• Andrew Jackson, Nathan Forrest and statues…

    So today’s effort is a bit of a mixed bag, expect some meandering of thought. Jump on, enjoy the ride. You may have heard in the news over the last few days that the Statue of Andrew Jackson in New Orleans in Jackson Square, is under threat from protesters calling themselves ‘Tear ‘Em Down New Orleans’, a group working in conjunction with Black Lives Matter, in a roundabout way, to push through action on votes that passed motion to reposition four statues of controversial historical figures who are in a modern context associated with some degree of white supremacy. Now we have an invisible set of boundaries here at Naked…

  • The Election of 1800

    So my son asked me last night what happens if the presidential election ends up in a tie.  Putting on my historian’s hat, I began to tell him about the Election of 1800.  That led into a discussion of the Electoral College, and if you ever have to try to describe that to a ten year old, good luck.  His sole comment was, “Mom, that’s stupid.”  I had nothing.  Anyway, back to the election of 1800. The level of bitter partisan fighting and dirty tricks in the election of 1800 made modern politics look like a Sunday School picnic.  It was only the fourth presidential election in the new country’s…

  • The Bull Moose Party

    I think everyone knows my utter admiration for the badass that was Theodore Roosevelt.  If you do not know why he was an amazing man, please go here and read so you can know the extent of his awesomeness. However, there were some times when the sound of how awesome he was deafened him to the realities of the situation.  Roosevelt had declared he would not run again after winning his own term in 1904.  He claimed the term he finished for the assassinated president, William McKinley, would count as his second.  He handpicked William Howard Taft as his successor for the Republican nomination and bowed out.  But Taft alienated…

  • American Political Convention Process

    Since today is the first day of the Republican Convention, I thought we should take a look at the the history of the political convention as a means of nominating candidates.  This is inherently tied in with political parties as a whole, which the founding fathers were not a fan of. Jefferson is famously quoted as saying “If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all.”  However, eleven years later, Jefferson won the presidency as the head of an organized party.  What changed?  As much as the founders tried to avoid political parties, they inherently fell into them.  Political scientists have…

  • John and Abigail Adams-   America’s Power Couple

    John Adams was one of the founding fathers as well as our second president.  What is less well known is the extraordinary relationship he had with his wife, Abigail.   The two first met when Abigail was fifteen and John was twenty-five and a practicing lawyer from Braintree, Massachusetts.  Abigail’s first impressions of the young man were less than complimentary.  She wrote in her diary he was “Not fond, not frank, not candid”.  However, from this unremarkable beginning, a relationship grew that would stand the test of time and tide.  Something happened to change Abigail’s opinion on the young lawyer, but we are not privy to what.  Soon he was…