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Thread: Why?

  1. #1
    John
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    Wink Why?

    Well, it shouldn't have been allowed in the first place.

  2. #2
    jaded68
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    Cool A Yankee Doodle in your midst...

    Please...expand on your post. I am quite interested in your thoughts on the subject.

    Tracie

  3. #3
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    I think it may have been an example of English humour.

    A phrase along the lines of "it should never have been allowed in the first place" is often used as a light-hearted comment on some undesirable and widely condemned current event. The implication of the remark is that the origins of this event lie in some other earlier historical event, which could or should have been prevented thus avoiding the alleged outcome.

    The argument is of course historically and philosophically unsustainable but part of the humour lies in the knowledge that both parties to the remark know that this is so and both know that the other person knows it.

    At least that was what I read into it. And now John will probably tell me that I’m quite wrong

  4. #4
    Kathryn Norman
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    Default Revolutionary War

    I believe that the Revolutionary War or War of Independence was started because the colonists were being taxed without representation. How would you feel?
    Cheers!
    Kathryn Norman

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    "How would you feel?"

    Old I may be but I'm afraid I wasn't around in those days. If I had been, I might have been reading Tom Paine. Look him up if you've never heard of him.

    And I'm afraid "no taxation without representation" isn't a slogan that would have inspired me to get out of my seat, let alone take up arms. Surely the American education system includes something on the noble and universal principles involved? No Thomas Jefferson?

  6. #6
    Russell Saunders
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    Default I read a book once....

    Hi there....

    Well actually I've read a few more that just the one... but I read a book once that suggested that the Boston Tea Party was started by a group of Masons after a Lodge meeting. It also said that we (the Brits) lost at Bunker Hill and therefore lost the war, due to the fact that the commanding generals on both sides were also masons and the British General did not fight in his normal manner, hence getting his troops slaughtered and losing.

    Now I don't put this forward as my own idea, but certainly it raises some intrique if this were true or even partly so.

    And I'm sure that our American cousins will have a view on this.

    Regards all

    Russell

  7. #7
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    "started by a group of Masons..."

    What? Not by Giant Green Lizards?

  8. #8
    Kathryn Norman
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    Default War of Independence ...Why?

    Actually the resistance of the colonists began when England imposed the Stamp Act of 1765 on the colonists to pay for British troops . This Stamp Act forced the colonists to pay tax on all printed paper. It wasn't a huge amount of money but what made this Act offensive to the colonists was that it was an attempt to raise money without the approval of the colonial legislature. The colonists feared that without resistance to this Act England would in the future impose even greater taxes.
    Congress appealed to George III who repealed it, however at the same time it was repealed a new edict was given by the Parliament that England had the right to impose what it wanted. This caused resistance and an undeground group formed called "The Sons of Liberty." From this time on there were small conflicts,resistance to all duties imposed by England on all good. These conflicts grew more and more violent, and eventually led to the "Boston Tea Party" and Bunker Hill etc.
    So we really can't begin the Revolution with the "shot heard round the world" on Bunker Hill...or the Tea Party . The resistance actually started with the Stamp Act.
    I hope this sheds a little light, although admittedly I put it all in a tiny nutshell.
    Kathryn Norman

  9. #9
    Famous for offering help & advice peter nicholl's Avatar
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    Wink Why? Because ...

    I believe that the answer to WHY? is “It was inevitable”. As Colonies expand they go from Pioneering/TrailBlazing to Consolidation and eventually when there is some degree of stability, to a Society. America had settled enough for there to be a Thinking Class, with all that that implies. The cause of the Revolution was not the Stamp Act, nor the Boston Tea Party, for they were the straws which with others would finally break the back of that particular camel. They might be triggers, but the cause was The Age of Enlightenment. With its roots in the previous Century, the Enlightenment looked at the Liberty of Man and the rebirth of the Republic. With the outcome of the English Civil War, the concept of a modern Republic had become more than an idea and America had not been isolated from those events. In fact, one school of thought says that the final battle in the Civil War was the Battle of the Great Severn in Maryland in 1655. Also, there was travel across the Atlantic in both directions.Franklin would travel to France where he would be regarded as the personification of the Age of Enlightenment. So the mood was set and with the ending of the French Indian Wars, something of a vacuum ensued. The English sought to establish a firmer control on the Colonies without realising a number of things; that the Colonists had found that despite their differences they could join together to stand up to a common foe; that people like George Washington, Benedict Arnold and Robert Rogers had fought alongside the British and knew their ways. OK, so Benedict Arnold would change sides later and although Robert would side with the British and form the King’s Rangers, some of his original Rangers fired on the British at Concord and Lexington. So, the intellectuals gave the motive, the “army” the means and things like the Stamp Act, the Proclamation that the Western expansion should stop at the Appellations, the opportunity. Why did the British lose? Because then as later on in its history, the determination of people fighting for their Country would be underestimated by the British: see the retreat from Kabul in the First Afghan War and the Battle of Isandlwana in the Zulu War. That, together with the facts that the Colonists did not fight in the European way and had some help from the French (Sun Tzu was right then) meant that we lost.
    The Above Carries The Following Health Warning: My History Studies were very Anglocentric and came to rest around 1066.
    Last edited by peter nicholl; 30-12-2004 at 9:58 PM. Reason: To cut out repeats.

  10. #10
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    I'm pretty much with you on this one, Peter.

    (I might take issue with one section "why did the British lose?" which underplays the significance of the level of support in Britain for the revolutionaries and to some extent doesn't sit easily with your perceptive comments on the Age of Enlightenment).

    It raises an interesting question which I hinted at more obliquely: Why weren't the intellectual roots of the American Revolution and the ideals that fuelled it not the first thing to be mentioned by the American contributors to this thread?

    Perhaps George Orwell had the answer - "Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past".

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