Read Dave Barry Slept Here: A Sort of History of the United States for Free Online

part.
     
    Eventually, however, Washington was able to recruit some troops via a promotion wherein if you enlisted in the army, you and a friend got an all-expenses-paid Winter for Two at Valley Forge. Nonetheless, the American troops were poor and ill trained. Many of them wore rags on their feet. They also wore their shoes on their heads. These were not exactly nuclear physicists, if you sense our meaning. But they were patriotic men, and they had a secret weapon that the king had not bargained on: “Yankee Doodle.” This was the Official Theme Song of the American Revolution, and when the Americans Marched into battle singing the inspirational part about how Yankee Doodle “stuck a feather in his cap and called it macaroni,” the effect on the British troops was devastating. “He called it what?” they would ask each other in confusion, thus giving the Americans the opening they needed to rush up and whack them with muskets.
     
    This forced the king to try a new ploy: He sent over the Hessians, who spoke no English and consequently paid little attention to “Yankee Doodle.” That was the good news for the British side. The bad news was, the Hessians were actually German, which meant that the words they formed in their battle formations were humongous. For example, their equivalent Of GO BRITS! was: WANN FAHRTDERSUGAB EIN UMWIEVIELUHRKOMMTERAN! It would sometimes take them days to form a simple preposition.
     
    Meanwhile , in Philadelphia, the Continental Congress, in an atmosphere of crisis, was trying to write the Declaration of Independence. The responsibility for this task had originally been assigned to the Special Joint Committee for Writing the Declaration of Independence, whose members immediately voted to go on a fact-finding mission, with their spouses, to the French Riviera. It Soon became clear that it was going to take them a long time just to declare their souvenir purchases, let alone independence, so the task fell to Thomas Jefferson. On a historic night in 1776, the lanky red-haired Virginian picked up a quill pen and began scratching on a historic piece of parchment. He worked all night, and by morning he was ready to show his results to the others.
     
    “Aren’t you supposed to dip the pen into the ink?” the others asked.
     
    And so the lanky red-haired Virginian went back to work for another historic night, and by dawn he had produced the document that has come to express the ideals and hopes and dreams of an entire nation.
     
    THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE
     
    When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary
    for one people to dissolve the political bands which have
    connected them with another, and to assume among the
    powers of the earth the separate and equal station to
    which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them,
    a decent respect to the opinions of mankind require that
    they should get some sleep. Because I have been up for
    two nights now, declaring independence, and I may be a
    lanky Virginian but I am not a machine, for heaven’s sake,
    and it just doesn’t make sense to sit here scrawling away
    these compound-complex sentences when I just know nobody’s
    going to read them, because nobody ever does read all the
    way through these legal documents. Take leases. You take
    the average tenants, and you could put a lease in front of
    them with a clause about halfway through stating that they
    have to eat toasted moose doots for breakfast, and I
    guarantee you they’ll never read it. Not that it would
    make any difference if they did, because tenants ignore
    most of the rules anyway, such as the rules about not
    flushing inappropriate objects down the toilet. Ask any
    landlord what he spends most of his time doing, and the
    odds are he’ll answer, “Pulling inappropriate objects out
    of tenants’ toilets.” I know one landlord who found a
    gerbil in there. Who the hell would do a thing like that?
    A cat, yes. I could see that. I could see giving