It’s like Washington and the cherry tree: what’s historically notable about that? Alfred and the cakes is an origin story for the UK.
FWIW, one of the reasons these stories are significant is because it’s how we learn about “The Presidents of the United States.”. Which begs the question: why should we learn the presidents? Or the names of the States? Or, in this case, the history of England?
Goddammit! I was going to say that! :mad:
The storming of the airports during the Revolutionary War
Frederick the Great’s clever method of introducing the potato to Germany: post guards around a potato warehouse, turning them into something mysterious and obviously valuable, then instruct the guards to look the other way whenever someone tried to steal the potatoes …
… was actually done, but by a Frenchman (Antoine-Augustin Parmentier) years later, after he’d spent time in Germany as a prisoner-of-war and taken a liking to potatoes. Frederick himself used the more straightforward method of subsidizing potato farmers.
(Source: John Reader, “Propitious Esculent”.)
I WAS JUST GOING TO LOOK THIS UP. Because I’ve always liked the story, but the thread title suddenly made me think, I wonder if that’s real?
Yep. That was a joke made in “Punch” as I recall, about what Napier should have reported.
It might have happened multiple times, but the story I read was that it was Ioannis Kapodistrias of Greece.
Catharine Winkworth suggested it as the sort of thing Napier ought to have telegraphed
Ignorance fought – I’d always imagined until now, that he did indeed telegraph the word. I take it then, that the companion episode of classical wit a decade-and-some later – Lord Dalhousie taking over Oudh state into direct British rule, and telegraphing back home “Vovi” – “I have owed” [Oudh] – is equally spurious.
Still, true or not, I can go on enjoying my fantasy of the telegraph company’s directors’ imploring the empire-building types: “Guys, please knock it off with the Latin puns: they bewilder our rank-and-file employees, and they’re not even very funny.”
Slavery abolished throughout the British Empire 1833. And that after several previous Acts outlawing the slave trade starting in 1793. From 1808 The British military actively suppressed the slave trade, capturing slave ships and releasing their prisoners.
In what way did it end in the United States first?
Umm, that’s a link that points to a discussion about Peary, which doesn’t mention Cook at all. Even taking the wider page, it’s hardly accepting of Cook’s claim.
For, surely, pretty much nobody accepts Cook’s claim at this point, though he certainly had his contemporary supporters. The evidence that he’d previously faked his claim about climbing Denali is pretty unambiguous. The current consensus seems to follow Wally Herbert’s conclusions: Peary didn’t reach the Pole, but made a fist of it and only then lied, while Cook barely went out onto the ice and fabricated the whole thing from there.
A lot of European countries officially abolished slavery in the early to mid 1800’s but their African colonies remained with slavery just simply not called slavery, and because they were way out there nobody really seemed to notice or care. The British and French African colonies were still working local Africans to death with no/minimal pay to help produce supplies during World War 2 for example.
And during the same period America treated their persons of color with the utmost respect and equality?
The whole of The West Wing. When the series first ran, and before I moved to the U.S., occasionally I would forget if something had really happened or if it was in an episode of The West Wing. Sadly, that is no longer the case.
“Hands up, don’t shoot !” Too soon?
wiki
“The Slavery Abolition Act 1833 (3 & 4 Will. IV c. 73) abolished slavery throughout the British Empire. This Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom expanded the jurisdiction of the Slave Trade Act 1807 which made the purchase or ownership of slaves illegal within the British Empire, *with the exception of “the Territories in the Possession of the East India Company”, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), and Saint Helena. Yet slaves in the colony of Jamaica were not emancipated until 1838. *”
Italics mine.
Now, that just means it ended in ALL parts of the British Empire much later than we think (India 1843) . Still they beat out the USA in 1865, but not by a lot.
Perhaps, maybe the other exception is: “In Australia, blackbirding and the holding of indigenous workers’ pay “in trust” continued, in some instances into the 1970s” but that more gets into types of modern slavery.
Just because Cook faked his ascent of Mount McKinley doesnt mean he faked his trip to the Pole. There is solid evidence that Peary caused Cooks evidence Polar trip to be lost. Cook was gone for 14 months into the Arctic.
After the Mount Denali expedition, Cook returned to the Arctic in 1907. He planned to attempt to reach the North Pole, although he did not announce his intention until August 1907, when he was already in the Arctic. He left Annoatok, a small settlement in the north of Greenland, in February 1908. Cook claimed that he reached the pole on April 21, 1908, after traveling north from Axel Heiberg Island, taking with him only two Inuit men, Ahpellah and Etukishook. On the journey south, he claimed to have been cut off from his intended route to Annoatok by open water. Living off local game, his party was forced to push south to Jones Sound, spending the open water season and part of the winter on Devon Island. From there they traveled north, eventually crossing Nares Strait to Annoatok on the Greenland side in the spring of 1909. They said they almost died of starvation during the journey…Cook never produced detailed original navigational records to substantiate his claim to have reached the North Pole. He said that his detailed records were part of his belongings, contained in three boxes, which he left at Annoatok in April 1909. He had left them with Harry Whitney, an American hunter who had traveled to Greenland with Peary the previous year due to the lack of manpower for a second sledge-journey 700 miles south to Upernavik. When Whitney tried to bring Cook’s boxes with him on his return to the USA on Peary’s ship Roosevelt in 1909, Peary refused to allow them on board. As a result, Whitney left Cook’s boxes in a cache in Greenland. They were never found…The Peary expedition’s people (primarily Matthew Henson, who had a working knowledge of Inuit, and George Borup, who did not) claimed that Ahwelah and Etukishook told them they had traveled only a few days from land. A map allegedly was drawn by Ahwelaw and Etukishook that correctly located and accurately depicted then-unknown Meighen Island, which strongly suggests that they visited it as they claimed.
The Peary expedition interviewed Cooks assistants,:dubious::rolleyes: and Peary, personally refused to allow Cooks documents aboard.
Trayvon Martin was attacked.
Hillary Clinton was exonerated by James Comey.
As a defense of the claim that Cook reached the pole, this all just seems rather, well, incoherent. (Meighen Island, for example, is only about 80[sup]o[/sup] north and so of marginal relevance.)