Tag: Founding Fathers

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What Do You Know About the Constitution?

I recently watched on Wondrium a very interesting and worthwhile pair of courses on the US Constitution taught by Eric Berger, a professor at the University of Nebraska Law School. The two courses were:

I am currently in the process of watching:

While the US Constitution is not that long and is not that hard to read, reading it and understanding it are two distinct things.  Both of the first two courses are good, but the second was more interesting to me as Continue reading “What Do You Know About the Constitution?”

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Rush: Revolution, Madness, and Benjamin Rush, the Visionary Doctor Who Became a Founding Father by Stephen Fried

I’ve been fascinated by Benjamin Rush ever since as a grade schooler, I realized that there was a signature on the Declaration of Independence with the same last name as mine, Rush.   Rush is not the commonest of last names. Of course, I fantasized that he might be a direct ancestor or other relation. At that time there had not been a lot of genealogy done on my family.  Since then I have discovered that we are related, not closely, but related.  We are 3rd cousins 6 generations removed. We share a common ancestor, Capt. John “Old Trooper” Rush.  What is interesting about John Rush is that he was a captain in Oliver Cromwell’s army.  If you remember your English history, Cromwell briefly established a republic in Great Britain in the 1650s.   Capt. Rush later immigrated to the Pennsylvania colony.

There are several reasons that Benjamin Rush has been assigned to the second tier of founding fathers.  Continue reading “Rush: Revolution, Madness, and Benjamin Rush, the Visionary Doctor Who Became a Founding Father by Stephen Fried”