The Stamp Act and Patrick Henry
A foreignman's journey learning american history, culture, politics and technological hegemony
This newsletter was intended for exploring the relationships and interaction between power and technology using primarily quantitative facts as well as historical realities. As technology is part of the variables of the many equations I will be trying to solve, it became obvious that understanding American culture and history was a required step because of the key role that America, I mean the united states, plays in the actual world’s technological scene and trend. learning American culture and history with its underlying political systems is a big challenge for a foreign man like me who has never put on foot in the new world and who has never studied American culture and history in high school but it’s fortunately also an opportunity for learning and lucky I am because thanks to the many technical innovations like the internet information for learning has become widespread but you and I could agree that at the same time attention has become scarcer and scarcer making it difficult to focus and learn. I will try my best to pass this required step by learning and sharing periodically with you some aspects of this America’s culture and history and its underlying political systems through the lens of technology and I will try along the way to have a scientific approach by bringing quantitative facts that will support what I will be learning and sharing with you.
This first piece is about Stamp Act which I just came to know about and I will be trying to include my own interpretation and opinions but don’t expect them to be truths graved on stone.
As my main goal is to have a scientific methodology by using quantitative facts as often as I can, I thought that this google trend about the stamp act was a good starting point
when I learned about the stamp act and looked at this google trends chart the first thing that caught my eye was the cyclicity of the trends of these two keywords. Recall that I use to look for google trends that show particular patterns and I was planning to start a publication about these particular trends and had already 40+ titles that I started writing last year but I don’t know why I judged that it was not beneficial to make public these writing. I think mostly because I thought that I was not ready to do that because I had not learned enough about the united states and most of the topics covered by these titles were about this country. Then maybe after several pieces like this one about Patrick Henry and the stamp Act, I will be confident enough and share also those titles with you.
Why the chart of these keywords is periodic is the question I first asked myself then that’s what I will try to answer in the following paragraph before writing what I have learned about the stamp act and Patrick Henry whom you may already know.
my first idea is to take the average date of the peak level and see what related events about the stamp act happen on these dates. The highest peak happens almost every year in October or September then there should be something important about the stamp act during these months. What is this event about the stamp act happening every September or/and October?
Google Says, I don’t know if all it says is true, that The stamp act Congress 1765 started on Monday, October 7, and ended on Friday, October 25 then these peaks of search happening every October of a year are related to the celebration of the adoption of this same stamps act. This chart actually doesn’t tell me much about what the stamp act is but the term Act tells already taught me that this is a law but a law about what?
As I have already warned you that I will be putting my thoughts and opinions here, I would like to share with you one of my opinion about this English word LAW that you, English men and women, may not have guessed. this opinion will bring into this piece my local foreign language which is Wolof and this other foreign language which is the Arabic language. This opinion is represented by these two bullet points :
in my local tongue, the word LAW as it’s pronounced in English is a verb that translates to the English verb to spread, mainly something that travels time and space. When you want to say that something is spreading like the corona you use the word law as how you pronounce it in English. Do you think that this is a pure coincidence? I don’t think so.
in the Arabic language, there is this word that is “LAWH” which translates to “desk” or mostly to a piece of wood or any other material used to write something but more importantly something well protected that should remain, something that should resist the effect of time and any other corrosive element. Is this a pure coincidence? I don’t think so.
I am not here for drawing conclusions but for learning then I let you draw your own conclusions from this personal opinion I shared with you in the two bullet points above while I will continue my learning journey of the law that is behind the stamp act.
because most people use Wikipedia I preferred history.com instead of it and here is word-to-word what history.com says about the stamp act
The Stamp Act of 1765 was the first internal tax levied directly on American colonists by the British Parliament. The act, which imposed a tax on all paper documents in the colonies, came at a time when the British Empire was deep in debt from the Seven Years' War (1756-63) and looking to its North American colonies as a revenue source.
What I first thought is that America has taken a long path since because I thought about the digital era in which we are living now and how producing a document is almost free
The goal of this learning journey is not about being a Harvard law school student even if I appreciated this talk about Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics, organized by The Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, that I have watched on youtube just before writing this could make me think so. Then I will not dive into the ins and outs of this law that is apparently something from the past, a law aborted.
but if you have remarked there is on this google trend chart that I recall below this red line about Patrick Henry and I have said nothing about him. Who is Patrick Henry?
For learning about this name that seems to be an important name in American history I decided to be a bit fair by using bing as I used since here google trends . Here is what Microsoft Bing says about him
almost every nation has fathers who have contributed to their trajectories and history. For America, Patrick Henry is one of these fathers. Before starting this article, I thought about learning about American fathers by writing about them. Then with this, it’s as if I have hit two with one piece of a stone because I was not aware that Patrick Henry was among those American fathers I thought of writing about. Then in this instance, I learned today one’s American fathers.
Learning about Patrick Henry, this American father led me to learn why Virginia is the state where his name is most searched because as you may already know Henry Patrick was a founding father who served as the first and sixth post-colonial governor of Virginia from 1776 to 1779.
a learning journey is never ending and Substack is alerting me that I am being long for this to hold on email then let’s connect next time when I will be learning another thing about American history, culture, politics, and technological hegemony.
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