Hit the dirt! The cry came at 4:15 p.m. on June 6, 1966, just before three shotgun blasts exploded from the bushes along Highway 51 near Hernando, Mississippi. Two of the rounds found their target: James Meredith, a 32-year-old black law student who had the day before embarked on a protest march from Memphis to Jackson, Mississippi. Sixty years ago, as Meredith fell to his knees on the ground, the civil rights movement found itself at a turning point.
On the 200th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party — December 16, 1973 — protestors descend on the celebration demanding "environmental protection, racial justice, an end to corporate profiteering. . ." Several throw empty oil barrels into the harbor. Others hang President Nixon in effigy. America’s Bicentennial is off to a bad start.
On May 9, 1754 an article was published in Benjamin Franklin’s newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gazette, calling for the British colonies on North America’s eastern seaboard to unite against the threat of French aggression from the western interior. This rousing exhortation was echoed by an accompanying illustration depicting the British colonies as a snake cut into segments and was captioned, “JOIN, or DIE.”
Although often cited as the first political cartoon published in an American newspaper, Franklin’s Join or Die cartoon has since become an iconic symbol of America’s founding struggle. Its progeny were numerous, because the cartoon was immediately copied in other colonial newspapers. It also went on to inspire other powerful artwork associated with American independence, most famously including the Gadsden flag, the war banner created by South Carolina delegate Christopher Gadsden in 1775, on which a similar rattlesnake figure—this one intact—appeared coiled above the words: “Dont Tread on Me.”
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent recently unveiled designs for a commemorative $1 gold-colored coin with President Trump's face on the front, which he said the U.S. Mint will produce in honor of the country's 250th birthday. Two months earlier, Bessent had also announced the Mint was planning for a possible $250 note with the president's likeness. Would the issuance of these be legal? Are commemorative coins and bills different from standard ones? It turns out the controversies around images of living persons on currency date back millennia.
Editor's Note: To celebrate the 100th anniversary of the founding of Route 66, Quarto Publishing Group recently published Jim Hinckley's Route 66: 100 Years, which chronicles the history of the highway through the voices of various historians and artists who've sought to promote and preserve it. The following is adapted from a chapter by Dries Bessels, a Dutch amateur historian and Route 66 enthusiast who once led tours along the historic route.