logo
Fort Ti opens its gates with deep dive into Revolution

Fort Ti opens its gates with deep dive into Revolution

Yahoo03-05-2025

TICONDEROGA — Fort Ticonderoga plans to open for the season with a bang on Saturday, May 3 as it explores the American Revolution.
This year the fort will feature 'innovative story telling on a grand scale' with live weapons demonstrations, historic trades, daily soldiers' life programs, outdoor activities, and special events showcasing the Revolution.
Fort Ticonderoga and Mount Defiance will open Saturday, May 3 from 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. It will be open Tuesday-Sunday until Oct. 26.
The new 2025 exhibition is 'Subjects, Citizens, Service,' focusing on the armies and people of the American Revolution.
The fort says that will offer 'a deep dive into the world of the Revolution.'
The exhibit will feature various themes, showcasing hundreds of artifacts, including items from the Robert Nittolo Collection that was acquired by the fort, many on display for the first time.
'As a leader in delivering a premium historic destination experience, we are thrilled to welcome visitors back to Fort Ticonderoga for the daily visitation Campaign Season, building family memories, fostering enjoyment in our site's beauty, and inspiring visitors to discover the power of the past and its meaning to us today,' said Beth Hill, Fort Ticonderoga president and CEO in a release. 'Our daily programs bring to life our nation's founding history and the many signature stories that unfolded here through new interactive programs and world-class museum exhibits, boat tours aboard the Carillon, living history events, special programs, lush historic gardens, Mount Defiance tours, hands-on family activities, and a lot more.'
The King's Garden at the fort is a historic garden with friendly animals like sheep.
'We have a new garden designed especially for children,' Hill said. ' There are heritage breed animals, including an oxen duo, Mick and Mack. There are sheep grazing on uneven terrain as part of our stewardship of this historic landscape.'
From May 9 to 11, the fort is hosting 'No Quarter' to commemorate the 250th anniversary of America's First Victory in the American Revolution with a real-time reenactment of the Green Mountain Boys' boat assault from Vermont, culminating in the capture of Fort Ticonderoga by Ethan Allen.
Visitors are encouraged to purchase tickets online in advance by visiting www.fortticonderoga.org or they can be purchased the day of a visit at the admission booth on the entrance road.

Orange background

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Comments

No comments yet...

Related Articles

Maj. Gen. Lafayette returns to Connecticut River Valley
Maj. Gen. Lafayette returns to Connecticut River Valley

Yahoo

timea day ago

  • Yahoo

Maj. Gen. Lafayette returns to Connecticut River Valley

WARE — Western Massachusetts towns from Pittsfield to Ware this weekend will celebrate the bicentennial journey of America's favorite fighting Frenchman — bringing music, costume balls and reenactment fanfare. Reenactor Mark Schneider of Colonial Williamsburg will portray the Marquis de Lafayette, as he races across the state to lay the cornerstone of the Bunker Hill Monument in Charlestown at a celebration certain to draw thousands Tuesday on the 200th anniversary, to the day, of his historic visit. 'Lafayette is a most modern hero,' Schneider told The Republican. 'In addition to leading us to victory in the Revolution, he lent his voice, his right arm, his pen, and his purse to fight against the institution of slavery, and he was a great friend of the Native Americans.' Starting Friday, Pittsfield will host a ceremony, 4 to 6 p.m., featuring a concert choir, marching band and local dignitaries. Worthington will then hold a period, costume-optional grand ball, 7 to 11 p.m., in a tent at Town Hall. On Saturday morning, Northampton will welcome Schneider for ceremonies at the Historic Clapp House including the dedication of stop on the Lafayette Trail from 9:30 to noon. In the afternoon at 2 p.m., at Belchertown's Lawrence Memorial Hall, Lafayette, with horse and carriage, will reenact his visit with an aging doctor he knew. At the Stone House Museum, 20 Maple St., the Green Valley Homestead Reenactment Group will portray 18th century life from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Lafayette will move onto Ware for ceremonies at 4 p.m., then Worcester, for ceremonies the following day, Sunday, at 10 am. Between 1824 and 1825, Lafayette was the last living major general of the American Revolution and, at age 67, visited all 24 states in a whirlwind 'Farewell Tour' that spanned 13 months. As a young man, he volunteered in the Continental Army and led troops to the victory that secured the nation's independence at the Siege of Yorktown in 1781. That was long before actor Daveed Diggs turned Lafayette into a rapping cultural icon in the Broadway hit 'Hamilton' in 2015. For many along the route, historical accuracy is a source of pride. Belchertown's Stone House Museum contains the diary of Dr. Estes Howe, which mentions Lafayette, according to archivist Cliff McCarthy. Plus, a local tavern owner's brother ran the carriage for the general. 'So it would have been logical that Lafayette would have stopped here to change horses and get himself some refreshments,' McCarthy said. Another source, from 1874, states that Lafayette, 'on being told … that there lay sick and feeble old officer,' ordered 'the carriage to stop and went in to shake hands with the invalid veteran.' 'He did not stay long,' McCarthy said. 'He was behind schedule, and they were plowing through Western Mass., trying to get to Boston for the Bunker Hill ceremony.' Beginning last August, events across the country celebrated the precise order of places Lafayette visited on his original 'Guest of the Nation' tour, Schneider said. Five reenactors are used on the current tour, including Schneider. The tour is made possible by local chapters of the Daughters of the Revolution and, in large part, by the American Friends of Lafayette, a nonprofit group promoting the life and legacy of Lafayette and the Franco-American Alliance. Alan Hoffman, president of the friends and the Massachusetts Lafayette Society, said he compares the man to 'Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Nelson Mandela in terms of his human rights activities and philosophy.' The American Friends of Lafayette's Peter Reilly, who organized events in Massachusetts, said that Lafayette was 'the full package' of the 'Enlightenment ideals,' like reason, individualism and progress. 'He was always bugging General Washington about slavery,' Reilly said. 'And also (was) known as a ladies' man.' 'Gentlemen are ready to throw by their business to shake him by the hand, and ladies forget their lovers to dream of him,' one New York newspaper wrote in 1824. 'If a man asks, 'Have you seen him?' you know who he means.' Wayne Phaneuf, former executive editor of The Republican, wrote a remembrance in 1976: as he walked down the streets of Northampton, 'school children, their aprons filled with flowers, strewed petals in front of him.' All told, Lafayette traveled 6,000 miles and left behind scores of streets, schools and towns named in his honor. At one point, he was pulled from the Ohio River. The Republican reported on June 22, 1825, that 'the trunk, supposed to contain the papers of Gen. Lafayette, which sunk with the steamboat Mechanic, has been recovered.' Research assistance for this article was provided by Joseph Carvalho III. Read the original article on MassLive.

How Miami Beach clubs and Coral Gables landmarks looked decades ago
How Miami Beach clubs and Coral Gables landmarks looked decades ago

Miami Herald

time3 days ago

  • Miami Herald

How Miami Beach clubs and Coral Gables landmarks looked decades ago

South Florida How Miami Beach clubs and Coral Gables landmarks looked decades ago This collection of stories shows how Miami Beach clubs and Coral Gables landmarks appeared decades ago through old photographs. You can see scenes from the Latin Quarter nightclub where bands played and the old movie theaters in downtown Hollywood that are now gone. The Place Pigalle featured comedians and South Beach had many nightspots in the 1990s. You will also find details about the Giller Building on 41st Street and Carrollton School in Coconut Grove. Miracle Mile in Coral Gables and the Barnacle, designed by Commodore Munroe, also appear. Street scenes from the business districts and parades in Coral Gables give more glimpses into the past. See the pictures and read about them below. In 1970, Hans Reiss,maitre d' at the Carillon Hotel in Miami Beach, has pleasant memories as he looks back on the revues and stars appearing in the hotel's Le Cafe supper Club. The Carillon nightspot was known as the Club Siam when it opened in February 1958, featuring such weekly changing entertainers as the Ames Brothers and Andrews Sisters. The name was changed to Cafe Le Can Can in 1959 and, for several years, the Carillon's executive director, Herb Robins, brought in top-flight revues produced by Lou Walters, who was Barbara Walters' father. Because the public wanted something more modern, the Carillon launched another new trend in Miami Beach entertainment with 'Shazzam,' offering the entire family comedy and spectacular illusions blended into colorful production numbers. NO. 1: MIAMI CLUBS USED TO LOOK LIKE THAT? SEE FOR YOURSELF HOW WE PARTIED THE NIGHT AWAY Take a look at the hottest places in South Florida. | Published September 13, 2024 | Read Full Story by Miami Herald Archives Looking west on Grand Avenue in 1967, with Food Fair supermarket in the background. NO. 2: COCONUT GROVE USED TO LOOK LIKE THAT? SEE PHOTOS OF HIPPIES, HEAD SHOPS, STREET LIFE This village has some history. | Published October 18, 2024 | Read Full Story by Miami Herald Archives No image found The Great Southern Hotel in the 1920s, near Young Circle in Hollywood. NO. 3: WHAT DID HOLLYWOOD AND FORT LAUDERDALE LOOK LIKE DECADES AGO? SEE FOR YOURSELF Do you recognize anything? | Published January 31, 2025 | Read Full Story by Miami Herald Archives No image found Arthur Godfrey Road in 1983. By C.W. Griffin NO. 4: MIAMI BEACH'S MID-SECTION USED TO LOOK LIKE THAT? SEE THE SCENE FROM 1950S THROUGH '90S Here's what 41st Street, also known as Arthur Godrey Road, was like through the years. | Published February 3, 2025 | Read Full Story by Miami Herald Archives The multi-purpose Coliseum in Coral Gables, which at one time had a bowling alley. NO. 5: WHAT DID THE STREETS OF CORAL GABLES LOOK LIKE DECADES AGO? TAKE A LOOK See how has the City Beautiful changed, and hasn't changed, through the years. | Published April 2, 2025 | Read Full Story by Miami Herald Archives The summary above was drafted with the help of AI tools and edited by journalists in our News division. All stories listed were reported, written and edited by McClatchy journalists.

The Real Message Behind Les Misérables
The Real Message Behind Les Misérables

Yahoo

time5 days ago

  • Yahoo

The Real Message Behind Les Misérables

The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. On February 7, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts suffered a presidential coup. Donald Trump filled its board of trustees with loyalists and declared himself its 'amazing Chairman.' On June 11, he is set to celebrate the dawn of what he has called a 'Golden Age in Arts and Culture' by attending a Kennedy Center performance of one of his favorite musicals, the globally popular adaptation of Victor Hugo's epic novel Les Misérables. Several cast members plan to boycott the opening. Perhaps they find it strange or even disconcerting that Trump is a big fan of Les Mis. Having declared of his Kennedy Center, 'It's not going to be woke,' why would he enjoy a tale in which the official victimization of society's underdogs is contrasted with the civilizing power of love, charity, and forgiveness? The term misérables can translate roughly to 'the wretched,' 'the dirt poor,' or even 'the scum of the Earth.' The frequent Trump epithet losers would be a suitably pejorative modern equivalent. This despised underclass is pitted against a punitive regime that honors bullies, sycophants, and plutocrats. They are not the sort of people who might expect compassion and understanding from the current administration. I find the gaudy, mass-market musical's appeal to Trump ironic but not surprising. Since it premiered on London's West End in 1985, the show, with its rousing anthems and its tear-jerking tale of victory over oppression, has thrilled more than 100 million people. We know that Trump has a weakness for bombastic 1980s musicals, and Les Mis is certainly that. Having spent four years writing a biography of Hugo, I can't help but find it a sweetened, antiseptic version of his weird, digressive underworld of moral and literal sewers. The original book would surely bamboozle and exasperate Trump if he ever undertook the journey through its 1,500 pages. [Read: America now has a minister of culture] The author himself wouldn't seem to hold much appeal for the leader of the MAGA movement. The president mentioned Hugo in 2018 at a White House dinner for Emmanuel Macron and the French delegation: 'This is the divine flame, which Victor Hugo wrote that 'evil can never wholly extinguish,' and which 'good can make to glow with splendor.'' Trump was referring to the shared military glories of France and the United States from the American Revolution through the Second World War. In fact, the words were taken from a description of the central character of Les Misérables, destitute following his conviction for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his sister's starving children. The narrator wonders whether Jean Valjean's soul has been destroyed, or whether an immortal 'spark' (not 'flame') has survived his dehumanization by a vindictive justice system. When Les Misérables was published in 1862, Hugo was an outcast. The founder of two distinct periods of Romanticism, he was the world's most famous living writer and an international symbol of freedom and democracy. By then, at the age of 60, he had spent 10 years in exile after opposing the coup d'état led by Napoleon Bonaparte's nephew, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, the self-crowned emperor of France who reigned as Napoleon III from 1852 to 1870. Hugo, as a refugee in the Channel Islands, was an embarrassment to the British government. The intelligence services of France and the United Kingdom considered him a socialist menace. Spies reported his dealings with suspected immigrant terrorists. His diatribe against 'Napoléon le Petit' was smuggled across the English Channel in walking sticks, sardine tins, and women's underwear. Miniature copies were concealed in souvenir plaster busts of Napoleon III. The exiled poet was criticized for his arrogant attempts to influence British and American foreign policy. He was mocked for his poor English and his wild appearance, as he recalled in his notebooks: 'To the English, I am shoking, excentric and improper'; 'I oppose the death penalty, which is not respectable'; 'I am an exile, which is repellent, and on the losing side, which is infamous.' I would venture to say that Hugo would not be made welcome in the Oval Office today: 'I look like a workman,' he wrote, and 'I fail to wear my tie in the correct fashion.' Les Misérables is one of the last universally read masterpieces in Western literature. In its own day, it was as popular as its musical adaptation would be in the next century. In France, it was bought even by people who had never learned to read. It was devoured by soldiers in the trenches of the American Civil War. Like all great works of art, it has a mind and momentum of its own. [Read: The fame of Victor Hugo] This ostensibly simple tale contains labyrinthine complexities and contradictions. Hugo had been a monarchist in his youth and then became a moderate liberal. At the time of the 1832 revolt, which takes up almost one-fifth of Les Misérables, he was a property-owning family man firmly opposed to violent protest. 'We should not allow barbarians to bespatter our flag with red,' he wrote in his diary. The barricade at the heart of the novel and the musical is actually a scene from the savagely repressed uprising of June 1848. Hugo had just been elected to the National Assembly as a right-wing moderate. When the rioting broke out, he fought with the forces of law and order against the insurgents, whom he considered innocent but misguided. These were the starving unemployed of the Paris slums, the malodorous and degraded masses that polite society called 'les misérables.' He took prisoners and was directly responsible for deaths and deportations. Tormented over his culpability, he had a crise de conscience and joined the socialist opposition to the dictatorship of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte. Hugo became the mascot and inspiration of liberation movements in Greece and Italy and throughout Central and South America, so it is fitting that the musical's opening and concluding song, 'Do You Hear the People Sing?' has been chanted in this century by antigovernment protesters in China, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, and Belarus. Less obviously appropriate is the adoption of Les Mis by Trump and the MAGA movement. No artistic genre is the exclusive property of one faction. As the Trump administration demonstrates, forms of moral discourse evolved by left-wing thinkers can serve the purposes of right-wing ideologues. The novel and the musical both have roots in popular 19th-century entertainment—vaudevilles, comic operas, and newspaper serials. Both were sneered at by middle-class reviewers and adored by the public. The MAGA reading of Les Misérables is just the latest example of its populist appeal. It also typifies the volatile nature of political buzzwords. [Read: Trump's Kennedy Center debut: 'Les Mis' and six-figure checks] Misérables was an insult that French insurgents picked up and brandished as a banner. By the same process, after Hillary Clinton called Trump's supporters 'deplorables' during the 2016 election campaign, her dismissive term inspired the digital backdrop of a Trump rally in Miami: Under the words les deplorables, a doctored image from the musical showed a crowd storming a barricade, waving the French Tricolor and the Stars and Stripes. That evening, the crowd sang a MAGA version of 'Do You Hear the People Sing?' In 2025, the U.S. Army Chorus sang this appropriated anthem of popular revolt at the White House Governors Ball. Hugo would likely have been repelled and fascinated by Trump's demagoguery, his rambling mendacity, his grammatically illogical but easy-to-follow oratory. The writer might have been reminded of Napoleon III, who hovers in the background of the novel as a sinister, clownish figure. Two significant differences are that Napoleon III had a long-standing interest in justice, and that he was never envious of Hugo's fame. After granting him and his fellow outcasts amnesty in 1859, Napoleon III lamented the great man's decision to remain in exile. In 1862, he allowed Les Misérables to be advertised and sold in France, leading his government to review its penal and industrial legislation and to concern itself with the exploitation of women and orphans, as well as the education of the poor. Trump's attacks on universities, the arts, and free expression increase the likelihood that any future American equivalent of Les Misérables will also have to be written in exile. But none of this knotty history need spoil Chairman Trump's triumph when he sits in the royal box at the Kennedy Center and hears the people sing for his pleasure. Article originally published at The Atlantic

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Get Started Now: Download the App

Ready to dive into the world of global news and events? Download our app today from your preferred app store and start exploring.
app-storeplay-store