"When the British evacuated New York City in 1783, they took many Loyalist refugees to Nova Scotia..."

"... while other Loyalists went to southwestern Quebec. So many Loyalists arrived on the shores of the St. John River that a separate colony — New Brunswick — was created in 1784..."

... followed in 1791 by the division of Quebec into the largely French-speaking Lower Canada (French Canada) along the St. Lawrence River and Gaspé Peninsula and an anglophone Loyalist Upper Canada, with its capital settled by 1796 in York, in present-day Toronto. After 1790 most of the new settlers were American farmers searching for new lands; although generally favorable to republicanism, they were relatively non-political and stayed neutral in the War of 1812....

"[English Canada] inherited, not the benefits, but the bitterness of the Revolution. It got no shining scriptures out of it. It got little release of energy and no new horizons of the spirit were opened up. It had been a calamity, pure and simple. And to take the place of the internal fire that was urging Americans westward across the continent there was only melancholy contemplation of things as they might have been and dingy reflection of that ineffably glorious world across the stormy Atlantic. English Canada started its life with as powerful a nostalgic shove backward into the past as the Conquest had given to French Canada: two little peoples officially devoted to counter-revolution, to lost causes, to the tawdry ideals of a society of men and masters, not to the self-reliant freedom alongside of them."

Today's "History of" country is Canada.

"12 Proposed U.S. States That Didn’t Make the Cut."

Including Superior.

"Look, if you colonists have been successful, you didn't get there on your own. You didn't get there on your own."

I didn't write this on my own. In fact, I didn't write it at all. Meade wrote this:

Lord North: Look, if you colonists have been successful, you didn't get there on your own. You didn't get there on your own. I'm always struck by colonists and yeomen who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart.

George Washington: Without our consent, we reject your taxes.

Lord North: There are a lot of smart people out there in the New World. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something -- there are a whole bunch of hardworking British subjects of the Crown out there.

Thomas Jefferson: Stop coercing us, Lord North. Your Acts are intolerable.

Lord North: If you yankees were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great King somewhere in your life. Some members of Parliament helped to create this unbelievable Royal Navy system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in French and Indian Wars and the East India Company.



Alexander Hamilton: The King is your king. He is only our king by our agreement.

Lord North: If you've got a medical practice or silver smithery or a cabinetmaking business -- you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen. The printing press didn't get invented on its own. Government research created the printing press so that all the pamphleteers could make money off the printing press.

Sam Adams: Hey, Lord North, shove your Stamp Act where the sun don't set.

Lord North: All right, all right - everybody just calm down. In politics, we all tolerate a certain amount of spin. I understand these are the games that get played in political campaigns. Although when folks just, like, omit entire sentences of what you said, they start kind of splicing and dicing, you may have gone a little over the edge there, you pesky Americans.

200 years ago today, who won the War of 1812?

We like to think we did, but...

[F]or some Canadians, the war is a seminal conflict and its commemoration an important event. Richard Merritt remembers being fed cookies and tales of Canadian heroics in 1812 by "elderly aunts" in Niagara-on-the-Lake, next to Fort George....

Presentation boards inside a former Fort George barrack aim to tell the history from all perspectives. But as he read of America's "overwhelming" numerical advantage and its "shameful retreat" from Fort George, Jim Auker, from Elkhart, Ind., thought: "There's a dig." The presentation's conclusion: "The United States did not succeed in conquering Canada or achieve the 'final expulsion of England from the American continent'."

"Minority babies are now majority in United States."

According to the U.S. Census Bureau. 

Population estimates show that 50.4 percent of children younger than 1 last year were Hispanic, black, Asian American or in other minority groups. That’s almost a full percentage point higher than the 49.5 percent of minority babies counted when the decennial census was taken in April 2010. Census Bureau demographers said the tipping point came three months later, in July.

Wait... Were any of those Hispanic babies "white Hispanic"?

Anyway, once you divide people into groups, isn't the majority always "minority"? Or, more accurately, we can decide whether we want to be able to say the majority is minority by choosing which groups — in a heterogeneous, pluralistic society — we want to classify as minority.

"While my faith in things has sometimes been challenged, I still believe this is America..."

"... this is a country that is governed by the rule of law; that the truth ultimately will prevail."

"Lost Sweathog Tyler Grady had a nice look and shtick, but he sang a mediocre song boringly."

No, that's not my theory why Tyler Grady failed to garner the votes to survive for another week of the "American Idol" competition. The song — "American Woman" — is not so much "mediocre" — many songs sung on AI are mediocre. That can hardly cause sudden death. The problem is that the song insults American women, and American women are the main people who do the voting. I have hated this song since it came out in 1970. The original group that did this song was the Guess Who. They were Canadian, and they were insulting American women and insulting America:

American woman gonna mess your mind...
American woman, stay away from me...
American woman, get away from me...
Don’t wanna see your face no more...
You know I’m gonna leave
You know I’m gonna go, woman
I’m gonna leave, woman
Goodbye, American woman
Goodbye, American chick
Goodbye, American broad ...

Well, hell. He was asking to leave. Don't want to see our face? Fine! We don't want to see yours.

The best place in the world to live? They say it's France.

For the 5th year in a row. (The U.S. has dropped from 3th to 7th place.)

Of the war... it lies red....

Origins of the state names, nicely charted here. The post title refers to Delaware and Wisconsin, my original and current home states.

There are some great state names and some not-so-great ones. I plan to list the state names from best to worst. I'm not quite ready. I seek your input. But I have developed some principles:

1. I strongly approve of the use of words from Indian languages. I suspect all the best names will fit this category: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas...

2. The names of Spanish derivation are all good: California, Colorado, Florida, Montana, and Nevada. Except for California, it's pretty easy to see what they refer to. Vermont works the same way with French. (It means green mountain.) This is an okay approach to naming.

3. I celebrate the 4-letter names: Iowa, Utah, and Ohio. All 3 are also from the Indian language and therefore belong at or near the top of the list. There are also 2 great 5-letter names: Idaho and Texas. And then there's Maine.

4. Anything with "New" that looks back to the old country is pathetic.

5. Points off for including a compass point. "Dakota" is a great name, but one of the Dakotas should have consulted the Sioux dictionary for another suitable — siouxtable — word. Don't the both of you be grabbing at the same word.

6. Naming the state after an American President, done exactly once, was not a very good idea, because it's unAmerican to adulate Presidents and because we already had the national capital named after that President, so it created unnecessary confusion and required us to say "D.C." all the time, which isn't amusing at all.

7. I deplore references to English or French royalty, even when these are processed away from the original name — like Virginia and Carolina — and not embarrassingly plain — like Louisiana, Maryland, and Georgia.

8. References to other English celebrities is stupid but that stupidity may be canceled out by the contribution the character actually made in America or by the coolness of the resulting word. There are only 2 names in this category, and I think I've just given both of them a pass.

If the U.S. ever breaks up...

... do you think it will break up this way?

"There's no reason for it to exist in English..."

... this "sort of book," by a Frenchman, Bernard-Henri Lévy, who did some traveling in America and then "worked up his notes," to be witheringly reviewed by Garrison Keillor in the NYT:

In more than 300 pages, nobody tells a joke. Nobody does much work. Nobody sits and eats and enjoys their food. You've lived all your life in America, never attended a megachurch or a brothel, don't own guns, are non-Amish, and it dawns on you that this is a book about the French. There's no reason for it to exist in English, except as evidence that travel need not be broadening and one should be wary of books with Tocqueville in the title.

The book is called "American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville." (You can read the first chapter here.)

Keillor:

Lévy is quite comfortable with phrases like "as always in America." Bombast comes naturally to him. Rain falls on the crowd gathered for the dedication of the Clinton library in Little Rock, and to Lévy, it signifies the demise of the Democratic Party. As always with French writers, Lévy is short on the facts, long on conclusions....

America is changing, he concludes, but America will endure. "I still don't think there's reason to despair of this country. No matter how many derangements, dysfunctions, driftings there may be . . .

No matter how many words beginning with D in a sentence there may be...

"no matter how fragmented the political and social space may be; despite this nihilist hypertrophy of petty antiquarian memory; despite this hyperobesity - increasingly less metaphorical - of the great social bodies that form the invisible edifice of the country; despite the utter misery of the ghettos . . . I can't manage to convince myself of the collapse, heralded in Europe, of the American model."

Thanks, pal. I don't imagine France collapsing anytime soon either. Thanks for coming.

Ha. This reminds me of a book in my half-read books collection: "America," by Jean Baudrillard. I got some ways into it -- I was seriously trying to read it, you know, doing that thing readers do where we submit to merging our mind with the mind of another human being -- and I just had to shake myself out of it and say nothing here rings true.

Hmmm.... "America" has a blurb from a NYT book review on the back. "Since de Tocqueville...."

IN THE COMMENTS: An interesting process of melllowing on Lévy!

A "vast and sterile desert" growing "astonishingly idiotic" men.

Think we have a problem with the French? They've been hating us for a long time. But what about Tocqueville? They thought he was presenting a "sugar-coated America."

Meanwhile, President Bush is trying to make the French like us by quoting the old sugar-coater.