The Whiskey Rebellion was this great example of early American state incapacity, like sub-Colonial, medieval – there’s like no viable currency in circulation so frontier grain farmers are basically coining their own by distilling whiskey and refusing to cut the feds in so George Washington himself raises an army – which basically amounts to insisting an army be raised and threatening to impress stray farmers with a handful of regular troops until he eventually gathers a mass of nearby absolute rabble plus every local elite from the area who all insist on being in command in their own way. This mass then sets off under the sitting President’s personal leadership eating, looting, and likely raping its way across its own country, and is considered a testament to Washington’s leadership that it survives intact all the way to Western Pennsylvania, at which point the rebels have already dispersed (and further sub-military expedition attempts to apply federal authority prove largely fruitless).
It was a complete nightmare the Lewis and Clark Expedition was at-the-time understood as a recovery from, a proof of the ability of the United States to sustain disciplined operations across the continent.
(And then the Civil War, and then like every Western country in the world the executive branch restructured and modernized itself modeled off Prussia.)
The Idaho potato industry is actually an offshoot of Mormonism; the desert-exiled tribe set up farms in the irrigated borderlands to grow the nutritious root vegetables to cater their funerals.
twitter will expose you to types of guys that you thought were extinct
A funny angle of knowing American history is appreciating that a lot of the foreign papist hordes streaming in to corrupt New England in H.P. Lovecraft’s time would have been Portuguese
This is such a strange way of categorizing US religion. The Baptist movement is so important to the history of religion in the USA, but on this map it’s completely subsumed into Protestantism (I think?).
I mean I kind of get what you’re getting at, that in America “Protestant” groups together European-heritage (or early American built in their model) “mainline” churches, distinct “evangelical” or “fundamentalist” traditions, and even Second or Third Great Awakening and other domestically founded stuff like the Adventists in an unhelpfully reductive way.
On the other hand, the notion of breaking out specifically the Baptist movement from the rest of American Protestantism seems like such an even stranger and more foreign way of categorizing things to me that it makes me wonder if you’re not in a much Baptist-heavier bubble than me that the distinction seems that significant.
twitter will expose you to types of guys that you thought were extinct
A funny angle of knowing American history is appreciating that a lot of the foreign papist hordes streaming in to corrupt New England in H.P. Lovecraft’s time would have been Portuguese
I remember the military veterans in 4th of July parades being like WWII vets riding surplus Korea equipment, what’re the parades like now it’s down to like, ‘Nam and Iraq?
Or is it like the turn of the 20th century where the institution of military parades trailed off (into things like the Salvation Army and Second KKK!) as the Civil War veterans died out
The “a Black sheriff?!” conceit of Blazing Saddles (1974) was really about how race interacted with the sort of postwar American identity mythologized in cowboy movies, the actual Western frontier was the most likely place in American history to find a Black man in a respected position of authority over whites until the post-Vietnam military.
