go out of their way to point them out to me. But the sheer pervasiveness of errors also allows unintentionally biased narratives to get repeated and become embedded as certainty, and even perhaps gives cover to people who purposefully make stuff up.
If the lack of replication or reproducibility is a problem in science, in history nobody even thinks about it in such terms. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of anyone systematically looking at the same sources as another historian and seeing if they’d reach the same conclusions. Nor can I think of a history paper ever being retracted or corrected, as they can be in science. At the most, a history journal might host a back-and-forth debate — sometimes delightfully acerbic — for the closely interested to follow. In the 1960s you could find an agricultural historian saying of another that he was “of course entitled to express his views, however bizarre.” But many journals will no longer print those kinds of exchanges, they’re hardly easy for the uninitiated to follow, and there is often a strong incentive to shut up and play nice (unless they happen to be a peer-reviewer, in which case some will feel empowered by the cover of anonymity to be extraordinarily rude).
Why New York Destroyed 3 Iconic Landmarks | Architectural Digest
Architectural Digest
Published 6 Apr 2023Michael Wyetzner of Michielli + Wyetzner Architects returns to AD, this time to look at the history and creation of three New York City landmarks that have since been demolished — but are far from forgotten. From the once (and future?) majesty of Penn Station to the New York Herald building and the original 19th-century Madison Square Garden, Michael gives expert insight into these three historic architectural landmarks, why they were laid to ruin, and what came to replace them.
(more…)
Comments Off on Why New York Destroyed 3 Iconic Landmarks | Architectural Digest
QotD: A typical polis
Defining the polis (plural: poleis) is remarkably tricky, so tricky in fact that the Polis Center, after spending ten years inventorying every known polis, did not quite manage to settle on a single definition and instead inventoried poleis based on if they are called poleis in the sources or if they show signs of doing the things that a polis usually does (like building walls or minting coins). In Greek usage, a polis was a town, but it was also the political community of that town (which may or may not be an independent state, though the Greeks tended to think that poleis ought to be independent by nature) and the broader territory that political community controlled and also the body of citizens, the politai, who made up the community. These are connected definitions, of course, but there is a lot of give in these joints, yet the idea of a polis as a self-governing community centered on a single, usually fortified, town center is a strong one in Greek thought.
In any case there certainly were a lot of them. The Polis Center’s inventory counts just over a thousand archaic and classical poleis (it does not extend into the Hellenistic period), of which probably around 800-900 existed at one time. Now our vision of these poleis is necessarily a bit skewed: most were very small and leave little evidence, while the two most prominent poleis in our sources by far, Athens and Sparta, were both very unusual in their size and governing structures. That said while most poleis were very small, it doesn’t follow that most Greeks lived in very small poleis; M.H. Hansen notes ((2006), 83) that by his estimates 80% of all of the poleis housed around 35% of the polis-living population, while the top 10% largest poleis housed roughly 40%.
But the smallest poleis could be very small. A touch over 200 poleis in the inventory had territories of less than 100km2. A small polis like that might have a total population of just a few thousand, with an even smaller subset of that population consisting of adult citizen males. On the other hand, very large poleis like Athens or Sparta might have hundreds of thousands of inhabitants, though as M.H. Hansen notes in the inventory these sorts of massive poleis with territories in excess of 1,000km2 were very rare: there are just thirteen such known.
But crucially for this survey, what we’re going to see is that there some fairly common and standard polis institutions, which seem fairly common regardless of size. Indeed, the language and thinking of our Greek sources is often informed by a sort of idea of an ideal or standard polis, from which every real polis deviates in certain ways. These little communities had institutions which resembled each other, to the point that the difference between “oligarchic” or “democratic” or even “tyranical” poleis could be surprisingly slight. So that’s what we’re going to look at here: a basic sense of what a polis notionally was. And we’ll begin by looking at the parts that comprised a polis, which is going to be quite important as we go forward, since the way one structures a government depends on how one imagines the component parts being governed.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: How to Polis, 101: Component Parts”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2023-03-10.
Comments Off on QotD: A typical polis
August 30, 2023
The endless search for the “Easy mode” in military conflict
CDR Salamander on the search for shortcuts to military excellence, despite literal millennia of evidence that there are no such shortcuts:
As the Russo-Ukrainian War reaches its 20th month, I hope everyone has been sufficiently sobered up to stand firmly against those promoting the “72-hour War” or spin an attractive story about some transformational secret sauce that provides an “easy button” for those tasked to do the very hard work of preparing a nation for war should, and if, it were to come.
See the Battle of Hostomel if you need a recent example of where buying this wishcasting can get you.
There is a reason we have continually railed against this Potomac Flotilla mindset for the better part of two decades here — it is the self-delusion of faculty lounge theories running up against the Gods of the Military Copybook Headings reality what we have thousands of years of experience to reference.
We are not smarter than previous generations. There is no secret weapon or war winning technology — or magic beans — that will allow us to skip past the hard work of a viable strategy backed up by a properly resourced industrial capacity to build, maintain, deploy, and sustain a fighting force on the other side of the Pacific for years if needed.
Not 24-hours. Not 72-hours. Think 72-weeks to 72-months and you have your mind right.
[…]
We do no one any good allowing free run towards the national security version of the prosperity gospel, a branch of the transformationalist cult, and their “name it and claim it” attitude towards solving hard problems.
From LCS to DDG-1000, to optimal manning, to six-sigma supply nightmares, to 100-hour workweeks, to 72-hour war CONOPS, to the “Deter by Punishment,” to “1,000 ship navy,” to the offset of this POM cycle, to counter-historical excuses for … again … not doing the hard work that takes so long to bear fruit that someone else will get credit for it.
Every time we have our top leaders — smart hard working professionals with the best intentions — step up to sound more like this guy — the worse we will all be.
It degrades them and endangers everyone.
We don’t need to sell the utility of small drones being used down to the lowest levels of responsibility — it is demonstrated every day.
What we do need sold is Congress’s need to fund a revitalization of our defense industrial capacity and a focus on the naval and aerospace forces that will do most of the fighting in any expected war west of the International Dateline.
Supported by swarms of drones of all shapes and sizes.
Comments Off on The endless search for the “Easy mode” in military conflict
QotD: Hairstyles of the late Ancien Régime
As the industrial revolution and various other shifts (including truly disastrous harvests) robbed those whose income came from hereditary landholding of their ancient riches and prominence, even while the court demanded a complex set of “dancing attendance” for royal favor (A policy started and encouraged by Louis XIV in part to rob the nobility of wealth and prominence, not to mention keeping their minds off rebellion) the nobility felt insecure. The fact that its ranks were being penetrated by people from the bourgeoisie, who married their children or “simply” franked the nobility’s lavish lifestyles, made the nobles feel they were losing control. Even though rank remained a thing of birth, they were in fact, in the real world, losing rank.
The response were fashions so extravagant that they make us go “Wait, what?” and must have given people headaches.
You can see where wigs came from and were fashionable, in a society without running water and/or decent shampoos. It was easier to keep your hair ridiculously short and wear wigs, which is why they’ve been part of human fashion since ever.
But it took the French revolution to come up with wigs on armatures (or hair extensions, ditto) and hairstyles that incorporated ships and, at one point, bird cages with live, singing birds.
To look at drawings or read descriptions is to go “uh, what? who ever thought that was attractive?” and also “Boy their heads must have hurt”.
Yet the competition for the most elaborate and showy hairstyle, no matter how insane, did not stop until those heads fell to Madame Guillotine thereby stilling forever their status anxiety.
Sarah Hoyt, “Is That A Ship On Your Head?”, Libertarian Enterprise, 2019-09-01.
Comments Off on QotD: Hairstyles of the late Ancien Régime
August 29, 2023
The noble reasons New Jersey banned self-service gas stations
Of course, by “noble reasons” I mean “corrupt crony capitalist reasons“:
“Model A Ford in front of Gilmore’s historic Shell gas station” by Corvair Owner is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
New Jersey’s law, like Oregon’s, ostensibly stemmed from safety concerns. In 1949, the state passed the Retail Gasoline Dispensing Safety Act and Regulations, a law that was updated in 2016, which cited “fire hazards directly associated with dispensing fuel” as justification for its ban.
If the idea that Americans and filling stations would be bursting into flames without state officials protecting us from pumping gas sounds silly to you, it should. In fact, safety was not the actual reason for New Jersey’s ban (any more than Oregon’s ban was, though the state cited “increased risk of crime and the increased risk of personal injury resulting from slipping on slick surfaces” as justification).
To understand the actual reason states banned filling stations, look to the life of Irving Reingold (1921-2017), a maverick entrepreneur and workaholic who liked to fly his collection of vintage World War II planes in his spare time. Reingold created a gasoline crisis in the Garden State, in the words of New Jersey writer Paul Mulshine, “by doing something gas station owners hated: He lowered prices”.
In the late 1940s, gasoline was selling for about 22 cents a gallon in New Jersey. Reingold figured out a way to undercut the local gasoline station owners who had entered into a “gentlemen’s agreement” to maintain the current price. He’d allow customers to pump gas themselves.
“Reingold decided to offer the consumer a choice by opening up a 24-pump gas station on Route 17 in Hackensack,” writes Mulshine. “He offered gas at 18.9 cents a gallon. The only requirement was that drivers pump it themselves. They didn’t mind. They lined up for blocks.”
Consumers loved this bit of creative destruction introduced by Reingold. His competition was less thrilled. They decided to stop him — by shooting up his gas station. Reingold responded by installing bulletproof glass.
“So the retailers looked for a softer target — the Statehouse,” Mulshine writes. “The Gasoline Retailers Association prevailed upon its pals in the Legislature to push through a bill banning self-serve gas. The pretext was safety …”
The true purpose of New Jersey’s law had nothing to do with safety or “the common good”. It was old-fashioned cronyism, protectionism via the age-old bootleggers and Baptists grift.
Politicians helped the Gasoline Retailers Association drive Reingold out of business. He and consumers are the losers of the story, yet it remains a wonderful case study in public choice theory economics.
The economist James M. Buchanan received a Nobel Prize for his pioneering work that demonstrated a simple idea: Public officials tend to arrive at decisions based on self-interest and incentives, just like everyone else.
Comments Off on The noble reasons New Jersey banned self-service gas stations
The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois “runs so fantastically counter to the entire ideology of ‘decolonise'”
In Spiked, Brendan O’Neill finds himself surprised at the inclusion of a very unusual book on a list demanded by those pushing for “decolonization” of university curricula:
W.E.B. Du Bois by James E. Purdy, 1907, gelatin silver print, from the National Portrait Gallery which has explicitly released this digital image under the CC0 license.
Wikimedia Commons.
“Decolonise the curriculum” is a movement that wants university courses to focus less on dead white European males and more on writers of colour. Its argument is that black students need texts that speak directly to them. They need books by authors who look like them. They need books about experiences and ideas they can more readily relate to than they can the stuff written about in “high white culture”. Black students must be able to recognise themselves in what they study, we’re told, or else they’ll feel cheated and demeaned.
I was surprised to find that one of the leading decolonise movements, at the University of Edinburgh, was arguing for WEB Du Bois’ 1903 book, The Souls of Black Folk, to be included on the English curriculum. The activists said it was unreasonable to expect black students to engage with so many white authors. They also need to engage with people like Du Bois, in whose work they might “recognise themselves”. I was surprised, not because I think The Souls of Black Folk shouldn’t be on more university courses – absolutely it should. No, it’s because The Souls of Black Folk runs so fantastically counter to the entire ideology of “decolonise”. It made me wonder if these activists have even read it. Du Bois’ book contains some of the finest arguments you will ever read against the idea that high culture is a white thing that others cannot connect with.
One of my favourite passages in the book, from the chapter on what kind of education black men are fit for, touches on this very question. Here Du Bois makes his critique of those in his own time who were arguing that blacks only require basic education and industrial training. He describes his own experience of higher learning, writing:
I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the colour line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas … From out the caves of evening that swing between the strong-limbed earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and they come all graciously with no scorn or condescension.
That passage, Du Bois’ moving belief that Shakespeare does not wince at him, captures a central thread of his writing: universalism. Du Bois agitates against accommodating to segregation or low expectations, and argues for the rights of “black folk” to assimilate into the spoils of civilisation; to become, as he puts it, “co-workers in the kingdom of culture”. To those in the late 1800s and early 1900s who argued that black people needed a targeted form of culture, one specific to their needs and capacities, Du Bois said: “We daily hear that an education that encourages aspiration, that sets the loftiest of ideals and seeks as an end culture and character rather than breadwinning, is the privilege of white men, and the danger and delusion of black men.”
Du Bois insisted that it is only through assimilation into the “kingdom of culture” that self-knowledge and self-improvement can truly occur. As he wrote: “Wed with Truth, I dwell above the veil.” The veil he’s referring to is the veil of colour, the one that separated blacks from whites in post-slavery America. For Du Bois, that veil was best lifted via assimilation into the American republic’s political universe and its realm of culture.
Du Bois’ critique of the notion that high culture was for white men, and would prove mystifying to black men, has sadly been superseded by an “anti-racism” with an entirely different outlook. Now, the supposedly radical stance is to believe that high culture is disorientating for black people, and possibly even damaging to their self-esteem, and therefore they require something more targeted. In short, they need release from the kingdom of culture. That, in essence, is what the decolonise movement desires: the “liberation” of non-white peoples from the cultural gains of Western civilisation. Behold the crisis of universalist belief.
Comments Off on The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois “runs so fantastically counter to the entire ideology of ‘decolonise'”
A Rare World War One Sniper’s Rifle: Model 1916 Lebel
Forgotten Weapons
Published 28 Feb 2018Unlike Great Britain and Germany, the French military never developed a formal sniper doctrine during World War One — they had no dedicated schools or instruction manuals for that specialty. The three major arsenals did produce scoped sniping rifles, however, with models of 1915, 1916, and 1917 (and a post-war 1921 pattern). We have a model 1916 example here today.
The rifles were completely ordinary off-the-rack Lebels, modified simply to add scope mounts. The 1916 pattern mount used a round peg on the side of the rear sight and a bracket wrapped around the front of the receiver, which allowed the scope to be quickly and easily detached for carry in a separate pouch (similar to what other nations did, to protect the optic from damage when not in use). The rifles were issued only in small numbers (2 per company, or even 2 per battalion) and it was left to the unit commander to decide how to employ them.
This particular scope has some neat provenance of being brought home by a US soldier after the war — it came back wrapped in a period copy of Stars and Stripes magazine. The rifle is of the appropriate type, but the “N” marks on the barrel and receiver indicated French overhaul in the 1930s, precluding it from being the original rifle this scope was mounted on.
(more…)
Comments Off on A Rare World War One Sniper’s Rifle: Model 1916 Lebel
August 28, 2023
The Last Chance | Dorktown
Secret Base
Published 15 Aug 2023The Minnesota Vikings of the 1970s were among the greatest football teams ever assembled. Entering 1974, Bud Grant’s teams had reached two Super Bowls, but lost them both. The good times don’t last forever. It’s time to cash in.
Written and directed by Jon Bois
Written and produced by Alex Rubenstein
Rights specialist Lindley Sico
Secret Base executive producers Will Buikema and Jon BoisKnown goofs:
• At about the 42-minute mark, Jon says Fran Tarkenton held a 45-8-1 record as starter between 1973 and 1976. His record across these years was actually 43-10-1.
(more…)
Comments Off on The Last Chance | Dorktown
Why Britain Advanced Before Other European Nations | Thomas Sowell
Thomas SowellTV
Published 17 Dec 2021
(more…)
Comments Off on Why Britain Advanced Before Other European Nations | Thomas Sowell
August 27, 2023
The Liberation of Paris – WW2 – Week 261 – August 26, 1944
World War Two
Published 26 Aug 2023Paris is liberated by the Allies, a symbolic act that causes the world to rejoice. Something far more important to the course of the war, though, happens this week in Romania. The Allies continue to advance in the south of France and begin a new offensive in Italy, though the Pacific War has quietened down once again.
(more…)
Comments Off on The Liberation of Paris – WW2 – Week 261 – August 26, 1944
6 Strange Facts About the Cold War
Decades
Published 27 Jul 2022Welcome to our history channel, run by those with a real passion for history & that’s about it. In today’s video, we will be exploring 6 odd Cold War facts.
(more…)
Comments Off on 6 Strange Facts About the Cold War
QotD: Getting food to market in pre-modern societies
Truly long-distance bulk grain transport overland wasn’t viable for reasons we’ve actually already discussed. There is simply nothing available in the pre-modern period to carry the grain overland that doesn’t also eat it. While moving grain short distances (especially to simply fill capacity while the main profit is in other, lower-bulk, higher value goods) can be efficient enough, at long distance, all of the grain ends up eaten by the animals or people moving it.
The seaborne version of this sort of itinerant, short-distance trade is called cabotage. Now today cabotage has a particular, technical legal meaning, but when we use this word in the past, it refers not to the legal status of a ship but a style of shipping using small boats to move mixed cargo up and down the coast. In essence, cabotage works much the same as the small caravans – the merchant buys in each port whatever looks likely to turn a profit and sells whatever [is] in demand. By keeping a mixed cargo of many different sorts of things, he protects against risk – he’s always likely to be able to sell something in his boat for a profit. Such traders generally work on very short distances, often connecting smaller ports which simply cannot accommodate larger, deeper-draft long-distance traders. Such cabotage trading was the background “hum” of commerce on many pre-modern coastlines and might serve to move grain up or down the coast, although not very much of it. Remember that grain is a bulk commodity, and cabotage traders, by definition, are moving small volumes.
But when it comes to moving large volumes, the sea changes everything. The fundamental problem with transporting food on land is that the energy to transport the food must come from food, either processed into muscle power by porters or animals. But at sea, that energy can come from the wind. So while the crew of a ship eats the food, the ship can be scaled up without scaling up the food requirements of the crew or the crew itself. At the same time, sea-transit is much faster than land transit and that speed is obtained from the wind without further inputs of food. It is hard to overstate how tremendous a change in context this is. Using the figures from the Price Edict of Diocletian, we tend to estimate that river transport was five times cheaper than land transport, and sea-transport was twenty times cheaper than land transport. So while the transport of bulk goods like grain on land was limited to fairly small amounts moving over short distances – say from the farm to the nearest town or port – grain could be moved long distances en masse by sea.
Now the scale and character of long-distance transport is heavily impacted by the political realities of the local waterways. If the seas are politically divided, or full of pirates, it is going to be hard to operate big, slow vulnerable grain-freighters and still make a profit after some of them get seized, pirated or sunk. But when we have periods of political unity and relatively safe seas, we see that this sort of transport can reach quite impressive scale. For instance the port regulations of late Hellenistic and Roman Thasos – itself a decent sized, but by no means massive port – divided its harbor into two areas, one for ships carrying 80-130 tons of cargo and one for ships 130+ tons (those regulations are SEG XVII 417). A brief bit of math indicates that the distribution of free grain in the city of Rome – likely less than a third of the total grain demands of the city – required the import, by sea of some 630 tons of grain per day through the sailing season. The scale of grain shipment in the back half of the Middle Ages (post-1000 or so) was also on a vast scale, with trade-oriented Italian cities exploding in population as they imported grain (Genoa being particularly well known for this, but by no means alone in it); with that came the reemergence of truly large grain-freighters.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Bread, How Did They Make It? Part IV: Markets, Merchants and the Tax Man”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-08-21.
Comments Off on QotD: Getting food to market in pre-modern societies
August 26, 2023
The United Banana Republics of America and their efforts to “get” Trump
Chris Bray points out an interesting historical precedent for the US government’s determination to pin something on former President Donald Trump:
There’s a whole lot of this sentiment on social media this morning, and I agree with it entirely:
But also read this. It’s important, and it’ll take you three minutes. Click on that link and read. You’ll see the point with every paragraph.
There are American precedents for the shameful acts of disgusting political lawfare being directed against Donald Trump (and his lawyers and political staff), and the most obvious and extremely telling precedent is the behaviour of Federalists during the Adams administration. The Sedition Act of 1798 made criticism of the federal government a crime, on a comparable construction of the idea of “disinformation” that’s now used as a repressive tool: the law forbade “any false, scandalous, and malicious writing” about the government, subjective terms that in practice opened the prison doors to mere disagreement and ordinary political criticism. Federalists arrested and prosecuted newspaper editors and a congressman. Representative Matthew Lyon was imprisoned for criticizing the Adams administration.
But the effects of the Sedition Act are extremely important. Here’s a description from archives.gov — from a site run by the federal government:
The laws were directed against Democratic-Republicans, the party typically favoured by new citizens. The only journalists prosecuted under the Sedition Act were editors of Democratic-Republican newspapers.
Sedition Act trials, along with the Senate’s use of its contempt powers to suppress dissent, set off a firestorm of criticism against the Federalists and contributed to their defeat in the election of 1800, after which the acts were repealed or allowed to expire.
The criminalization of dissent by Federalists destroyed the Federalists. The party went into a hard decline; John Adams became the only Federalist president in our history (because Washington, sentimentally a federalist, declined to identify as a Federalist), though the party continued to be regionally important in New England until it finally destroyed itself at the Hartford Convention. The event that historians call the Revolution of 1800, the election of the Democratic-Republican Thomas Jefferson to the presidency, was in significant part a result of American disgust over the political repression of dissent1. See this point clearly:
Federalists jailed their political opposition, so America loathed the Federalists and turned against them.
1. See also the High Federalist response to the Fries Rebellion, which treated a careful act of resistance as a dangerous insurrection. If you’ve never read about this one, I strongly recommend this book.
Comments Off on The United Banana Republics of America and their efforts to “get” Trump
