![]() (John Adams estimated that at the Revolution’s start another one-third were Loyalists and the last one-third were waiting to see who would win.) Of course, George III also wanted his American subjects to enjoy life, liberty (as he conceived it) and the pursuit of happiness, until such time that roughly one-third of them started to rebel against him. The Declaration is read out in some towns on the anniversary of its adoption by the Continental Congress, mixing as it does some gorgeous prose about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness with the second two-thirds of the document which is almost totally factually false. Yet even today, nearly 250 years later, the 28 clauses of the Declaration are still accepted by many Americans as almost Holy Writ in its entirety. In order to clothe themselves in the revolutionary mantle of these earlier giants, they therefore ideologically had to try to make George III out to be as oppressive as those earlier Stuart despots.īut the truth is that George was simply not tyrannical rather he was a good-natured, enlightened constitutional monarch, who inconveniently for the Founders also genuinely admired the Glorious Revolution of 1688 as much as they did-not least because it paved the way for his family to come to the British throne despite his great-grandfather George I only being the fifty-first in line. ![]() The Founding Fathers-whose courage in taking on the world’s most powerful empire I greatly admire-saw themselves as revolutionaries in the mould of their heroes, the English revolutionaries of 1642 against Charles II and of 1688 against his son James II. Four major misunderstandings, all in one sentence, which can now be comprehensively set straight. In fact, he firstly wasn’t mad with porphyria, secondly he wasn’t a tyrant king, thirdly he was perfectly sane throughout the American Revolution, and lastly, he wasn’t responsible for Britain’s defeat. For the cruel prancing camp sadist portrayed so memorably by Jonathan Groff is as far removed from the real King George III as it is possible to get.Īfter two centuries of largely deliberate and highly political misrepresentation, people on both sides of the Atlantic think that because George was a tyrant king and moreover mad with porphyria, Britain lost the American War of Independence. To tell the story of the American civil rights movement properly, a conscientious director would have to plot a course from at least 1619, when the first enslaved Africans arrived, to this week.I loved Hamilton: An American Musical for its foot-tapping tunes and witty libretto, but it’s no more an accurate portrayal of history than Shakespeare’s Richard III or Macbeth. The most basic is the lack of clear beginnings and ends. History does not come with spoilers - or spoiler alerts - but it does have a habit of setting traps for ambitious filmmakers. The above can serve as a partial plot summary of “Selma,” Ava DuVernay’s bold and bracingly self-assured new movie about the march and the events, in Selma and elsewhere, leading up to it. King and televised images of official brutality as well as by his own political and moral instincts, had introduced the Voting Rights Act in a nationally televised address to Congress. By the time the third, ultimately successful effort left Selma on March 21, President Lyndon B. Martin Luther King Jr., turned back rather than risk further violence. Efforts to change this had been met with bureaucratic obstruction, intimidation and lethal brutality, including the killing, a week earlier, of Jimmie Lee Jackson, a 26-year-old laborer and protester, by a state trooper.Ī few days later, a second march, led by the Rev. ![]() The procession would have crossed Lowndes County, where not a single African-American voter had been registered in more than 60 years. The marchers had planned to walk the 50 miles to Montgomery, the state capital, as part of a long-building protest against the denial of basic voting rights to Southern blacks. ![]() On the afternoon of March 7, 1965, Alabama state troopers and members of a Dallas County posse, armed with clubs, cattle prods and tear gas, attacked civil rights demonstrators on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala.
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