“What does Cotton 1706 stand for??”
It refers to Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin (born in 1706). If you’re not familiar with Mather, he was basically the Billy Graham of his day. I had seen a documentary on Franklin around the time I chose the screen name.
My favorite story about the two was when Mather and Franklin (Mather quite old and Franklin quite young) were walking down a stairway, and the ceilings in stairways at the time were low and Franklin bumped his head, to which Mather replied, always stoop through life and you’ll avoid a lot of bumps. In other words, be humble in your doings and you’ll run into less problems.
Yes, I’m very familiar with Cotton Mather which was why I asked you about your name. The year 1706 threw me off. He was born long before that. He was a very interesting person. Smart and educated. He also, IIRC, he was a slave owner.
A lot of Boston folks still feel superior to Southerners feeling, falsely, that northerners would never be slave owners. Of course they are fooling themselves. Northerners owned a lot of slaves. Northerners used cotton in their mills and made a lot of money off the work of slaves. It’s fun to visit the cemetery where he’s buried and tell people he was a slave owner. Of course they won’t believe it.
I should have added - Cotton Mather introduced the concept of inoculations Boston. Small pox was a real scourge in those days and it was Cotton’s slave that told him about getting inoculated when he was in Africa - or so the story goes. Cotton tried to get the residents to accept the idea and had some success.