by Roseanna White | Oct 16, 2013 | 17th-19th Centuries, Remember When Wednesdays
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| English Cannon by the Hudson River, Revolutionary WarPhoto by Michael Francis Studios (Michael Cook) |
In what spare moments I’ve had the last week, I’ve been reading a book I’ve had set aside for research for over a year now. One that, when I saw it pop up in my Amazon search at the genesis of an idea, I got so excited about that I bought then and there, though I didn’t actually need it yet, given that I wasn’t actually writing the book, LOL.
I need to put a smidgeon of work into the idea for my agent though, so out it came. To my immense delight. =) The book is Declaration: The Nine Tumultuous Weeks when America Became Independent by Willian Hogeland, and it’s turning out to be all I hoped. A non-fiction book that tells me stories. That presents the wit of the men of the day in ways that make me laugh.
That redefines my assumptions.
See, even after researching for two separate Revolution-era books, I haven’t quite plumbed the depths of how revolutionary this was, this idea that a group of colonies could just break away from its mother country. I can never quite shake the ideas I got in my schooling, that everyone just banded together, put to use their Yankee ingenuity and grit, and ousted the tyrannical government. All Americans for one, and one for all.
A lovely, patriotic picture. Except that “patriot” was an insult at the time. “Lovely” doesn’t begin to describe the fear and uncertainty that Americans experienced. And our people were anything but unified into one coherent picture.
The simple fact is that most people didn’t want independence. They didn’t even understand independence. To them, England was Mother. The king was awful, sure, he was a tyrant. But England…England was home. And just because you don’t like a few parts of it, that doesn’t mean you disown it altogether, right? It just means you try to fix it. And sure, if it comes after you, you defend yourself. So at Lexington and Concord they had no choice. But to seek war? To seek a break?
Unthinkable. That would be like looking your dearly beloved mother–they one who might not always be fair in your eyes, but who had loved you and nurtured you–in the eye and then stabbing her in the gut.
Not something a good person would do. And the leaders, the upright citizens, the majority of the day prided themselves on being noble and just. On holding high ideals, like the philosophers of old. To defend oneself was right. But to take the offense…that would cross a line good people did not cross.
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Painting of Benjamin Franklin, 1778
by Joseph-Siffrein Duplessis |
Most of the Continental Congress had strict instructions, as late as May of 1776, to steer clear of anything that even smelled of independence. To vote against anything that would be more than a vague remonstrance of England’s unfairness. Founding fathers like Benjamin Franklin didn’t come over to the cause until very late in the game–and only then after a decade in England and final humiliation before Parliament that put him in a rage.
It wasn’t easy. It wasn’t simple. And had King George not sent a fleet of hired mercenaries after us (think a mother hiring a gang to come teach her unruly child to listen when she tells him to clean his room), there quite possibly wouldn’t have been enough support to ever make that famous Declaration.
I’ve thought before about the bravery the Patriots showed by standing against the British on the battle fields. Ragtag farmers facing off against the best military in the world. But I’d never really paused to consider how brave (and quite honestly, reckless and heavy-handed) it was for the Sons of Liberty to challenge the prevailing thought of the day. To use guile, intrigue, and rhetoric to convince an unwilling people to follow them into a war most of them didn’t want. It took them decades of work. It took compromise and bullying. But they didn’t just redefine an ideal–they rewrote history. They made their cause so strong that hundreds of years later, school children just think That’s the way it was.
It wasn’t. Not until they made it so.
Do we believe that strongly today? Enough that we’re willing to work all our lives for a goal that most deem foolhardy? Are we willing to fight against prevailing sentiments? When the world says, “You’re crazy,” do we answer, “Maybe, but only until I can change the definition”? It’s a dangerous thing to be that determined. Scary dangerous. And about most causes, I would never dare to be so.
But I pray that when it matters, I could be so brave. So patriotic. So radical in a quest, if the Lord is the one who put it on my heart. I pray I’m cut from the same cloth as those who forged a nation.
by Roseanna White | Oct 14, 2013 | Word of the Week
Nearly forgot it was Monday! LOL But lucky for you, I remembered. 😉 And so, I’m hear to talk about acute.
This will be a quick one, but I found it kinda interesting primarily because of my own weird thought-processes. See, when I was learning about angles back in middle school, I taught myself to remember that acute = under 90 degrees, because small = cute. So acute angles were small angles.
Worked well enough in math class…but not so well in vocabulary, LOL, when I began reading books that used acute in a non-math sense. When I first came across it, I naturally thought that “an acute case of the flu” meant a SMALL case of the flu.
Um, er…brilliant, Roseanna. Just brilliant. 😉
I quickly learned I was wrong, but I never bothered looking up why. As it turns out, it’s pretty simple. Acute in its math sense doesn’t mean “small.” It means “sharp.” Makes total sense, right? The Latin acutus is “sharp, pointed.” Interestingly, though, the original meaning in terms of a disease or whatnot was “coming and going quickly” more than “intense,” which didn’t come about until 1727. Between those two, though, was the expected “sharp, irritating” meaning that evolved by the 15th century.
Makes much more sense with the angle meaning than my “small.” 😉
by Roseanna White | Oct 10, 2013 | Thoughtful Thursdays, Uncategorized
You know, life these days is pretty crazy. We’re all running, running, running, trying to keep up with this and that and the other thing, with kids’ activities and our own, with our complicated lives, jobs, church commitments, you name it.
Rarely do I have a season lately that I don’t deem “crazy.” But October is always the worst for me. And this year, for some reason I thought it would be fun to schedule a ton of fall releases for WhiteFire, LOL, so I have a bunch of editing on top of it (I’ve been prepping five different books). I’ve got Octoberfest (last weekend), family reunion (this weekend), my daughter’s birthday, an extra night of ballet starts next week for Nutcracker rehearsal–and this year, her physical therapy twice a week on top of it, not to mention that whole moving thing that still isn’t finished.
Yeah. Wee bit crazy around here. I’ve been getting up at 5:30 every day, scheduling every minute of my day, and falling into bed exhausted every night. And I still don’t feel exactly on top of things. But the schedule helps. A block of time for writing. Then blogging. A block for exercising, showering, eating, and reading my Bible. School. Running out and about. More school. Editing. Picking up the house, cooking, evening activities. Somewhere in there I’m trying to squeeze in a research book. And laundry, LOL.
I know, though, that I’m not the only one with one of those crazy-beyond-comprehension months–October just happens to be mine.
What time of year are you busiest? Christmas? Summer? Some random month like mine? What are your tricks for keeping your head above water?
by Roseanna White | Oct 9, 2013 | Ancient World, Remember When Wednesdays
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Medieval Miracles, from a 13th century abridgement
of the Domesday Book |
We live in a world of doubt. With special effects and computer graphics, folks can make pretty much anything look real. Look like it happened.
But we know better. Right? It’s all just show. Made up. Pretend.
We’ve been conditioned to doubt. Not just what we see on television, but everything. We’re hard pressed to ever accept anything that looks miraculous, because come on–it’s more likely a hoax. Sleight of hand. Misdirection.
I mean, sure, there were miracles in the Bible. Healing the blind. The lame. Feeding the five thousand. Walking on water. Sure. But that was Jesus. Maybe the apostles. That’s different. And that’s not weird. It’s an accepted kind of miracle, those ones in the Bible. Easy to accept, right?
Then I read it all more closely, and a line of Jim Rubart’s Soul’s Gate comes to mind. “What,” one of his characters says (I may be paraphrasing slightly), “have you only been reading the boring parts of the Bible?”
I mean, seriously. Look at the Old Testament. Saul goes to a medium and calls up Samuel–who appears!
Um…our comfy little spiritual boxes get a little chafing at that one.
On the day Jesus died, the graves opened, and the dead were seen walking about.
Um…that surely means something other than what it sounds like, right? (I included this in A Stray Drop of Blood, and apparently some folks thought I was getting weird and making it up–until they looked it up, LOL.)
In Acts, we read how Paul grew frustrated with a girl with a spirit of fortune-telling and turned around and cast out the demon. Okay. Nothing too worrisome there…until we read on that her master was furious because now he had no way of making money.
Which implies that it worked. She really could tell the future, at least in part. We don’t like that at all, do we? The other side shouldn’t have power like that.
This time of year, you can’t go out in public or turn on the TV without seeing a lot of Halloween stuff. My kids think it’s all grand fun, and they love to ask questions like “Is this real? Or is it pretend?”
And you know…sometimes it’s hard to know how to answer them. Is it real? Mostly no, the things on TV. Mostly not. But then, there’s so much that goes beyond our comprehension, largely, I think, because we’re so quick to doubt. We dismiss everything.
But maybe we shouldn’t. Because if we don’t pay attention to it, we can’t fight it–and a lot of these “weird” stories in the Bible are of God’s servants having to deal with this stuff.
The spiritual world is baffling…but it’s there. And sometimes I wonder what our faith would be like if we were a little more open to learning the truth about it…and a little less quick to ignore all we don’t understand.
I’m delving into some of this in A Soft Breath of Wind…nothing resembling the cartoon ghost, LOL, but I’m reading the Bible carefully and with a point of looking at we normally dismiss as too “weird.” I’m prayerfully asking the Lord for understanding of some of these bothersome parts. And it’s pretty fun to see what new “weirdness” springs up every day in my reading. 😉
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by Roseanna White | Oct 7, 2013 | Word of the Week
Last week in the course of our homeschool day, somehow or another we got talking about what our different fingers are called, and my clever little Xoe asked me why the pointer finger is also called the index finger.
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| Closeup from Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam |
Insert Mommy going, “Um…because…maybe…it’s the one you trail down the page of an index when you’re looking for something?” LOL. At which point I added, “Don’t believe that, I’m making it up. Let’s look and see.” And so we did. =)
Index has meant “the pointer finger” since the 14th century. It comes directly from Latin, and the literal meaning is “that which points out.” So of course, it makes sense for the finger…and it also makes sense for the index in a book, a meaning which came along by the 1570s. Old in its own right, to be sure! So while the two are very directly related, coming from the same meaning of the same word, one didn’t derive from the other, but rather from the root. So I quickly corrected my guess, LOL.
More derivative meanings (like “cost-of-living index” or “heat index”) come from the sense of “indicator” that the word carries and started popping up in the 1800s.
Hope everyone has a great week!
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Roseanna M. White is a bestselling, Christy Award winning author who has long claimed that words are the air she breathes. When not writing fiction, she’s homeschooling her two kids, editing, designing book covers, and pretending her house will clean itself. Roseanna is the author of a slew of historical novels that span several continents and thousands of years. Spies and war and mayhem always seem to find their way into her books…to offset her real life, which is blessedly ordinary.