Tea at Trianon: America's Stonehenge

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, February 21, 2021

America's Stonehenge

From Discover:

Later, a Harvard scientist named Barry Fell studied apparent inscriptions on stones at Mystery Hill and claimed these markings were Phoenician or Iberian in origin. Fell, it's worth noting, was a marine biologist, your go-to guy if you wanted to know about, say, sea urchins. But his forays into epigraphy were perhaps less accomplished and won him mostly skepticism and ridicule from the scientific community.
All we know for sure about the early history of the site is that it served as a homestead and a rock quarry in the 19th century, and that Native Americans were once active there, possibly for centuries. Nevertheless, amateur researchers, New Age devotees and the current owners continue to support the belief that America's Stonehenge's features are as old as 4,000 years, were built by prehistoric European visitors, and may even have some connection to the people who built Stonehenge on England's Salisbury Plain. In fact, the only link between America's Stonehenge and the real thing is the name itself, and that bit of rebranding didn't occur until the 1980s. Runnels notes that no verifiable evidence has ever turned up to support any of the wilder claims surrounding the site. (Read more.)