V o lu me T h i rt y F o ur , N umber 4
Franklin’s visit to rural Ireland advances American Revolution By Richard Peterson from his book, Ike Would Be Proud
There is an interesting vignette in American colonial history that occurred in Ireland. It involved Benjamin Franklin, famous inventor, entrepreneur and statesman, who was appointed special delegate to the British Crown by Massachusetts and other colonies. Franklin was an Anglophile; he loved London and spent 10 of his last years living there. In 1771, he traveled to Ireland for a vacation. He had been given the use of a carriage driver, who escorted him throughout his holiday in Ireland, which at the time was a part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain [England, Scotland, Wales] and Ireland. Following his weeklong stay in and around Dublin, he asked his carriage driver to show him more of Ireland, including the rural country tracks. At first, the driver refused, but Franklin insisted. He wanted to see how the Irish really lived under Britain’s rule. Once on the back country roads, he soon found out, and he was appalled by what he saw: people living in extreme
Summer 2020 poverty and ill health, dwelling in leaking leantos and straw houses with thatched roofs. He had observed that the Irish had lost their energy under British rule. He worried that the American colonies would have the same fate under an autocratic British regime. About this time, the American colonies were near full rebellion. The Boston Tea Party had
OIL PAINTING by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris (1863–1930) is titled Writing the Declaration of Independence, 1776. It depicts Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.
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Hamilton, a reminder of how we began, televised on Independence Day weekend By Lynn Ayres It has been 50 years since my last American history class, and all I remember about Alexander Hamilton is that someone named Aaron Burr killed him in a duel. I have long been oblivious to Hamilton’s face on the $10 bill and the Treasury Building on the other side. Seeing Broadway’s Hamilton on Channel 1971 filled those gaps. The performance was different and very much better than I expected. Being billed as a rap musical is technically accurate, but it is so much more. Not a fan of rap, I was initially put off by that description, but by the time Beaumont aired Disney’s film of the
theater performance with the original cast, I was excited. Subtitles were useful because many of the actors sang incredibly fast. But this rap is more than syncopated speech. It is the sound of beautiful voices in rhythmic song. The musical (or is it an opera?) did not take long to mesmerize the theater audience. African-American actors portraying Washington, Jefferson and Burr were initially surprising, but the fast-moving plot and clever dialogue made ethnicity irrelevant, as the audience became immersed in the characters and story. There is joy when Hamilton’s son is born and grief when he is killed in a duel, foreshadowing Hamilton’s own death a few years later. There are chuckles when a flamboyant
HAMILTON continued on page 12