[Note: I have merely recorded what Uncle Dave said. He says he can be reached at InbredRoyalsTalkAstrophysics DOT com.]

Hello, boys and girls. This is Uncle Dave here, presenting today’s history talk. Several things happened on this day in history. For example, way back on April 18, 1636, Julius Caesar, England’s Master of the Rolls and second highest judge, died. Since he was 79 at the time, which was ancient by Seventeenth Century standards, he died of old age. William Shakespeare took a few liberties with his life when writing the play “Julius Caesar.”

Also, on this day in 796, Osbald became King of Northumbria, which is now part of England, after King AEthelred I was murdered by Ealdred and Waca for not having a silly enough name. After just one month, Osbald himself was replaced by Eardwulf, whose name means “earth wolf” or “dirty dog,” as the main qualification for king was having the kingdom’s most bizarre name.

Speaking of names, on this day in 1980, Canaan Banana got a new job as the country of Zimbabwe came into existence. He had been a minister, where he was known as Reverend Banana to his followers in the town of Wankie. His new job was President of Zimbabwe, where his most notable achievement in his seven-year term was passing a law preventing the people of Zimbabwe from making fun of President Banana’s name. That idea was Banana’s.

April 18 also marks the date of Boston’s 1689 uprising against Governor Edmund Andros. Back in 1686, the English government came up with the idea of uniting the Massachusetts Bay Colony, whose capital was Boston, with Plymouth Colony, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Hampshire, and New York into one large colony called the Dominion of New England. This caused some discomfort, especially among all the governors who lost their jobs.

Andros saw making the Church of England the colony’s main denomination as part of his job. This angered the residents of Plymouth, who were Pilgrims and wanted to get rid of the Church of England; the residents of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, who were Puritans and merely saw the Church of England as too close to Catholicism for their tastes; and the residents of New York, who were basically neutral on the topic of religion but really wanted something to be angry about anyway. Based on their cries of “Boston Su-uh-uh, Super-duper does what a Hoover brand Vacuum Cleaner also does” whenever the Red Sox come to town, New Yorkers are still angry about this.

Anyway, the English government, for some reason, then decided to add New Jersey to the Dominion of New England, making the residents of New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Rhode Island angry that they had to share a governor with New Jersey. This did lead to some cultural exchanges. For instance, the Massachusetts We’re Number One sign, which consists of the longest finger on a hand held up while the other fingers are folded down, became a popular way to salute outsiders in both New York and New Jersey, and has remained so for centuries.

In response to England’s behavior, the residents of Boston held their own silly name contest and planned to send the two winners, the father-son team of Increase Mather and Cotton Mather, to see King James II in London, although only Increase made the trip. When he arrived, he brought a list of complaints about Governor Andros with them. Leading the list was “Andros belongs to the Church of England,” because Bostonians thought that, with James II being a Catholic, they had a common interest in regarding the Governor as being an Instrument of Satan.

However, the British Parliament, being mostly members of the Church of England, had their own view of the matter, and invited the Dutch leader, Willem number something of the House of Orange, to become England’s new king. Willem’s army had no problem landing in England and making their way to London, mainly because most of the English army were also members of the Church of England and thus wanted James II out, too. The replacement of James II by Willem, who became known in England as William III, has become known as the Glorious Revolution, mostly because the English Army wanted a better name for the event than “The We-Let-Them-In Time.”

So, by the end of 1688, Increase had to change his strategy, and sent a letter to Boston saying that the residents of London were revolting. He then sent a clarifying letter saying that he wasn’t describing the personality of your average English soccer hooligan. The residents of Boston figured out two things from these letters. First, if London could replace its government, they could replace theirs. Second, while Bostonians had no chance of being big-time soccer hooligans, they could find a niche in baseball hooliganism.

Thus, on the morning of April 18, 1689, Bostonians revolted against Andros. They began by sneaking up on sleeping English soldiers and stealing their drums, knowing that the soldiers needed the drums to keep in step while marching, and also because they were tired from being kept awake by loud drum solos. By 9 am, the Bostonians had captured Andros and neutralized the English soldiers.

Simon Bradstreet, who had been the governor of Massachusetts Bay before Andros came along, suggested that Andros officially step down. Andros refused, and the Bostonians held him at Castle Island in Boston Harbor for several months before he escaped, fleeing to Rhode Island. Rhode Islanders recognized Andros, and decided he should be punished by having to stay in Providence for 10 months before being sent back to England for trial.

Andros was acquitted on charges of treason, partly because Increase Mather had developed carpal tunnel syndrome from all his letter-writing and was physically incapable of writing down all the charges. The King broke up the Dominion of New England into its former colonies, and then decided to make Andros governor of Virginia, where the local leaders were at least members of the Church of England.

Massachusetts leaders would remember their success in resisting England, and would pass this story down through the generations. This would make April 18, 1775, exactly 250 years ago, another historic day of rebellion in the Boston area.

By then, several other things had happened. For one thing, England and Scotland had joined together to form the United Kingdom in 1707. While the army’s drums were still useful, the new united British army also had bagpipes, which could be heard for miles and miles. Also, the British had slacked off a bit in collecting colonial taxes, and Bostonian merchants had further avoided paying those taxes by smuggling tea, chocolate, coffee, morphine, Viagra, and many other drugs into Massachusetts.

Also, from 1754 to 1763, the British and French fought each other in the Seven Years’ War, which, based on the dates, lasted nine years. This is because Europe had already fought the Nine Years’ War between 1688 and 1697, and no one had thought of adding Roman Numerals to the names of wars in the same way they had already done for kings, dukes, and George Forman’s children. Hence, they never considered naming it the Nine Years’ War II.

Also, only seven years of the war were fought in Europe, most of it between Britain’s ally Prussia and France’s ally Austria, but some of it between England and Spain, so that’s why it’s called the Seven Years’ War. The part of the war in North America has become known as the French & Indian War, which sounds like the French and the Indians were fighting each other, but most of the Indians fighting were on the side of the French, with the Iroquois, also known as the Haudenosaunee, which means People of the Long Names, on the side of the British.

We’ll skip over the battles of the war, and state the result, which was,

Yes, I know, but if I go into the war in detail, we’ll never get to what happened 250 years ago. There’s always one in every audience.

Britain, which already had 13 colonies on the Atlantic coast, defeated France, and gained control of what is now the United States east of the Mississippi River, as well as Eastern Canada. While much of what Britain had gained had few white men, Canada did have some French speakers in what is now the Province of Quebec. Being French, they really hated the British takeover, and decided to keep speaking French instead of learning English, which is why Canada now has two official languages, giving them twice as many insults for NHL referees as we do.

No, I won’t list the insults in either language. If you want to learn some of them, go up to someone and give them the Massachusetts We’re Number One sign. I recommend that you don’t make the sign outside of Massachusetts.

Also, the British gained control of Florida from Spain, which technically lost the war as an ally of France, but regarded the loss of Florida as a net gain. The UK would go on to return Florida to Spain just twenty years later, on the grounds that it didn’t want Florida, either.

Anyway, the war cost Britain a lot of money, and the government in London needed a way to pay the debt. Parliament decided to tax the colonists living in America to get this money. The House of Commons liked this idea, as the colonists had no representation in the House of Commons. If they had taxed people in Britain, they would have had to answer to the people in their districts, and that might cause them to lose their jobs in upcoming elections. The House of Lords didn’t care one way or another, since they inherited their positions and didn’t have to answer to anybody. This is why members of the House of Lords sleep most of the day. They’re already rich, and can’t lose their jobs, so why bother doing anything?

Since they were government officials, they decided that reducing the tax on molasses in half would bring in more money. Traders were already smuggling molasses into the colonies. Reducing the tax would reduce the amount of money the smugglers were earning by breaking the law refusing to pay the tax, which would make them more likely to just pay the tax and avoid jail time. If you understand that, you, too, can become a government official. Jail spells were especially hated by the Americans, because the British spelled jail as G-A-O-L, which they thought made no sense. Name another word where the letters “GA” are pronounced “ja.” If you pronounce it the way G-A-O-L is spelled, you’d have another insult for NHL referees.

You in the back. Since nobody sees molasses advertised on TV or the internet, you want to know what it’s used for. Well, people use molasses to make rum, a major ingredient in fruitcakes, which has become another name to insult referees with because nobody actually likes fruitcakes. But getting food was hard back then. There were no supermarkets, so most people were farmers and had to produce their own food. If there wasn’t enough rain, food wouldn’t grow, and, if there was too much rain, the food would grow, but it would rot before people could it eat. Sometimes, they didn’t grow enough food, and the local Indians would tell them to eat grass. The colonists made fruitcake so that they would have emergency food in case the grass ran out.

Since nobody was paying the molasses tax in any case, changing it didn’t bring in revenue. However, the American colonists complained about it anyway. Britain said it needed taxes to protect Massachusetts and Virginia and Georgia and most other colonies from France. It didn’t need any taxes to protect its new colony of Florida from the French, since not even the French wanted it. However, the colonists said that Britain had just gotten rid of the French threat from next door, so they didn’t actually need the protection as the threat no longer existed.

The British Parliament thought long and hard about it, and decided to tax something that wasn’t smuggled in. They taxed paper, and called it the Stamp Act because each sale of paper needed a stamp. Want a newspaper? Pay tax on the paper it’s printed on. They couldn’t get on the smartphone to check news because Alexander Graham Bell wouldn’t invent the telephone for another century. Want to draw something? Well, you have to pay extra to get a stamp on it, and then you need to spend time removing that stamp. Toilet paper? It had to be stamped, and those stamps really scratch where you don’t want them to.

The colonists, who still regarded themselves as British, said that the Stamp Act violated their rights because they did not have representation in Parliament. “Taxation without representation is tyranny!” they cried, although many of them would go on to draft a Constitution where Washington DC would get taxed without any representation in Congress. Also, because the 13 British Colonies did not have indoor plumbing, the colonists also complained about the extra time they had to spend in smelly outhouses, removing those stamps from their toilet paper. “The Stamp Act Stinks!” was their other rallying cry.

In Boston, one group of protestors formed the Sons of Liberty, which would organize many protests. These members included John Adams, the future president number two; his cousin Sam Adams, the beer guy; John Hancock, the big signature guy; Isaiah Thomas, the basketball guy; and lawyer James Otis, the unprintable nickname guy.

Parliament in London didn’t care, as news of protests would take several weeks to cross the Atlantic, not to mention the protesters themselves. So colonists came up with another idea. They wouldn’t buy things made in Great Britain, and made their own things instead. This cost wealthy merchants in Britain money, so suddenly Parliament cared. It decided to repeal the Stamp Act, and replace it with some laws proposed by Charles Townshend, who is best remembered today for having a grandfather who was called Turnip Townshend, which isn’t quite as close to first place as Canaan Banana is in the silly name contest.