Tea at Trianon: America’s 13 Colonies Did Not Fight Alone

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

Thursday, April 24, 2025

America’s 13 Colonies Did Not Fight Alone

From The Christian Science Monitor:

In his excellent new book, “Shots Heard Round the World: America, Britain, and Europe in the Revolutionary War,” author John Ferling places much of his emphasis on “the world.” Ferling dramatically conveys the global significance of America’s long fight for independence in what he calls an “international history” of the war.
This is not to suggest that the author, a professor emeritus at the University of West Georgia, neglects the home front in his elegantly written volume. He opens with the circumstances that led the 13 American Colonies to break from England and then covers each year of the drawn-out conflict in vivid detail. He describes the pivotal confrontations – from the opening Battles of Lexington and Concord in April 1775 to the victorious Battle of Yorktown exactly 6 1/2 years later – and analyzes the strategies, accomplishments, and missteps of Continental army Commander in Chief George Washington, British commander William Howe, and Howe’s eventual replacement, Henry Clinton. (Read more.)