200,000,000 $PATIENCE. Given back to the community. Out of pocket. Find another project in the space willing to do that. We’re not here to follow the standard, we’re here to change it. Community first. Always. 🌱

He ran off from home as a teenager after a fight with his father and turned up on the Virginia frontier with nothing but his fists and a bad attitude. He hauled wagons, drank hard, gambled harder, and beat men senseless in taverns for fun. Nobody looked at young Daniel Morgan and saw a future war hero. They saw trouble with a strong back. Then came the lashing. During the French and Indian War a British officer struck him with the flat of a sword, and Morgan knocked the man out cold. For hitting an officer he was sentenced to 500 lashes, a punishment meant to kill. He lay there and counted every stroke himself. He lived. And for the rest of his days he told it as a joke, that the drummer miscounted in the dark and only gave him 499, so the British crown still owed him one lash and he intended to collect. He nearly died more than once before the Revolution even began. A musket ball tore through the back of his neck and out through his cheek, taking teeth with it. He clamped onto his horse's neck, sure he was finished, and rode until he didn't fall off. He carried that scar and a lifetime of chronic pain, and sciatica so brutal that in later years men sometimes had to lift him onto his horse. When war came he raised a company of frontier riflemen and marched them hundreds of miles to Boston in the dead of the campaign. At Quebec in 1775 he stormed the walls in a blizzard, kept fighting after the assault fell apart around him, and when he was finally cornered he refused to hand his sword to the enemy. He pressed his back to a wall, dared them to shoot him, and surrendered only to a clergyman standing nearby so no redcoat could ever say he'd taken Daniel Morgan's blade. His riflemen were something the world had barely seen. They could kill a man at 250 yards while regular armies still fired in massed volleys and prayed. At Saratoga his marksmen hung in the trees and picked off British officers one at a time. One of his men dropped General Simon Fraser from an impossible distance, and with that shot the fight went out of the British line. That campaign ended in a whole British army surrendering and brought France into the war on the American side. Then came the day that made him immortal. January 1781, a cold field in South Carolina called the Cowpens. Morgan was sick, outnumbered, and staring down Banastre Tarleton, the young cavalry commander who left burned farms and slaughtered prisoners behind him and who no one wanted to face. So Morgan did the unthinkable. He put his weakest, jumpiest militia right up front, walked the line the night before, and told them plain: give me two good volleys, boys, just two, then fall back and I'll ask no more of you. Tarleton saw ragged militia running and thought he'd won. He charged straight into the trap. The militia peeled away exactly as planned, the British came on howling, and Morgan's real line rose up and hit them while cavalry swept around the flank and the whole thing snapped shut like a jaw. In under an hour Tarleton's force was destroyed. Morgan pulled off a perfect double envelopment, the kind generals dream about and almost never land, and he did it with a broken-down body and a militia most officers wouldn't trust to hold a fence line. They still teach that battle at West Point. Cowpens broke the British in the South and set the road to Yorktown. Congress struck a gold medal for him. The wagon driver with no schooling, a back that barely worked, a mouth full of missing teeth, and 499 scars on it, out-generaled the best they had and helped win a nation. Daniel Morgan. Remember the name.

🇺🇸🇺🇸 Hell yeah!! 🇺🇸🇺🇸

🇺🇸 Gettysburg 163 Live: July 1st, 12:30 PM Gettysburg resident John Burns decides he is not hiding in his cellar. The 69-year-old civilian walks directly onto the active battlefield wearing a blue swallowtail coat and a top hat. Armed with a personal rifle, the elderly constable reports straight to the front line and demands a place in the ranks. Sent over to fight alongside the fierce Midwesterners of the Iron Brigade, Burns settles into the woods and opens fire. He spends the afternoon calmly picking off targets from behind a tree, refusing to yield an inch of ground. Despite taking three bullet wounds, the old veteran survives the onslaught to become an absolute national legend.

How it feels setting your air conditioner to 60. 🇺🇸

Stories spread through Bataan about a captain who seemed to appear and disappear in the jungle. Something was crawling behind Japanese lines at night, ambushing patrols, hitting their positions, and vanishing before they could react. It was one American officer, often alone, with a Thompson and a handful of grenades. American troops began calling him the Ghost of Bataan. This is the story of Arthur Wermuth..🧵1/6

For Father’s Day, I’ll share this letter to Karl Marx from his dad

Back in 1806, Andrew Jackson found himself facing off in a duel with a man named Charles Dickinson. The trouble started with a heated dispute over a horse racing bet, which quickly turned personal. Dickinson had publicly insulted Jackson’s wife, Rachel, by calling her a bigamist because her first marriage had not been fully dissolved before she married Andrew Jackson. An attack the future president would never tolerate. Dickinson was widely known as an expert marksman with a deadly accurate aim. When the two men faced off Dickinson fired first and struck Jackson directly in the chest. The bullet broke two ribs and lodged near his heart where it would remain for the rest of his life and cause him ongoing pain. But Jackson refused to go down. Without flinching or showing any sign of weakness he stood his ground and fired back. His shot struck Dickinson fatally, ending the duel in Jackson’s victory. That kind of unbreakable will and raw toughness earned him the legendary nickname “Old Hickory.” The man was truly built different.

On this day in 1778, a different army marched out of Valley Forge than the one that had stumbled in. People picture Valley Forge as a battle. It wasn't. No British attack, no siege. The enemy was 18 miles away in warm Philadelphia houses while Washington's men built their own log huts in the snow and waited out the worst winter of the war. The numbers are brutal. Around 2,000 men died in that camp. Not from bullets. From typhus, dysentery, pneumonia, and exposure. Soldiers stood guard with no shoes, their feet wrapped in rags, leaving blood in the snow. They went days with nothing but "fire cake," which was just flour and water baked on a rock. Men deserted. Officers quit. The whole thing nearly fell apart. Then a strange figure showed up: a Prussian who called himself Baron von Steuben. He barely spoke English and may have padded his own resume to get the job. Didn't matter. He grabbed the freezing, starving men and drilled them like a real European army, cursing them out in German and French while an aide translated the swearing into English. He wrote the drill manual the U.S. Army would use for decades. So on June 19, they marched out. Same ragged men, completely transformed. Nine days later at Monmouth they stood toe to toe with British regulars in the open and held the line, something the old army could never have done. Valley Forge has no famous charge and no battlefield victory. It's just proof that the hardest fights are sometimes the ones where nobody is shooting at you. You don't become dangerous in the moment you win. You become dangerous in the months nobody is watching.

Normandia, D-Day czerwiec 1944. Amerykanie umacniają przyczółek. Widoczna jest skala największej operacji desantowej w historii. W tle niemieccy jeńcy pod strażą. Ciekawy detal: po bliskim wybuchu większość z nich instynktownie pada lub kuli się – jeden stoi niemal nieruchomo.

240 years ago today, the most underrated general in American history died. From a sunburn. Nathanael Greene was never supposed to be a soldier. He was a Quaker from Rhode Island who ran his family's iron forge. He had asthma, a stiff leg that gave him a permanent limp, and zero combat experience. His own church suspended him just for going to watch a military parade. So how did he end up commanding the entire Southern army? He read. He bought every book on warfare he could find and taught himself strategy from scratch. Washington noticed, and trusted him more than almost anyone. By 1780 the war in the South was a disaster. The previous American general got beaten so badly he fled 200 miles on horseback. Congress let Washington pick the replacement, and he picked Greene without hesitation. Greene's plan was insane. He looked at his small, starving, half-naked army and decided he could not win, so he would lose correctly. He ran Cornwallis all over the Carolinas until the British were exhausted, far from supply, and bleeding men they could not replace. "We fight, get beat, rise, and fight again." At Guilford Courthouse, Cornwallis technically won the battle and lost a quarter of his army doing it. That was the whole point. Greene lost almost every fight on paper and won the entire South. Cornwallis limped off to a little tobacco port to rest and refit. The port was called Yorktown. Here's the part that should make you angry. To feed and clothe his men, Greene personally co-signed for war supplies because the government wouldn't pay. When the bills came due, Congress refused to honor them. The man who saved the South came home buried in debt that wasn't his. Georgia gave him a plantation near Savannah as thanks. He finally had peace. Then one hot afternoon in June 1786 he spent the day walking a neighbor's rice fields with no hat. He collapsed from sunstroke and a week later he was dead at 43. One last twist. After he died, his widow Catharine took in a broke young houseguest tinkering with an idea. His name was Eli Whitney, and the cotton gin was invented at the dead general's home. June 19, 1786. Remember the name. Nathanael Greene.