With no Saints to honor this Friday we note instead that on this date in 1775 occurred the first Battles of the American Revolutionary War, the Battles of Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts. Today is the birthday of my daughter’s former Significant Other Blake, who is the father of my younger granddaughter (1982).
The battles of Lexington and Concord marked the outbreak of open armed conflict between the Kingdom of Great Britain and its thirteen colonies in the mainland of British North America. About seven hundred British Army regulars, under Lieutenant Colonel Francis Smith, had been given secret orders to capture and destroy military supplies that were reportedly stored by the Massachusetts militia at Concord. Through effective intelligence gathering, Patriot colonials had received word weeks before the expedition that their supplies might be at risk and had moved most of them to other locations. They also received details about British plans on the night before the battle and were able to rapidly notify the area militias of the enemy movement. The initial mode of the Army’s arrival by water was signaled from the Old North Church in Boston to Charlestown using lanterns to communicate “one if by land, two if by sea”. The first shots were fired just as the sun was rising at Lexington. The militia were outnumbered and fell back, and the regulars proceeded on to Concord, where they searched for the supplies. At the North Bridge in Concord, approximately five hundred militiamen fought and defeated three companies of the King’s troops. The outnumbered regulars fell back from the minutemen after a pitched battle in open territory. More militiamen arrived soon thereafter and inflicted heavy damage on the regulars as they marched back towards Boston. Upon returning to Lexington, Smith’s expedition was rescued by reinforcements under Brigadier General Hugh Percy. The combined force, now of about seventeen hundred men, marched back to Boston under heavy fire in a tactical withdrawal and eventually reached the safety of Charlestown. The accumulated militias blockaded the narrow land accesses to Charlestown and Boston, starting the Siege of Boston. Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his “Concord Hymn” (1837), described the first shot fired by the Patriots at the North Bridge as the “shot heard ’round the world.” Patriots’ Day is celebrated annually in honor of the battle in Massachusetts, Maine, and by the Wisconsin public schools, on the third Monday in April. Today is the birthday of my daughter’s former Significant Other Blake, who is the father of my younger granddaughter (1982).
Last night I continued reading The Cat Who Smelled a Rat by Lilian Jackson Braun (Ebook).
I woke up at 8:00 am, fed the cats, and did my Book Devotional Reading. I then ate my breakfast toast and read the Acadiana Advocate out on the porch. After I did my Internet Devotional Reading, Richard went to the store, and I read the April 2024 issue of my Jesuit American Magazine. Richard came home, and I read the April 2024 issue of National Geographic Magazine. I then continued reading The Annotated Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Michael Patrick Hearn out on the porch, and my gastroenterologist’s office called; I have an appointment on Wednesday, May 29th. I watched Jeopardy!, and Richard and I ate hamburger steak with mushrooms for dinner and watched Cavalcade (1933), the Best Picture for that year. In sports, our #7 LSU Lady Tigers lost the first game of a three-game three-day Away SEC College Softball Series with the #4 Tennessee Volunteers by the score of 4 to 0, our LSU Tigers won the first game in a three-game three-day Away SEC College Baseball Series with the Missouri Tigers by the score of 12 to 1 in seven innings, and our New Orleans Pelicans get one more chance to be in the Playoffs by playing a Home NBA game with the Sacramento Kings in the NFL Play In Tournament.
With no Saints to honor, we will note that tomorrow is 4-20 (wink, wink, nudge, nudge). On a much more serious note, tomorrow is the twelfth anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, which killed eleven workers (one of them from my town) and caused a major environmental disaster. And tomorrow is the birthday of my Internet friend Sonya in Colorado. I will be going to the 4:00 pm Saturday Anticipation Mass for the Fourth Sunday of Easter (Good Shepherd Sunday) (Alleluia!). Our #7 LSU Lady Tigers (34-9, 10-9) will be playing the second game of a three-game three-day Away SEC College Softball Series with the #4 Tennessee Volunteers (33-7, 13-3), and our LSU Tigers (24-15, 4-12) will be playing the second game in a three-game three-day Away SEC College Baseball Series with the Missouri Tigers (17-22, 5-11).
Our Parting Quote on this Friday evening comes to us from Raymond Carr, English historian (died 2015). Born in 1919 in Bath, Somerset, he studied at Christ Church, Oxford, where he was elected Gladstone Research Exhibitioner in 1941. Carr was briefly a lecturer at University College, London, in 1945 – 1946, before returning to Oxford as a Fellow of All Souls College, 1946 – 1953. He married in 1950, and he and his wife had four children. He was next a Fellow of New College, 1953 – 1964, then Director of Oxford’s Latin American Centre, 1964–1968 and the University’s Professor of the History of Latin America, 1967–68. He became a Fellow of St Antony’s College, Oxford, in 1964, Sub-Warden of the college in 1966 and Warden in 1968. At St Antony’s he established an Iberian Centre, of which he was co-director with Joaquin Romero Maura. He became a member of the British Academy in 1972. His recreation was fox hunting, about which he has written two books, English Fox Hunting: A History (1976), a comprehensive history of fox-hunting from medieval times, and, with his wife Sara Carr, Fox-Hunting (1982). He was made a Fellow of the British Academy in 1978. His Modern Spain, 1875-1980 (1980) was called by the Times Literary Supplement “a turning point in Spanish historiography – nothing comparable in scope, profundity, or perceptiveness exists.” After his retirement from Oxford in 1987, he was made a Knight Bachelor at the 1987 New Year Honours. He was King Juan Carlos Professor of Spanish History at New York University in 1992. In 1983 he was awarded the Order of Alfonso X el Sabio by King Juan Carlos of Spain; Carr also wrote an extensive foreword to the 1993 edition of The Spanish Labyrinth by Gerald Brenan. He was awarded the Prince of Asturias Award in Social Sciences, Prince of Asturias Foundation, in 1999. Carr also wrote many book reviews for journals, including for the New York Review of Books and The Spectator (died 2015): “I am old-fashioned and aged enough to believe that the best history is the work of the lone individual.”
From The Recamier 