Britain had been fighting a new country, born against its wishes, and had now lost.Something of that mood of punitive lesson-giving hangs over budget talks between Barack Obama and congressional Republicans.
No body, no convictions and no clear picture of what happened (though there are plenty of rumours; about drugs, ruthless backwater dealers and punitive lessons gone wrong).
But as China's leader, Xi Jinping, has intensified a crackdown on dissent that human-rights groups describe as the most punitive in decades, these lessons are likely to become even more ideological.
These and other punitive measures blissfully ignore the lessons learned in the 1970s and 1980s, when Washington monetarily harassed the oil industry: Investment plummeted.
Regardless, the jury's decision and the punitive damages it awarded have lessons for Corporate America and pregnant workers.
Anyone who has the welfare of the child at heart, rather than the punitive desire to teach someone a lesson, can surely see that.
Maybe Congress will get around to reforming tort law after a jury in Alabama, desiring to enrich fellow Alabamans and teach Northerners a lesson, awards $300 billion in punitive damages against General Motors for leaving a scratch on a fender.
Although Rudd has compared Syria to Rwanda and Srebrenica, the current plan for limited punitive strikes against the Assad regime actually belies the lessons supposedly learned in these two atrocities.
It is a shame that the school must instead answer to punitive, external measures that stand to dangerously drive drug use underground and divest students of the lesson of responsible autonomy.
Cigarette makers want the country to believe that "they are good boys and girls" who have learned their lesson, said the lawyer, Stanley Rosenblatt, in opening statements in what could be a multibillion-dollar punitive judgment in Miami-Dade Circuit Court against top cigarette manufacturers.
