A friend who read McCullough’s book said the Adamses’ letters were “the 18th-century equivalent of phone sex.” 
I don’t get HBO, alas, so I’m looking forward to the miniseries DVD.
He was 57 in 1800. That’s not exactly geezerdom.
That’s good news for me, then.
an interview with the actor playing washington revealed that he had a bit of trouble hanging onto the accent. he said they looked into accents around where washington’s family was from in england, and worked with voice coaches. mr morse was dealing with an irish role at the same time and had to becareful not to let the irish slip in.
I’m thoroughly enjoying it as well.
I was quite impressed with the actor playing Wilkinson (the stongest objector in the congress). Much to my surprise, it was Zeljko Ivanek, best known as Victor Drazen in the first season of 24. (Why does he always hate America? 
)
One historical thing that surprises me… I consider myself fairly knowledgeable about US history (at least compared to the man on the street), and the name Richard Henry Lee, the guy who actually put forth the proposal for independence, is basically totally unknown to me. You’d think that would be a name that would be at least somewhat familiar, as that seems like a fairly important action.
Did anyone notice that the Adams children (including young Charles Adams, later to be a famous cartoonist ) didn’t age at all between 1770 and 1775?
Overall I’m loving this series. It’s just the type of thing that HBO is so good at.
This is the huge caveat I have. They blew this moment in utterly spectacular fashion for me. I hated, hated, hated, hated the way they did this. This should have been the linchpin moment of the series where they captured everyone’s spirit. However, by breaking it up and having different people reading it they destroyed all it’s energy. Having Adam’s daughter…sickly, adolescent daughter!.. reading the most famous line was unforgivable in my eyes, and having her no know how to pronounce the word “unalienable”, while realistic, killed the emotion it should have had. Even the town crier had a limp, ineffective voice when he read it from the doorstep of the courthouse.
Ugh. Awful! Those words needed to be spoken by someone with an immense power of voice.
You’ll never forget Richard Henry Lee after the song from the musical: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXnBRVLVqfQ (starts about 2:15)
I admit that that God in Heaven in everybody’s God…but I tell you, John, with pride, God leans a little on the side, of the Lees, the Lees of Old Virginia!
Thank you for your opinion, Michael Bay. I respectfully disagree.
You definitely never saw 1776. Lee gets a big musical number, almost all to himself. In it he names many of the famous Virginia “Lees”, most of whom I’ll bet aren’t familiar to most people today. Fame is fleeting.
There’s a lot of burbly, half-whispered, fake-realistic dialogue of the kind Hollywood loves, often obscured by shaky accents. That’s regrettable in a story that turns on ideas and relationships. When Giamatti, in one such passage, said someone must “chart the course,” I at first understood it as “shout the cause.”
Also, did Zjelko Ivanek play Wilkinson or Dickinson? If the former, I really do need to clean out the ole lug’oles.
Dickinson.
I noticed. I was looking up Adams’ bio and saw that Charles was born in 1770, so he was a big infant. They did look to be the right ages in 1775.
The problem with that, though, is that George Washington was a third generation Virginian. His great-grandfather had immigrated.
My great-grandfather immigrated here from Germany, and I don’t have a German accent.
Ack…last thing we need to do is to rehash the “Did Washington speak with a Southern accent?” question here. I thought most of the actors did a good job doing “not quite English/not quite Boston/not quite Southern” accents and that they fit well with the formality of their language compared to the “American” English we speak nowadays. I found the Rutledge accent most “interesting”…the actor (a first TV/movie role for him, apparently) reminded me of the guy who played Octavian in Rome and I kept hearing him as an upper class Roman.
Damn, where’s the newsreader from Rome when we need him?
I think Radar from MASH should say them.
One of the worst things about the lamentable musical 1776 is how it turns Lee into a cartoonish idiot, making puerile puns on his own name.
I had a question about the inoculation depicted in the second episode, but see that it’s already been answered in this thread. Gotta love the SDMB.
(HBO usually does a great job with their historical productions, but sometimes there’ll be a baffling anachronism, such as Essex whipping out a telescope to look for returning ships at the time of the Armada in Elizabeth I.)
I really enjoyed the McCullough book. By random luck I just picked up a great Franklin biography (“Benjamin Franklin: An American Life” by Walter Isaacson) which I’ve been reading on my trip out here and was finishing it up as I watched the first two episodes on HBO Sunday night. They have a copy of a draft DOI showing some of Franklin’s edits and he did indeed line out some of Jefferson’s words and replace them with “self-evident” amongst others.
Definitely recommend reading both, fascinating books about fascinating people.
R.e. tarring and feathering, anyone who has ever worked with asphalt can probably tell you how funny it is to get hot tar on yourself. I spent one summer in grad school working in a pavement engineering lab and can say with some authority that spilling even a little molten asphalt (about 275C IIRC) down your heat-proof gloves will get you to the lab sink so fast it looks like you just teleported there. Getting stripped and literally drenched with the stuff would probably do severe if not fatal damage to a person.
I’m a bit of a history geek; it almost gave me chills when I realized I was seeing Henry Knox hauling the captured guns from Ticonderoga. A great feat, and Knox is one of my favorite figures from the Revolution.
He was the one to whom Washington said the immortal words “Shift your fat ass Harry. But slowly, or you’ll tip the boat”