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Violent, lively and brash, taverns were everywhere in early colonial America

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Re: Violent, lively and brash, taverns were everywhere in early colonial America

#91

Post by cafard »

floren wrote: post #8
Footkerchief wrote: post #6

> By 1775, however, sporadic rioting and violence in and around taverns transitioned into outright war when a group of ‘minute men’ gathered at the Buckman Tavern in Lexington, Massachusetts on 19 April 1775, just before murdering more than 70 British troops. Murder of the British is a strange take on the events of Lexington and Concord. The author appears to be scraping. Is the assertion that the taverns caused publ…

He has some, ah, unique takes scattered throughout: > American forces – well, the French and Spanish forces, along with the sputtering Americans – managed to win the American Revolution in 1783. Make no mistake, the French forces were key, but to lay the victory at the feet of the Spanish ahead of the Americans throws the whole piece into question.

On Virginia Avenue NW in Washington, DC, there is a statue of one Galvez, who led Spanish forces in the Mississippi Valley area, fighting against the British. But that was a long way from the main theatre of operations.

Re: Violent, lively and brash, taverns were everywhere in early colonial America

#92

Post by NoImmatureAdHom »

est31 wrote: post #86
NoImmatureAdHom wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I said "many places" not "all places"... Doesn't mean that people living in those areas don't have to watch out. I agree that there is some non-zero number of people in the U.S. who have to watch out for gun murder. The point I'm trying to make is that they make up a really small proportion of the population. Anecdotes are fun. > As for gun murders being a rare death cause, indeed if you average over all age ranges…

> As an aside, thinking about this (and many other things) in terms of ordinal rankings will often lead you down the wrong path. "Top four reasons" tells us nothing at all. If there are 5,000 categories constructed and they are roughly evenly distributed, "top four" tells us nothing. If 99% of the probability mass is in #1, "top four" tells us nothing. That is correct, but please note that it's still a significant co…

> but please note that it's still a significant component.

I guess my overall point is it's not important. Even if the ordinal ranking is informative in this case (your argument), the overall likelihood of any kind of death is so low that we shouldn't care very much about the ranking.

Re: Violent, lively and brash, taverns were everywhere in early colonial America

#93

Post by NoImmatureAdHom »

watwut wrote: post #71
throwaway0a5e wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>. And they are concentrated in certain types of places (e.g., poor urban ghetto) such that the parts of the country that aren't these places have vanishingly small probabilities of being hurt by a shooting. And even then they are basically concentrated around illegal parts of the economy. Drug traffickers, pimps, etc. can't use the courts and the police so when it comes to settling disputes they have to DIY their ow…

Afaik, personal conflict and relationships are most common reasons for murders. It is less likely to be business nowdays and more likely that someone violent with poor impulse control got angry at friend again.

This was my understanding too

Re: Violent, lively and brash, taverns were everywhere in early colonial America

#94

Post by Balgair »

djohnston wrote: post #2

i would enjoy a VR game where i could sit in an old tavern while i drink an actual beer

Cal Newport recently talked about this feeling on his blog [0]. These 'ambient' experiences have the power to be very deep with VR/AR.

[0] https://www.calnewport.com/blog/2020/11/23/on-technology-and...

Re: Violent, lively and brash, taverns were everywhere in early colonial America

#95

Post by disown »

klmadfejno wrote: post #50
Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Murder of the British is a strange take on the events of Lexington and Concord. The outbreak of the American Revolution in 1775 can fairly be called an act of violence. The American colonies in the early days of the conflict were pretty evenly split between loyalists and revolutionaries. The latter ultimately won the day in large part by burning down loyalists’ houses or tarring and feathering them, sending some of…

Nobody is doubting it was an act of violence. The oddity is that they're calling it an act of murder as opposed to an act of war. Murder sounds like a bunch of criminals, which is a really one sided take. The british soldiers were there to destroy colonial military supplies. It may be technically correct, but you don't hear about how the GIs murdered a bunch of Nazis on the beaches of Normandy or whatever other war s…

> It may be technically correct, but you don't hear about how the GIs murdered a bunch of Nazis on the beaches of Normandy or whatever other war suits your fancy. Save for the particularly one sided conflicts.

That's because the nazis lost. If they had won, as Robert McNamara said, we'd be called murderers and criminals and our leaders would have been hanged for crimes against humanity.

Not only did the british call the revolutionaries murderers, they also called them terrorists since the revolutionaries were attacking and terrorizing the loyalists. Ironic huh? One man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist.

As strange as it sounds, in an alternate universe where the brits won, the history books probably describe the revolutionaries as murderers and terrorists. Can you imagine how odd it would be to view Benedict Arnold as a hero and George Washington as the villain?

> there was no ambiguity that the revolutionary war was a bloody conflict.

And there certainly was no ambuigity about who were the good guys and who were the bad guys.

History is just one part of nation building propaganda. The people in charge ( usually the winners ) get to write it. Fundamentally, there are no good guys or bad guys, just winners and losers in history.

Re: Violent, lively and brash, taverns were everywhere in early colonial America

#96

Post by daveslash »

Not too far from where I grew up in Downeast Maine is a Tavern in that was built in 1770. It's where some locals planned to capture a British Lt., which ultimately led to the first naval engagement of the Revolutionary war. [1]

It's website is.... nostalgic....[2]

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burnham_Tavern

[2] https://burnhamtavern.com/

Re: Violent, lively and brash, taverns were everywhere in early colonial America

#97

Post by [deleted] »

quantummkv wrote: post #64
scarmig wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm increasingly hearing the idea (from Hindu nationalists?) that the caste system was the invention of the British, not anything indigenous. If anyone's in the know, I'd be curious to hear what's broadly accepted among historians nowadays.

What classical Hinduism had was the varna system, where you were a member of a particular varna according your jobs and qualifications (for eg, bhramans were supposed to be learners and teachers of scriptures, analogous to professors and phd's today). And even this varna system was debated and discusses throughout classical Hinduism, as with every other idea in Hinduism was. But overtime, especially when people of di…

[deleted]

Re: Violent, lively and brash, taverns were everywhere in early colonial America

#98

Post by klmadfejno »

disown wrote: post #95
klmadfejno wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody is doubting it was an act of violence. The oddity is that they're calling it an act of murder as opposed to an act of war. Murder sounds like a bunch of criminals, which is a really one sided take. The british soldiers were there to destroy colonial military supplies. It may be technically correct, but you don't hear about how the GIs murdered a bunch of Nazis on the beaches of Normandy or whatever other war s…

> It may be technically correct, but you don't hear about how the GIs murdered a bunch of Nazis on the beaches of Normandy or whatever other war suits your fancy. Save for the particularly one sided conflicts. That's because the nazis lost. If they had won, as Robert McNamara said, we'd be called murderers and criminals and our leaders would have been hanged for crimes against humanity. Not only did the british call…

> That's because the nazis lost. If they had won, as Robert McNamara said, we'd be called murderers and criminals and our leaders would have been hanged for crimes against humanity.

Perhaps this is just an American thing, but I wouldn't call the Nazi soldiers killing American soldiers murderers either. The holocaust is murder, if not superceded by the term genocide. Something can be an unjust killing and still not be murder.

Re: Violent, lively and brash, taverns were everywhere in early colonial America

#99

Post by klmadfejno »

beaner wrote: post #68
klmadfejno wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody is doubting it was an act of violence. The oddity is that they're calling it an act of murder as opposed to an act of war. Murder sounds like a bunch of criminals, which is a really one sided take. The british soldiers were there to destroy colonial military supplies. It may be technically correct, but you don't hear about how the GIs murdered a bunch of Nazis on the beaches of Normandy or whatever other war s…

I'm not a historian but isn't there some ambiguity here? If war hadn't already been declared by the relevant governments, you can't be killing in the name of war.

This is just semantics, but I think not. If you're attacking a military unit to achieve a military objective, murder feels inappropriate. In my opinion, murder tends:

* to be done by an individual, not a group

* tends to happen to one, or a few victims. It's odd to describe someone as murdering 70 people at once.

* tends to imply the victim was not professionally engaged in such a way that their death in those circumstances is not a plausible concern

* the motive is not political, else it is an assassination

Re: Violent, lively and brash, taverns were everywhere in early colonial America

#100

Post by bobthepanda »

epicureanideal wrote: post #54
bobthepanda wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They were presented in mine, though New York being the center of Loyalist America probably had something to do with it.

Interesting! I wonder how it has influenced political parties etc. to the present?

I don't think it has influenced political parties per se, because New York has had so much immigration that descendants of the original colonial population is a negligible percentage. (That, and many Loyalists fled to other British colonies to escape persecution.)

Where this shows up is maybe general political philosophy. New York has a strong tradition of concentrated government, with Alexander Hamilton behind proposals for a US Senate with lifetime appointment and a central bank. And the state executive is unusually strong and the most celebrated figures in state government, elected or otherwise, are known for wielding their powers in nearly dictatorial ways. (Andrew Cuomo is currently trying to emulate this, invoking the images of former members of government like Robert Moses and Nelson Rockefeller. And yes, that Rockefeller.)

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