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Showing posts from July 4, 2021

Does Every Country Have a 4th of July? (yes, it comes after the 3rd of July!)

I am writing this on the morning of the 4th of July. As noted in the title, the 4th of July happens everywhere. What does not is Independence Day. The 4th of July is celebrated in the U.S. to mark the day the 13 colonies of North America declared their independence from Great Britain. But, why the 4th? It is at the top of the Declaration of Independence, the official document that was drawn up by Thomas Jefferson at the behest of the Continental Congress. However, there are a lot of other dates that we could (and maybe should?) celebrate or at least publicize. As you might imagine, I am going to do a bit of that for you now. By July 4th, 1776 the Colonies were already at war with Great Britain. (fyi, for simplicities sake, I am going to follow convention and just refer to Great Britain and her armies as "the British" in most cases) The first shots "officially" fired at British troops by Continental militia were at Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts on April 19th...