Sons Of Liberty

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Apr 062016
 
Sons Of Liberty

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The Sons of Liberty was an organization of American colonists that was created in the Thirteen American Colonies. The secret society was formed to protect the rights of the colonists and to fight taxation by the British government. They are best known for undertaking the Boston Tea Party in 1773 in reaction to new taxes. Britain responded with the Intolerable Acts, leading to a counter-mobilization by the Patriots.

In the popular imagination, the Sons of Liberty was a formal underground organization with recognized members and leaders. More likely, the name was an underground term for any men resisting new Crown taxes and laws. The well-known label allowed organizers to issue anonymous summons to a Liberty Tree, “Liberty Pole”, or other public meeting-place. Furthermore, a unifying name helped to promote inter-Colonial efforts against Parliament and the Crown’s actions. Their motto became, “No taxation without representation.”

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Why Yankee Doodle Called It “Macaroni”

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Jan 292016
 

Why Yankee Doodle Called It Macaroni

An explanation of why Yankee Doodle called the feather in his hat “Macaroni”. Both the line and the song have more historical context than many people may realize.

Most of us sing “Yankee Doodle” with a focus on the tune rather than the apparently gibberish words:

Yankee Doodle went to town

A-riding on a pony,

Stuck a feather in his cap

And called it macaroni.

To a kid, the macaroni at the end makes it sound like Yankee Doodle was an ignoramus who didn’t know what mac and cheese was. But a kid doesn’t know a couple of key things about the song, including that:

  1. The whole thing was written to insult Americans
  2. The real meaning of macaroni is a multilayered insult for the ages

“Yankee Doodle” had many different versions, but we know it was sung by British officers before and during the Revolutionary War. And a macaroni was actually a specific type of person — the type of person to be mocked.

“Macaroni referred both to particular short-lived fashion for men in the early 1700s and to a certain kind of man,” professor Kate Haulman writes in The Politics of Fashion in Eighteenth-Century America. “Often derisive, the term applied to elaborately powdered, ruffled, and corseted men of fashion, successors to the Restoration era fops and predecessors to the nineteenth century dandy.”

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