The Election of 1800

Can we get back to politics? Please? Yo,

I'm sorry, I just had to use that Hamilton line. It comes into my head whenever I think of The Election of 1800. Hamilton aside, this election was pretty interesting! Welcome back to Hysterical Histories, and today we're going to tackle what is, in my opinion, one of the coolest elections ever.

This election had a lot of firsts. It was the first election where both parties (at that time the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans,) both ran candidates for office, and they actually had to work a little at it. One couldn't just say "Vote for Adams because he's better than you." This was also the first tie in the electoral college for the presidency. Normally there is always a rig to make it so that this doesn't happen, but the Republican who was chosen to throw his vote... didn't? And then we had a tie between two candidates: Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr.

So now I'm facing Aaron Burr, with his own faction...

The vote then went to the House of Representatives, as was laid out in the Constitution. It took 36 ballots, and as we Hamilton fans know, an interjection from Hamilton, to finally have a clear winner. Thomas Jefferson was going to be President, and, to everyone's confusion, Burr would be Vice President.

Haha, yeah right. Do you hear this guy? Man openly campaigns against me, talkin' about "I look forward to our partnership." 

So, one of the main things that changed in the Jefferson presidency was that rule that the runner-up becomes Vice President. But 1800 saw a lot of other interesting things occur. The first slave rebellion, though largely unsuccessful, was in 1800.

Another important occurence was the Marbury vs. Madison case. This was the case where the judiciary gave itself the power of judicial review. Basically, this means that the judiciary can uphold or invalidate federal laws as it sees fit. But the judiciary is really complicated, so we'll talk about it another time.

Thanks for reading! See you next week!

Gregarious Gov 1 - An Overview of Power in the U.S.

Hello wonderful humans and welcome back to... what are we gonna call this while I’m not talking about history? Gregarious Government? Sure, why not?

Anyway, this month I have a rabbit trail down the path of Government! So we’re gonna talk about some interesting things about separation of powers and some interesting things you may not know about. Let’s go!

Okay, so first let’s define government. Government is a set of rules and institutions people set up so they can function together as a unified society. People do this in different ways. Some do monarchies, some do dictatorships… but we have a democracy here in America, so that’s what we’re gonna be talking about.

First let's talk Congress. This is in two parts as most of you know -- the House of Representatives and the Senate. The House has an amount of representatives based on population, and the Senate has two senators for every state. As you may remember from Part 2, the only reason we even have a senate is because Delaware threatened not to join the Union if we didn’t have equal representation, and Madison saw it as a necessary evil.

Both houses have some particular things they alone handle. House of representatives has 3:

1. It’s in charge of impeaching people and all the investigations involved with that. 
2.  All tax related laws run through the House.
3. The House decides a presidential candidate when there is no clear winner. 

Another fun fact is that the House officials were the only democratically elected ones--everything else ran through the Electoral College (and the president still does!) because the Founders didn’t trust the people to make the right decisions.

The Senate also has 3 things it does.

1. It holds impeachment trials. 
2. It handles treaties. 
3. It ratifies officials appointed by the President. This may not seem super important to us, but trust me, it definitely is.

Now on to the President! We’re aware of a lot of the things he does because he’s the leader of his political party and thus gets the most news time. Originally the President was designed to be pretty weak, but outside of the constitution he’s pretty powerful.

Executive action, for example, is an action the President can take to put something in place without the approval of Congress. The judiciary still reserves the right to declare whatever the action is unconstitutional, though.

His other big power, which most of us know about, is the veto. Even if a law passes both houses he can still shoot it down. But then he can be shot down with a two-thirds majority in both houses of Congress. Huh.

Finally, the judiciary. They also have three main functions: Settling disputes, interpreting the law, and setting expectation for future actions. It’s because of the judiciary that we know that doing business will be fair, because people who don’t follow it will be punished. Catch the drift? The judiciary is much more complex than this, but that’s for another time.

The Plymouth Colony Was Not All Fine and Dandy

Hello wonderful humans and welcome back to another episode of Hysterical Histories! This week we’re gonna talk about the Plymouth colony that wasn’t even originally at Plymouth and that wasn’t as nice as all the Thanksgiving stories made it out to be. Yes, I am here to crush all of your historic idealistic realities. But that’s beside the point. Let’s GO!

So after the disaster that was Jamestown, the Puritans were the first to take on the colonization challenge. After Jamestown, the monarchy decided to take a step back from actual colonizing but invited companies who wanted to try it to sail out and try to found a colony.The Puritans weren’t businessmen, but they used it to escape religious persecution.

We always seem to think of the Puritans as these prudish, kind of stuck-up people who were die-hard traditionalists, but they were actually of the opinion that the Anglican church was too much like the Catholic one. Sure, they were tied to tradition, but it was their own one. Many of the Puritans remained in England and tried to change the faith from within, but others, called the Separatists, wanted to separate from the Church of England entirely and start their own faith.

King James had a pretty strict hand over the country when it came to religion. The Separatists had to lay low and practice their religion in secret, and the few times they got called out they were persecuted severely. At some point they left for more tolerant Holland, where they stayed for many years. However, they realized that they were dirt poor and it was hard to be English in Holland, so they sought a better solution.

Eventually, they signed a deal with the Virginia Company to help expand the colony on the Chesapeake Bay. They created the Mayflower Compact, which said they were citizens under James but they had some self-government power for the good of the colony. They sailed off and after three attempts to get out there they finally did and landed a little south of Plymouth.

They quickly found an abandoned spring home of one of the Indian tribes in the area. Not knowing what it was, they dug up corn and other food and stole it for their own use. From that time onward the natives weren’t very nice to them. They also started to starve, so they needed a better place to stay.

Lucky for them, a few colonists sailed north and found Plymouth. It was surprisingly barren and unpromising, but it was out of the range of the natives who were giving them trouble and it had some potential. The colonists hopped on this chance to start again. They moved north and became friends with the Indian tribe that did occupy that area, because they knew they needed them to survive. And a few months later, Thanksgiving did happen, although whether or not the Indians were even invited is another debate.

And that's it for this time! Thanks so much for reading!

Why You Wouldn't Want to be a Settler in Jamestown

HELLO WONDERFUL HUMANS and welcome back to Hysterical Histories! Today we’re talking about why you wouldn’t want to be a settler in Jamestown, and no, it’s not just because there’d be no internet. This is way worse than losing track of your server in Pokemon Go. This is life and death and even some cannibalism. Let’s go!

Okay so the settlement in Jamestown was the third attempt to colonize Virginia. The two past attempts had failed, the more commonly known one being the one at Roanoake, in which all the settlers mysteriously disappeared. However, England still wanted to colonize there because they were late to the party and wanted some gold. Enter the Virginia Company!

The Virginia Company was a group of entrepreneurs. They’d heard about the Maya and Aztec gold that the Spanish had found in South and Central America and they were eager to get their  hands on something similar. They got willing volunteers, but they may not have been the best ones for colonizing an area. It was gold they were interested in, so mostly noblemen who’d never touched tools in their lives went, along with some commoner types who were looking for a big break. But these commoners weren’t farmers. They were jewelers and the like. They were set up for disaster from the get-go.

Even on the ship ride over, the commoners and lords were arguing. The lords refused to do work and found the commoners to be rabble-rousers. This continued once they were on land -- the commoners did all the work while the lords sat by and waited for gold that would never come.

Lack of gold was to be the least of their problems, though. Powhatan, the chief of the nearby Native American tribe, had just heard a prophecy that a tribe would come from the bay and wipe his out. When he saw the English coming… it started to be a bad time for the Jamestown settlers. Native Americans showed no mercy. They were lethal archers from ridiculous distances and with panning being such a stationary activity, settlers were easy pickings for the Native Americans.

Over time, lots of people were buried, but only some were due to the Native Americans. Remember how there weren’t any farmers? Well the Virginia Company still refused to send any over, so many died of starvation. Another thing they lacked was decent drinking water. The only thing close was the James River, which was salt-water. Many died of sodium poisoning, which was a long, painful death that drove many insane. These problems are where we see that some of the settlers turned to cannibalism, digging up dead bodies and cooking them. It was a gruesome time. One particular winter cut down the colony by a HUGE amount. This was called the Starving Time.

After the Starving Time, the Virginia Company sent over some actually useful settlers and food, and
Jamestown was able to thrive. If they hadn’t done that, America might be a very different place today. For example, English might not have been the primary language. Alexander Hamilton would have no shots to even think about throwing away. It’s interesting to think that a colony of stuck-up noblemen cannibals were the lichpin of our country.

That's all I have for you this time! Thanks for reading!

Why Don't We Just Scrap the Constitution?

There's a lot of words that go into this, so I figured the best way to do this one would be to link the video. Here's the Hysterical Histories video about this topic!

Why Early Europeans Should Never Have Drawn Maps

HELLO WONDERFUL HUMANS and welcome to the very first Hysterical Histories!

This week we learned about prehistory and the Age of Encounters, or sort of the time when the Europeans and Native Americans were first interacting with each other. One of the books I’m reading is called “Encounters in the New World” by Jill Lepore, and it’s basically a bunch of primary sources from the Age of Encounters.

One of the best types of primary sources we have is maps. And maps that were created during the Age of Encounters with the so-called “new world” were VERY interesting, and sometimes quite funny. So today I thought I’d talk about how euro-centric and intolerant Europeans were and why we really shouldn’t have trusted them to make maps. Let’s go!

Okay, so maps at the time, to begin with, were… interesting. A lot of the maps made in the time before the New World was discovered were centered around Christianity because a lot of the people in the known world were Christian of some sort. Introducing the T-O map! T-O maps were not really maps that had any sort of geographic information and more ones that held religious symbolism: the T representing the cross, for example. Let’s take a look at a T-O map.

This divides the world into three parts. Asia, in the upper part; Africa, in the lower right; and Europe, in the lower left. At the top of the map is written "Paradisus", farthest from the most-known world, representing the Garden of Eden. Around the edges of the world, of course, are oceans, and seas dividing the continents.

Now, how were maps once people started sailing to the New World? There were lots of interpretations, none of which were particularly correct, so here are a couple of my favorites:

1. This map of the New World from 1687, mapped by Giovanni de Rossi. This map is pretty great, except for the fact that California’s an ISLAND. It says this was a COMMON misconception. Aside from that, this map is pretty good. But I can’t get over that California’s an ISLAND. 
   
   
2. This map from 1507 by Martin Waldseemuller. This one’s older, and not even CLOSE to what the coastline looks like. It’s not much better than the 1515 consideration that it’s an infinite mass of land. Also, most of the map is taken up by the symbolism of Ptolemy, the main map guy for a really long time, being like “hey look at my world” and Waldseemuller being like “um nah, my world is better, look.

Anyway, that’s all I have for today! What do you think? Have any questions for me about US History that I might tackle in another post? Leave them in the comments below. Thanks for reading, see you next time!

Hysterical Histories!!

Hi there and welcome to my Hysterical Histories blog!

This was originally a video series, but that's way more work than writing a blog post, and as things get busier, I'll be needing that extra time. So I'm converting the project into a blog. I'll be posting all the original scripts (and doing the weeks that I skipped!) and then we'll move forward from there. I hope you're all ready to join me on this fun journey!

- Livv