Paper Connections

History leaves traces everywhere. Join our investigation, connect the dots, and follow us down the rabbit hole. 🔗

[Paper Connections @paperXconnect]

The men of this story, off duty and far from home. John Greenwood painted these Rhode Island sea captains carousing in a tavern in Dutch Surinam, a hub of the molasses and the slave trades, somewhere between 1752 and 1758.

Among the figures drinking, gambling, and being sick upon the floor are Esek Hopkins, who would command the slave ship Sally and then the first navy of the United States, Nicholas Cooke, a future governor of the colony, and Joseph Wanton, the governor who would one day offer a hundred pounds for the Gaspee raiders and mean none of it.

It is reckoned the first genre painting in American art, and it shows the world of the bay exactly as it was: prosperous, seagoing, and built upon the trades that ran to Africa and the islands. Sea Captains Carousing in Surinam, John Greenwood, c. 1752–1758. Saint Louis Art Museum, via Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain. Accessed 06/12/2026.

[Paper Connections @paperXconnect]

The raid that fired the first shot of the American Revolution was led by smugglers. Some of those leaders were slavers. All of them became heroes, and not one of the three words can be removed without falsifying the record. The privateersman at the head of the boats had made his fortune hunting French ships. The merchant who called the raiders together had sent a ship to the slave coast of Africa, and would one day stand trial in the republic he helped to found. And behind them, at the muffled oars, sat the ordinary townsmen of Providence, who rowed of their own free will, a shipmaster's son of nineteen among them. This was no militia of farmers, and it was no gang of pirates either; it was a whole port, high and low, rowing out behind its merchant aristocracy to defend a liberty that was real and a commerce that was not innocent. For months we tried to pry the three words apart, the smuggler from the slaver from the hero. We could not. No one can. The words were never separate in the men, and the hypocrisy was not a flaw in the founding; it was the design. The essay makes the case at full length, the first of a new series.

The First Shot of the American Revolution
Smugglers, Slavers, Heroes, and the Birth of American Liberty
https://t.co/Wr1Bf4juJ8

[Paper Connections @paperXconnect]

“Watch for the torch that is handed to you as freedom. Someone has usually paid for the matches.”

Our trending essay:
Propaganda. The Man Who Manipulated the Twentieth Century
Edward Bernays, and how he shaped the public mind.
https://t.co/nkgcuHdT8g

[Paper Connections @paperXconnect]

After midnight on the tenth of June, 1772, eight longboats came on through the dark of Narragansett Bay in line abreast, oars bound in cloth, not a light among them and not a word. At their head was a privateersman who had taken twenty-three French ships in the late war. Ahead of them, helpless on a sandbar where a packet captain had deliberately lured her at a falling tide, lay His Majesty's armed schooner Gaspee, the most hated vessel on the water. One musket flashed in the dark, her commander went down, and by the time the flames reached her powder the whole bay stood lit as bright as noon.

It was the first shot of the American Revolution. Lexington came three years later, and has worn the name ever since. That night is only the door. Behind it stand the trade that made the men in the boats, the silence that shielded them for half a century, the navy that rose out of their web, and a question the country has never answered: whether the liberty they fired for can ever be cut loose from the commerce they fired to protect. Today we publish the essay that follows that question to its source, the opening of a new series.

The First Shot of the American Revolution
Smugglers, Slavers, Heroes, and the Birth of American Liberty
https://t.co/Wr1Bf4juJ8

[Paper Connections @paperXconnect]

Mussolini and Madison Avenue were reading the same book. So were Hitler, Freud, and Theodore Roosevelt. Fewer than 200 pages. Paris, 1895.
The new Paper Connections essay follows the paper trail.
The Book That Manipulated the Twentieth Century
https://t.co/7FlqlAemo1

[Paper Connections @paperXconnect]

🤿El audio deep “Saint-Domingue y la arquitectura de la economía atlántica del azúcar, 1493–1791“
...la arquitectura de la economía atlántica del azúcar desde 1493 hasta la víspera de la Revolución haitiana🎧
https://t.co/8JAtDoN2S6

[Paper Connections @paperXconnect]

🤿This audio deep dive on our original essay ‘Saint-Domingue and the Architecture of the Atlantic Sugar Economy, 1493–1791’. It is a story about the true origins of industrial capitalism — and about who paid for it with their freedom.🎧
https://t.co/2IjcdC5rPa

[Paper Connections @paperXconnect]

🤿This audio deep dive on our original essay ‘Saint-Domingue and the Architecture of the Atlantic Sugar Economy, 1493–1791’. It is a story about the true origins of industrial capitalism — and about who paid for it with their freedom.🎧
https://t.co/8JAtDoN2S6

[Paper Connections @paperXconnect]

The Venetian Empire, that invented the telescope trade could no longer quite see what was approaching. Twenty-five years later, the Republic was gone. Our latest deep dive on the Long Autumn of the Serenissima is live. 🤿
The Perfect Machinery of Twilight
https://t.co/33swYnwZIF

[Paper Connections @paperXconnect]

The Republic of Venice was, by 1772, a beautiful and superbly functioning antique.
"...with a precision and reach its founders could scarcely have imagined."

THE LONG AUTUMN OF THE SERENISSIMA· Article 2
The Perfect Machinery of Twilight
https://t.co/33swYnwZIF

[Paper Connections @paperXconnect]

The Venetian Empire, that invented the telescope trade could no longer quite see what was approaching. Twenty-five years later, the Republic was gone. Our latest deep dive on the Long Autumn of the Serenissima is live. 🤿
The Perfect Machinery of Twilight
https://t.co/33swYnwZIF

[Paper Connections @paperXconnect]

The Republic of Venice was, by 1772, a beautiful and superbly functioning antique.
"...with a precision and reach its founders could scarcely have imagined."

THE LONG AUTUMN OF THE SERENISSIMA· Article 2
The Perfect Machinery of Twilight
https://t.co/33swYnwZIF

[Paper Connections @paperXconnect]

🤿This audio deep dive on our original essay ‘Saint-Domingue and the Architecture of the Atlantic Sugar Economy, 1493–1791’. It is a story about the true origins of industrial capitalism — and about who paid for it with their freedom.🎧
https://t.co/2IjcdC5rPa

[Paper Connections @paperXconnect]

🤿This audio deep dive on our original essay ‘Saint-Domingue and the Architecture of the Atlantic Sugar Economy, 1493–1791’. It is a story about the true origins of industrial capitalism — and about who paid for it with their freedom.🎧
https://t.co/8JAtDoN2S6

[Paper Connections @paperXconnect]

🤿El audio deep “Saint-Domingue y la arquitectura de la economía atlántica del azúcar, 1493–1791“
...la arquitectura de la economía atlántica del azúcar desde 1493 hasta la víspera de la Revolución haitiana🎧
https://t.co/8JAtDoN2S6

[Paper Connections @paperXconnect]

🤿El audio deep “Saint-Domingue y la arquitectura de la economía atlántica del azúcar, 1493–1791“
...la arquitectura de la economía atlántica del azúcar desde 1493 hasta la víspera de la Revolución haitiana🎧
https://t.co/eMGnGi9lCs

[Paper Connections @paperXconnect]

🤿El audio deep “Saint-Domingue and the Architecture of the Atlantic Sugar Economy, 1493–1791“
...la arquitectura de la economía atlántica del azúcar desde 1493 hasta la víspera de la Revolución haitiana🎧
https://t.co/eMGnGi9lCs

[Acquired Podcast @AcquiredFM]

Our episode on the complete history and strategy of Ferrari: https://t.co/yAEVIAQL3d

[Acquired Podcast @AcquiredFM]

Full episode: https://t.co/yAEVIAQL3d