Category Archive 'George Washington'
21 Nov 2017

Painting of Washington’s Tent by L’Enfant Discovered

, , ,

Washington Post:

Philip Mead was online late one night in May, looking for possible artifacts from the American Revolution, when a painting up for auction caught his eye and got his heart racing.

The chief historian at the American Revolution Museum had spied an unsigned watercolor from 1782. It was a panorama of an army encampment, and to his expert eye seemed to feature the only known wartime depiction of the tent George Washington used as his command center during the Revolutionary War.

The tent is the marquee exhibit at the museum, which opened in April. And, thanks to Mead’s sharp eye, the museum now owns the painting that will anchor an exhibition next year.

Mead said the discovery seemed almost “too good to be true.”

“I’ve had this level of excitement only a handful of times in my 30 years of looking for this stuff,” Mead said.

When Mead saw the painting, he immediately emailed the image to Scott Stephenson, the museum’s vice president of collections, exhibitions and programming.

“My heart leapt into my throat when I realized what this painting was,” Stephenson said.

They had to quickly line up donors to bid on the piece, which was going up for auction just days after they spotted it. They were concerned maybe they weren’t the only people to spot the rare work, and they weren’t 100 percent sure the painting was exactly what they had hoped.

“Our motto is you must kiss every frog in case it is a prince,” Stephenson said.

In this case, it was a prince.

With only one other bidder, they landed the painting easily, for $12,000. Once in hand, the museum’s curatorial team was able to conclude the painting shows the Continental Army’s fall encampment at Verplanck’s Point, New York, and was created by Pierre L’Enfant, the French-born engineer best known for laying out the nation’s capital.

Before he created the blueprint for Washington, D.C., L’Enfant served in the Continental Army. He was wounded at the Siege of Savannah, taken prisoner at the surrender of Charleston and upon his release went back to serve George Washington for the remainder of the war.

The painting depicts hundreds of military tents arrayed across a rolling Hudson Valley landscape. Perched on a hilltop rising about the scene on the painting’s left side is Washington’s field headquarters, including the telltale tent.

RTWT

31 Oct 2017

That Witches Coven Down in Alexandria

, , ,

Zman unloads on the SJW female nutcases who recently decided it would be necessary to tear down memorials to Washington and Lee in the church they once attended.

These churches are big on the “all are welcome” stuff. They hang banners outside their empty churches with this slogan, usually decorated with rainbows. My suggestion is the alt-right toughs should take pics of themselves dressed as Hitler, posing in front of these stupid signs. That would make for a hilarious social media campaign. The fact is, the only people welcome in these hell holes are Progressive nutters and sexual deviants. As is always the case with The Cult, the opposite of what they say is usually the truth.

If you have any doubts about any of this, take a look at the roster of clergy running this church. The rector has two last names, suggesting she is keeping her options open. A good rule of thumb is that a woman with two last names is a nut. That’s probably why she hired a tranny as a youth counselor. Her second in command is a former actress, a profession known to attract the stable and virtuous. Two more women fill out the priestly class of this old church. It’s not hard to see why they are waging jihad on George.

That’s the thing with these churches. They are run by social justice warriors who see the church as a vehicle to inflict Progressive morality on their congregations. You can be sure that no one in the church gave a damn about George Washington. These hens spend all day clucking about what they read in the New York Times or heard on NPR. They came up with the idea of evicting the father of the country, because they wanted attention. It is virtue signalling, but their idea of virtue originates outside the Episcopal Church.

Of course, this was always the end point of the Rebel Flag burning and statue toppling. It is the thing everyone knew all along. It may have started as a tantrum by Cloud People aimed at the Dirt People, but it was going to end as a orgy of self-abnegation. These people hate their own kind. They hate their ancestors. The reason is, they hate themselves and the way to erase themselves is to erase their past. Progressives dream of the day when they no longer exist and any memory of them is gone too.

He’s perfectly right on this one. Once you start putting in charge of your famous churches revolutionary activists who have already decided that they are entitled to overthrow two thousand years of ecclesiastical tradition (and the judgment of all the saints and doctors of the church past) in order to gratify their own amour propre by donning clerical robes and usurping a position never previously occupied by members of their sex, you can’t be surprised that the same historically-illiterate, limitlessly self-infatuated progressives will proceed on to further acts of destructive sacrilege.

29 Oct 2017

Vestry Committee Votes to Take Down Lee & Washington Memorials in Church They Attended

, , , , , ,


The soon-to-be removed offending memorial to George Washington.

The Washington Times reports that the much-predicted and inevitable has occurred. This time, they are going after Washington as well as Lee.

George Washington was one of the founding members of Christ Church in Alexandria, buying pew No. 5 when the church first opened in 1773, and attending for more than two decades.

This week the church announced it was pulling down a memorial to its one-time vestryman and the country’s first president, saying he and another famous parishioner, Robert E. Lee, have become too controversial and are chasing away would-be parishioners.

While acknowledging “friction” over the decision, the church’s leadership said the twin memorials, which are attached to the wall on either side of the altar, are relics of another era and have no business in a church that proclaims its motto as “All are welcome — no exceptions.”

“The plaques in our sanctuary make some in our presence feel unsafe or unwelcome. Some visitors and guests who worship with us choose not to return because they receive an unintended message from the prominent presence of the plaques,” the church leaders said.

A staffer at the church Friday said the decision was going to be announced to the church on Sunday.

The smarmy letter announcing this spectacular insult to American history signed by all 12 Vestry committee members and the local priestess herself is here.

They explain that this destructive, insulting, and revolutionary step was necessary because “discussion about the appropriateness of the plaques in our worship space caused friction in our parish family.” In other words, some extraordinary and outrageous assholes infected with a repulsive ideology hostile to America, our history, our founding fathers, and our national heroes, started making irrational complaints, and the useless, spineless, brainless nincompoops and poltroons on that Vestry committee lacked both the backbone and intellectual resources to defend even the memory of George Washington in his own church, and decided to surrender.

Traditionally, the Episcopal Church would be considered to represent a prominent pillar of upper middle class American culture. Episcopalians used to be expected to be, on the average, wealthier, better educated, and more prominent in the leadership of the community than members of other denominations.

I find myself muttering to myself in frustration, and wondering aloud: how did this country ever come to this? How did we wind up with, everywhere you look, from Yale and Harvard, to city halls all over the Southland, to Christ Church in Alexandria with nobody in charge who thinks or cares? How did it ever happen that the American Establishment sold its soul and gave away its conscience to the brainless demoniac Radical Left? How is it possible that that gentleman over there, a graduate of an elite university, in a tweed jacket and a club tie or that attractive older female graduate of a Seven Sisters school in pearls, are today prepared to throw both Washington and Lee under the bus as sacrifices to the Gospel of Howard Zinn?

Thank goodness we have flyover, Red State America, because coastal urban Establishment America is rotten to the core. Our Establishment today is no less ready to surrender to the Reds than the one in St. Petersburg a hundred years ago this week.


You can see it again right there, on the left.

28 Mar 2017

George Washington, Hobbit

, ,


Detail: Arnold Friberg, The Prayer at Valley Forge, 1976.

Jefferson Shupe sees a strong resemblance between George Washington and Frodo,

On an estate in Northern Virginia, there lived a hobbit.

He lived in the countryside and liked to keep to himself. He was slow to make speeches or draw attention. He loved things that grow and preferred quiet evenings at home to far-away adventures.

His name was George Washington.

No, he didn’t fit the visual hobbit stereotype. He was 6’2″, wore shoes, and we have no record of him visiting Middle Earth even once. But hobbits are curious things, and given his life and his choices, he may have been one all the same.

Read the whole thing.

22 Feb 2017

Washington’s Birthday

, , , , ,

The submersion of the national holiday honoring George Washington into a generic and meaningless “Presidents Day” is one of the nearly too-many-to-count bad things we owe to the administration of the late and unlamented Richard Nixon. A number of editorialists this year are arguing that America needs to do the right thing by going back to honoring our first, and possibly greatest, national hero.

John R. Miller:

In 1968, the public-employee unions, seeking a three-day weekend, convinced Congress to move the commemoration of Washington’s birthday to the third Monday in February. This eventually led to what we now call Presidents Day, which marks the birthday not only of Washington but of Lincoln and all other presidents. By celebrating every birthday, we effectively celebrate none.

Washington’s contemporaries hailed his Revolutionary War victories at Trenton and Yorktown, but they honored him more for risking his fame, fortune and life in taking on military responsibilities for which he wasn’t paid—and then giving up command to return to his farm and family. The young American citizenry esteemed him for bringing together and presiding over the Constitutional Convention, but they honored him more for his steadfastness in holding the colonies together and facing down potential insurrectionists who might have seized the government and made him a military dictator. And while they appreciated him returning to public service as president, they honored him more for leaving an office that many expected him to hold for life.

Americans in the 18th and 19th centuries were unaware of, but they would not have been surprised by, what King George III supposedly said upon hearing that Washington, after winning the Revolutionary War, had refused to be king: “If that is true, he must be the greatest man in the world.” …

Our ancestors expected that America would produce other great leaders. But they celebrated Washington’s birthday because, as the Connecticut Courant observed in 1791, “Many a private man might make a great president; but will there ever be a President who will make so great a man as WASHINGTON?”

24 Nov 2016

A Proclamation

, ,


As published in the Massachusetts Centinel, Wednesday, October 14, 1789

22 Feb 2016

Washington’s Birthday

, , , ,

The submersion of the national holiday honoring George Washington into a generic and meaningless “Presidents Day” is one of the nearly too-many-to-count bad things we owe to the administration of the late and unlamented Richard Nixon. A number of editorialists this year are arguing that America needs to do the right thing by going back to honoring our first, and possibly greatest, national hero.

John R. Miller:

In 1968, the public-employee unions, seeking a three-day weekend, convinced Congress to move the commemoration of Washington’s birthday to the third Monday in February. This eventually led to what we now call Presidents Day, which marks the birthday not only of Washington but of Lincoln and all other presidents. By celebrating every birthday, we effectively celebrate none.

Washington’s contemporaries hailed his Revolutionary War victories at Trenton and Yorktown, but they honored him more for risking his fame, fortune and life in taking on military responsibilities for which he wasn’t paid—and then giving up command to return to his farm and family. The young American citizenry esteemed him for bringing together and presiding over the Constitutional Convention, but they honored him more for his steadfastness in holding the colonies together and facing down potential insurrectionists who might have seized the government and made him a military dictator. And while they appreciated him returning to public service as president, they honored him more for leaving an office that many expected him to hold for life.

Americans in the 18th and 19th centuries were unaware of, but they would not have been surprised by, what King George III supposedly said upon hearing that Washington, after winning the Revolutionary War, had refused to be king: “If that is true, he must be the greatest man in the world.” …

Our ancestors expected that America would produce other great leaders. But they celebrated Washington’s birthday because, as the Connecticut Courant observed in 1791, “Many a private man might make a great president; but will there ever be a President who will make so great a man as WASHINGTON?”

——————————————-

Basil explains that the federal holiday really is still officially designated as Washington’s Birthday.

I know. Some of you thought today was “Presidents’ Day.” Don’t let that bother you. Some of you believe in the Loch Ness Monster, UFOs, and that Elvis works at a Burger King in Michigan.

Where I come from, we usually look at such people and say “Bless their heart.” That’s Georgia-speak for “What a dumbass.”

I know, the calendar you got at the kiosk at the mall has “Presidents Day” written in the little block for today. Well, about those people that made that calendar? Bless their heart.

I know, all the TV and radio ads talk about “Presidents Day” sales going on today. Those people that wrote those commercials? Bless their heart.

Today’s a federal holiday. And, it’s “Washington’s Birthday.” Take a look at United States Code 5 U.S.C. 6103 and see what it says. Sure enough, it says “Washington’s Birthday.”

Now, the truth is that George Washington’s birthday isn’t until tomorrow. In fact, the official federal holiday for Washington’s Birthday never falls on his actual birthday. Who else but the government could screw up a birthday so bad? And some folks want them in charge of health care. Bless their heart.

Why do I make a big deal about what today is called? Because I think it’s bad idea to ignore history. George Washington was actually a pretty important guy in American history. Important enough to actually give a holiday for his birthday. …

In 1968, the movement to change many holidays to a nearby Monday began. In 1971, Richard Nixon issued Executive Order 11582, beginning that process. Still, the holiday is officially Washington’s Birthday, and has always been Washington’s Birthday. (Snopes has a write-up about this, too, by the way.)

Some states observed Abraham Lincoln’s birthday (February 12). Some still might. And some people got the idea that the new federal holiday in February was for Washington and Lincoln. Bless their heart.

Somewhere along the way, people began to call today’s holiday “Presidents’ Day.” Whether by design or not, it contributes to the ignorance of Americans. It ignores the importance of George Washington. And it causes many Americans to either forget or never understand the contributions of George Washington in the formation of this great country.

So, I wish you a very pleasant Washington’s Birthday today. Some of you are off work. Others, like me, have a regular work day. Whatever your plans are, take some time to remember George Washington.

And, if you’re celebrating Presidents Day today? Bless your heart.

26 Nov 2015

A Proclamation

, , ,


As published in the Massachusetts Centinel, Wednesday, October 14, 1789

27 Nov 2014

A Proclamation

, ,


As published in the Massachusetts Centinel, Wednesday, October 14, 1789

22 Feb 2014

Washington’s Birthday

,

“Associate yourself with Men of good Quality if you Esteem your own Reputation; for ’tis better to be alone than in bad Company.”

–From a set of maxims which Washington copied out in his own hand as a boy: “Rules of Civility and Decent Behaviour in Company and Conversation.”

28 Nov 2013

A Proclamation

, , ,


As published in the Massachusetts Centinel, Wednesday, October 14, 1789

31 Mar 2013

“Ouch — That’s Just Brutal”

, , ,

Ed Driscoll filling in for vacationing-Glenn Reynolds admires a fine example of the artful juxtapositions of Matt Drudge.

Your are browsing
the Archives of Never Yet Melted in the 'George Washington' Category.
/div>








Feeds
Entries (RSS)
Comments (RSS)
Feed Shark