If you fought in the Revolutionary War, the reason you’d most likely die wouldn’t be from musket, cannon, or Apaches; It’d be from smallpox. And besides spreading all over the place (in 8 years, from Boston to Georgia to Mexico to Canada), smallpox was also extremely nasty. The virus toppled the American troops, due largely to the awful ways of British General Howe, who deployed a group of men he knew to already be infected. Defense came only after Washington realized what Howe had done, and raced the clock to send word of the plot back to Congress. George Washington had thus become our first Jack Bauer.

Nixon wasn’t having much luck by 1973. Watergate was getting serious, the press was getting sniffy, and his jowls were stubbly as ever. Suddenly, unrelated to any of this, his Vice President (and go-to “elitist” hater) Sprio Agnew plead guilty to tax evasion, and quit. Ha ha! This meant Nixon had to dust off the 25th Amendment, and name a guy to fill the spot (well, only until he’d resign, 10 months later). Ignoring pleas to pick some governor called Reagan, he settled on plucky Minority Speaker Jerry Ford, who everyone liked. Hooray! This would be the first and last time Richard Nixon did a clever thing.

Everybody hated this thing. While observing that it was “too weak” is an oversimplification, the variety of reasons why people were so miserable in the 1780s have everything to do with this document (until 55 of them got fed-up enough to scrap it). John Adams hated that he couldn’t get a commerce treaty under it. George Mason hated that it didn’t protect civil liberties. James Madison hated that it was too lenient on debtors, while Adonijah Mathews (a bartender) and Daniel Shays (a farmer) led separate rebellions claiming it was too harsh on debtors. Cows are contrarians anyway, so they just hated it on principle.

Happy birthday, North Dakota! Boy, do I have a soft spot for this slugger. I used to drive through it each summer between college and home, and it was great (for predictable reasons).

So back in the 1960s, a UND professor called E.B. Robinson wrote the definitive historical volume on the state, and identified six themes that repeatedly emerge in the story of North Dakota. Now, to me, looking over these, they all seemed a touch… familiar. And that’s when it hit me: Why, he wasn’t just talking about some grassland prairie state; These are themes that show up every day in my apartment!

America’s rush of scientific innovation at the end of the 19th century sparked the world as we know it today. Once Sprengel solved the removing of air from a glass bulb, Thomas Edison could take what was known at the time — when carbon gets hot, it lights up — and, freed from oxidation, make the arc light obsolete. His electric bulb was an instant catalyst for new ideas — including, as two men (Farnsworth & Zworykin) tried, activating a film of selenium across an electron beam. The result, television, was a harbinger of American ingenuity and intellectual progress, which today we honor by TiVo-ing Jersey Shore.

As the Founders saw it, the “peculiar institution” of slavery couldn’t survive in the new Enlightenment; It would, along with the boiling need for a war, die out naturally. But when a mechanic called Whitney improved on an existing machine by adding one part (a handy wire grate), the situation flipped. Suddenly, cotton, which drove the economy of the South, exploded as supply finally met demand. So too did the price of a slave, and the potential to make a lot of people very, very rich. Except, that is, for Whitney, whose patent was nearly impossible to protect. The man died bankrupt, but not before giving it just a few more tries.

Robert E. Lee was bored. In the years leading up to 1861, Lee was still a Colonel for the (still whole) United States. He’d taken a bunch of vacation from his stints with Army training and field command to care for his father-in-law’s deeded (now-iconic) mansion, and he’d grown restless. Sure enough, on one cool fall morning, he received word that he was needed upriver at Harpers Ferry, where a well intentioned but flawed abolitionist called Brown was (literally) shooting up the town. From that week, nothing was the same for Lee, or the nation, and it just took one more year for war to come.

Clarence King, before he led the brand-new Geological Survey, was tasked with something very tough: To survey the rocks and mountains along the 40th parallel, from the Rockies to the Sierra Nevada. Because he kept good notes, we know that King and his men had many clever methods for taking accurate accounts of all the mysterious caves they were charting.

Now here’s the thing. I’ve been a dude for a long time, and reading through King’s diary of that craaaazy summer, I think — forgive me if I’m wrong — that there’s a certain auditory trick being left out here. I mean, come on. They’re dudes.

Captain Charles Whittlesey was having a terrible October 4th. Not only were he and his men tasked with engaging the deeply entrenched Germans at Argonne, but by just the 2nd day of their undermanned effort, he’d already lost two whole carrier pigeons. And that’s when his own confused allies started bombing him. Whittlesey quickly hammered out what he could (seriously, go look at it), tied it around the leg of his last, best hope, and, in pangs of solemn desperation, sent him off. I can only imagine how heightened the already-deep bond between an officer and his pigeon must have been in that moment.

If you wanted to be a raving bigot in the 1950s, only two things stood in your way: your moral conscience (ha ha), and television. Arkansas governor Orval Faubus didn’t count on the latter when he, in defiance of the Supreme Court, public opinion, and his own school board, decided it’d be fun to deploy the national guard to prevent nine black students from entering Little Rock Central High School. Seeing and hearing the full insanity of this over dinner was new for America, and it took Eisenhower and the 101st Airborne to finally end it. Faubus was like the punchline to a terrible joke that only he was in on.