Gratuitous Historickal Posting (TM)

Yikes! I've become so used to the LMC as the mainstay poster here at Llama HQ that his sudden radio silence catches me on the hop. What to do? Political commentary? There's certainly plenty of fodder, but tace is the Latin for a candle. The Nats? Hey, they had a bit of a rally over teh weekend, although they've dropped their last two. Babes? Well, it happens to be Kate Hepburn's birthday, but even in her young days I don't think she fits in with the general flavah of our ongoing thread.

No, instead I will serve up to you Camelidophiles an item that these days I would usually post at what Steve-O calls the Robbo back room, the one with the leather curtain over the door where you go to get "the good stuff".

Today is the anniversary of the birth, in 1622, of Louis de Buade, Comte de Frontenac et de Palluau, Governor General of Canada from 1672 to 1682 and from 1689 to his death in 1698. A truly remarkable man among a whole host of remarkable men who pioneered both the French and the English advent into North America. Among other achievements, perhaps his greatest was preventing the Iroquois, during his second term, from wiping French Canada off the face of the earth through a combination of iron will, diplomacy and force.

I am on my regular colonial history kick again. I started off with the very beginning of Francis Parkman's magnum History of France and England in North America earlier this year, took a break for Lent, and then picked it up again with enthusiasm. I am currently up to Montcalm and Wolfe, and am wading through the wretched doings in Acadia shortly before the outbreak of the Seven Years' War.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: It is literally impossible to understand the American Revolution without understanding the 150 or so years of colonial history that preceded it. And despite the fact, or else perhaps because of the fact that it seems fashionable at the moment to believe that history ended in 1968, it strikes me as all the more important to study it in order to not be caught completely unawares when its cycles and dynamics reassert themselves, which they undoubtedly will.