With the July 4th holiday fast approaching, Balladeer’s Blog offers readers another seasonal post regarding overlooked military actions.
JANUARY 8th, 1776 – In Charlestown, Massachusetts, British troops and American Tories were attending a performance of General John Burgoyne’s play The Blockade of Boston. The play was a farce ridiculing the supposed inadequacies of the American rebels. An unknown number of American soldiers carried out a raid on the town, panicking the theater audience, capturing 5 British soldiers and destroying 8 Tory buildings.
JANUARY 12th – At Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island, the HMS Glasgow and HMS Sloop Swan landed 250 British soldiers and Marines. The Brits clashed with approximately 50 American men of Richmond’s Regiment and forced them to retreat. Throughout the night the Redcoats pillaged supplies, stole livestock away to the two ships and burned down homes and barns.
JANUARY 13th – After daybreak, Captain William Barton led 60 men from Richmond’s Regiment in an attack on the British. Gunfire was exchanged for over 3 hours, with several men from other Rhode Island units crossing the bay to reinforce their fellow rebels. Ultimately, the Brits were forced to end their pillaging and burning and to retreat to the two warships, having suffered at least 14 dead and an unknown number of injured. Continue reading
THE MARK OF ZORRO (1920) – Douglas Fairbanks digs into his comedic AND acrobatic skills in this first screen adaptation of Johnston McCully’s masked hero of 1820s California (The Curse of Capistrano had just been published the year before and Fairbanks bought the film rights for United Artists.) 
Excellent fight choreography, heroic opposition to tyranny and the rousing, marathon chase and fight scene near the film’s finale make The Mark of Zorro an absolute must-see for anyone curious about silent movies. Nearly every frame of the film is a portrait.
As always, 
MICROMEGAS (1752) – Written by Voltaire. The famed philosopher’s contribution to the nascent science fiction genre dealt with one of the earliest known instances of beings from other planets depicted visiting the Earth. Amid the fantastic elements of the story Voltaire fits in examinations of the philosophies of Aristotle, Locke, Descartes and others.
Here at 
Whether you like or hate Donald Trump is irrelevant – it became clear long ago that the cesspool of corruption which masquerades as America’s political system is targeting Trump to make a public example of any non-career politician who dares to oppose the establishment.
For this weekend’s light-hearted, escapist blog post about superheroes, Balladeer’s Blog goes back to the Justice Society of America, this country’s very first superteam. Years ago, I covered the early years of the JSA, from their first appearance in 
ALL-STAR COMICS Vol 1 #28 (April 1946) 
Regular readers of Balladeer’s Blog may remember that I’m a Silent Movie geek. Last time around I took a look at the magnificent film poster for Douglas Fairbanks’ Thief of Bagdad. This time around it’s posters for one of my favorite underrated Fairbanks flicks, Don Q: Son of Zorro. 
STRAIGHT TO HELL (1987) – For a glib, one sentence review of this movie, how about “Quentin Tarantino minus Quentin Tarantino equals Straight to Hell?” Though this flick came out years before Tarantino’s films it clearly influenced him and to this day it feels like a lost, inferior effort by Quentin. 
Alex threw in some of his stable of regulars from his two earlier films, slapped together a script in three days (co-written by Dick Rude) and used a mere few weeks to make this oddball genre-bender in Spain. 
