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New audiobook release: The Capture of Fort William and Mary
PGA Weblog ^

Posted on 06/04/2024 7:03:21 AM PDT by ProgressingAmerica

We have an amendment, the Second Amendment, because in part when the colonists had no say in how their own societies should be run and what they wanted most was self-government, Britain though it a good idea to confiscate. Mostly the confiscation centered around gunpowder, but there were along with it plots and schemes to take away actual weapons such as guns and cannons.

Today we have the story of The Capture of Fort William and Mary, which details a unique and fun chapter in pre-U.S. history in which the colonists said we are going to disarm you before you disarm us.

It's a short work, coming in at just over 1 hour total recording time for the entire book. Its more like a pamphlet, really. But it does highlight a distinct truth. Americans are fearful of weapons regulation by government because it has always led to (or coincided with) a domineering government, and that includes right here in our own country's unique and amazing history.

I hope everyone will take a listen. This story is not nearly as well-known as it need be, but now it is powered by its own audio book. I'm looking forward to listening to it too.

https://librivox.org/the-capture-of-fort-william-and-mary-by-charles-lathrop-parsons/


TOPICS: Books/Literature; Education; History; Military/Veterans
KEYWORDS: 2ndamendment; audiobook; banglist; fortwilliamandmary; freeperbookclub; godsgravesglyphs; guncontrol; librivox; nra; pages; secondamendment; theframers; therevolution

1 posted on 06/04/2024 7:03:21 AM PDT by ProgressingAmerica
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To: Glad2bnuts; ebshumidors; nicollo; Kalam; IYAS9YAS; laplata; mvonfr; Southside_Chicago_Republican; ..

Ping......


2 posted on 06/04/2024 7:04:25 AM PDT by ProgressingAmerica (The historians must be stopped. They're destroying everything.)
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To: DesertRhino

Another friendly ping


3 posted on 06/04/2024 7:04:59 AM PDT by ProgressingAmerica (The historians must be stopped. They're destroying everything.)
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4 posted on 06/04/2024 10:08:25 AM PDT by SunkenCiv (Putin should skip ahead to where he kills himself in the bunker.)
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To: rlmorel

I just finished listening, thank you.

You know the sad thing is this. If this were taught in government schools they would make you memorize 1) How many barrels were taken 2) what was the date of the event, and the second event 3) what were the names of the British ships 4) which known founding fathers [if any] participated, 5) what towns are nearby, and other completely wooden and boring memorization facts that kids would hate.

This short work (and your reading amplifies, I think) highlights the adventure of it all. I don’t really like this other word because of its potential negative connotations, but it does highlight the intrigue of it all. The story and the action and the culture are all here. You get the relevance and the interesting stuff.

Your recording of Joseph Warren which I also recently just completed, does the same thing. Yes there are plenty of wooden stick facts there, but you get an idea of impact, the story, the situation.

The schools could kill Harry Potter if they taught Potter the way American history is taught. I think that’s really the gold in the gold mine with all of these old works and those yet to be recorded, is that the interesting story is properly framed instead of being systematically sabotaged.

It’s the culture. These people who founded our country were simply amazing.


5 posted on 06/05/2024 4:05:40 PM PDT by ProgressingAmerica (The historians must be stopped. They're destroying everything.)
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To: ProgressingAmerica

Thank you for your kind words, FRiend. I can’t tell you how grateful I am that you steered me into this. I’d like to hope the more I read, the better I will get at the craft. I don’t know if I could ever do individual voices, as I just heard done in a phenomenal version of Rudyard Kipling’s “Kim”, but...even if I don’t, I am enjoying it because I am reading books I have never read. It is a win-win…

By the way-this turned out to be kind of long. But your observations hit home.

When you began discussing the way history is taught in schools, it made me think about it, my own experiences…

My whole life, I liked history. Those are the kinds of things that attracted me as soon as I remember reading… One of the first full length books I remember reading was “30 Seconds Over Tokyo”… Or at least, that was the first book I checked out with my new library card. And I got average to better than average grades in History, which was really good for me. I was an awful student. Hated school.

But I didn’t get bitten with the history bug until I got out of the Navy. Living up in Massachusetts, as an adult, I began to see all the history around me. Everywhere.

Sure, when I lived over in the Philippines and Japan, there was history there too… But it was different.

When I was a Boy Scout, I went on the route of the Bataan Death March. I remember the winding roads, and the white obelisks at various places along the March. I can’t remember, it’s been so long, but I seem to remember reading things like “14 American soldiers were put to Death here on April 14, 1942 by the Japanese army“.

I don’t honestly remember if they had inscriptions on them or mile markers, but I do remember understanding just what that was that happened at that point. But history was much closer there, in the Philippines.

In Japan, it was a little different. there wasn’t, predictably, a lot of WWI history, even though they had plenty of history, most interestingly, to my mind at that point was the Japanese dreadnought Mikasa that was embedded in concrete just outside the naval base in Yokosuka,Japan.

I used to climb under the fence to go look at it from the outside. I didn’t have enough money to go on board and take a tour, but I did remember how excited I was when my school went on a field trip to the vessel

But the weirdest thing for me was, going on the ship. It was disappointing.

As a military dependent, ten or eleven years old, I was the equivalent of what I think they called a Wharf Rat. I used to go down to the docks where the ships were tied up, and try to get a sailor to take me on board and give me a tour.

Occasionally, it worked. I got to go on an attack sub (don’t recall name) the USS Constellation, and a few others. I even got to serve Mass on the USS New Jersey when it was in port. As a persistent kid, I had seen a good number of ships and what they looked like inside. Hatches. Fire Stations. Ladders. That kind of thing.

So, on the day my fourth grade class took a trip off base to the Mikasa, I was pretty excited. (If I recall correctly, we were also going to take a ferry out to Monkey Island, a place with abandoned bunkers and caged monkeys who would throw feces at you and I had one that impossibly grabbed my crewcut hair when I got too close) But first, in the morning, we were going on the Mikasa. (For those who don’t know, the Mikasa was a Japanese Dreadnaught that served as Admiral Togo’s flagship in the battle of Tsushima Straits, where they inflicted on the Russian Navy an astonishing (and for the Russians, humiliating) defeat.

It’s hulk survived the war, because the Japanese would never break it up for scrap, and the allies declined to bomb it. At the end of the war, Chester Nimitz worked on the committee to raise funds to restore the Mikasa.

So, on the day I went on it, I fully expected to see hatches with dogs on them, ladders, ect. It painted gray on the ouside, still had the big guns, looked like a dreadnought.

But going inside-they had hollowed it out and we walked into a big room with a movie screen, carpeted floor, etc. It was a conference room with paneled walls. I was disappointed.

But even if that was the only real Japanese military history in public, there was the evidence everywhere you looked of WWII, if you took the time to look. The caves everywhere, burrowed into the smooth green Japanese terrain on the base. All of them boarded up (except for one my brother and I found where the lock was broken and almost got lost in that cave in the pitch black when our light went out.) Or the huge drydocks that the IJN Taiho was built in, the largest warship ever sunk, as it was built on the converted hull of a Yamato Class battleship. And they also had the air-raid sirens, which I simply assumed were left over from the war, and which they sounded twice a day IIRC, once at noon, and once at 5 PM. They gave a creepy, eerie wail, as the air raid sirens all across the base were sounded, and the wavelength of each drifted in and out of synch with the others giving it that characteristic scary sound.

So, when my dad retired from the USN and moved our family back to his hometown in Massachusetts, I lived there two years, and then joined the Navy. But I spent those next four years focusing on myself, how I fit into my unit, and what I was going to do with my friends when I went home on leave. No time for history.

But when I got out and went to college, I began noticing all the rich Revolutionary War history around me, everywhere. The field at Lexington. The bridge at Concord. The place where Paul Revere was stopped by a British Patrol on his famous ride. The actual road the British marched resolutely out on that fateful morning, and scrambled back on in panic and exhaustion later that day.

I got bit hard by the history bug. And on a nice spring morning, I can go out to the bridge in Concord when there is nobody there. In the early morning, the sun is up, the temperature may be cool, but after winter, it feels like a summer day. The birds are flying around, and the Concord River slowly flows by, mucha as it did back in 1775. When it is like that, I can imagine looking across that bridge and seeing the Red Coats massed on the other side, their bright crimson woolen tunics, spotless white britches, bayonets gleaming in the morning sun.

I can just see that so vividly at that time. Just amazing.

Recently, I went to the museum in downtown Concord, and there was a glass case when you walked up and approached a staircase. In it, there was some artifact.

When stopped to read, I stared at it.

It was an old lamp. It was one of the two lamps that had been in the Old North Church to send the “One if by land, Two if by sea” message.

It took away my breath. There it was, just a foot away from me, real, honest-to-goodness history. Some hand had touched that very lantern hundreds of years ago, and set history into action.

THAT is why I love history.

And the fact that you have steered me towards books I would never have read, and even more people would have never even heard of makes me feel that a love a little bit as a read, because you showed my the way into the door.

When you talked about how history is taught, I thought “My God. How. How can they make History UNINTERESTING?” How, Indeed. You explained it well. In that light, I would like to think that, by getting involved in this, we can play a part in making it accessible to people who might get bit by the bug as well.


6 posted on 06/05/2024 6:51:39 PM PDT by rlmorel (In Today's Democrat America, The $5 Dollar Bill is the New $1 Dollar Bill.)
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To: rlmorel
My favorite quote out of the history of the revolution that encapsulates everything, an excerpt from a speech given by Samuel Adams at the Philadelphia State house on August 1st , 1776: "If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or your arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen. Among the natural rights of the colonists are these: first, a right to life; secondly, to liberty; thirdly to property; together with the right to support and defend them in the best manner they can. The liberties of our country, the freedom of our civil Constitution, are worth defending at all hazards; and it is our duty to defend them against all attacks. We have received them as a fair inheritance from our worthy ancestors: they purchased them for us with toil and danger and expense of treasure and blood, and transmitted them to us with care and diligence. It will bring an everlasting mark of infamy on the present generation, enlightened as it is, if we should suffer them to be wrested from us by violence without a struggle, or to be cheated out of them by the artifices of false and designing men." The men and women who founded our country were amazing people.I hope there are still a few like them around now. If one has read history, and experienced it as well, one is half way there to following in their path.
7 posted on 06/05/2024 7:43:37 PM PDT by Candor7 (Ask not for whom the Trump Trolls,He trolls for thee!),<img src="" width=500</img><a href="">tag</a>)
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To: Candor7

Yes! Brilliant choice!


8 posted on 06/05/2024 7:47:59 PM PDT by rlmorel (In Today's Democrat America, The $5 Dollar Bill is the New $1 Dollar Bill.)
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To: rlmorel

Thank you for sharing your experiences, I’ve never been there to see for myself, but it is strange that there is a huge lack of WWI history in Japan. There isn’t much of it here in the States either, almost seems like it has been memory-holed. The next big book I want to record is about WWI, but it will be a long time before I can get past short works.

As for the rest, I’m glad you are enjoying this. Over time I have developed a seemingly contradictory affinity for free stuff sourced online, partially because I enjoy (in turn) giving things away that people can use, and partially driven by my own curiosity and need to learn more - limited by money I don’t have or shouldn’t use to buy the next 300 books. Which then runs into time limitations to not sit down and not read them anyways.

The strength of open source though is that these things once put online can never ever go away, not with institutional backing of the sort we have tapped into.

Librivox/Archive.org and backed by packaging up to YouTube as well as direct Wikipedia pointers, that’s why in part they get so huge an amount of hits once released to the general public.

But I will say, with respect to Founders John Langdon and Paul Revere and the rest of the boys who had some role in the scene of capturing the fort, as well as Joseph Warren - you’re doing them all a great honor in giving them their voices back. That and your doing Senator McCarthy’s book. That was a genius item that opens up Librivox to a whole different crowd than would have previously never even known Librivox was there - or only considered Librivox for enjoyment items. Plays, Shakespeare stuff, or other light hearted things.

Two of the books I’m sitting on at LV (both are way past 1923) simply would not exist at all if not directly for your sleuthing about copyright limitations on McCarthy’s work. At least one I suspect you’ll probably take an interest in.


9 posted on 06/05/2024 9:43:08 PM PDT by ProgressingAmerica (The historians must be stopped. They're destroying everything.)
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To: ProgressingAmerica
"...Two of the books I’m sitting on at LV (both are way past 1923) simply would not exist at all if not directly for your sleuthing about copyright limitations on McCarthy’s work. At least one I suspect you’ll probably take an interest in..."

I am always interested!

My next project might not be a Librivox recording, I am thinking of dictating a book written by a friend who is a USMC LTCOL (Ret.) who recounts his experiences when he served in Vietnam...I will enjoy reading it aloud.

10 posted on 06/06/2024 5:02:10 AM PDT by rlmorel (In Today's Democrat America, The $5 Dollar Bill is the New $1 Dollar Bill.)
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To: rlmorel

You will certainly do your friend proud and I hope that once it is available that it sells well. One thing that is often lost with these recountings of events is the power of the spoken word - an enhancement you can bring with the mic. They often times only get written, published, and that’s the end of it.

There will be expressions he will want to emphasize that are not always possible in text or are just simply more natural when directed by the original story teller. You can make that happen. Will he be working with you as you go chapter by chapter to make sure those feelings are to a certain degree brought to the surface?

It should be really good, especially now that you’ve had numerous books’ worth of experience and practice.


11 posted on 06/06/2024 3:42:24 PM PDT by ProgressingAmerica (The historians must be stopped. They're destroying everything.)
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To: Candor7; rlmorel

FWIW:

The Writings of Samuel Adams, Volume 2 (free audiobook)
https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/4013893/posts


12 posted on 06/06/2024 4:14:10 PM PDT by ProgressingAmerica (The historians must be stopped. They're destroying everything.)
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To: ProgressingAmerica

Ping.


13 posted on 06/20/2024 4:49:36 PM PDT by Chainmail (You can vote your way into Socialism - but you will have to shoot your way out.)
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To: JohnRLott

Friendly ping.............

“the colonists said we are going to disarm you before you disarm us.” (my words)


14 posted on 11/05/2024 10:41:49 AM PST by ProgressingAmerica (We cannot vote our way out of these problems. The only way out is to activist our way out.)
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