Nobody knows for sure where it came from. The Black Plague of the 1600s is the most widely accepted origin of the song, with good reason. Most scholars explain the song this way:
Ring around the rosy - rosy refers to the rose-colored rash people developed.
A pocket full of posies - posies were herbs used to sweeten the air from the smell of death.
Atchoo, atchoo - these were the original words to the song, having been traced as far back as the 1800's.
We all fall down - I don't think I need to explain this one, do I?
Now for the other side of the argument. There are some scholars who disagree with the Plague reference simply because there are a great deal of records detailing how the Plague started, how it spread, what the symptoms were, how it disappeared, how many people died, and the way that people lived. Yet it wasn't until the 1800's, almost two centuries after the Plague, that the first reference of the song appeared.
In the Old West it was the job of the person seated next to the driver to keep a lookout for trouble. This person kept his weapon, usually a shotgun, ready at all times in case it had to be used.
Off Providence there is a small island originally called Aquidneck. In 1644, the name of the island was changed to Rhodes, after the more famous one in the Mediterranean Sea where the statue of Colossus once stood.
The elephant was created by political cartoonist Thomas Nast in 1874. His choice of the elephant was a result of his needing a political symbol at the time as a mass animal escape from the New York Zoo was in the news. He merged rampaging elephants with the opinion that Republicans were practicing random destructiveness in their policies.
The term for southerners came about because most who work in the fields wear clothing that provides a loose and open neck. With the skin exposed to the sun's rays day after day, the neck area came to get a dark brownish-red color. Because the American South has been, and continues to be, more agricultural than the North, the term has come to be associated with southerners.
