So tonight I'm thinking about a particular story that was quite funny at the time but has taken on increasingly weird dimensions since it first happened in 2017.

So I'm a masters student studying history and archives. One of the history professors' advisors came to give a lecture. He was quite the... personality. Very animated, very dynamic, way more so than the average history professor perhaps might be.

Because his former advisor is in town, his former student asked him if he'd like to give a guest lecture and the former advisor said he would love to. Smash cut to this man standing in class talking about the origins of the American Revolution.

The man asks a student to read from Thomas Paine's Common Sense and the student, as undergrads put on the spot are justifiably wont to do, mumbles out a deadpan reading of the passage of Common Sense and the man yells, NO! STOP! THAT IS NOT HOW YOU READ THOMAS PAINE

And so this man dramatically yells the passage of Thomas Paine, mustering as much fury and anger as he could in his history professor frame, and then stops and asks (that is, shouts at) the class, "Why did Thomas Paine write this? What is he trying to accomplish?"

Dead silence in the class as they stare at this professor.

He answers his own question. "HE'S TRYING TO CONVINCE YOU TO PICK UP A GUN AND SHOOT AT A REDCOAT"

Meanwhile the very mild mannered former-student-now-professor is like

Ok so funny story aside of an old history professor yelling excitedly at the class about shooting Redcoats, I do think about how there was a psychological leap a society needs to make to jump from mass protest to a full-blown revolution

Despite the unconventional theatrics, I do think it was important to remind students that history isn't just a story that had a predictable ending. Thomas Paine was out there writing inflammatory material trying to get his neighbours to pick up a gun and shoot someone.

Like, that's absolutely nuts! But it happened. There was a protest and then the protest grew violent and someone panicked and fired a shot and then the Boston Massacre happened. And people like Thomas Paine urged everyday people to grab a gun and shoot a Redcoat.

The Redcoats were, as every American knows, the oppressor! They were, in fact, a kind of military police sent to the colonies to quell what they saw as unruly behaviour that threatened rule of law (and in many cases, those fears were justified)

And enough colonists who read Thomas Paine's pamphlet picked up a gun and started shooting, and the rest, as the saying goes, is history

I think about that a lot; the Revolutionary War is enshrined as an ur-American event -- as all myths are wont to do -- and that particular American mythos is that it's totally ok to pick up a gun and shoot a Redcoat, the oppressor

No real reason for me to be thinking about this at this particular time, though. You know us historians, hopelessly irrelevant and disconnected from the present. Don't mind me.

Also I realize the very real irony of writing this thread with Canadian spelling; I'm in Canada now and I switched my spellcheck to try to get used to the new language, please forgive this traitor