June 18

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania has had a bad reputation and been the butt of poor jokes[i] for a very long time. While the city’s place in history is secure, what with the Liberty Bell and all that sort of stuff, it really is a rather grimy backwater today. Do you need further proof of the city’s undesirability? On the 18th in 1778, British troops, fighting the very new Americans, abandoned it, thus ceding even more territory to the rather annoying revolutionaries.

[i] Last week I went to Philadelphia but it was closed. –W. C. Fields