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The year is 2024. Do you remember 2018? If you’re a political junkie, you may recall it was the year Brett Kavanaugh won confirmation to the Supreme Court. If you enjoy reading People Magazine, then you’ll note it was the year Meghan Markle married into the British royal family. If you prefer business, it was the year both Sears and Toys ‘R’ Us declared bankruptcy.
If you’re an adult, each of those stories endure vividly in your memory. They don’t seem that far distant. And if any of those subject areas carry emotional weight with you, those scars remain to this day.
Now imagine the year 1824. What major event happened in the year 1818 that sticks in Continue Reading “Lafayette’s Farewell Tour: America In 1824”
How Colonial Charters Continued To Haunt The New Republic
Articles of Confederation via Wikimedia Commons.
The Treaty of Paris may have resolved the conflict between America and Great Britain, but it left unaddressed the conflicts between America’s new states. United in their struggle for independence, they were far less united in determining where one state’s claims ended and another’s began.
King George no longer ruled the former colonies. The legacy of the colonial charters, however, continued to shape the thinking of the individual states. For more than a century, English monarchs had granted overlapping charters across North America, often with only the vaguest understanding of the geography involved. The Treaty of Paris transferred vast stretches of Britain’s former frontier to the United States, but it also revived old questions those charters had never fully answered.
America had overthrown the king. It had not escaped the king’s paperwork.
Nowhere was this more apparent than in Greater Western New York. Although some colonial Continue Reading “How Colonial Charters Continued To Haunt The New Republic”