Maggie's Farm

The “Join, or Die” cartoon was
created by Benjamin Franklin and first published on May 9, 1754. 

Bari Weiss: American Regeneration - This Independence Day, we don’t just
celebrate the birthday of the words that made us—but the choice to live
by them two and a half centuries later.

At Great Books, a piece of American History

I've been to Carthage. It feels strange to see the highway exit sign.

What is there now is, mostly, the ruins of the Roman city. The old Carthage was destroyed completely.

Yes, the Phoenicians invented our alphabet.

I remember looking at it in the British Museum decades ago, but forgot what I learned. The trip to Egypt renewed my curiosity.

It was a chunk of a 200 BC stele of a decree by the Greek (Ptolemy) dynasty in Egypt.

It is written in three scripts: Hieroglyphs on top, Demotic script in the middle, and (ancient) Greek on the bottom.

We might finally know how the pyramids were built. Breakthrough studies are beginning to paint a spectacular picture.

The father of radio, more or less. Guglielmo Marconi was quite a fellow.

His antennae etc have all washed away now. Ocean beach erosion.

Excellent:

Here is the lighthouse-keeper's house today (the Coast Guard moved the light itself to California):

This little brick structure in the back contained the kerosene, delivered by boat as needed, to keep Mayo Light burning to mark Wellfleet Harbor:

Just past Mayo Beach, through the 1920s, was the grand Chequessett Inn, built on pilings (the stumps of which still poke through the mud) and finally destroyed by an attack of sea ice in the 1930s. Rumor is that rum-runner boats would stop by at night, contributing to the Inn's popularity during Prohibition.

It was built by Mr. Lorenzo Dow Baker, the pioneer of the banana trade from the Caribbean and Central America. On a whim, he loaded his schooner's empty hold with tropical fruit for the return trip to Boston, and made millions. Mainly bananas, hitherto unknown in Boston. Ended up owning plantations all over Central America, and a big hotel in Jamaica. His employees were Jamaicans: They worked Wellfleet in the summer and the Jamaica hotel in the winter.

Baker's business became the Boston Fruit Company, the foundation of the United Fruit Company. A clever Yankee.

Cahokia was a large North American Indian city. Not as large a civilization like those in Central and South America, but still interesting.

Just click on these WW2 photos to see the same places today.

Interesting, but not historically important

Fearless, humble country boy

The Wood Age surely preceded the Stone Age. Heck, we still use plenty of wooden tools, but mostly with something metal attached to them.

Prehistoric wooden tools were generally not preserved:  Four amazing Stone Age sites with wooden artifacts - From Africa, Asia, and Europe, these sites give us a rare window into the ways that organic technology shaped ancestral lives.

There were cultural misunderstandings. There was a big world out there.

What was France thinking? Same thing goes for the Germans. What's the point?

He keeps it simple:

I am impressed by this humble guy. SOG teams in Vietnam, late 1960s.