If you folks notice the titles of individual episodes getting changed again and again, it’s not because of my own indecisiveness. Rather, it’s because YouTube doesn’t seem to want to distribute some episodes as much as others, and so I change the titles to see if that has any effect.
For example, the most recent episode was originally titled, “Wild Nuts Can Kill”, or something like that. After a couple of days, it hadn’t even been seen by 50 people! This got me wondering if maybe YouTube’s algorithms weren’t throttling the video because of the word “Kill”. That’s why I began changing the title several times to see if it had any positive effect.
That episode is now titled: Exclusive 111: Wild Nuts Can Save or Worse
The school textbooks tell you the settlers crossed the Atlantic for religious freedom.
Some of them did, partly. What the textbooks leave out is the thing that sits in the actual letters, in the sailors' accounts, in the merchant pamphlets circulating in English ports from the 1580s onwards: a major reason people came to America was the wild game. Meat you could take. Meat nobody owned. Meat that walked into camp.
For a population legally separated from the animal for five hundred years, this was the whole pitch.
Consider what they were leaving.
A family in a Devon cottage in 1618 eats pottage. Oats, barley, an onion, whatever greens grew near the back door. No meat in it this week. No meat in it last week. There will be meat in it on Christmas Day, God willing, if the chicken is still alive by then. The deer in the forest at the end of the lane have been the king's property under the Forest Laws since 1066. Taking one is a hanging offence. The father has never taken one. His father never took one. The institutional...
