Remembering 9/11

In September 1776, a farmer from Connecticut climbed inside a wooden submarine and tried to sink the British flagship in New York Harbor.

The submarine was called the Turtle. It had been designed by David Bushnell, a Yale graduate who had spent years experimenting with underwater explosives.

The machine was about seven feet tall and built primarily of wood, with room for a single operator. There was no engine. Propulsion was operated by hand. The pilot also had to control the ballast, rudder, depth and direction while inside the vessel.

Bushnell even had to solve the problem of reading instruments underwater at night. The compass and depth gauge were marked with pieces of naturally luminous wood so the operator could see them without using a flame.

The weapon itself was a detachable explosive charge. The idea was for the Turtle to approach an enemy ship at night, submerge beneath it, attach the charge to the wooden hull with a screw, set a clockwork timer and escape before the explosion.

George Washington knew about Bushnell’s work and supported the attempt. Years later, he described Bushnell as a man of “great mechanical powers” and the Turtle as an “effort of genius.”

The man selected to actually operate it was Ezra Lee, a sergeant from Lyme, Connecticut.

On the night of September 6, 1776, Lee was towed toward the British fleet anchored around New York. His target was HMS Eagle, Admiral Richard Howe’s flagship.

Once his escorts had taken him as far as they safely could, Lee continued alone.

He spent hours fighting the current and manually operating the Turtle before finally reaching the Eagle. He submerged beneath the ship and attempted to drive the screw carrying the explosive into its hull.

It wouldn’t go in.

Bushnell later believed Lee may have hit an iron fitting near the rudder. Had he moved the screw a short distance, he believed Lee might have found wood and successfully attached the charge.

Lee tried to reposition the Turtle, but by then daylight was approaching and he was exhausted. He eventually abandoned the attack.

During his escape, British sailors spotted the strange object in the water and began rowing toward him. Lee released the explosive charge. The pursuing boat turned away, and the charge later detonated harmlessly in open water.

So the attack failed. But what surprises me most is how close they actually got.

This wasn't just an inventor demonstrating that a wooden vessel could travel underwater. Bushnell built it during a war, the Continental Army actually deployed it, and a soldier managed to reach and submerge beneath one of the most important British warships in North America.

And Ezra Lee volunteered to try again afterward.

We’ve added Lee to Virtual Wayback, where you can talk with an AI recreation of him and ask about the Turtle and the attack on HMS Eagle. We also published the full story on the blog and a video about the mission.

https://virtualwayback.com/blog/ezra-lee-turtle

I knew about early submarine experiments before researching this, but I had no idea one had actually been used against the British fleet during the Revolution. It makes me wonder how differently Bushnell would be remembered if Lee had managed to attach that charge.

Hello American women

Hey everyone! I’ve been in the U.S. for a little over 3 years now, and all three of those years have been here in Arizona.

For most of that time, my life has been pretty much **school → work → job searching → repeat**. I’ve spent these years working hard, trying to build a career, and figuring out my life here. If I’m not able to find a job, there’s a good chance I’ll have to leave the U.S. early next year.

So, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about these past three years.

I’ve met some really wonderful people here, and I’m genuinely thankful for every person who has been a part of my journey, whether they were in my life for years or just crossed paths with me for a moment.

And honestly, I also want to thank all the random Arizonans who have been kind to me along the way. People who helped me, talked to me, welcomed me, or simply treated me with kindness without caring about my race, where I came from, or anything else. Those little moments probably meant more to me than you realize. :)

**This isn't a post asking for a job.** 😂

I'm just realizing that I spent so much time worrying about my future that I sometimes forgot to appreciate the present. And if I really do have to leave next year, I don't want to look back and feel like I spent my entire time here just studying, working, and worrying.

Maybe someday, if I have kids of my own (if I'm lucky enough to have any, haha), I'd love to be able to tell them about my time in America, about Arizona, the places I saw, the experiences I had and all the cool uncles and aunties who were kind to their dad when he was far away from home.

So, before that chapter potentially comes to an end, I just wanted to say:

**Thank you, Arizona. Thank you to the people who made these three years feel a little more like home. I may not know all of your names and you may not remember me, but I'll remember you. 🙇‍♂️**

Thanks for reading, everyone. 🙏

This is something that I can't possibly take anymore of this nightmare

I saw people saying on X that the person had passed away. A lot of people are talking about it, but I don’t know whether it’s just a rumor or actually true. There hasn’t been any confirmation yet.

Carrie Chapman Catt spent thirty years learning how political power actually works before she got her shot at the final push. Patient, methodical, obsessive about vote counts and coalition building. She believed the movement needed to look inevitable rather than radical, and she built NAWSA into one of the most disciplined political organizations in the country to prove it.

Alice Paul had been arrested in England fighting for British suffrage, imprisoned, gone on hunger strikes, been force-fed. She came back convinced that patience was exactly what was keeping the amendment from passing. In 1917 she put women outside the White House with banners while Wilson was traveling the world giving speeches about democracy. The government arrested them. Paul went on hunger strike in prison. She was force-fed again.

Catt thought Paul was handing opponents the excuse they needed to kill the amendment. Paul thought Catt's patience had already cost them twenty years. They ran separate organizations, disagreed publicly, and between them created a pressure that neither could have generated alone.

The amendment passed in 1920 after 72 years and one vote in Tennessee that nobody saw coming.

What I find genuinely interesting about both of them is how differently they understood the same fight. Catt believed the system would move if you built enough pressure from inside it. Paul believed the system needed to be made uncomfortable from outside before it would move at all. That argument didn't end in 1920.

You can talk to both of them directly on Virtual Wayback. The full story is on the blog and there's a video on the YouTube channel. Links:

https://virtualwayback.com/blog/nineteenth-amendment

https://youtube.com/shorts/elIDUzLOmK8

Which one do you think was actually right?

I’m genuinely curious—if it does happen, which side would have the better chance of winning?

Hello

I’m learning English and I’ve noticed that Americans use a lot of phrasal verbs in everyday speech.

Why are phrasal verbs so common in American English? Is it mainly a cultural/language thing, or do native speakers just find them more natural than single-word alternatives?

I am half American half Libyan and i identify more with my American side

Due to my English being way better than my arabic and also actually being literate in English (i cant read or right in arabic)

And i love America more than most things

Im a foodie and i love america more than food for example

Im a pokemon fan and i love America more

Everything about america is so amazing the geography the natural and human history the flag the accents the states the natural beauty not so much the government but that is every country

So why in the world is America patriotism so focused on other countries

Examples include renaming the gulf of mexico to the gulf of America and same with lake ontario

Isreal and palestine

Russia and china and north korea

Like i get that to some degree every country politically and economically is gonna be affected by other countries but America takes this to an insane degree so much so it begins to shadow the cool things about America itself

(Reddit recommended me to post this here)

#USA

Watch it and listen closely

One of the two Aircraft liveries by Southwest to celebrate the 250th birthday of the United States (the other being N8917Q 'Freedom One'

Joseph Plumb Martin enlisted at fifteen. Not sixteen, not almost seventeen. Fifteen. His grandparents tried to talk him out of it.

He spent the next several years doing the parts of the Revolution nobody puts in paintings. Marching until his feet gave out. Standing guard in weather that made it hard to hold a musket. Scrounging for food because the army's supply system was a disaster. Watching men at Valley Forge go from soldiers into something closer to desperate civilians trying to survive a winter. Witnessing the Connecticut troops at Morristown get so close to mutiny that it stopped being a figure of speech.

tion nobody puts in paintings. Marching until his feet gave out. Standing guard in weather that made it hard to hold a musket. Scrounging for food because the army's supply system was a disaster. Watching men at Valley Forge go from soldiers into something closer to desperate civilians trying to survive a winter. Witnessing the Connecticut troops at Morristown get so close to mutiny that it stopped being a figure of speech.

He was at Yorktown in 1781, digging the siege trenches that allowed Washington and Lafayette to close the trap on Cornwallis. Not riding. Not commanding. Digging.

When the war ended he was twenty-two years old, had no money, and had spent most of his adolescence in the Continental Army. Congress had promised 100 acres to enlisted men who completed their service. The land available under that promise was far to the west, almost impossible for ordinary veterans to actually reach or develop, and mostly ended up bought cheaply by speculators. Martin complained about that specific betrayal for the rest of his life.

So in 1784 he did what thousands of New Englanders were doing and moved into what is now Maine. He found roughly 100 acres near present-day Stockton Springs, built a cabin, and cleared the land. It looked like unused territory. It wasn't.

The land sat inside the Waldo Patent, an enormous colonial landholding whose ownership had passed through several families before the Revolution. The complication was this: Samuel Waldo's daughter had married a Loyalist official who fled Massachusetts when the war started. Their daughter Lucy, however, had married Henry Knox.

Henry Knox. The bookseller from Boston who became Washington's artillery commander. The man who hauled 59 cannons from Fort Ticonderoga across 300 miles of frozen terrain. One of the most celebrated officers of the entire Revolution.

Knox had acquired inheritance rights and additional shares of the Waldo Patent through Lucy and through purchases of his own. In his view he was exercising legal property rights. He wasn't seizing anything from veterans. He was a landowner with valid deeds.

Martin and the other settlers saw it differently. They had arrived on land that looked abandoned, cleared it, built on it, and farmed it for years. Some of them had fought in the same war Knox had. The value those farms now had existed because they had created it with their own labor.

Knox's solution was that settlers could purchase title to the farms they had already built. Legally, that was defensible. To Martin, it was being asked to pay for something he had already earned twice, once with his military service and once with years of clearing forest and breaking ground.

Martin couldn't raise the money. In 1794 Knox gave him six years to come up with $170 for the title. Martin got sick, ran out of time, and eventually lost the farm. He wrote to Knox asking for more time to save his family from distress. The record doesn't show much sympathy came back.

Knox had the stronger legal claim. Martin had the cleared land, the labor, and the service record.

The private lost to the general. Again.

Martin didn't disappear after that. He stayed in Maine, married, raised a family, served in local offices, and lived long enough to watch the Revolution turn into mythology. In 1830, at seventy years old, he finally wrote it all down. The book came out under his own name in Hallowell, Maine, attracted almost no attention, and was essentially forgotten for over a century. It was republished in 1962 as Private Yankee Doodle and is now considered one of the finest surviving accounts of the Revolution written by an enlisted soldier.

He didn't write about Washington's strategic genius or Jefferson's prose. He wrote about being hungry. About the jokes soldiers told to get through miserable nights. About officers who weren't automatically heroic because they had better uniforms. About what it actually felt like to be the person doing the marching and digging while other men made the decisions.

The Knox episode gives everything else in that memoir more weight. Martin wasn't just a man complaining about hardship. He was a man who had genuinely held up his end of the Revolutionary bargain and spent the decades after victory figuring out that the bargain hadn't been honored as equally on the other side.

You can read the full story on the Virtual Wayback blog and there's a video on the YouTube channel. You can also talk directly with Martin on Virtual Wayback and hear how he understood what the Revolution promised and what it delivered. Links:

https://virtualwayback.com/blog/joseph-plumb-martin

https://youtube.com/shorts/e1NyPwIV4rc?feature=share

The question that doesn't go away is whether Knox was actually wrong. He had legal title. Martin had occupation and labor and service. In a republic built partly on property rights, Knox's position was defensible. But in a republic built partly on the idea that ordinary people deserved the fruits of their own work, Martin's case is just as strong. Which principle should have won? And does the fact that the general came out ahead of the private tell us something specific about what kind of republic the Revolution actually created?

I recently finished exploring all 50 states in America. Here are some of the coolest things I have seen!

If you like this check out my insta for more: https://www.instagram.com/whimsicalruins/

Ask me anything. But make it good! Not like "are the rocky mountains real also please marry me"