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6 days ago | 
vtdigger.org | Mark Bushnell
If Russell Porter ever wrote a resume, recipients could be forgiven if they thought someone was playing a joke on them. At various times, he was an artist, but also an engineer. An architect, but also a cartographer. He was a builder, and a death-defying arctic explorer, while also being a ground-breaking telescope designer. In truth, Porter might never have had to write a resume and make sense of all this nonlinear bouncing between vocations and avocations.
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1 month ago | 
vtdigger.org | Mark Bushnell
If Ethan and Ira Allen had their way, Canada would have been America’s 14th colony. The Allen brothers were hardly alone in pushing to have Canada join the United States. In 1774, delegates to the First Continental Congress, including Benjamin Franklin and John Adams, published an open letter to the Province of Quebec, urging Canadians to join their struggle against the British government. All they heard back was crickets.
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2 months ago | 
vtdigger.org | Mark Bushnell
Vermonters have learned the hard way not to get their hopes up about spring. The season here is long and cruel. Any stretch of warm, sunny weather will not be followed by more of the same, as it might be in other parts of the country, places where spring means green grass, flowers and confidently putting away one’s winter clothes. In Vermont, warm days in early spring are just a tease of what is still months away.
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2 months ago | 
openlegalblogarchive.org | Mark Bushnell
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2 months ago | 
vtdigger.org | Mark Bushnell
Vermonters weren’t particularly concerned when President Jefferson signed the Embargo Act into law in December 1807. They assumed the new law, which was bound to have a chilling effect on the nation’s economy, wouldn’t affect them. It wasn’t a crazy assumption.
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Mar 2, 2025 | 
openlegalblogarchive.org | Mark Bushnell
1762 was a year of firsts. Six-year-old musical prodigy Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart played for the first time at royal courts in Vienna and Munich. Catherine the Great began her rule of Russia. John Montagu, the 4th earl of Sandwich, invented what would become an international culinary standard when he ordered bread with his meat, so he could keep his fingers from getting greasy while he played cards at his club.
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Mar 2, 2025 | 
vtdigger.org | Mark Bushnell
1762 was a year of firsts. Six-year-old musical prodigy Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart played for the first time at royal courts in Vienna and Munich. Catherine the Great began her rule of Russia. John Montagu, the 4th earl of Sandwich, invented what would become an international culinary standard when he ordered bread with his meat, so he could keep his fingers from getting greasy while he played cards at his club.
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Feb 16, 2025 | 
vtdigger.org | Mark Bushnell
The Brattleboro Reformer gushed with pride on January 10, 1922. Just the day before, the newspaper proclaimed, workers had started to build a ski jump in town that would be “the best in this country.” The facility’s aggressive design, which featured a longer “in run” area for skiers to build up speed and a greater drop than other facilities in the Northeast, guaranteed that competitors would shatter records set at the famed jumps at Lake Placid and Dartmouth College, the paper stated.
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Feb 2, 2025 | 
openlegalblogarchive.org | Mark Bushnell
America has probably never had a more influential journalist than William Lloyd Garrison. A social activist by calling, Garrison railed against intemperance (his father was an alcoholic who abandoned the family), gambling and war. But his real passion was the fight against slavery. He originally advocated gradual emancipation, but his beliefs evolved, and he eventually championed immediate and complete emancipation.
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Feb 2, 2025 | 
vtdigger.org | Mark Bushnell
America has probably never had a more influential journalist than William Lloyd Garrison. A social activist by calling, Garrison railed against intemperance (his father was an alcoholic who abandoned the family), gambling and war. But his real passion was the fight against slavery. He originally advocated gradual emancipation, but his beliefs evolved, and he eventually championed immediate and complete emancipation.
