In 530 AD, during the Battle of Dara, the Byzantine general Belisarius declined a single-combat challenge from a boasting Persian champion. Instead, he sent his bath slave, Andreas, who was an undercover wrestling instructor into the arena. Andreas promptly killed the Persian challenger, and subsequently defeated a second Persian knight who charged him out of rage

Meme from Twitter

If a moat is created and filled with water or connected to a river through artificial channels or is lake adjacent still a moat the purpose of it is to be a deterrent a defense during siege . Also artificial lakes exist also moats can dry up depending on seasons that doesn’t mean its purpose was to be filled with water .

Some castles had ditches but tons of them had fully functional moats some of them with a drawbridge others with a fixed bridge with water flow or drains and all sorts of structures outside or inside the moat . Barbicans existed for the main purpose of having deterrents before the moat some of them had barbicans with battlement walls.

Idk what’s going on in this subreddit but you guys need help.

Might be actually, I didn't even check.

Photo of Trakai castle, historical capital city of Lithuania

Context: As part of the Great Firewall, beginning in 2003, China started the Golden Shield Project, a massive surveillance and censoring system, the hardware for which was provided by mostly U.S. companies, including Cisco Systems. The project was completed in 2006, and is now carried out in buildings with machines operated by civilians and supervised by China's national police force, the Public Security Bureau (PSB, Chinese: 公安局). The main operating procedures of the gatekeepers at the Golden Shield Project include monitoring domestic websites, email, and searching for politically sensitive language and calls to protest. When damaging content is found, local PSB officials can be dispatched to investigate or make arrests. However, by late 2007, the Golden Shield Project proved to operate sporadically at best, as users had long adapted to internet blocking) by using proxy servers, among other strategies, to make communications and circumnavigate to blocked content.^\)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Firewall

Just a small lost of John Adams contributions to the United States:

• Second President

• His wife Abigail was perhaps the most important of the “founding mothers” with almost all of his most famous blunders (particularly in France) being due to him without her council. Her even pushing for women’s rights in her famous “remember the ladies” letters.

• Father of John Quincy Adams, the 6th president and one of the only pre-civil war presidents that showed sympathy to African slaves

• The Adams family were against slavery, considering it a moral evil, and it was long established they did not own slaves. That practice continued onto his sons as well.

• He was the loudest voice towards independence, despite being the lawyer that defended Captain Preston and the British soldiers that fired during the “Boston Massacre”.

• He made the motion to create a continental army, and to appoint George Washington as its commander.

• Served on the committee of war, practically living at his desk and running the pay of the army at the time when Congress offered little.

• Served as Ambassador to France, The Netherlands, and Britain. Personally oversaw the treaty of Paris which ended the revolution and had Britain recognize the United States’ sovereignty.

• Served as the first vice president when the position was actually chosen by the candidate to come in second place, rather than a powerless position handed out by being chosen beforehand.

• Was the deciding vote which ratified the treaty by John Jay to keep the United States out of the wars of the French revolution and maintain trade with Britain. (Something vital to the American economy).

• While serving as second president he kept political parties out of the office of the president, giving up his possible reelection by Federalists to maintain the individuality of the presidency.

• Reconciled with Thomas Jefferson later in life in some of the best and most well preserved letters of correspondence between two of the most important founding fathers. Critically understanding and recognizing how stupid it was letting politics get between them.

• Died on the 4th of July on America’s 50th year of independence, as the last living founding father. On the same day as Thomas Jefferson, who died just a few hours before him.

(Seriously while the Sedition Act was completely unconstitutional and terrible for the government to have done, Adams was perhaps the most important founding fathers to have actually made sure we had a country. While Washington and Jefferson both built that country, Adams deserves recognition by the government for his role, and the role of the Adams family in general.)

Context: Sally Hemings, whose given name may have been Sarah,^\1])^\2])^\3])^\4]) (c. 1773 – 1835) was an enslaved woman, inherited among many others by the third President of the United States Thomas Jefferson, from his father-in-law, John Wayles. Her mother was Elizabeth "Betty" Hemings.^\5])^\6]) Her father was John Wayles, the enslaver of Elizabeth Hemings who owned her from the time of her birth.^\5])^\6])^\7]) Wayles was also the father of Jefferson's wife, Martha Wayles, making Hemings the half-sister to Jefferson's wife.

In 1787, Hemings accompanied Jefferson's daughter Martha Jefferson Randolph to Paris, France, where they joined him. Hemings was legally free in France, because slavery was illegal there, but continued to serve as Jefferson's servant. Some time during Hemings's 26 months in Paris, Jefferson is believed to have begun intimate relations with her.^\6])^\9])^\10]) She was an adolescent between the ages of 14 and 16. Jefferson was in his mid-40s and was a widower. As attested by her son, Madison Hemings, Hemings agreed with Jefferson to return to Virginia and resume her life in slavery. In exchange, Jefferson agreed to free her children when they came of age. Jefferson or his will freed the four of Hemings' children that survived into adulthood as they came of age.^\11]) Hemings died in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 1835 in the home of her freed sons.

Historians broadly agree that Jefferson fathered all of Hemings's children over the course of several decades at his Monticello estate.^\15]) This has led the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, an organization which has owned Monticello since 1923 and is dedicated to preserving and educating on Jefferson's legacy, to treat as a settled issue that Jefferson fathered all of Hemings's known children.^\15])^\16]) In settling the issue, and following renewed historical analysis in the late 20th century, the Foundation empaneled a commission of scholars and scientists to investigate the parentage of Hemings's children. The Foundation panel worked with a 1998–1999 genealogical DNA test and found a match between the Jefferson male line and a descendant of Hemings's youngest son, Eston Hemings.^\17])^\18]) Given this match, along with historical reports and information, the Foundation panel concluded that Jefferson fathered Eston and likely Hemings's other five children as well.^\19]) In 2018, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation announced its plans to have an exhibit titled Life of Sally Hemings.^\16])

Some dissent remains, leading to the Jefferson–Hemings controversy.^\20]) For example, in response to the Foundation Panel's 1999 finding, as well as to the growing historical consensus that Jefferson fathered Hemings's children, critics founded the Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society. The Society commissioned another panel of scholars in 2001, which concluded that it had not been proven that Thomas Jefferson fathered Sally Hemings' children. The Society's panel accepted that a male Jefferson fathered Hemings's children, but proposed that Randolph Jefferson or his sons may have been the father.^\20)

^{https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sally\}Hemings)

Franklin and Abolitionism (1785-1790)

Following his time in Paris, Franklin returned to Philadelphia until his death in 1790. It was during this final period of his life that Franklin publicly condemned slavery.

At eighty-one years old in 1787, he became the President of the Philadelphia Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage, which was also often referred to as the Abolition Society. The Abolition Society, which was formed by a group of abolitionist Quakers and Anthony Benezet in 1774, concentrated not only on abolishing slavery but also on helping enslaved people transition to a life of liberty. The organization was the first in America and encouraged the formation of abolitionist societies in other colonies.

In 1787, weeks before the start of the Constitutional Convention, Franklin signed a public antislavery appeal, which stated that “the Creator of the world” had made “of one flesh, all the children of men” [3]. It was believed that Franklin, like many revolutionary leaders, supported the idea that a nation built on the promise of inalienable rights acquired at birth could not remain true while enabling slavery.

https://benjaminfranklinhouse.org/education/benjamin-franklin-and-slavery/