My pic would be Theodore Roosevelt. No matter what you think of him, his life was anything but boring. It’d be hard to make a film about him though because it’s be extremely difficult to condense it down to the length of a film. Honestly I wouldn’t be mad if we got a movie about FDR or Eleanor either. The Roosevelt family in general is fascinating.

--- 1796: [Cleveland, Ohio was founded by General Moses Cleaveland](). Of course he spelled the name of the city the same as his last name: "Cleaveland". It is unclear how the spelling of the city name changed. There is a story that the "Cleveland Advertiser" newspaper dropped the "a" because the name  "Cleaveland" would not fit on the masthead for its first issue in 1831. Others claim that the "a" was dropped by accident (a simple misspelling) on early maps from the 1790s. When the city was incorporated in 1836, they adopted the spelling of "Cleveland".

--- 1934: Gangster John Dillinger, the original Public Enemy Number One, was shot and killed by federal agents outside of the Biograph Theater in Chicago, Illinois.

--- Please listen to my podcast, History Analyzed, on all podcast apps.

--- link to Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6yoHz9s9JPV51WxsQMWz0d

--- link to Apple podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/history-analyzed/id1632161929

David Koresh pictured in a police line-up & British Israeli World Federation (BIWF) Map

The world watched as a compound in Waco, Texas, became a horrific fireball. Inside the burning building were cult leader David Koresh and scores of his followers. Twenty-five years on, relatives of the British victims reflect on what happened.

Koresh became infamous as the self-styled prophet who thought he was the new Christ.
His followers were in thrall to him, and remarkably, 30 of them were British. Twenty-four died when a weeks-long siege of the compound ended in tragedy.

They came from the streets of Manchester, London and Nottingham - outwardly ordinary young people in their 20s and 30s.

History has largely forgotten them. These are their stories.

Her sister Gail cherishes memories of a lively girl about town: "I used to call her 'rent-a-crowd', because she always had a gang of girls around her. She loved Van Halen, and she loved soul music - she and her friends would go to gigs all round the country."

Bernadette Monbelly was well liked at work, as a training supervisor in a bank. A vibrant young woman enjoying the social life and clubs of 1980s London.

One day a leaflet came through the sisters' door - it was an invitation to the local Seventh Day Adventist Church, where many of the congregation, like Gail and Bernadette, were either first or second Windrush generation. Gail and Bernadette both took up the offer.

Bernadette fell in with a group preaching radical Christian theology in their own small circle, away from the main church services - and there was talk of a man in Texas who knew the secrets of the final judgement day.

Bernadette hadn't been feeling right - her health had taken a downward turn, and as her sister remembers, it lowered her guard enough for their influence to overtake her.

"These people started enveloping her. They were always at her place, day and night. And I told her, 'Bernadette who are these people?' And she said 'They're helping me'. And that was when the paths started to separate."

The man in Texas they were referring to was David Koresh. The reason they were talking about him was that he had actually visited England with his right-hand man - scouting for members who would join his budding sect.

How BBC reported end of Waco siege

It's understood that David Koresh came to England around 1988 along with his trusted lieutenant - a man called Steve Schneider.

They sought a fertile recruiting ground for their message of the imminent coming of the apocalypse, or "Revelation" as it is depicted in the Bible.

Koresh himself had been rejected from the Seventh Day Adventist Church in Texas. So he knew that his starting point in England would be there.

He gave talks at a Seventh Day Adventist college in Berkshire called Newbold, without permission, and kept his identity a secret from its staff.

It was there that three students had their lives changed forever.

From there, the power of Koresh's message on their minds would ripple out to families across England.

The Manchester connection

At the time, one of these students was dating a Manchester girl called Diana Henry.

She was from a large family of five brothers and sisters; her father was a bricklayer in Old Trafford.

Diana had just finished her degree in psychology when her boyfriend sold her Koresh's message of a utopian life at his Texas commune.

As her father Sam remembers: "Her boyfriend wasn't a flippant lad, he was a serious lad. And so she thought well, if that's what he says, it's got to be right. She was hooked. She dropped her studies and would have followed this man anywhere."

Diana would make several visits to Waco, slipping away during term time to meet David Koresh without her father's knowledge, before coming back to Manchester one last time.

Sam remembers how on that occasion she became instrumental in spreading Koresh's message herself.

The stories of the Britons of Waco and their entrapment by Koresh is told in a new BBC Radio 5 Live Podcast, 'End Of Days' - available now on BBC Sounds.

She organised meetings in a semi-detached house in a Manchester suburb called Cheetham Hill at which dozens of young people attended.

Koresh's lieutenant was there, giving a charismatic talk, and saying "he needed to take his instructions from God".

He was talking, of course, about Koresh.
A local Seventh Day Adventist elder, George Taylor, recalls being at the clandestine meetings.

"I remember turning to my wife and saying: 'This is strange. This is not right.'"

His wife, Dimplets, recalls a packed room.

"There were people standing, sitting on window ledges, in corners, and they were about an urgent business. And when I tried to interrupt the speaker to ask questions, they were like 'Woooah! Why are you challenging this man?'"

George Taylor saw what was happening to Sam's daughter Diana. He tried to change her mind - to stop her from being seduced into the would-be prophet's message.

His pleas fell on deaf ears.

In time, Sam Henry would make a frantic journey to Waco to try and convince her to return. There he confronted David Koresh himself: "He tried to convince ME to stay there as well. He said come here - the authorities will never find you. He tried everything.

"I said we must leave, you must leave this place! But she didn't listen. None of them listened."

Sam had to return to Britain without his daughter.

But worse was to come. Diana had in fact convinced her mother and four siblings to also leave their father and journey to join her at the commune in Waco, not long after.

None of his family would return alive.

The cult spreads in Britain

Back in Britain - in Nottingham - Devon Elliott was trying to talk his sister out of going over to Waco.

A cheerful, gentle man in his mid-50s, one would never assume that he more than many others suffered the most terrible pain of Waco.

"I lost my sister, her fiance, my auntie, my cousin-in-law, and a very close friend."

They had each been entranced by Koresh's message at Newbold College.

Devon remembers his sister Beverly's wonderful singing voice and sense of fun. '"I wish I had recorded her singing years ago," he says.

"Some people from London had come up to Nottingham, trying to have meetings, chats. Obviously they'd got wind of some theology which wasn't really sound. But it was just like me going to my mates to watch the football - nobody really looked into it any.

"In hindsight, if I knew she was going to go, I would have cut her passport up. I would have," he remembers. He didn't know that she really meant to carry out her plan.

Instead, he had to watch on helplessly as communication with the cult commune was lost; how the FBI eventually surrounded the building, fearful of Koresh's stockpile of weapons; and how a growing sense of unease would become a national - and international - tragedy.

"To me this was like being in a film. My life became all about just watching this white building. And at one moment you just see it all crash. And I'm thinking… my sister's in there. My aunty is in there. People that I love dearly are in there," Devon says.

Koresh's offer to the Britons was a seductive one.
They'd mainly come from traditions well versed in the Bible. So he was pushing at an open door.
The Revelation, or the Biblical description of the apocalypse, was at hand, he said.

He'd convinced them that he was the next messiah - one sent by God to lead those righteous souls that would be saved, and that would taste eternal life.

He told the Britons that they would be among them. That they should go to lead a frugal life of prayer at his Texas ranch, preparing for the imminent end of days.

What he didn't tell them is that his version of the apocalypse would be armed with a massive stockpile of guns and ammunition - and that he was a serial sexual predator.

The FBI's attempt to release the cult members ended in a horrific fireball.

In a matter of minutes, 72 people died. Twenty-four were British. They had left cities and towns seeking a simple life, fulfilling Biblical prophecy.

"The 'wackos of Waco' were like you and me" says Gail Monbelly as she remembers her sister Bernadette. She wants people to reconsider the memory of the 30 Britons who went there.

As a senior British detective who investigated Waco also remembers, "the problem is that they were all tarred with the same brush. And that was quite wrong. Responsibility for what happened at Waco lies with one man only. And that is David Koresh."

———

Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-46039014

Source: https://raremaps.com/gallery/detail/70445/anglo-saxondom-modern-israel-the-nation-company-of-nations-the-great-people-god-declared-israel-should-become-ye-are-a-chosen-generation

if there was a textbook update for grades k-12 what key black figures and events would you include. Inclusions from other cultures are welcome

Hello as the title says I’m homeschooling my oldest child and in preference to her liking the 00s era I’m putting together a 10 month curriculum, with each month focused solely on a year in the decade. Ex August is 2000, September 2001, etc. I want to focus on both history/politics/culture from it all.

Right now I’m working on 2000, I’ve got top 10 for movies, tv shows and music, top headlines for the year, the dot com burst, summer Olympics and the election. Touched on y2k panic. But I feel like I’m missing stuff. What are some things you would include?

Following the 19th Amendment, politicians were freaking out about how to appeal to women voters. This anecdote from Dolly Gann is a good insight into it.

Sponsored by Mamie Eisenhower and equipped with a pressurized water reactor, the 596-foot vessel carried passengers and cargo, featured luxury amenities like a swimming pool and cinema, and operated safely for nearly a decade before retiring in 1972 due to high costs.

Preserved as a National Historic Landmark in Baltimore, the ship now serves as a museum exhibit demonstrating mid-20th-century nuclear maritime engineering after traveling over 450,000 miles.

The Israeli and U.S. flags are projected on the wall of the old city of Jerusalem during the visit of President Joe Biden on July 13, 2022. (Getty)

“Walter Russell Mead is not Jewish, but he knows more about Jews than most Jews. The son of an Episcopal priest from South Carolina, Mead is the Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and Humanities at Bard College, and previously taught foreign policy at Yale, a subject about which he has written several books. But when we first met, some 10 years ago, he wanted to tell me about the Blackstone Memorial.

The Blackstone Memorial (1891) was a petition presented to President Benjamin Harrison in 1891. It was signed by 431 prominent Americans, including J.P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, future President William McKinley, the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, and numerous congresspeople, as well as several notable organizations, including the Washington Post and New York Times. What urgent message did this star-studded manifesto convey to the American president? It was a plea to return the Jewish people to their historic homeland in the Middle East. Far removed from the work of Jewish activists, it was compiled years before the Jewish writer Theodor Herzl would kick off the modern Zionist movement.”

William Eugene Blackstone

An American evangelist and Christian Zionist. He was the author of the Blackstone Memorial (1891), a petition which called upon the United States to actively return the Holy Land to the Jewish people. Blackstone was influenced by Dwight Lyman Moody, James H. Brookes, and John Nelson Darby.

After the initial contact, Brandeis asked Rev. Blackstone to prepare for presentation to President Woodrow Wilson a second Blackstone Memorial. The purpose of the second Memorial was to influence President Wilson to support the developing Balfour Declaration…

The second Memorial was presented privately to President Wilson May, 1917. The Memorial strongly influenced President Wilson to let the British government of Lloyd George know of American sympathy in favor of the Balfour Declaration. The second Blackstone Memorial was never publicly presented.

Nathan Straus wrote to Blackstone on May 16, 1916, on behalf of Brandeis: "Mr. Brandeis is perfectly infatuated with the work that you have done along the lines of Zionism. It would have done your heart good to have heard him assert what a valuable contribution to the cause your document is. In fact he agrees with me that you are the Father of Zionism, as your work antedates Herzl".

The Nation & Company of Nations (BIWF Map)

Extremely rare separately published pictorial map published by the British Israel World Federation (BIWF) on the 30th anniversary of its founding.
The BIWF espouses the following tenants: that the descendants of the Lost Ten Tribes of Israel migrated to Britain, that the British Royal family is descended from King David, and "the British nation plays an important part of God’s great plan for world order."

The map includes a strange melange of iconography and historical allusion, indicative of its creator's abstruse worldview. The sheet is dominated by a world map in which all Anglo-American territories are colored red (according to the key: "Lands under Israel's stewardship"). Additionally, the map is filled with portraits and tracks of the major Anglo-American missionaries (underlined in blue) and explorers, from the 2nd to 20th centuries. The areas colored with blue dots are said to be "Lands reached by British and American missions"). The areas covered with yellow hatching are "People aided in famine, pestilence and aggression".

In the upper-right corner is an inset map that purports to show how the Israelites made their way to the British Isles. The coats of arms of nations around the world fill the border, with prominence given to those of Great Britain and the United States, the first country to offer a branch of the BIWF outside of Britain.

The map reflects a racial chauvinism that was common at the time but here is more overt and confident than in any other mid-century map that we have seen. It depicts the Anglo-Saxon race as the God-chosen dominating force of the world - albeit a force for charity and the improvement of mankind. British Israelism has long been criticized for trying to imbue Anglo-American colonialism with religious justification.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the map makes no mention of the modern-day state of Israel, which had just come into existence when it was published. While modern-day British Israelism - especially the strains followed in the United States - is often associated with the Christian Identity movement and overt antisemitism, many of the 19th-century founders of the movement were philosemites and early Zionists.

With its curious, problematic subject matter, dramatic visual style, and extreme rarity, this is one of the most unusual pictorial maps that we have handled.

———

Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2022/07/biden-israel-lobby-america-walter-mead/676794/

Source (William E. Blackstone): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_E._Blackstone

Source (The Blackstone Memorial): https://www2.wheaton.edu/bgc/archives/docs/BlackstoneMemorial/intro.htm

Source: https://raremaps.com/gallery/detail/70445/anglo-saxondom-modern-israel-the-nation-company-of-nations-the-great-people-god-declared-israel-should-become-ye-are-a-chosen-generation

Hi everyone,

I've been playing the Oregon Trail Il game recently and I'd like to learn more about the actual history.
I've found a few non-fiction resources (American History Hit podcast, etc.), but they tend to focus on the Donner Party specifically, and I’d like to get a wider view.

Has anyone read any non-fiction they'd recommend?

I initially posted this on the American History sub but was told to post here instead.

Thirty-four hours of bombardment fell on Fort Sumter in April 1861 — by Major Robert Anderson's own count, fire from seventeen 10-inch mortars and from batteries of heavy guns, "well placed and well served." The quarters burned. The main gates were destroyed. The magazine was surrounded by flames and its door had to be shut against the heat. By the end the garrison had four barrels and three cartridges of powder, and nothing left to eat but pork.

Nobody in the garrison was killed.

Anderson accepted terms on April 13 and marched his men out the following afternoon with colors flying and drums beating. Before leaving he asked to salute the United States flag with one hundred guns.

Partway through the salute, a spark caught the cartridges of one of the guns. Private Daniel Hough was killed instantly. Several others were wounded. Anderson stopped the salute at fifty.

He reported it the next day, and the phrasing has stayed with me:

"God was pleased to guard my little force from the shell and shot which were thrown into and against my work, and to Him are our thanks due that I am enabled to report that no one was seriously injured by their fire. I regret that I have to add that, in consequence of some unaccountable misfortune, one man was killed, two seriously and three slightly wounded whilst saluting our flag as it was lowered."

(Official Records, Series I, Vol. 1, p. 12)

The bombardment that opened the war killed no one. The first death came in the ceremony afterward, from an accident, during a salute to a flag that was already coming down.

The same report ends with a request. Anderson writes that his officers and men "acquitted themselves in a manner which entitles them to the thanks and gratitude of their country," and then asks that they not be ordered on duty of any kind for some months — "as both officers and men need rest and the recreation of a garrison life."

They had been inside the fort for three and a half months.

Growing up in New England, with its woodlands so integral to its identity and its general aesthetic, I was surprised to see turn of the century photographs of fields and hills with hardly any trees around them throughout New England. Some turn of the century photographs of archipelagos in New England are also very barren of trees. It looks like Scotland with houses and shacks on small islands. Seeing old photographs and paintings of Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Connecticut, it’s hard to not imagine the entire state just wiped of trees, but perhaps this was only a small percentage of land?

Not sure if this is what the bulk of land looked like in post colonial, pre-industrial, agrarian America looked like? Rather what was taken in photographs or depicted in paintings mostly land people owned and not the vast wilderness?

Also, as the country expanded westward, did settlements in California or Colorado also deforest the land for farming in the same way until industrial booms came to develop those areas, farmland was sold or abandoned and forests grew back?

Hey everyone - I’m from Georgia, studying Architecture and want to learn more about Oglethorpe. Specifically about his design of Savannah and his egalitarian approach. Please recommend me some books!

I've been thinking recently about the Great Party Switch, or the process by which the once more conservative ideology of the Democratic Party became more in line with the ideology of the Republican Party. And how that happened slowly over decades and decades, to the point that they in large part flipped core ideologies. Someone who is a Republican in 2026 would have been much more aligned with what the Democratic Party was saying 80+ years ago than they would the Republican.

I wonder if that is an inevitable cycle? Is it random? Will it switch again, do these things just go in cycles?

Hello Everyone: Chris Burchfield's bio of John C. Fremont, "The Pathfinder," gets under way with a look at his youth, accessible via the link below.

Sorry, there are no illustrations as Chris, who is now blind, and I live far apart, making it impossible for me, his copyeditor and distributor, to give it the formatting we'd like, as I lack editorial privileges on his page.

Nevertheless, this a rollicking and extremely enjoyable tale, both epic and comic, of ambition and skullduggery on the American Frontier.

Thanks!

https://medium.com/@xybuster1/the-charlatan-the-scandalous-adventures-of-john-fr%C3%A9mont-chapter-1-the-misbegotten-son-0d0f2c1cacad?sharedUserId=thomburchfield