WhoDat!656

For our service men and women!!

lee909

Happy 4th July from you resident anti-monarchist English/Irishman

foreverfan

Danno

A classic.

Its sad that I'll use that line occasionally and some youngster will say "Germans? It was the Japanese that bombed Pearl Harbor, not the Germans".

I immediately feel really really old.

Danno

John Adams wrote, in a letter to his wife:
The second day of July, 1776, will be the most memorable epoch in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be commemorated as the day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forever more.

Danno

Wow, I got like a whopping 4 friggin questions right. I suck at trivia.

Answers...
1. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams (1826) and James Monroe (1831)
2. Zachary Taylor. He became ill with cholera that night and died five days later.
3. 1776
4. Vicksburg, Miss. It came a day after the Union victory at Gettysburg, marking a turning point in the Civil War
5. Ann Landers and Abigail Van Buren (real names: Esther "Eppie" Lederer and Pauline Phillips)
6. 19 innings. The game ended at 3:55 a.m., and the Braves then fired off their Independence Day fireworks, leading many local residents to believe the city was under attack.
7. June 14, 1777. This date is observed as Flag Day.
8. Seven.
9. The bombardment of Fort McHenry
10. Philadelphia, 1960
11. So no one state would be above another.
12. True. The phrase was added in 1954.
13. William Henry Harrison, who died of pneumonia shortly after his inauguration. He served only 32 days, from March 4 to April 4, 1841.
14. Thomas Jefferson
15. William Howard Taft, on April 14, 1910, at Griffith Stadium in Washington, D.C.
16. Alexander Graham Bell (called by President Rutherford Hayes)
17. James Madison
18. Andrew Jackson
19. John Tyler (15)
20. Hot dogs
21. Warren G. Harding
22. Rutherford Hayes, in 1876
23. Chester Arthur (also the first to employ a full-time valet)
24. Franklin Roosevelt (April 30, 1939)
25. Thoms Jefferson and John Adams

SmashMouth

What Abraham Lincoln thought about Fourth of July, Declaration of Independence

In the 1850s, Abraham Lincoln's rhetoric was suffused with a profound sense of loss. He considered it shameful national backsliding that a new affirmative defense of slavery had arisen in the South. At the time of the Founding our nation had merely tolerated slavery; now, it was an institution actively celebrated in part of the country.
In a letter in 1855 despairing of ending slavery, Lincoln wrote to the Kentuckian George Robertson that "the fourth of July has not quite dwindled away; it is still a great day--/for burning fire-crackers/!!!"
At around this time, Lincoln fastened on the Declaration of Independence as "his political chart and inspiration,” in the words of his White House secretary John G. Nicolay.
He made it the guidepost by which the country could return to its lost ideals. His example shows the enduring vitality and the endless potential for renewal that is inherent in the Declaration.
The truths of the Declaration are eternally relevant, a perpetual call to honor liberty and the dignity of the individual.
Distant from his own father, Lincoln felt a deep affection for the men he called “the fathers.” In a speech as a young man, he said that it is our duty to transmit “undecayed” our inheritance of constitutional liberty, out of “gratitude to our fathers, justice to ourselves, duty to posterity, and love for our species in general.”
In his great anti-slavery speech in Peoria in 1854, he said, “I love the sentiments of those old time men.”
Those sentiments weren't universally admired. For the Slave South, the Declaration's statement that "all men are created equal" was nonsense. John C. Calhoun called it nothing less than “the most false and dangerous of all political error.”
Southern extremist George Fitzhugh agreed. “Liberty and equality are new things under the sun,” he sniffed. Indiana senator John Pettit called the central contention of the Declaration “a self-evident lie.”
In his 1852 eulogy for the great statesman Henry Clay, Lincoln noted how the Declaration was increasingly assailed "for the sake of perpetuating slavery."
In his Peoria speech, he lamented that “Little by little, but steadily as a man’s march to the grave, we have been giving up the OLD for the NEW faith.” He imagined what would have happened had Senator Pettit denigrated the Declaration during the Founding generation: “If it had been said in old Independence Hall, seventy-eight years ago, the very door-keeper would have throttled the man and thrust him into the street.”
Lincoln wanted to catch the falling flag of our patriotic patrimony. Lincoln urged that we “re-adopt” the Declaration, as he put it at Peoria. The road to salvation ran through 1776, he argued in one passage: “Our republican robe is soiled, and trailed in the dust. Let us re-purify it. Let us turn and wash it white, in the spirit, if not the blood, of the Revolution.”
Lincoln believed that this renewal is exactly the purpose for which the Declaration had been intended.
In a 1859 letter to a Republican festival in Boston marking the anniversary of Jefferson’s birth, he wrote: “All honor to Jefferson—to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.”
Lincoln used the Declaration as such a rebuke and stumbling block to slavery. He wielded it as a rhetorical weapon, made it a rallying cry, and established it by the end of the war as national gospel.
The truths of the Declaration are eternally relevant, a perpetual call to honor liberty and the dignity of the individual. The Fourth of July, in short, should never be a day just for burning firecrackers.


Read more: What Abraham Lincoln thought about Fourth of July, Declaration of Independence | Fox News

TheOak

Fairly comprehensive Flag trivia. Also what someone going to an NCO board in the ARMY should know about the flag.

http://www.armystudyguide.com/flashc...rds.php?cat=58

TheOak

Patrick Henry ~ "Guard with jealous attention the public liberty.
Suspect every one who approaches that jewel.
Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force.
Whenever you give up that force, you are inevitably ruined."


Patrick Henry ~ "Let us trust God and our better judgment to set us right hereafter. United we stand, divided we fall. Let us not split into factions which must destroy that union upon which our existence hangs. Let us preserve our strength for the French, the English, the Germans, or whoever else shall dare invade our territory, and not exhaust it in civil commotions and intestine wars."

ChrisXVI

Well... I had the option of having today off of work but I have a baby on the way so I chose to work. I need to make that good holiday pay with me and wifey's first child on the way! The good news is that in 6 months we'll add another little Who Dat to the world!