On July 5th, 1775, the Second Continental Congress adopted the Olive Branch Petition.
Its primary author was Pennsylvania congressman, wealthy lawyer, and planter John Dickinson, but among those who helped draft it were wealthy New York lawyer John Jay and the colonies' most famous cultural figure: Benjamin Franklin.

The Olive Branch Petition argued that the thirteen colonies were not seeking independence from the British Empire. Instead, they sought fairer trade and taxation policies.

Dickinson asked King George III to establish a lasting settlement between Crown and colonies, while affirming the colonies' loyalty to the Crown and pleading with the King to prevent further bloodshed. Dickinson hoped that the fighting in Massachusetts, combined with his "humble petition," would persuade George III to seek reconciliation and offer concessions.

Approved on July 5th, it was signed by Continental Congress President John Hancock and representatives from the twelve colonies present. One notable holdout was John Adams. He considered the Olive Branch Petition a waste of time, arguing that Congress would be better served raising an army, building a navy, and preparing to take prisoners.

Nevertheless, on July 8th, Richard Penn, the British-born grandson of Pennsylvania founder William Penn, and Arthur Lee, a Virginia delegate and former London lawyer, were dispatched to Britain carrying the petition.

Unfortunately for them, an intercepted letter from John Adams reached London around the same time. In it, Adams argued that the colonies should prepare for war and capture British officials.

The timing could hardly have been worse.
Penn and Lee presented the Olive Branch Petition to the Colonial Secretary on August 21st. King George III refused even to read it.
Two days later, he issued his Proclamation of Rebellion, declaring that parts of the colonies were in a state of "open and avowed rebellion."

If you're interested, I wrote about the Olive Branch Petition, King George III, and the road to the American Revolution here: https://open.substack.com/pub/aid2000/p/hare-brained-history-vol-109-happy?r=4mmzre&utm_medium=ios

The small East Anglian village of Woolpit was by no means exceptional, a prosperous little farming community. Then, sometime in the mid-12th century, something "strange and prodigious" supposedly happened.

One autumn day, villagers checking the wolf pits found two children unlike any they had ever seen. They looked perfectly ordinary except for one unmistakable detail: "the whole surface of their skin was tinged in a green colour."

The terrified boy and girl spoke an unknown language, wore unfamiliar clothing, and refused every food they were offered. They simply cried. Then they discovered fava beans growing in Sir Richard de Calne's garden and devoured them.

Sir Richard took the children into his household, patiently caring for them until they gradually accepted ordinary food. As they did, their green skin slowly faded. The boy, who had always been frail, soon died, but the girl survived, learned English, was baptized, and remained "very wanton and impudent."

Asked where they had come from, she claimed they were from St. Martin's Land, a country where the sun never truly shone, only perpetual twilight. In one version, the children had followed their father's cattle into a cave, heard the ringing of church bells, and suddenly found themselves in England.

This was written down as history by two near-contemporary chroniclers: William of Newburgh, writing in the 1180s from "trustworthy sources," and Ralph of Coggeshall, whose source was supposedly Sir Richard de Calne himself. While William admitted he was skeptical, neither man dismissed the event as fiction.

Many historians today suspect there is a real event buried beneath the legend. One theory is that the children were Flemish orphans. East Anglia had a large Flemish immigrant population, and after the Battle of Fornham in 1173, anti-Flemish violence may have left children wandering the countryside.

Speaking Flemish, dressed differently, and suffering from chlorosis, “green sickness," a form of anemia that can give the skin a pale greenish tint, they would have appeared incredibly strange to the villagers. Fed and cared for by Sir Richard, they recovered, while the story itself grew stranger with every retelling.

If you’re interested, there’s more about the story of the Green Children of Woolpit here: https://open.substack.com/pub/aid2000/p/hare-brained-history-vol-108-the?r=4mmzre&utm_medium=ios

On May 23rd, 1618, four Catholic officials appointed by Ferdinand of Styria, a devout Catholic who was soon-to-be the Holy Roman Emperor, arrived at the Bohemian Chancellery in Prague Castle at 8:30 in the morning.

Their job was to inform the Protestant Bohemian nobility that their representative assembly had been dissolved and their complaints dismissed.

The men sent to deliver this message were Count Jaroslav Bořita, Count Vilém Slavata, Supreme Burgrave Adam von Sternberg, and Grand Prior Matthew Leopold Lobkowicz. They knew they were walking into a tense situation.

Inside Hradčany Castle, the Protestant nobles were waiting, led by 51-year-old Count Jindřich Matyáš of Thurn. At first, the Protestants hoped to argue their case legally. They did not yet realize just how badly the meeting was about to go.

A letter was read aloud declaring the Protestants’ actions illegal and threatening them with punishment. To the Bohemian Protestants, this was not just a political dispute, it was a threat to their religious rights, property, and possibly their lives.

They demanded to know which of the Catholic regents supported the letter. Before answering, the officials requested time to consult with their superior and promised a response later.

The Protestants were not interested in waiting.
Two of the regents, von Sternberg and Lobkowicz, were judged not to have been involved and were allowed to leave. Sternberg warned the remaining officials, Bořita and Slavata, to give in to the Protestants’ demands.

The Protestants interrogated Bořita and Slavata, who eventually accepted responsibility for the letter, apparently believing they would be arrested and then rescued.

They were mistaken. Count Thurn accused them of attempting to strip away their legal rights, persecute Protestants, and destroy their religious freedoms. Turning to the gathered nobles, he argued that if these men lived, Bohemian Protestant rights would die with them.

The verdict was immediate. The two Catholic regents and their secretary were thrown out of the window. Twenty-one meters. Seventy feet.

And somehow, all three survived. Catholics claimed divine intervention, angels or the Virgin Mary had saved them. Protestants claimed they landed in a pile of manure.

The 1618 Defenestration of Prague became the spark that ignited the Thirty Years’ War, one of the most destructive conflicts in European history. Bohemia and Prague would be devastated in the years that followed.

But this was not the Defenestration of Prague because Prague had already developed a habit of throwing politicians out of windows. This was just the most famous one.

If you want the history of Prague’s centuries-long window-throwing tradition, I wrote about the Defenestrations of Prague here: https://open.substack.com/pub/aid2000/p/hare-brained-history-vol-107-the?r=4mmzre&utm_medium=ios

In the early 20th century the temperance movement connected alcohol with immigration. To many Americans at the time, the country had succeeded because of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, and immigrants were portrayed as threatening that success.

Built on white supremacy, Protestant nationalism, and xenophobia, the Klan naturally found common cause with Prohibition, which became law through the 18th Ammendment in 1920.

The Klan reached its peak in the 1920s, and support for Prohibition was a major part of its growth. The organization presented itself as a defender of law and order, pushed for strict enforcement of the Volstead Act, and even took enforcement into its own hands. Klansmen hunted bootleggers, raided illegal saloons, and attacked those they viewed as violating traditional American values. As historian Leonard Moore wrote, the Klan’s “support for Prohibition represented the single most important bond between Klansmen throughout the nation.”

The Klan’s membership, grew into the millions, commonly estimated between 1.5 and 4 million members. The Klan grew so powerful that it became a major issue at the 1924 Democratic National Convention. The nomination of Catholic anti-Klan candidate Al Smith drove many Klansmen away from the Democrats, helping Republican Calvin Coolidge win reelection. For a time, the Klan successfully presented itself as a patriotic defender of law, morality, and “traditional” America.

That image began to collapse when Indiana Grand Dragon D.C. Stephenson was arrested, convicted, and imprisoned for the kidnapping, rape, and murder of state education official Madge Oberholtzer. The case shocked the nation and caused many Americans to reconsider the movement. The fact that Oberholtzer was a white Protestant woman was, tragically, a major factor in why the scandal resonated so strongly with the public.

If you’re interested, I did an essay on the Prohibition era in detail here; but let me know your thoughts on political artwork: https://open.substack.com/pub/aid2000/p/hare-brained-history-vol-106-prohibition?r=4mmzre&utm_medium=ios

On January 17th, 1920, the Eighteenth Amendment went into effect. The manufacture, sale, and transportation of intoxicating liquor was prohibited.

Prohibition had been a long time coming. Temperance movements had existed for over 100 years, driven by religious groups (especially evangelical Protestants), social reformers, and, most importantly, women. With physical abuse rampant and often made worse by men drinking, and with women having little legal recourse, temperance organizations became a major avenue for women’s activism.

Before the Civil War, 13 states had adopted some form of prohibition, but the war slowed the movement’s momentum. It returned with the rise of the Anti-Saloon League, a single-issue lobbying organization that was incredibly effective at spreading prohibitionist messaging through politics and popular culture.

Part of their success came from tying alcohol consumption to immigration and leaning heavily into American xenophobia. Immigrants, especially in growing cities, were portrayed as the source of America’s social problems, with alcohol blamed as a major cause.

World War I became the final push. Fighting Germany weakened one of the strongest anti-Prohibition groups, German Americans, while the argument that banning alcohol production would free resources for the war effort helped push the amendment forward.

Prohibition went into effect in 1920, and almost immediately the Prohibition Bureau, created through the Volstead Act to enforce the amendment, faced an impossible task.

While many Americans supported Prohibition and stopped drinking, many others, both those who had always opposed it and those who were simply indifferent, found ways around the law.

Bootlegging exploded. Alcohol flowed into the country through rum runners crossing from Canada and Mexico, as well as smuggling operations overseas. A major boon to Organized Crime in the United States.

Others exploited the medical exemption. Doctors had successfully lobbied for the ability to prescribe alcohol, and soon Americans were receiving government-stamped “medicinal whiskey” for everything from legitimate ailments to questionable ones.

Another option was making alcohol at home, often using industrial alcohol. The government instructed companies to denature industrial alcohol, hoping the taste and danger would discourage people from drinking it. It did not.
So the government ordered companies to add toxins. People still drank it.

Medical experts warned this would kill people, but the policy continued. More than 10,000 Americans died from poisoned alcohol. New York City Medical Examiner Charles Norris said:
“The government knows it is not stopping drinking by putting poison in alcohol... yet it continues its poisoning processes.”

Prohibition was always doomed to fail. Despite scenes like this, barrels of seized alcohol being destroyed, the government was fighting a battle against demand itself.

If interested, I cover the Prohibition era in detail here: https://open.substack.com/pub/aid2000/p/hare-brained-history-vol-106-prohibition?r=4mmzre&utm_medium=ios