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Faded icon of the gilded halo, Once illuminating, inspiring; Admirers, enemies, lovers, family, A distant memory trodden under foot. Evanescent existence; flickering fame, A quintessence of reflections Incidentally etched on ancient relics. Can we conjure your presence? We barely remember Joseph Warren as the person who dispatched Paul Revere on his famous ride, and as the hero of the Battle of Bunker Hill, where he was killed in action. It wasn’t always that way. For almost a century Warren was one of the most important and remembered founders of the fledgling American nation. John Trumbull’s painting 'Death of General Warren at the Battle of Bunker’s Hill,' a renowned icon of American history, dates from that period. In it scarlet uniformed British soldiers, heavily armed and personally led by their officers, have just overwhelmed American entrenchments atop Breed’s Hill, within sight across the Mystic River of Boston. In the background loom the eponymous Bunker Hill and the village of Charlestown, its houses and churches aflame, a smoky cloud framing the battlefield. The Americans, a motley amalgam of raw militia, countrymen and workers, try unsuccessfully to fend off the onslaught. New England’s Pine Tree flag still stands within the American dirt fort in the unseasonably hot and breezeless early summer afternoon. The red coated attackers, brandishing the colors of the United Kingdom, will take it down in a moment. It is June 17, 1775: The defenders of an embryonic American Liberty are about to be defeated in a British Pyrrhic victory. In the forefront, Colonel William Prescott commands the Americans while rotund General Israel Putnam vainly shouts orders in the background. British Generals Burgoyne and Clinton command the British attackers as Major John Pitcairn, leader of the marines falters, mortally wounded, yet still supported by a soldier. British and Americans have fallen indiscriminately on the field among the detritus of battle. In the foreground, a finely dressed figure lies prostrate, his sword dropped to the earth. Prescott wards off a bayonet thrust by an onrushing British infantryman. It is a thrust the enemy’s own superior officer, Colonel Small, curiously appears to want deflected. But the targeted figure already lies supine, looking skyward in a saintly blank stare. He is suspended momentarily in a halo of tranquility amongst the mayhem. This dying man can no longer smell the acrid, dense black powder smoke that hangs low in the windless oppressive heat, obscuring the afternoon sun. He pays no heed to the shouts of men nor the eerie lull in the previously deafening gunfire. The animation, his admonishments of others to action, the thrill and fear of battle, all suddenly calm. A single bullet annihilates in an instant inspiring words, the force of personality, the martial spirit in action, the reality and complexity of a human being. Dr. Joseph Warren, the central figure, moves from life to legend. Trumbull’s iconic painting raises unanswered questions about its subject. How did a physician come to assume such a responsible role in this engagement? How did he meet his fate within sight of his home town? Why was he famous throughout the young United States as a model for involved citizenship? Was there any truth to the cynicism of his political enemies? Most compelling of all-why has this once beloved leader been so long and unjustifiably forgotten? This biography of Joseph Warren answers these and other questions. It utilizes modern analytical methods, uncovers new material, and sheds new light on “established” facts... Please join me in getting to know Joseph Warren, accompanying him on his lifetime’s journey to Bunker Hill, and considering the fate of his reputation and memory long after his heroic demise. ↗
For years, walking round London, I had been aware of the actual land, lying concealed but not entirely changed or destroyed, beneath the surface of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century city. It has been said that 'God made the country and man made the town', but that is not true: the town is simply disguised countryside. Main roads, some older than history itself, still bend to avoid long-dried marshes, or veer off at an angle where the wall of a manor house once stood. Hills and valleys still remain; rivers, even though entombed in sewer pipes, still cause trouble in the foundations of neighbouring buildings and become a local focus for winter mists. Garden walls follow the line of hedgerows; the very street-patterns have been determined by the holdings of individual farmers and landlords, parcels of land some of which can be traced back to the Norman Conquest. The situation of specific buildings - pubs, churches, institutions - often dates from long distant decisions and actions on the part of men whose names have vanished from any record. ↗
Elizabeth Cady read the nation's great Declaration, and it bothered her. All men are created equal, it said. But what about women? ↗
But what is certain is that in five, ten or twenty years, this problem unique to our time, according to him, will no longer exist, it will be replaced by others...Yet this music, the sound of this rain on the windows, the great mournful creaking of the cedar tree in the garden outside, this moment, so tender, so strange in the middle of war, this will never change, not this, this is forever. ↗
The early and relatively sophisticated Egyptians understood that their civilization would be threatened if they bred with the Negroes to their south, so pharaohs went so far as "to prevent the mongrelization of the Egyptian race" by making it a death penalty-eligible offense to bring blacks into Egypt. The ancient Egyptians even constructed a fort on the Nile in central Egypt to prevent blacks from immigrating to their lands. In spite of the efforts by the Egyptian government to defend their civilization, blacks still came to Egypt as soldiers, slaves, and captives from other nations. By 1,500 B.C., half of the population of southern Egypt was of mixed blood, and by 688 B.C., societal progress had ended in Egypt when Taharka became the first mulatto pharaoh. By 332 B.C., Egypt had fallen when Alexander the Great conquered the region. ↗
As the soil of a garden is richer and as the harvest of the garden bears healthier nourishment from the decay of leaf matter and banana peel and egg shell and human hair and chicken bone and fireplace ash, so the accumulation of death in teh ground of a city implants therein energies and powers. ↗
I know girls who pine for it. They like to play dress-up and pretend being Vor ladies of old, rescued from menace by romantic Vor youths. For some reason they never play 'dying in childbirth', or 'vomiting your guts out from the red dysentery', or 'weaving till you go blind and crippled from arthritis and dye poisoning', or 'infanticide'. Well, they do die romantically of disease sometimes, but somehow it's always an illness that makes you interestingly pale and everyone sorry and doesn't involve losing bowel control. ↗
War means fighting. The business of the soldier is to fight. Armies are not called out to dig trenches, to throw up breastworks, to live in camps, but to find the enemy and strike him; to invade his country, and do him all possible damage in the shortest possible time. This will involve great destruction of life and property while it lasts; but such a war will of necessity be of brief continuance, and so would be an economy of life and property in the end. ↗
