Posted on 08/02/2024 5:09:02 AM PDT by ProgressingAmerica
It’s summertime, which calls to mind the perennial question for parents: where can we take the kids on vacation and learn something along the way? That question sustains our nation’s massive heritage tourism industry. Odds are you already have a list full of destinations with fascinating museums and popular historic sites. But it’s not just about kids and vacations. In the buildup to the nation’s 2026 semiquincentennial birthday celebration, planners everywhere are hoping to leverage history tourism to boost their local economies.
Boston’s Freedom Trail—arguably the nation’s most popular American heritage tourism site— appears to offer a prime example for them to follow. The wildly popular self-guided Freedom Trail walking tour, which follows an actual red line drawn on city streets and sidewalks, has been leading tourists to the city’s most iconic historic sites since the 1950s. Think Bunker Hill, Old Ironsides, and the Boston Massacre.
(Excerpt) Read more at time.com ...
Check out this article. In TIME's rush to assault big evil windfall profits, they note a lack of true history - as if it should be the left wing gate keeping historians who tell the story?
Yet when reading the article, and I couldn't even finish it. I just kept thinking, "when are they going to rub racism raw?", "when are they going to rub racism raw?", "when are they going to rub racism raw?" And sure enough, they get to scratching salt on their favorite wound. It never fails. Journalists are genuinely stupid, stupid, stupid people. The whole lot of them are genuine fatheads.
Meanwhile, they'll stand in utter refusal to acknowledge that Boston prior to the Revolution was quite against slavery even while under British dominion. But we can't acknowledge that, of course! That would be, then, to admit that slavery is inherited from the prior order and abolitionism has American roots. No, no, America can't be the good guys!
Fatheads, idiots. Of course they want left wing gatekeeping historians to guard the history from prying eyes.
Apparently someone got bent about the Freedom Trail. Is there more to it than the article lets on?
Ask that question and you discover that the Freedom Trail’s story is really about who is remembered and who isn’t. And this points to why walking the Freedom Trail is only truly a vacation for those who have benefited from American prosperity in the last century.
Ask yourself: who hasn't benefited from American prosperity in the last century?
The answer is obvious: almost no one. America's poor people are rich by the standards of the world.
All of America has benefited from American prosperity in the last century.
How history is remembered works both ways. Everyone has heard of Crispus Attucks the mulatto sailor credited as the first American to die for freedom but few have heard of Samuel Gray or James Caldwell both white men. All three were killed on the spot at the Boston Massacre and there is no definitive evidence of who actually died first. Not to take anything away from Attucks but his spot in history is possibly slightly inflated for racial reasons. All three men should be credited as the first ones to die for Liberty.
More importantly to the media is that the Christianity can’t be portrayed as good... they tend to omit that leading abolitionists were Christians following Christian principles.
What a blazing, woke jackass. And yes, they are going to rub it raw, as much as they can. I listened to the Michele Tafoya Podcast yesterday, and she interviewed Tammy Bruce, a woman who had been the President of the Los Angeles chapter of the National Organization of Women (NOW) who became a conservative. She was part of the far Left, and became a conservative. When Tafoya asked her what it was that began the crystal growing in her that forced Tammy Bruce to leave the Left, she said it really began for her when someone with the national leadership told her (in essence) that there weren't problems they wanted to solve and put into the past, they wanted to let some of them persist and fester so there would always be a need for the National Organization for Women. It was that one incident that began her ideological fissure, ending in her Conservatism.
How very Alinskyite of NOW to want some things to persist and fester. Straight out of Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals", and it is the same attitude we see in race hustlers of the ilk of Jesse Jackson and his Rainbow Coalition over the years, which was all about race-baiting and rubbing racism raw so he could make money. Thank goodness he is probably confined to a bed somewhere so we don't have to worry about him rubbing a racial sore raw for the gold that lies beneath.
I read this paragraph:
"...In their minds, it also meant drawing the line carefully away from histories that might confront prosperous white tourists with urban poverty or ethnic and racial difference. They didn’t include a stop at the site of Boston’s famed Liberty Tree, for instance, because it was deemed to be too close to Chinatown. Schofield worried too about insolent street kids, and the problem of suburban tourists being “greeted with mobs of urchins at Paul Revere’s House.” And though Crispus Attucks—the formerly enslaved man celebrated as the first American killed in the Revolution—could just as well have been the trail’s mascot, it’s worth noting that by the 1950s Paul Revere had become a beloved symbol of white entrepreneurial manhood. Mark Bortman, the wealthy plastics magnate who chaired the Chamber of Commerce’s committee on historic places, was a Revere fanatic. He and the other men who drew the line loved seeing Revere on his horse..."
Everything is about race with people like this author. He bemoans the fact that Paul Revere is a beloved symbol of "White Entrepreneurial Manhood" (something the author could probably never aspire to) while a man who was killed by a British musket ball that was fired randomly into a crowd is supposed to be elevated above him because of the melanin content of his skin, and nothing else?
Talk about racism.
Anyone who knows anything about Paul Revere beyond his famous "ride" also knows he gets less credit for the things he did in every other aspect leading up to April 19, 1775 than he should have gotten.
He, Joseph Warren, and Samuel Adams where the heart and soul of what became Revolutionary America. Without those three men the American Revolution may never have taken place.
And the glue amongst the besieged New Englanders was not Joseph Warren or Samuel Adams, it was Paul Revere who transcended the different layers of class that existed, and could easily mingle and be accepted in all of them, top to bottom. That man deserves to have statue and a special place in the history of America, because over the centuries, he epitomized what America was-an entrepreneurial man with calloused hands and an apron who produced world famous quality work, and made money doing it, and he believed fervently in the right of every person to have that opportunity to do what he did.
That was what the American Revolution and the subsequent Constitution we adopted was all about: Equality of opportunity. The ability of anyone, of any station, to make and keep their own money.
You can tell I detested the opinion piece. A piece based on wokeness and Leftism at its root.
That is, and always has been, my attitude towards this.
And in my post above, I was going to mention both of those things you pointed out, that other men, non-black men, who had lives and families, died that night but nobody knows their names because they were “melanin-challenged”, and that who the hell knows who of those three died first?
Because that seems to be the shaped history of the Left, for political reasons, that a black man and former slave living in a Northern State just had to be designated the first one killed in the Revolution. They also push hard to make that the “start” of the American Revolution, but it wasn’t. It was another event in a series of events the culminated in the American Revolution.
But they have to make EVERYTHING about race, in the same way the Communists have to make EVERYTHING about The Party.
Just think what America could have accomplished if not for the endless obsession with race. All of the resources diverted to witch hunts over race, spending trillions for racial ‘equity’, spending all of our focus and energy on racial ‘offenses’ and words that people don’t like.
Just think if all that money and energy had been used on something productive - what America could have accomplished!
Is it true?
Saw on Facebook that Crispus Attucks was killed by a ricochet while looting the chemist’s store during the riot...
I am 100% in concurrence with that mindset.
Just think of where we might be if the policies and approaches of Booker T. Washington had become the default path to equality in this country (education, family, hard work, learning trades, and commerce with non-blacks) instead of someone like W.E.B Dubois, who was a Marxist in his approach to race relations.
It brings to mind a graphic I saw recently with George Floyd’s image on the left, and Thomas Sowell’s image on the right, with the question of why one of them is celebrated in the black community, and the other is not.
In my opinion, that is closer to the root of the problem in the black community than Police brutality. But that is for them to address, and I do see some indications that on some level, it is getting traction.
All I will say is do not disturb the “trash pile” in the middle of the pond at Boston Commons.
Swan doesn’t like to be disturbed. . . (grin)
"More importantly to the media is that the Christianity can’t be portrayed as good... they tend to omit that leading abolitionists were Christians following Christian principles."
This is one of the many aspects of how the left wing historians, the gate keepers, have prevented history from cutting both ways in the last century.
It's one thing for history to remember Crispus Attucks but forget the other named gentlemen just the same when Paul Revere is remembered but Wentworth Cheswell is forgotten. These are accidents. Accidents are the only way it can cut two ways.
What we have today is not accidental. The 1619 Project entirely and completely blames the United States for slavery on these lands even going so far as to blame the U.S. for what the Empire did. There's no two-way cutting about that sort of thing, it's just propaganda that benefits progressivism.
It has been my experience that yes, conservatives recognize the danger posed by journalism in the media. However, there is a blindness to the danger and the threat from the historians. Historians have been manipulating U.S. history to gain progressive ends since the Progressive Era starting in the 1900s. Do we have an MRC? Yes, we do. We do not have an HRC.
We are not prepared to defend our own history.
I agree.
You know, reading these old books as we are, it’s only going to make things better and not worse. You start to see just how active a role the historians are playing in destroying our national culture.
100%. I could not be MORE in agreement. That is one of the reasons I enjoy these old books, as they were written in a different time.
One is tempted to paint these authors from the 19th and 20th Century as unsophisticated nationalists, but if someone does so, I would counter that they aren’t “unsophisticated” especially since they didn’t have Google as a source to find information, and even if they were nationalists, how is that in any way inferior in quality to authors with a known anti-American, anti-truth bias?
Given the choice between two evils, I will choose the side of those authors from the 19th and 20th Century. They may have a bias, but at least is isn’t a bias in polluted waters.
Whoops. I think I said that backward.
The more of these old books you read from prior to the progressive era, the worse it is going to get. The more information you have, the worse it will be known to be.
The Founders are in fact better than all of us know.
Sometimes I almost get the humorous feeling they were aliens, they seemed so unlike many Americans (or anyone else) before and after them.
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