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The king’s approval was the last event connected to the Stamp Act to be accomplished with ease. For the Stamp Act set off in America a crisis that had no precedents. In a sense, the rioting and mobbing that ensued during the summer and autumn of 1765 are the most interesting features of the episode; but interesting though they were, the organization of protest and the reorganization of local politics that emerged in the crisis were more important. And most important of all was the development of the colonial constitutional position, so evocative and expressive of self-consciousness among the colonists. News of the stamp tax arrived in the colonies in the first two weeks of April. For the next six weeks almost nothing about the Act made its way into the colonial press, and certainly no public body seemed eager to take the lead in opposition. At the end of May, however, an official body, the House of Burgesses in Virginia, took action. The Burgesses approved a set of resolves on May 31 which declared that the constitution limited the right of taxation to the people or their representatives and that this right belonged to Virginians by virtue of the fact that they were British subjects who lived under the British constitution. The implication was inescapable: Parliament, a body to which they sent no representatives, had no authority to tax them.15
The Glorious Cause
Robert Middlekauff
As long as I could connect every new thing I learned to this universe, I had an easy time with math. And I noticed that classmates who had problems with math weren’t struggling with math; they were struggling with connections. They were trying to memorize equations, but no one had successfully shown them how those equations connect with everything they had already learned. They were doomed. At some point along their path, their interconnected math universe had shattered into fragments, and they were trying to learn each piece in isolation—an extremely difficult proposition.
Fluent Forever
Gabriel Wyner
In February 1904, the Japanese struck against the Russian fleet, eventually destroying it at the Battle of the Tsushima Straits; that battle took place after the Japanese had inflicted comparable defeats on the Russian army in the Pacific and in parts of Russian-occupied Manchuria. The Japanese later justified their assault on Russia’s forces in the Far East by pointing to the danger a Russified Korea held out for them. Rikitaro Fujisawa, a prominent Japanese political figure, quoted a friend as saying that the Japanese had to strike against the Russians, because “Korea lies like a dagger, ever pointed towards the heart of Japan,” words that could have easily been spoken nearly half a century later, by the most senior American national security officials. Then he added in his own words, “Korea in the possession of Russia, or even a weak and corrupt Korea which might fall any time an easy prey to the Russian Eagle would place Japan’s destiny in the hands of the unscrupulous ‘Colossus of the North.’ Japan could not accept such a fate. That the Russo-Japanese War was not only a defensive war for Japan but Japan’s struggle for her very existence as an independent nation is too obvious to require either elucidation or explanation.” It was a great way to justify an offensive war—the Koreans, not the devil, made them do it.
The Coldest Winter
David Halberstam
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