In 1840, the United States was facing its 14th presidential election, ready to give President Martin Van Buren a second term, or to elect its ninth president.  The feeling was that the Democratic-Republicans (or the Democrats, as they came to be known) would win again.  Of course they would!  Only three times had the United States elected a man who wasn’t a Democratic-Republican.  There was John Adams, a Federalist, elected in 1796, and George Washington, elected in 1789 and reëlected in 1792, who claimed no party affiliation.  For forty years, the Democrats had had a solid grip on the Executive Mansion (or, as it would later be called, the White House).  Every election following the creation of the Electoral College in 1804 had gone for the Democrats.  Could nothing be done to break their grip on power? The Whig Party hoped there might be something it could do.  The Whigs were founded in 1833, so this was to be their second presidential election.  Their first presidential elect

Before anything else burned to the ground, Abraham decided to clear out of Mamre.  He headed for the Negev Desert, because how’s anyone going to burn down a desert?  Following some bad maps, he headed to a spot between Kadesh and Shur, a nice little community called Gerar.  Still, Abraham didn’t much trust the locals, and felt safer telling them that Sarah was his sister and not his wife.  King Abimelech of Gerar asked to have Sarah brought to him, because kings can do that with unmarried women, so this little white lie of Abraham’s was going to lead to trouble, even though no one really understood why he’d feel the need to lie about this in the first place.  Yahweh turned up in Abimelech’s dream some time after this and told him, “You’re going to die, ‘cause that new piece of chattal you took is a married woman.  Big mistake!”  Abimelech didn’t think this was fair, because he hadn’t yet laid a hand on her.  “Lord, what’s the deal?  Why would You kill someone for something he didn’t

Senator John Nance "Cactus Jack" Garner (D-TX) suggested splitting Texas into five states. It’s unusual to carve a new state out of an existing one, or even to redraw state boundaries.  The United States’ Constitution makes it very difficult to do.  Not only would the residents of the existing and potential new states have to agree, Congress has to agree, too.  In 1820, the new state of Maine was carved out of Massachusetts, and the new state of West Virginia was (sort of) carved out of Virginia.  Besides that, there have been occasions where state boundaries were nudged a little bit, but for the past century, things have been pretty calm on the new-borders front. That’s not to say there are no efforts to break new states out of the old ones.  Most of these efforts don’t go anywhere—a handful of counties in rural Colorado tried to form the state of North Colorado in 2013, complaining that they didn’t get the attention they deserved from the government in Denver.  The re

One commonly printed “phrase” has disappeared from the English language.  This “phrase” wasn’t a phrase at all, but it would often appear in print, starting in the late 19th century and vanishing by the 1980s.  The “phrase” would baffle readers who were hard pressed to pronounce it, much less to understand it.  The phrase was “etaoin shrdlu”. “etaoin shrdlu” was the subject of many letters to the editor from readers begging an explanation.  An item in the local paper might look like this: Item in the New York Times, October 30, 1903. A reader might, understandably, want to know what’s going on.  That line, third from the bottom, looks like gibberish, but anyone who read newspapers frequently during this time would have seen the “etaoin shrdlu” part before.  Editors would dutifully explain what it’s all about. You might have guessed that the twelve letters in “etaoin shrdlu” are the most commonly used letters in the English language, from the most frequent to the twelfth