“4th of July,” written by Dave Alvin and performed by him with the band X.
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“4th of July,” written by Dave Alvin and performed by him with the band X.
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“Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.”
— Frederick Douglass (ca. 1818 — 1895), a speech on the twenty-fourth anniversary of Emancipation in the District of Columbia, Washington, D.C. (April 1886)
This year, descendents of Frederick Douglass read his powerful 1852 Independence Day speech “What To The Slave Is The Fourth Of July?”
Related:
“How Black Lives Matter transformed the Fourth of July,” Peniel Joseph, CNN
“How Black Americans Co-opted the Fourth of July,” Livia Gershon, JSTOR Daily
African American Fourth of July
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Americans have celebrated July 4th as the nation’s Independence Day since 1776.
No more. Today is a celebration of the Supreme Leader, who will personally harangue a cheering sea of red hats from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial this evening, conducting a political rally at enormous public expense. God Save America.
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Every year the Office of Personnel Management prints a list of all official national holidays. Washington’s birthday, for example, is really February 22nd, but this year the Federal Government observed it on February 18th. Likewise, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday is actually January 15th, but the government observed it on January 21st.
The official 2019 federal calendar omitted a holiday, probably because OPM’s Acting Director Margaret Weichert is so busy directing OPM while also deputy-directing the Office of Management and Budget and everything. Luckily, a White House tweet corrected the record, so mark your calendar. Although Donald Trump’s birthday is June 14th, the nation will observe it on the 4th of July. Who knows, there might be a big crowd!
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“4th of July,” written by Dave Alvin and performed by him with the band X.
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Matt Stonie vs Joey Chestnut. Miki Sudo vs Sonya Thomas. It’s the 100th annual Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest.
Or is it?
“Showmen behind Nathan’s annual Fourth of July hot dog eating contest have long claimed the tradition began in 1916 as a showdown between patriotic immigrants on the Coney Island boardwalk.
That would make this Monday’s contest a centennial, except for an inconvenient truth: The contest and its backstory were invented in the 1970s by PR men trying to get more attention for Nathan’s, which had just become a publicly traded company.
‘Our objective was to take a photograph and get it in the New York newspaper,’ acknowledges Wayne Norbitz, who served as president of Nathan’s for 26 years and still sits on the board of directors.
Norbitz is careful to say that the company’s source for the 1916 story is ‘legend has it.’ He says the first contest actually happened in 1972, and the early chowdowns were all small, sparsely attended affairs.
‘We’d honestly wait for a couple of fat guys to walk by and ask them if they wanted to be in a hot dog contest,’ he says.”
— “Behind famed hot dog contest, a whopper of a legend,” Michael Balsamo, Associated Press
More:
“Competitive Hot-Dog Eaters Have Made America Great Again,” Walt Hickey, FiveThirtyEight
“The Aspiring Writer Who Became an Eating-Contest Emcee,” Ross Arbes, The New Yorker
Related:
“An ode to America’s favorite summer food — the hot dog,” Bruce Kraig, Washington Post
Update:
“Joey Chestnut eats 70 hot dogs, 17 more than Matt Stonie, to win Nathan’s title,” Michael Balsamo, Associated Press
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Many Americans will celebrate this Independence Day by ingesting a batter-like slurry of pork and/or beef meat taken off the bone by advanced meat recovery machinery (AMM) and mixed with potassium lactate, sodium diacetate, sodium erythorbate, corn maltodextrin, sodium nitrate, and paprika extract, then forced into tubes for processing.
Patriotic citizens will heat the slurry-filled tubes over glowing little pillows of carbonized sawdust and petroleum distillates, place them in enriched flour buns moistened with a paste of ground yellow mustard seeds mixed with acetic acid and turmeric, and garnish them with many tiny cubes of chemically preserved cucumber dyed an improbable green with FD&C Yellow #5. Then they’ll eat them.
Yum!
The National Hot Dog & Sausage Council says Americans will eat 7 billion hot dogs this summer, 150 million of them on Independence Day. So enjoy our National Food, and have a safe and happy 4th of July.
Read more:
“What’s in Your Wiener? Hot Dog Ingredients Explained,” Katherine Harmon, Scientific American
“Why Americans Are Eating Fewer Hot Dogs,” Paul Lukas,Bloomberg BusinessWeek
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At this year’s Nathan’s Famous Fourth of July International Hot Dog-Eating Contest, eight-time winner Joey “Jaws” Chestnut was defeated by Matt “Megatoad” Stonie, who scarfed 62 dogs in 10 minutes to Chestnut’s 60. The takedown wasn’t completely unexpected; last year, Rolling Stone‘s James Montgomery called Matt Stonie “The Future of Competitive Eating.”
The new champ, 23 years old and 120 lbs., attends Mission College in Santa Clara, California. He’s majoring in nutrition and plans to become a dietitian. “A lot of people say it’s ironic,” he told Molly Vorwerck of the Mercury News.“I think a lot of it is you kind of have to have an interest in food….”
Related:
“Joey Chestnut is focused on gobbling wieners after splitting from fiancee,” Beckie Strum, New York Post
“Why would someone eat 50 hot dogs?” Robert Pursell, PBS Newshour
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“What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sound of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants brass fronted impudence; your shout of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanks-givings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.”
— Frederick Douglass at Corinthian Hall, Rochester NY, on July 5, 1852.
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