You know how the American founding fathers didn't like the idea of political parties being a thing, so there's no framework in the constitution to tell parties how to act and as a result they're entirely unregulated and running rampant and just fucking everything up for everyone? And so other later constitutional republics codified political parties as a thing so they have rules they have to follow and procedures and limits and as a result those countries have more diverse political landscapes with more parties representing more points of view and ideas rather than being strangled by America's two party system? That's kinda what TTRPG designers mean when they say that more rules can lead to more player freedom and expression.

On the road leading into the center of Concord, Massachusetts, there sits a house.

It is a plain, colonial-style house, of which there are many along this road. It has sea green and buff paint, a historical plaque, and one of the most multi-layered stories I have ever encountered to showcase that history is continuous, complicated, and most importantly, fragmentary, unless you know where to look.

So, where to start? The plaque.

There's some usual information here: Benjamin Barron built the house in 1716, and years later it was a "witness house" to the start of the American Revolution. And then, something unusual: a note about an enslaved man named John Jack whose epitaph is "world famous."

Where is this epitaph? Right around the corner in the town center.

It reads:

God wills us free; man wills us slaves. I will as God wills; God’s will be done. Here lies the body of JOHN JACK a native of Africa who died March 1773 aged about 60 years Tho’ born in a land of slavery, He was born free. Tho’ he lived in a land of liberty, He lived a slave. Till by his honest, tho’ stolen labors, He acquired the source of slavery, Which gave him his freedom; Tho’ not long before Death, the grand tyrant Gave him his final emancipation, And set him on a footing with kings. Tho’ a slave to vice, He practised those virtues Without which kings are but slaves.

We don't know precisely when the man first known only as Jack was purchased by Benjamin Barron. We do know that he, along with an enslaved woman named Violet, were listed in Barron's estate upon his death in 1754. Assuming his gravestone is accurate, at that time Jack would have been about 40 and had apparently learned the shoemaking trade from his enslaver. With his "honest, though stolen labors" he was then able to earn enough money to eventually purchase his freedom from the remaining Barron family and change his name to John, keeping Jack as a last name rather than using his enslaver's.

John Jack died, poor but free, in 1773, just two years before the Revolutionary War started. Presumably as part of setting up his own estate, he became a client of local lawyer Daniel Bliss, brother-in-law to the minister, William Emerson. Bliss and Emerson were in a massive family feud that spilled into the rest of the town, as Bliss was notoriously loyal to the crown, eventually letting British soldiers stay in his home and giving them information about Patriot activities.

Daniel Bliss also had abolitionist leanings. And after hearing John's story, he was angry.

Here was a man who had been kidnapped from his home country, dragged across the ocean, and treated as an animal for decades. Countless others were being brutalized in the same way, in the same town that claimed to love liberty and freedom. Reverend Emerson railed against the British government from the pulpit, and he himself was an enslaver.

It wouldn't do. John Jack deserved so much more. So, when he died, Bliss personally paid for a large gravestone and wrote its epitaph to blast the town's hypocrisy from the top of Burial Hill. When the British soldiers trudged through the cemetery on April 19th, 1775, they were so struck that they wrote the words down and published them in the British newspapers, and that hypocrisy passed around Europe as well. And the stone is still there today.

You know whose stone doesn't survive in the burial ground?

Benjamin Barron's.

Or any of his family that I know of. Which is absolutely astonishing, because this story is about to get even more complicated.

Benjamin Barron was a middle-class shoemaker in a suburb that wouldn't become famous until decades after his death. He lived a simple life only made possible by chattel slavery, and he will never show up in a U.S. history textbook.

But he had a wife, and a family. His widow, Betty Barron, from whom John purchased his freedom, whose name does not appear on her home's plaque or anywhere else in town, does appear either by name or in passing in every single one of those textbooks.

Terrible colonial spelling of all names in their marriage record aside, you may have heard her maiden name before:

Betty Parris was born into a slaveholding family in 1683, in a time when it was fairly common for not only Black, but also Indigenous people to be enslaved. It was also a time of war, religious extremism, and severe paranoia in a pre-scientific frontier. And so it was that at the age of nine, Betty pointed a finger at the Arawak woman enslaved in her Salem home, named Titibe, and accused her of witchcraft.

Yes, that Betty Parris.

Her accusations may have started the Salem Witch trials, but unlike her peers, she did not stay in the action for long. As a minor, she was not allowed to testify at court, and as the minister's daughter, she was too high-profile to be allowed near the courtroom circus. Betty's parents sent her to live with relatives during the proceedings, at which point her "bewitchment" was cured, though we're still unsure if she had psychosomatic problems solved by being away from stress, if she stopped because the public stopped listening, or if she stopped because she no longer had adults prompting her.

Following the witch hysteria, the Parrises moved several times as her infamous father struggled to hold down a job and deal with his family's reputation. Eventually they landed in Concord, where Betty met Benjamin and married him at the age of 26, presumably having had no more encounters with Satan in the preceding seventeen years. She lived an undocumented life and died, obscure and forgotten, in 1760, just five years before the Stamp Act crisis plunged America into a revolution, a living bridge between the old world and the new.

I often wonder how much Betty's story followed her throughout her life. People must have talked. Did they whisper in the town square, "Do you know what she did when she was a girl?" Did John Jack hear the stories of how she had previously treated the enslaved people in her life? Did that hasten his desperation to get out? And what of Daniel Bliss; did he know this history as well, seeing the double indignity of it all? Did he stop and think about how much in the world had changed in less than a century since his neighbor was born?

We'll never know.

All that's left is a gravestone, and a house with an insufficient plaque.

Beginning with the Boston Common, first occupied by British troops in 1768, and closing with Fraunces Tavern in New York, where George Washington bid farewell to his officers on 4 December 1783, this map plots the locations of these sites and uses The American Revolution: A Historical Guidebook to explain why they were important. 

My Favorite Moments in Early US History

Founding Father eyebrow game strong.

This post is dedicated to all of the kids that were involved in the Civil Rights Movement. The kids who suffered through police brutality and race mobs to give us the freedom that we take for granted today. Many didn’t know what they were fighting for; many didn’t know how big the movement was; and many didn’t know if they’d survive to see another birthday or milestone of life, yet they still chose to stand against their oppressors. Salute!

This picture, circa 1860, is the oldest surviving aerial photo in the world. It is an image of Boston, taken from a hot air balloon, and originally titled “Boston, as the Eagle and the Wild Goose See It.”

Celebrating Evacuation Day in honor of the time that George Washington drove the snakes out of Boston!

(via The British Siege of Boston led to Evacuation Day, March 17, 1776)

The captioned adventures of Ben Franklin.

There’s no rule saying Congress has to meet in DC; indeed, on two occasions since DC became the capital, they have met in other places (Philly in the 80s and NYC in 2002) for ceremonial purposes.

I think they should take Congress on the road. Meet in various state capitals. Be a peripatetic organ of government, like medieval royal courts. They could do stunt meetings in the Alaskan wilderness, or on the summit of a Hawaiian volcano.

They could even meet in exotic locales with historical significance for governmental assemblies. An American Congress on the Thingvellir! A Diet of the American States in Frankfurt! Do a swapsies with Britain and have the Americans meet in the House of Commons while the Commons meets in the US Capitol.

Fun fact: this used to be how parts of the US judiciary worked. The circuit courts, now simply the first level of appeal in the federal court system, were originally named for the practice of "circuit riding," in which two Supreme Court justices and one district court judge would roam to designated locations within a region to hear cases. This practice wasn't formally abolished until 1912, though in practice the Judiciary Act of 1891, which created the modern circuit court structure, made it mostly irrelevant.

Before there was 9/11, there was 9/16.

On that day in 1920, 100 pounds of dynamite exploded in a horse-drawn wagon that was parked in the Wall Street area in front of the Assay Office and across the street from the J.P. Morgan Bank. Witnesses had seen the driver climb down and hurry away a minute before the explosion.

The blast killed 38 people, injured 143 seriously, and left hundreds of others with burns and wounds. It also caused more than $2 million in property damage (the equivalent today of $25 million) and destroyed most of the inside of the Morgan building. The damage was so great because 500 pounds of iron sash weights had been piled on top of the dynamite, which acted as shrapnel after the explosion. It reminded many veterans of combat in World War I.

The blast derailed a streetcar a block away and sent debris as far as the 34th floor of the nearby Equitable building. Fragments of the wagon’s horse landed hundreds of yards away. Stockbroker Joseph P. Kennedy, father of future President John F. Kennedy (then three years old), was lifted clear off his feet by the explosion, as were many others.

The bombing was never solved, despite a three-year investigation. (City cleanup crews destroyed most of the evidence that would have helped to find the killers.) Most speculation centered on a group of Italian anarchists that had been guilty of previous bombings. One suspect was an associate of Sacco and Vanzetti, who had been indicted for murder just nine days before (on Sept. 11).

It was the worst act of terrorism on American soil until the bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal Building in 1995.