ODDITIES of HISTORY

 

In this case…

One OCTOBER 20^th LONG AGO…

 

If you have read my blog in the past, you know I like to mull over “this date in history.”

Especially on less than well remembered items, such as the one I stumbled on today.

 

On October 20, 1774, the First Continental Congress adopted the Continental Association, a sweeping agreement that instituted a trade boycott with Great Britain. To promote wartime frugality and unity, Clause 8 mandated the discouragement of all "expensive diversions and entertainments," specifically targeting theater, horse racing, gaming, and cockfighting.

 

Well then, how’s about them apples.

 

Known as The Act for Discouragement of Entertainment, the act specifically banned:

   Horse racing

  Gaming and gambling

  Cockfighting

  Exhibitions of shows and theatrical plays

  Lavish funeral practices (e.g., buying expensive mourning clothes, scarves, and gloves)

I suppose today it would include all sorts of digital consumption products and a few more merriment-making activities.

 

Governments, even the sort that proclaimed their goals to limit the governmental imposition on individuals, (such as fueled part of the American Revolution), can betray these goals at the drop of a hat.

 

It is noted that, despite the ban, theatrical performances and recreational events occasionally continued in secret during the Revolutionary War. Most famously, George Washington ignored the ban in 1778 and staged a production of the play Cato at Valley Forge to entertain and inspire his officers.

 

On this October 20^th, I hope you find joy and perhaps some entertainment in this post.

William Hogarth etching The Laughing Audience (1733) depicts eighteenth-century theater scene

ARGUABLY THE GREATEST PRESIDENT

 

We know Abraham Lincoln saved the union of states, but at a great cost to his mental health and eventual physical demise. Lincoln suffered from clinical depression aggravated by the enormous cost of the war between the states. He was murdered shortly after victory, and never got to know how grateful most of us are to this day for keeping us “one nation, indivisible.”

 

We know about Lincoln’s childhood in a log cabin, and about the tragic loss of his beloved son Willie to typhoid fever while living in the White House. (The Lincolns lost another son twelve years earlier to tuberculosis.) These losses took their toll on Mary Todd Lincoln, and all in all made for very hard presidential years for Abe.

 

Here’s what I didn’t know until just before I blogged about it six years ago here. Abraham Lincoln was a bonified inventor. Almost on this date, May 22^nd in the year 1849, future U.S. president Abraham Lincoln was granted a patent for a boat-lifting device; he was the only U.S. president to have a patent. 

 

We’ve heard that a rising tide lifts all boats.  Now we know Lincoln did, both figuratively and in practice.