Abducted from Africa and then shipped from Cuba aboard the schooner Amistad as slaves, fifty-three Africans overcame their captors and gained control of the ship. However, the Amistad would be seized by the Navy off Long Island, New York, and the Africans imprisoned, charged with murder and facing extradition to Cuba. Dated January 7, 1840, this document was submitted on their behalf by a group of American attorneys representing them before the Federal District Court in Connecticut.
Answer of S. Staples, R. Baldwin, and T. Sedgewick, Proctors for the Amistad Africans, to the several libels of Lt. Gedney, et. al. and Pedro Montes and Jose Ruiz, January 7, 1840; Records of the District Courts of the United States; Record Group 21; National Archives.
Hearing, Sir, that our immortal and everlasting Patriot was to go to the House on Monday next, I was exceedingly overjoyed, and thought I could not do less than go and drink Porter for the Good of the Nation.” /s/A VERY GREAT PATRIOT
“A Dream,” Virginia Gazette (PD), 1 July 1773, p2c3.
Truth surmounts but an hundred years afterwards, is then entombed in history, and appears as flat as, or less interesting than, the lies with which it is surrounded and has been overwhelmed.
Horace Walpole to Horace Mann, 18 January 1770.
217More from the “Madness of Francis Nicholson” files
“You must remember that I have often told you that I lefft my daughter to make her own choice as to a husband. I would never be guilty of such a horrible peice of Cruelty (for to gain a kingdom) as to force my daughter to marry agt her will to the best man alive.”
[Lewis Burwell to Francis Nicholson, 6 January 1703, Francis Nicholson Papers, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation]
To All With Disease of the Heart
A CURE FOR LOVE
Into a pint of the “Water of Oblivion,” put of the “Essence of Resignation,” two drops — of Prudence and Patience, equal parts (3 grams) and of some Judgement, one draehm — Mix after they have stood some time — then take off the scum of Former Remembrances, and sweeten the mixture with the “Syrup of Hope” — Pass it through the filter of Commons Sense into a bottle of Firm Resolution, stopping it with the cork of Indifference. Take a draehm morning and evening, if the constitution bear it, reducing the dose as the disease declines.
[c1785, Wormeley Papers, Univ. of Virginia Special Collections]
New papers available for open peer review on History Working Papers. Please participate http://t.co/i3IldOnF #twitterstorians #edtech
“During the past decade, historians and laypeople alike have gone to the sprawling website of a guy on the Internet, Matthew White—self-described atrocitologist, necrometrician, and quantifier of hemoclysms. White is a representative of that noble and underappreciated profession, the librarian, and he has compiled the most comprehensive, disinterested, and statistically nuanced estimates available of the death tolls of history’s major catastrophes. In The Great Big Book of Horrible Things, White now combines his numerical savvy with the skills of a good storyteller to present a new history of civilization, a history whose protagonists are not great emperors but their unsung victims—millions and millions and millions of them.” —Steven Pinker
Historians are left forever chasing shadows, painfully aware of their inability ever to reconstruct a dead world in its completeness however thorough or revealing their documentation. We are doomed to be forever hailing someone who has just gone around the corner and out of earshot.
Simon Schama (via soundtechgal)
Snowflakes fell from the sky like tiny pieces of a snowman who had stood on a land mine.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2011/oct/17/alan-partridge-i-partridge-book
Mystery bores me. It chores me. I know what happens and so do you. It’s the machinations that wheel us there that aggravate, perplex, interest, and astound me.
A unintentional consideration for historians from Markus Zusak’s splendid The Book Thief, 243.
