The Invention of Chocolate Milk
Sir Hans Sloane, an Irishman, first created chocolate milk over 350 years ago. He had tasted chocolate while in the West Indies, but said it made him nauseous, so he added milk and sugar to make it more appealing. (This was before hot chocolate and chocolate bars were invented, so he was eating something closer to melted semisweet or baking chocolate.) By 1700, people would often go to “chocolate houses” instead of coffee houses, where they could choose from a range of different chocolate milk mixes. His new invention must have been quite healthy — Sir Sloane lived to the impressive age of 92.
D.C. Museum exhibit attempts to rewrite Irish History to show the Bristish as having a "civilizing" impact on Ireland
irishcentral.com“Purporting to represent Anglo-Irish relations, cultural and political, between 1580 and 1700, its major claim is that the period was not marked by conflict but by ‘cooperation.’ If this be so, the lexicographers have deceived us.
“The long century in question was perhaps the most violent and destructive in the catalog of Ireland’s tragic history. During this period, the longtime residents were subject to the largest land confiscation and (even including the Great Famine of the 1840s), the largest proportional loss of population ever.
“The systematic destruction of the native polity and the institutions it patronized—legal, political, cultural, and religious—put an end to a civilization older than that of its rapacious conquerors.
“A succession of wars, rebellions, and massacres resulted in the disappearance of over half a million people: into violent death, European exile, or slavery in Barbados. The Penal Laws enacted at the end of this period reduced the remaining population to virtual slaves. The colonial endeavors of the ‘nobility’ and ‘newcomers’ had neither the intention nor the effect of ‘civilizing’ Ireland, but of turning its resources to their exclusive economic benefit.
“The exhibition alleges that this small island, which had an advanced civilization for a millennium before the century in question was ‘at the edge of the known world,’ and was in need of a Protestant reformation, an Anglicized ‘pacification,’ and benign ‘investment.’ It represents the native Irish as ‘exotic,’ ‘fantastical,’ and ‘intractable.’
It proposes that the Irish chieftains freely abandoned their ancestral lands for Continental opportunities. It they had any values worth defending, this exhibition does not consider them worthy of mention. Instead, we get complacent colonial disinformation.
“We are repeatedly told that all of this was conducted in the spirit of humanism, improvement, and ennoblement. This despite the preponderance of the historical evidence—excluded from the exhibition—that it was a brutal military conquest.The corner stone of the British Empire rests on these bones which, current political necessities aside, will not lie still.”
