Smart Aleck's Guides: Subversive Study Aids

Poopsmith: The Career for You

2012-01-27T20:49:00.000-08:00

While working on our Shakespeare guides, we jotted down a list of Elizabethan job titles. A couple of officials in Shakespeare's day were The Master of Revels (whose job was to make sure that the plays didn't offend anyone - they could be naughty, but not too blasphemous or political) and The Keeper of the Heads (whose job was to keep an eye on the traitor's heads displayed on London Bridge). When we were thinking of "Elizabethan Jobs We'd Like To See," one that came up was "Her Majesty's Royal Poopsmith."

This WAS a real job, though - the official title of one to dug up latrines was "gong farmer." "Gong" was from an old-fashioned word that meant "to go." The pay was low, and gong farmers couldn't live too close to others.

Nice to have something to fall back on if head-keeping doesn't work out.

Romney and Co. Eat Money

2012-01-10T06:37:00.000-08:00

Something we threw together here at HQ with a photo of Mitt Romney and his Bain Capital guys that was in the Boston Globe:

A take off of a famous Nixon poster distributed by Kennedy supporters:

Really, we think the Romney shot is the more damning of the two. The Nixon shot just happens to show him looking kind of sleazy - it's not really much better than making fat jokes about Governor Christie. The Romney one is similar, in that the Mephistopholes look on his face is probably just a coincidence, but what's going on in the picture re-enforces the image of Romney as "that upper management meatball that everyone in the company thinks is incompetent." You can just picture him leaning over your cubicle and saying "What are you working on?" now and then, until the day he comes by and says, "Hi, Adam. Can you come by my office in a little bit for a little sit-down? That'd be great."

History shows that "experience" is not a great indicator of who will be a good president and who won't. Frankly, we've only had a handful who were all that great to start with, so there's no way to pick out a pattern of what sort of background a good president should have (and one can assume that it varies by era, anyway - different kinds of people are needed for different times). Many have been governors or military men, but many of those have also really sucked as president. Lincoln was a country lawyer and a former junior house nobody when he was elected. Eisenhower was a pretty good president who had military experience, but without enough political experience even to have declared which party he was in before the election. Grant was a great general whose experience didn't end up translating well. Herbert Hoover was one of the most successful and respected men in the world when he was elected - he was an organizational genius. Both parties wanted to nominate him at various times. But his policies didn't translate as well as they seemed like they would.

What happened with Borders books (the late, lamented chain store that actually carried our book) is an example of why we here at HQ don't think being a good business man means you'd be a good president. Borders tried to make next quarter look better by gradually lowering selection, focusing more on big-ticket items, and spending less on in-store events and entertainment at most locations. These moves cut back on costs and put the focus onto products with better margins, but after a few years of these cuts, they didn't have much of a company left. We can make our budget look better as a country by cutting back on spending on education, infrastructure, fire prevention, police, etc - but after a few years of it, how's the country going to look? You can't just lay people off to streamline the country. You can stop spending money on educating, feeding, or insuring them, but you'll still have to deal with them. They'll still be your citizens. It's not like firing them, where they're out of sight and out of mind once they're out the door.

Then again, in the interest of being fair and balanced, maybe now is the time for a business man to take the reins and turn the ship around. It'd be one hard message to sell, what with all the anti-corporate sentiment going around and all, but maybe Mitt can find a way to turn the above photo into a net positive.

Ron Paul and the Beatnik Party of 1960

2011-12-26T11:09:00.001-08:00

A friend of mine once observed that when you take the "extreme right" and the "extreme left," the versions that the mainstream wings of the party generally try to ignore, they're not much different from each other. Ron Paul's people wouldn't have much to do with the Beatnik Party of 1960, but, really, Paul reminds me of them quite a bit.

In 1960, a group of beatniks gathered in New York to build a platform and nominate a candidate as the Beatnik Party's nominee for president.

One attendee was Joffre Stuart, a 34-year-old poet from Chicago who had been featured in "Howl," Allen Ginsberg's epid beatnik poem. Ginsberg described him as a man

who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving
    behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees
    and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in fire
    place Chicago,
who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the
    F.B.I. in beards and shorts with big pacifist
    eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incom-
    prehensible leaflets,

Leaflets were always Joffre's thing. He still passes them out today - at the 2007 Bughouse Square debates, which serve as a reunion for old Chicago bohemia, he was passing out leaflets promoting the idea that 9/11 was the result of a conspiracy by "Jewish chauvanists."

Back in 1960, the party convention fell into two factions - responsible and irresponsible - Stuart became the leading voice of the irresponsible beatniks. They opposed actually nominating someone at all. "Like, only squares really nominate someone," said Stuart. Eventually, they agreed to allow for someone to be nominated, on the condition that the candidate not be bound to the platform. After all, as Stuart noted, "only finks play to win."

The beatniks then set about coming up with a platform. A few things were eventually agreed on: they were for peace with all nations (because "all beatniks are cowards"), and opposed to atomic energy, sex laws, work (the cry of "abolish work" was heard loud), and, of course, squares.

No official slogan was picked, though several were bandied about, such as "We have nothing to lose, we're already beat!" and "Trust us with the peace - we're too cowardly to fight."

When it came time to pick a nominee, Stuart raised his hand. "Is there a bastard in the house?" he asked. He felt that since this was an ANTI-candidate, a bastard would be appropriate.

About four people raised their hands. All but one, the hand of Jimmy the Greek, eventually dropped when Stuart asked them to be honest.

"All right!" said Stuart. "I nominate Jimmy the Greek!"

The convention went through four ballots - making it, in the words of one reporter, "the only convention of the year that wasn't rigged." Senator Kennedy was one of seven men on the first ballot - he tied with Jimmy the Greek at three votes - but it was then ruled that only people present could be nominated.

Votes were then confined to Jimmy the Greek, Tom Condit, "Big Bill," or WIlliam Lloyd Smith, owner of Maury's Beatnik Bookstore in Chicago, who was representing the responsible wing. After a bitter floor fight, the nomination went to Smith.

Smith selected Stuart as his running mate, which made for a balanced ticket - not geographically, since both were from Chicago, but in terms of race (Smith was white, Stuart black) and responsibility. Smith was a "responsible" sort, or, anyway, he seemed to be. "Bill knew more about politics than I did," Stuart said years later. "But he was a total anarchist."

His two part plan for the county was something to behold: as President, his first act would be to dissolve the government. His second would be to resign.

Not even Republican VP candidate Barry Goldwater, who was well known for anti-federal government posturing, could top that.

Nearly 50 years later, I ran into Stuart in Bughouse Square. Up until about 1960, Bughouse Square, on the lower North side of Chicago, used to be a popular place to go to make speeches. On nights when the weather was good, upwards of 3000 people would cram into the park to heckle the soapbox orators, which ranged from hobos to famous lawyers and politicians of the day. The park is quiet now, but once a year the adjacent Newberry Library hosts "The Bughouse Square Debates," where they sort of re-enact the park from its glory days.

Having long been familiar with the park from its appearances in novels by Daniel Pinkwater, and having more than a passing familiarity with bohemian Chicago history, I went in 2007 with an audio recorder to make a podcast, and figured Stuart for a regular old-timer. I asked him who he remembered from the park, and he mentioned Bill Smith. I asked if that was the guy who ran for President, and Stuart grinned. "Yes, he did! And I was the vice presidential candidate. Or anti-candidate, anyway….we were a blip on the history of electoral politics."

The official topic that day was immigration, and Joffre's own brief speech was a little tour de force. "The framing of the question is false!" he declared. "The borders which separate us from one another were created by an illegal war brought on by the people who brought my significant ancestors over from Africa….down with the state! Revolution!" He shouted the last word with a flourish.

Had Joffre been running for president that day, he could have vaulted to the front of the primary opinion polls - particular if it was one of those years where the only "not-frothing-at-the-mouth" candidates were too boring for anyone to get excited about them.

But as soon as he finished talking, he went right back to handing out leaflets alleging that 9/11 was the result of a conspiracy of "Jewish chauvinists."

It's difficult now for me not to compare Joffre to Ron Paul. His anti-government logic was tight and attractive, and you had to admire a guy for sticking to his guns no matter how many feathers it ruffled. You had to admire his passion.

But what about those newsletters and leaflets?

If you haven't followed the news, it seems that in the 1980s and 90s, Ron Paul had a series of newsletters that cost $99 bucks a year to subscribe to. They were full of weird conspiracy theories, the occasional racist rant, and other things that no one who actually expected to get elected could say out loud in the 21st century. You can read an 8 page letter he sent out to drum up subscribers here and many pdfs of examples here.

If Paul hadn't plugged them on TV, I would doubt that they were real. As it is, I have many questions:

1. That letter is from 1995. Desktop publishing was not new or unusual then. The Star Wars fanzine I put out in 1994 looked better than this.

2. Who in the world would pay $99 a year to subscribe to something based on a letter like that?

3. How could Paul not have known about these? His claim is that not only did he not write them, but he didn't even know about them until years after the fact. Wouldn't he have heard from a handful of crazy people? I get crazy letters from people about ghost stories all the time. If these newsletters were as widely-circulated as has been claimed (he apparently made a lot off of them), how come no one tracked him down and confronted him over this stuff?

4. I know he's for free enterprise and all, but wouldn't you prosecute someone who put stuff like this out under your name without your knowledge?

5. If he really didn't even take a casual glance at these things, how in the world can he be considered responsible enough to run a country?

Everyone who runs for office has skeletons in the closet - a bad business deal, some investors with shady pasts, attending church services where the pastor was a maniac, getting involved with a weird group or two. But you have to own up to it before people can move on. The more of these I see, the less I'm inclined to believe Paul didn't approve of them, or even that he didn't write at least some of them. Many of the conspiracies here are fairly common talking points that come up when I argue with libertarians; most major players in the party know that they appeal a lot to this sort of people (as one of the last groups that will actually argue against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and most of the things it accomplished), and surely a few of them have tried to get ahead by appealing to those people.

Joffre Stuart made a fun "fringe" candidate in 1960. But even if, by William Lloyd Smith came back from the dead and he and Joffre somehow became the democratic nominees, they couldn't get past those newsletters and leaflets of Joffre's in the general election. And I don't think Ron Paul could, either. He can poll up to about 25% in some primary polls, and that MIGHT be enough for him to carry a state or two as long as the field remains crowded with other candidates, the weather is bad enough that only die-hards come out to the caucus, etc. But that 25% is right about where his support tops out. It'd be interesting to see how the GOP at large reacted to him winning the primaries, but I think it's safe to say that they wouldn't take it sitting down. His policies have about as much to do with the regular GOP than the Beatnik Party had to do with John F. Kennedy's.

I believe it was PT Barnum who once said it was morally wrong to let suckers keep their money. I won't be voting for Paul under any circumstances that I can imagine, but what I'd like him to do us say "look, I'm not proud of those letters. But I thought I was done with electoral politics, so it didn't matter what I said, and I found that there was good money in ripping off hillbillies. If they didn't give it to me, they'd just give it to someone worse."

Go Ahead and Pray, Kiddos!

2011-12-10T07:11:00.000-08:00

“And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father." - Jesus.

That's from Matthew, Chapter 6, in your trusty Bible. It's not from Paul's commentary, and obscure verse from a chapter that outlaws the eating of shrimp, it's straight from the mouth of Jesus himself. I was about 13 when I first noticed that verse. If Jesus told people that it was better to pray in private, why the whole push for prayer in school?

Of course, by then I knew that the issue was already rife with misinformation. Any kid can pray any time they feel like it, provided they aren't disrupting the class (i.e., during lessons on evolution, you can't sit there shouting "Dear God, please kill this evil teacher and send her to hell where demons will torture her in the lake of fire for all time" so loudly that no one can hear what she's saying). The rule is just that the school can't organize or sponsor the prayer. It seemed to me that the "prayer in school" fight was just people fighting to get the government to recognize that THEIR religion was the RIGHT one.

Now and then, you DO hear stories about kids being told not to pray, or that it isn't allowed. This is because certain groups have been VERY successful in spreading the myth that school is not allowed. Apparently, even the governor of Texas is misinformed by it.

Well, perhaps he is, anyway. When someone goes on TV and says that prayer is not allowed in school, there are two possible reasons:

1. The person is misinformed. For most people, this is understandable, since there's so much misinformation out there (though for a governor of Texas to be so badly misinformed about something like this, which comes up a lot, is inexcusable).

2. The person is trying to play to people's base fears and prejudices in order to rile them up.

When a school lunch aide tells a kid not to bow his head before eating his chicken nuggets (despite the fact that praying to SOMEONE before eating those things is probably wise), it's probably the former.

But the people who are telling that lunch aide that prayer is not allowed - politicians, TV preachers, radio talk show hosts, and other noisemakers - should really know better. And I tend to assume that they DO know better.

History rarely smiles on politicians who get elected by playing up to people's fears and prejudices (and as a historian, you'd think Newt Gingrich would know this).

John Newberry: Morally Upright Weenie

2011-11-14T06:45:00.001-08:00

In his seminal review of our first book, Richie Partington wrote that "awards committees are not likely to take seriously a history book like THE SMART ALECK'S GUIDE." And right he was! We got short-listed for several, but few awards committee-types would risk their rep by sticking their necks out for a book with a title like that.

But you know what? Recently, our pal James Kennedy asked us to find out some stuff about John Newberry to use in his "90 Second Newberry" presentation at the New York Public Library, and what we found out shocked us. Do we even WANT an award named for such a guy?

Well, we ain't gettin' one anyway, so we might as well not want it, huh? Here's our video. I wear a bow tie in it. Bow ties are cool.

Anonymous

2011-11-01T14:48:00.000-07:00

This afternoon I went to see anonymous with David Kathman (of
shakespeareauthorship.com) and Greg Reynolds, both of whom I know from
my time on Shakespeare newsgroups, where authorship arguments tend to
overshadow any real discussion about Shakespeare. The vibe on many of
them is more like a professional wrestling match than an academic
debate. In high school I went through a period of arguing that Edward
De Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, was the real author of Shakespeare. It
didn't last long and I'm sort of ashamed of it now, but in the process
I learned a lot about Shakespeare's life, times and works, as well as
a lot of valuable lessons about info literary that have served me
well. Kathman argued me down a lot in those days, if I remember right,
but he also did so gracefully, and, anyway, all of us on that group
knew that when we argued with David, we were in over our heads to
begin with. It was fun now, a decade later, to sit laughing at a movie
about that theory with him.

Anonymous is a movie based loosely around the "Oxfordian" theory. The
sets are stunning, the cinematography is masterful, the costumes are
fantastic. But the three of us spent half the movie laughing. One
line, "I can't very well put MY name on it. I'M the 17 Earl of
Oxford!" struck us as particularly rich, as did the scene where de
Vere's wife goes into hysterics because her husband is WRITING again.

The theory put forth here is that de Vere was the illegitimate son -
and, later, lover - of Queen Elizabeth, and could have been king if
only he had been able to stay away from writing poetry. This is a
version of the Oxfordian theory that is too outlandish even for most
Oxfordian. They didn't go the route of having everyone in town know
who the REAL author was, and never dreaming that Will Shakespeare of
Stratford was anything but a grain merchant who happened to have the
same name as the Earl's pen name, but THAT version frankly would have
been more plausible than what they came up with. I don't think the
story here is going to persuade many new converts to Oxfordianism.

Shakespeare is here portrayed as a guy who reminded me of, well….
imagine if Richard Simmons grew a mustache and was constantly
wandering around in a daze, as though he'd just been clubbed in the
head with a two by four. It's said that he's illiterate - he can read,
but "never learned to form his letters," and panics when he's
challenged to write the letter I. I'm not sure that this even makes
sense. If one can read, one ought to be able to copy down the abcs,
the same way I can draw a respectable triangle without knowing much
about trigonometry.

Meanwhile, Christopher Marlowe has a small role as a villain who calls
to mind the snake from Disney's version of The Jungle Book. In one
scene where he reveals that he knows Shakespeare isn't the author, it
can only have been by sheer force of will that the actor didn't start
twirling his mustache.

Ben Johnson, meanwhile, plays the one guy who knows de Vere's secret
and who single-handedly thwarts the Essex rebellion. As a character
here he sometimes made me think of Captain Jack Sparrow. Never once
did he make me think of Ben Johnson (though one of the other
playwrights - I think it was supposed to be Thomas Nashe - did). I
never did figure out what made the character here tick, and he was
such a big character that I felt like I needed to know more about him.

The anachronisms pile up one on top of the other. We have Venus and
Adonis being published in 1601 (8 years too late), Marlowe being
stabbed by Shakespeare in 1598 (not by himself in a tavern five years
earlier), everyone being shocked that Romeo and Juliet is entirely in
iambic pentameter (they wouldn't have been even if it was). The Essex
Rebellion went down entirely differently than it does in the history
books. Etc. Changing these things around to condense the narrative,
make the story easier to follow, or to give it more emotional heft is
perfectly fine for a movie, I think - but in this case the changes
didn't really do any of those things.

I wanted to think, early on, that if you gave everyone a different
name and didn't pretend that this had anything to do with history, it
would have been a great movie. But I wound up spending too much time
wondering what was going on, and why I should care much. There seemed
to be two movies inside of the screenplay - one about political
intrigue and the relationship between Elizabeth and Edward, and quite
another about the theatre. It wound up feeling like a bit of both but
not enough of either. I spent a lot of time not quite sure what was
going on, and a general knowledge of the era didn't help, because they
deviated from the facts so much that I only got more confused.

People are going to compare this to Shakespeare in Love, which was
also entirely fiction. But for all that was wrong with SIL, it was
still a wonderful, entertaining, and moving film. Though the notion of
Shakespeare making up the plot of Romeo and Juliet himself was absurd
(like most of his plays, the plot was not original), but at least the
changes there made clear sense to the movie as a whole - and it
contained plenty of details that made it obvious that the writers knew
the Elizabethan theatre world pretty well. We don't really know what
kind of guy Shakespeare was in 1593, in his late 20s, at the time of
Marlowe's death, when he was making the transition from being a
promising playwright to being the Soul of the Age, but Shakespeare in
Love comes off as a pretty good guess. And when they changed things,
you knew it was all in good fun - not to make a point or promote a
theory.

Still, Anonymous had a lot going for it. The cinematography, as
mentioned before, was fantastic, and many of the theatrical scenes
were great - The St. Crispin's day speech was just as rousing as it
was supposed to be. I also liked Oxford's chambers, with books
everywhere, bizarre scientific specimens in glasses, a zebra head on
the wall, maps all over…it's exactly as though someone had tried to
dream up the office of a 17th century genius and done a hell of a job
with it. And even though I got confused a lot, I definitely never got
bored.

I was quite pleased for an entirely selfish reason - my new book,
EXTRAORDINARY*, is out next Tuesday, and prominently features two bits
of Shakespeare - a bit from Twelfth Night, and the St. Crispin's day
speech (which characters shout as they roll a Wells Fargo wagon full
of unicorn poop through the streets of Des Moines), and both of them
just happen to turn up in the movie (along with the opening speech
from Richard III, which is also in both).

On The Evolution of the Words "Pee" and "Poop."

2011-09-22T07:34:00.000-07:00

(here's a cross-post from Playground Jungle)

Folklorists generally ignored fart rhymes and other "naughty" ones up until about the 1970s. Even Iona Opie, a nursery rhyme expert who was no prude, was referring to "unprintable rhymes" in the 1950s. But it can generally be assumed that any time you find a counting-out rhyme about a stink, that rhyme was also used when someone farted.

Here's one from The Counting Out Rhymes of Children, an 1888 tome by a guy named Henry Carrington Bolton (with a name like that, he just about HAD to be a 19th century scholar):

Ink, pink, a penny a wink
Oh, how do you stink!
-- (Ontario, Canada)

Another one goes back even further - Mary Cooper recorded it in Tom Thumb's Pretty Song Book, the very oldest surviving collection of nursery rhymes, which she published in 1744

Little robin redbreast sat on a pole
niddle noddle went his head, poop went his hole

Eventually people cleaned up the last line - it was later published as "wiggle waggle went his tail," which, of course, doesn't even rhyme. Lame. Incidentally, the "poop" here means "fart." When the word "poop" first appeared in America, it meant "butt." In 1640, a guy named Ned Ward wrote a sentence that went "while he manages his whiffle staff with one hand, he scratches his poop with the other." But a 1714 dictionary actually defined the word "poop" as "to break wind backwards." It didn't start being used in its modern sense until around 1900 (according to the book on the left). So, while "poop" has become a broadly accepted, even polite term for both excretion and that which one excretes, you're really showing that you're a fan of traditional values when you use a much older term, like %&%^.

Another rhyme in the same 1744 collection:

Piss a bed, piss a bed,
barley butt
your bum is so heavy
you can't get up.

This later turned up in Joyce's Ulysses.. "Piss" meant the same thing then as it does now - in fact, it's one of the older words in the English language. People starting saying the first initial, "pee" (I suppose we should spell it "p---" ) when "piss" started to be considered impolite. Even the cleaned-up versions of the rhymes are pretty well out of circulation now, as far as we can tell, but the 1700s were not a terribly prudish time.

Grave Robbing: Interview with a professional "subject gatherer."

2011-09-22T07:26:00.000-07:00

Nearly half a century after the Anatomy Act was passed in the U.K., granting medical schools the bodies of poor people who had no friends to pay for a burial, colleges in the states were still desperate for bodies - desperate enough that you could bring a body to most medical schools and trade it in for cash or valuable prizes, no questions asked. Here’s an interview with Charles Keeton, “Professor of Subject-Gathering” conducted by the Cincinnati Enquirer in 1878. Keeton was proud of his profession, since his labors were performed in the interest of science:

Enquirer; How long have you been in the business?

KEETON: About eleven years, sir. I began with Mr. Cunningham, “Old Cunny,” they called hi, eleven years ago, and have followed the business every winter since that.

Does it pay pretty well?

Not now. It used to pay, for we got a good price for subjects, but there isn’t much money in it now.

Why don’t they pay so much now?

Well, sir, the fact is I don’t want to say nothing against anybody, but it ‘pears to me that somebody ain’t exactly doing the fair thing by the profession of subject-gathering. I don’t ‘cuse none of the doctors themselves of going out to get stiffs, but there is something wrong somewhere. The old demonstrators of anatomy at the colleges wouldn’t have stooped to such a thing either, but I think things are changed now. I went to the demonstrator of one college— I ain’t going to call any names— in March, and asked him how many subjects they were going to want for the spring session, and he told me he thought they wouldn’t want any more, that they had enough on hand. Well, you see, I know better than that, and my private ‘pinion is that that ‘ere demonstrator gets his subjects in some queer sort of way. I don’t say that he goes out for ‘em himself, but if he doesn’t he must have some no ‘count men that would as soon rob the grave of a party well connected, with lots of friends, as any other way. Now, now body snatcher as has any respect for hisself or his calling ‘ll do a thing of that sort. There’s plenty of material lying ‘round and rotting, just rotting, sir, and no friends to claim it.

How long have you been at the business?

It’s about eleven years since I first begun it. I begun with Old Cunny. First he paid me $3 a head; that was while I was learning. Then he gave me $8 apiece, and finally I decided to quit him and go by myself, and so he said he’d give me half, and then we worked together and shared till he died.

Do you make it a regular business, then?

I get my living by it in the winter time.

What do you get for subjects?

We used to get about $25 apiece for them, but lately the price somehow has got down to $15. The professors buy some subjects for themselves, and they most always get them for about $15.

How do you usually get the bodies?

Well, we generally go out two together and go to a burying ground. We go to the poor lots, the Potter’s Field, and when we can find any fresh graves we get the bodies.

You don’t get them from the parts where the better class of people are buried?

No. Lots of times Cunny and I have been out together and we’d find a fresh grave on a large lot, and Cunny would always say “Come ‘long, honey, we won’t take that.’ When we’d come through to the part where the graves were close together, and we knew it was the poor lot where the people without any friends were buried, then we’d dig down to the coffin, break it open, and put a rope around the neck and pull the body out. I don’t do it that way now, though, for it is just as easy to throw all the dirt out. Then, after throwing it out, I generally get down and open the coffin, and take the body by the waist and lift it out to my partner. He takes it, and gently runs a knife down the back and rips the clothes off, and lets ‘em drop down. Then we slip the head into a sack, press the knees up against the chest, and slip the body in it and tie the sack. That’s all there is to it.

How do you enjoy the work?

Well, it wasn’t very pleasant at first, of course, but any one gets used to it. It is for the good of science, and I think it is just as right and honorable as for the man what does the dissection. I want to say one thing, though, and that is that the colored people have ‘cused me of robbing the graves and their graveyards. I never have done so. I have took up a good many bodies of colored people wot was buried in the poor lot, but never any other.

How many do you suppose you have furnished in your experience as a body snatcher?

Maybe 500. I got about forty last winter, but it wasn’t a very good winter for it, though.

For WAY more information:

Drafting the Confederate Constitution (Chapter 4 supplemental article)

2011-09-22T07:18:00.000-07:00

In 1861, big shots from the newly formed Confederate States of America met in Montgomery to draft a provisional constitution for their new country. Only sight changes were made between their provisional draft and the final one.

Not many changes were made to the original United States constitution - Jefferson Davis gave a speech saying that the new constitution was what the founding fathers intended, and differed only in that it made their original intention more explicit (in a very good example of the still-common fallacy of thinking that the original founding fathers all agreed on anything).

Of particular note is the addition of a line to the pre-amble which invokes the aid of "Almighty God," a concept left out of the United States constitution altogether. Confederate archives that were captured by the Union in 1865 give an interesting behind-the-scenes look at how this was added.

After some debate about whether to call the new country The Confederate States of America or The Republic of Washington, a motion was made to ad "invoking the aid of Almighty God" into the pre-amble. One man objected and wanted the line removed. Another wanted it changed to "invoking the aid of almighty God, who is the God of the Bible and the rightful source of all power and government." But, since this might imply that Christianity was the official religion, Judah P. Benjamin, the most notable Jewish confederate big shot, objected. The short "almighty God" line was kept; the longer one and more explicit one was left out.

There was also an attempt by either Thomas Reade Rootes Cobb, the be-mulleted gent above, or his cousin Thomas Howell Cobb, the guy below who looks like a larger, fresh-from-the-fight clone of Stephan Douglas (sources aren't clear about which Cobb it was), to add a line stating "No man shall be compelled to do civil duty on Sunday."

It was quickly rejected, so whichever Cobb it was tried to insert a law about at least banning the delivery of mail on Sunday. A guy from Louisiana said that the people of Louisiana believed that people could worship God any day they wanted, so Louisiana should be exempt from that law. Texas wanted out too, and in the end the whole line was removed.

Interestingly, the provisional authors voted down a rule saying that all new states joining the Confederacy had to allow slavery. However, since the final draft very explicitly protected the right to own slaves, such a rule would have been unnecessary. A non-slave state could have joined, but it would have immediately become a slave state.

For all the talk you hear about "State's Rights" being a major cause, there's precious little of it in the CSA constitution, other than some lip service to the states acting in their "sovereign character." That's the impression one gets from reading accounts of these conventions and meetings - they would talk about state's rights now and then, but there was only one that really loomed large in their mind. Once people got started talking about slavery and their frustration with northern attempts to end it, it was hard to get them to shut up.

Slavery and the Civil War (Chapter 4 supplemental article)

2011-09-22T05:49:00.000-07:00

The issue in The Smart Aleck's Guide to American History that generates the most mail is, without question, slavery and the Civil War. There are a LOT of people out there who absolutely insist that it never occurred to anyone that slavery had anything to do with what was going on at the time, and the real fight was about "State's Rights" and that thousand of black soldiers fought for the Confederacy.

Most of this is a myth - but to say that the war was "about" slavery is over simplifying. Let's take a look....

For the whole first half of the 19th century, there was no more divisive issue in America than slavery. And every ten years or so, the south would threaten to secede from the union to preserve it. The whole point of the Mexican American War was to add more "slave" states so that slave states would continue to be able to outvote non-slave states in congress.

By 1860, the growth of the country was robbing the South of its power. Today, no single region holds THAT much power, and for a president to be elected without winning any state in New England or the Southeast is hardly unheard of. But when Lincoln won without even being on the ballot in many Southern counties, people got rather freaked out.

If you read through the articles of secession that a few states issued, the reason they left was very clear: it was to preserve slavery. In fact, they usually mentioned slavery in the first couple of sentences. The new Republican party was thought of as an anti-slavery party (which wasn't totally accurate; it's like when conservatives calls the Democrats the pro-gay marriage party today), and with the country adding new states, we were approaching a situation where all the OTHER states could vote to outlaw slavery, and the south would just have to sit there and take it. This could have affected other issues besides slavery, but if you look at the documents and rhetoric from the time, it's hard to figure out which other issues, if any, were on their minds.

In fact, the CSA's constitution didn't provide many additional states' rights. In fact, by giving the president a line item veto and a six year term, it could be argued that they made their president MORE powerful (they did give him a single term, but it was largely an age of one term presidents). Really, the CSA constitution was just a minor revision of the USA one, with one particularly glaring change: a section that insured that congress would pass no law restricting slavery (see our article about the drafting of the CSA constitution, including a picture of a guy with a mullet.)

One the fighting began, no one really thought of it as a war to end slavery - they thought of it as a dust-up to get things back to "normal." But once it became clear that this was not going to be a three month conflict, but an actual war, ending slavery seemed like a good move for a variety of reasons. It gave the north a rallying cry, along with a new supply of soldiers in freed slaves. But another issue was that if the war DIDN'T end slavery, but just brought the south back to the union, we would just end up fighting the same war over again sooner or later.

Most of the "it wasn't slavery" brigade sends us the same false information - usually a quote from Grant saying that if he thought it was about slavery, he would have fought for the other side (which, as we state in a sidebar, was just a quote someone made up to make him look bad when he was running for president in 1872), or the common story that thousands of black soldiers fought for the confederacy - they weren't allowed to join at all until the very last weeks of the war, when they were desperate enough to offer freedom for service. None are known to have seen combat. Prior to that, the south was always fearful of a slave revolt, and arming black people was the last thing they wanted to do. They wouldn't even consider black union soldiers to be actual soldiers when negotiating the release of prisoners.

But that's not to say that every soldier in the CSA army was fighting to protect slavery, or that every soldier in the Union was out to end it. Indeed, your average soldier probably didn't care too much one way or the other. The reason they fought was that there was a war going on. From the point of view of a confederate soldier, there was an army marching into their home state, ready to burn down their home and everything around them. Very few of the soldiers actually owned any slaves, but all of them felt that they had SOMETHING to protect. When a ruling came down that men who owned enough slaves were exempt from service, soldiers sneered that this was a "rich man's war and a poor man's fight." And in the union, when the draft came around and men could get out of it by paying $300 (roughly a year's salary for many working class men at the time), soldiers THERE sneered that it was a "rich man's war and a poor man's fight."

Then again, most wars are.

Ask the Smart Aleck Staff: The Boston Tea Party

2011-09-08T05:52:00.000-07:00

Here comes some reader mail from Ava, a reader in Nebraska,

In your book, you say that the Boston Tea Party was a protest against the government giving tax breaks to a business. So why do the tea party guys dress up like colonists? And why did the Boston Tea Party people dress up like Native Americans?

Great quest, Ava! First of all, here's a multiple choice question for you:

Which party is most often guilty of making wild claims about how The Founding Fathers would agree with them?
a. Democrats
b. Republicans
c. Libertarians
d. whichever party is not currently in power.

The answer is usually D (and, therefore, C - those guys are never in charge).

Both sides are making ridiculous generalizations to imply that the framers of our country all felt the same way on any given issue (especially issues relating to things they couldn't have imagined in the 18th century).

Exactly who counts as a Founding Father and who doesn't is a bit of an X factor - some count everyone who lived in the 1700s, some just count the people who fought in the wars and/or served in congress, and some just pick and choose at random. But any way you slice it, the Founding Fathers were a rather diverse bunch (for a bunch of rich white guys). They didn't agree on much back then, and they wouldn't agree on much now. When you ask what the founding fathers would think of any given issue, you really have to take it on a founding father by founding father basis.

And even then, their individual views evolved over time - it's impossible to guess what they'd make of the situation now. Even if we dug them up (you know that we here on the Smart Aleck Staff just LOVE grave robbing) to see if they'd registered their disapproval by rolling over in their graves (as one does), it would take some hardcore forensics to figure out WHEN they'd rolled over (or how many times). Even if they were facing down, they might have rolled over at the Missouri Compromise, then again the Nebraska Kansas Act, and again during Bloody Kansas.

As for the costumes, one thing conservatives and liberals have in common is that their protest rallies tend to be taken as an invitation to put on stupid costumes, say stupid things, and act obnoxious (see also: the Smart Aleck's Guide to Making an Ass Of Yourself) (one that we're definitely qualified to write!). Protest rallies in the 1770s were probably no different.

But we digress (as we do). In the 18th century, the East India Company was BIG business - it actually controlled parts of India for a time. In the 1770s, the British government gave them a legal monopoly on importing and exporting tea - colonists who wanted to buy tea from anyone who wasn't one of their consignees had to buy tea from smugglers. Smugglers didn't pay taxes, so they were able to keep their prices low. To help the East India Company, the government gave them MASSIVE tax breaks, allowing them to lower their prices and push competitors out of business.

But there was no spending cut attached to the tax break, so the government made up for the loss of revenue by passing The Townsend Acts, which added some taxes for colonists, including one on tea. They were not exactly crippling taxes, but the colonists were rather miffed that they had to pick up the slack to allow for a company to get a tax break.

So they organized boycotts, and started pushing locally-grown tea that didn't need to be imported (but apparently was not very good). It worked well enough that in 1770 the government repealed most of the taxes in the Townsend Acts - except for the one on tea, which they left in place just to show that they could. For a few years, taxes on both the company and the colonies went up and down. By 1773, the East India Company was basically operating tax free, and were allowed to do their own exporting, cutting out middlemen and helping keep their prices far lower than any competitors. Some in parliament wanted to do away with the tea tax, since it was just annoying the colonists, but they had set it up so that the revenues it brought in were what paid the wages of local officials, like judges.

With the smaller-time dealers and smugglers out of business, the East India Company now controlled the tea trade - if they didn't name your store as a consignee, you'd be going out of business. Several people who WERE consignees resigned in protest. In 1773, seven East India Company ships were sent to the colonies, but since their consignees had resigned, six had to be sent back - all except the one bound for Boston, where the governor had talked the consignees out of resigning.

Sam Adams (brother of John) held a meeting at which people passed a resolution urging the ship to turn around and go home. 25 people guarded it against being unloaded. On the last night before the deadline by which they had to either pay the duties and unload the tea or go home, another meeting was held, attended by some 7000 people.

According to legend, when it became apparent that the governor wasn't about to let the ships go home without paying the duties on their cargo, Adams said "this meeting can do nothing further to save the country," which was the coded signal for the tea partiers to take action. As with most of these legends, it isn't exactly right - the phrase may or may not have been a code, and Adams may have tried to STOP people from leaving because he wasn't done talking yet.

But hundreds DID leave, and one group (from 30 to 130, depending on who you ask) boarded the ship, supposedly dressed as Mohawk Indians (to conceal their identities and guard against being accused of treason, though it's hard to imagine the disguises actually fooling anyone - we here at the Smart Aleck's Guide think there's just something about a protest that makes people want to get dressed up in pointless costumes). Once on board, they dumped the tea in the water.

What they were there for is probably a mixed bag - some might have been generally anti-tax, but it seems like the issue most were protesting was paying taxes to allow for a company's tax break. We don't know of anyone railing that parliament should have been cutting spending altogether and eliminating the need for taxes.

Others, of course, were probably just there because it sounded like a real party.

No one at the time really seems to have thought they made much of a point, and even most of the pro-independence colonists seem to have found the whole affair sort of embarrassing - the sort of thing that made them look like they were nuts. The British responded with MORE "intolerable acts."

But the bottom line is that the party was about saying "this sucks, let's change it." This is something both parties can get behind - neither has a monopoly on the Boston Tea Party. But it's certainly VERY difficult to imagine the modern "tea partiers" having any issue with the government making things easier on the East India Company. In any case, the common notion that all of the "founding fathers" favored small government, low taxes, and the rest of the Libertarian Party platform goes against the basics of human nature. The "Framers" were arguing about what the part in the Constitution about promoting the general welfare meant before the ink was even dry.

Victorian "Mummy Unwrapping Parties:" Fact or Fiction?

2011-09-08T05:09:00.000-07:00

One often comes across mention of the Victorian fad for "unwrapping parties." In those days, you could buy an actual mummy at any decent antiquities auction, and many of them were bought and publicly "unwrapped." According to the oft-repeated story, it became a huge fad among the upper class to host "unwrapping parties," where a mummy would be unrolled in one's parlor, with the trinkets found within the folds given out as gifts.

While we here at the Smart Aleck's Guide were working on our guide to grave robbing, we went looking for accounts of actual unwrapping parties. As far as we can tell, the term "unwrapping party" didn't appear in print until the very late 20th century. We never found a single account of anyone unwrapping a mummy for the fun of it at a social function. There are no diary entries like:

Today was the big unwrapping party of Lord Autumnbottom's estate...the creature was gruesome and the smell horrid, and Henry and I were so covered with yellow dust that a man outdoors thought we were urchins and suggested that we die and decrease the surplus population. Henry says we must get a mummy of our own before Ascot, but I'm not at all sure I shouldn't rather simply play whist.

Public unwrappings DID happen. Here's the "party" invitation that probably sparked the urban legend - it's advertised a gathering at Lord Londesborough's home with "a mummy from Thebes to be unrolled at half-past two:"

But while this sure looks like a party invite, it wasn't a social gathering. Surviving accounts of what went on that 10th day of June, 1850, make it sound less like a party than an academic lecture. Most attendees were members of the Society of Antiquaries.

There were many other notable unwrapping (including a highly-publicized one in Boston at which a man unwrapped a "princess" who turned out to have a wiener), but most of them were held in lecture halls and universities, not at private homes. Many accounts indicate that having one at a party would have stunk up the house (even by Victorian standards), and that the dust and dried bitumen would have gotten all over everyone's clothes. Unwrappings were not something to attend in party clothes!

Full details of what we "uncovered*" are in our new book, The Smart Aleck's Guide to Grave Robbing!

* - Yeah, when you talk about researching grave robbing, making puns about stories you "dug up" just comes with the territory.

Smart Aleck's Guide to Naughty Playground Songs and Children's Folklore

2011-09-06T14:40:00.000-07:00

THE SMART ALECK'S GUIDE TO NAUGHTY PLAYGROUND SONGS and CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE

Only 2.99 on:

Kindle or Nook

Don't have one?

Read it on a FREE Kindle app

for your pc, mac, iPad or phone.

Or try a free nook app

for pc, mac, iPad, or phone

Supplemental material:

mp3 to:

"The Burning of the School" (six verse version)

and

"Drink Your Juice (Or You'll Get Scurvy)"

(right click to save)

The staff who brought you the acclaimed SMART ALECK'S GUIDE TO AMERICAN HISTORY (Random House 2009) is back with a look at the history of the songs and jokes you repeated when the teacher wasn't around, from Miss Suzy and her steam boat to the numerous songs about killing teachers, eating underwear, and coming down with the case of diarrhea, with an additional look at the dirty jokes, ghost stories, pranks and customs that have been passed from kid to kid for generations. Tracing many songs back hundreds of years (while debunking myths about the "origins" of others) using data from their popular PLAYGROUND JUNGLE blog, the guide is fascinating, hilarious, and will bring back memories for everyone. Those jokes are older than you thought!

With their usual "brainy but lighthearted" approach, theSmart Aleck Staff's latest guide includes fascinating looks at the history and mythology surrounding "Miss Mary Mack," "Miss Suzy Had a Steamboat," "Me Chinese," "A Boy's Occupation," "Ring Around the Rosie" (which was not about the plague, but may have been about a prostitute), and dozens more, examining their variations, evolution, and origins in soldier slang, 18th century tavern songs and ancient folk ballads.

In addition to rhymes, songs, and jokes, the staff delves into customs like "Jinx," "Light as a Feather Stiff as a Board," and "Cooties," as well as section on "wicked four square moves," with side trips along the way into the evolution of the word "poop," the various synonyms for "level" used by video game players in the '80s, and the history of fart jokes, plus the staff's trademark hilarious "assignments" and "experiments to try at home." A fascinating history lesson and a great nostalgia trip for children of the 80s, in particular, though it' will surely bring back memories for anyone who ever spent any time at a school or camp.

This full-length (over 50,000 words) ebook contains an active table of contents, active internal links, and a handy active index of first lines, as well as an appendix full of original songs such as "Drink Your Juice (or You'll Get Scurvy)" and "Glumpy, The Elf Who Sawed His Leg Off." A wonderful resource for writers - or anyone who wants to be the hit of their next party.

Smart Aleck's Guide to Grave Robbing ebook

2011-09-05T16:07:00.000-07:00

THE SMART ALECK'S GUIDE TO GRAVE ROBBING

Only 2.99 on:

Kindle

Nook

Don't have one of those?

Read it on a free Kindle app

for your pc, mac, iPad or phone.

Or a free NOOK app

for pc, mac, iPad, or phone

SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL:

Marietta: Or, The Students - the wicked Victorian grave-robbing melodrama (get the pdf; the two-column format makes the other versions a bit wonky)

"Grave Robbing in Lincoln Park" - our "Chicago Unbelievable" Podcast with Daniel Kraus

Download mp3 from archive.org or

Pictures and Info

Hey, kids....wanna see a dead body?

In this out-of-left-field follow-up to the acclaimed SMART ALECK'S GUIDE TO AMERICAN HISTORY (Random House, 2009), the Smart Aleck Staff delves into the history, theory and practice of robbing graves. It's everything you need to launch YOUR career as a 19th century resurrection man - the Smart Aleck way!

With their trademark humor somehow staying (mostly) in the bounds of good taste, the staff delves the days when anyone who came into possession of a dead body could trade it for cash or valuable prizes at medical schools, no questions asked, and murderers who found that simply killing a person to sell to colleges saved them a lot of digging. The investigate the history of mummy "unwrapping parties" and conduct interviews with horror novelists and archaeologists.

THE SMART ALECK'S GUIDE TO GRAVE ROBBING is fascinating, disgusting, and entertaining.

As a text book, it comes complete with quizzes, assignments, and experiments to try at home (the history book included experiments like finding out if it hurts to get poked in the liver, and assignments included making a propaganda poster for your teacher - one can imagine that the assignments in a grave robbing text are pretty grim....) It even includes a handy set of rhymes to help you remember whether "coffin liquor" is safe to drink based on the color and texture.

Not for the faint of heart, but horror fans, trivia buffs, and the historically inclined will find much to enjoy (albeit not before dinner). This full-length ebook contains an active table of contents, active internal links, and the complete famous "Diary of a Resurrectionist" in the appendix.

Are there dark origins behind "Step On A Crack and Break Your Mother's Back?"

2011-09-02T18:27:00.000-07:00

(the following is a cross-post from one of our blogs, Playground Jungle):

Here’s one that everyone knew to chant while walking down the sidewalk:

Step on a crack, you’ll break your mother’s back.

This has been recorded in print since at least the late 19th century, often with a few additions:

Step on a line, break your mother’s spine

Step on a hole, break your mother’s sugar bowl

Step on a nail, you’ll put your dad in jail

So the thing to step on here is probably a bowl. Everything else will kill people or, at least, uproot your life considerably. One can survive the loss of a sugar bowl. Health nuts will even say that you’ll benefit from it.

One person I knew added another:

Giggle while you pee, you’ll turn into an old dead tree.

Stepping on cracks has long been subject to superstition. In addition to the danger of breaking your mother’s back, a 1905 book, Superstition and Education, lists several other grim superstitions: that if you step on a crack, you will have bad luck, or that you will not get a surprise at home that you otherwise would have.

Many claim that the original rhyme was “step on a crack and your mother will turn black,” and that the superstition went that stepping on a crack meant that you’d have a black baby. Indeed, Iona Opie noted that that one was fairly common in parts of the UK in the 1950s, but there’s no real reason to think it’s the original, not just another variation that came and went - the idea that it was the original probably comes from people who pick that one line out of Opie's long entry on the subject.
At the same time, kids were saying that if you stepped on a crack, you’d be chased by bears. This idea was invented by A.A. Milne in his poem “Lines and Squares,” but, from Opie’s description, was a more widespread superstition than the racial one. You have to watch out when people tell you the "original meanings" of things - like the supposed "secret origins" or nursery rhymes that go around, they're seldom true. And this is coming from the blog that connects songs about pooping in your overalls back to ancient ballads about making violins out of dead bodies.

These are all, in any case, some of those superstitions that no one really believes. While the good luck brought from a penny can be debatable, most kids figure out right away that people who step on cracks in the sidewalk don’t come home to dead mothers and don’t get chased by bears (at least not very often).

The Smart Aleck's Guide to Naughty Playground Rhymes and Children's Folklore ebook will be out next week!

Keeping 'em coming!

2011-08-26T17:10:00.000-07:00

Like our new logo? A very talented artist named Bailee Des Roacher designed it. It's not quite finalize, but it's just about there!

We won't be OFFICIALLY launching the new guides for a bit, but we WILL be quietly slipping two new ones out next week. And we'll be working on re-branding some of the other staff blogs to tie in to this one, including:

Playground Jungle
Chicago Unbelievable
Halloweenspecials.net

Soon, we'll be using THIS page to post neat stuff from our guides and research, more like a regular blog. We'll still have all the "supplementary info" here, along with cool new downloads, movies, and more (right now, we're mixing an down the tracks for an mp3 that'll go along with the Shakespeare guides). We're finalizing the draft for our first official follow-up to The Smart Aleck's Guide to American History, which, believe it or not, will be The Smart Aleck's Guide to Grave Robbing. That's right! Your guide to the history, theory and practice of robbing the dead - everything you need to launch your career as a 19th century resurrectionist, the smart aleck way! The mnemonics, discussion questions and assignments in this one have to be seen to be believed.

Back for more!

2011-08-11T15:14:00.000-07:00

Hi, everybody. We're the Smart Aleck Staff, the group of no-goodniks who brought you the critically Smart Aleck's Guide to American History (Random House, 2009). And now we're back with a very "work in progress" version of our new webpage and a whole new series to launch.

Rather than just doing one big guide every few years, we've decided to relaunch the brand with LOTS of new guides - about any subject we want. There'll be some big ones, like The Smart Aleck's Guide to Baseball, and a lot of medium-sized guides to novels and Shakespeare plays that we like to think of as "like Cliff's Notes, but ten times funnier and twice as interesting." We'll have Smart Aleck's Guides(tm) to Shakespeare and all the classics that are commonly assigned, but we'll also do guides to 80s horror films, grave robbing, naughty playground rhymes, and anything else we feel like. No one's gonna stop us!

No one ever seems to say "You know, I really got in Shakespeare after a read a study guide to Coriolanus." Not so far, anyway. We don't just want to get you THROUGH a subject, we want to get you INTO it.

We've got at least five guides coming out as highly affordable ebooks this fall:

Hamlet
Julius Caesar
Romeo and Juliet
Macbeth
Grave Robbing (everything you need to launch your career - the smart aleck way!)

Coming close on the heels of those guides, we'll soon have guides to Dickens, Jane Austen, Mark Twain, 80s Horror Films, US Politics and Elections (2012 edition) Baseball History and Appreciation, and many, many more. The Shakespeare guides each contain about 30,000 words of the stuff you should know about Shakespeare's life and times, plus another 30,000 about the individual play. But they're work-sheet free and contain 95% fewer "compare and contrast" exercises than the next leading brand.

But since we're doing most of these without backing from our publisher (who sort of learned that there's only so much market for YA nonfiction that isn't about one's changing body) we do need a bit of help to hit the ground running. We've launched our project over on kickstarter.com . Come see us for a chance to get your dad's ridiculous haircut ridiculed in a book!

All of the stuff that was on the page before is still here - just click on the "US HISTORY" tab up top for all the supplemental material, assignments, and other crazy stuff that we inflict on you. But in the coming months, we'll be doing a LOT more with this site, including some neat facts, quizzes, and homework assignments that might get you killed.

We're the Smart Aleck Staff. And we're bound for glory.

Assignment: Presidential Mnemonic by Liam Jankelovics

2010-02-22T17:47:00.000-08:00

The big End of Book Assignment - take a list of the presidents, in order, and replace each name with a word starting with the same letter (ie: Washington, Adams, Jefferson >> Windows Are Jazzy...) This was submitted by Liam Jankelovics of Chicago on the occasion of his ninth birthday - we think it's GREAT! Now you can remember the presidents in order just by remembering the story of a bridge game gone horribly wrong!

What
Are
Jewish
Men
Madly
Quarelling
About?
Jersey
Vans
Brought
Hooligans
to
Play
the
Four
Person
Bridge.
Lenny
Jacobson
Got
Hattie
Greenberg
a
Chocolate
Herring
Cleverly
Making
Reuben
Teitelbaum
Wonder,
"How
Could
He
Ruin
This
Event!!!"
(Kangaroos
Jumping
Never
Forget).
"Can
Ruthie
Bring
Cinammon
Bagels
Over????"

Propaganda from Ohio

2010-02-22T16:00:00.000-08:00

From Karen Yingling, a librarian at Blendon Middle School. This teacher looks like he'd be THRILLED for you to repeat the past - or repeat his class, anyway. And who can blame him? You're CHARMING!

Blood on the Risers Action Playset!

2010-02-19T09:20:00.000-08:00

Mark Johnson of Appleton, WI, has turned in an A+ assignment - a diorama based on the WW2 paratrooper song Blood on the Risers!

The mixed-media diorama is the first such assignment to be turned in - and we imagine it'll be hard to top!

(turned in March, 2010 - this post is back-dated)

Assignment: Presidential Mnemonic

2010-02-10T05:17:00.000-08:00

Here's one from Ed Levin for Chapel Hill, NC.

When
a
joking
mad
man
quickly
advances,
just
vanish,
hurrying
to
proceed,
thus
finding
peace.
But
lately,
just
going
hither
goes
against
clear
headwind
coming
menacingly.
Rather,
to
win
handily,
climb
higher,
raise
truth,
endeavor
kindness,
justice
now.
Find
clear
regions
behind
cloudy
bangers
overhead.

Chapter 1: Early Explorers: Brave, Bold and Rich in Minerals

2009-12-28T15:03:00.000-08:00

No one seriously claims that Columbus discovered America anymore - plenty of people (including plenty of white people, not to mention the "Indians.") got there before he did. Before 1776, most people credited the discovery to John Cabot, who bumped into Canada while working for the British. But after 1776, people wanted some national heroes that WEREN'T associated with the Brits, so they started naming everything in sight after Columbus. The Spanish tried (and failed, over and over) at setting up colonies throughout the 1500s. The Pilgrims arrived in 1620 and, unlike many who came before them, managed not to get eaten. But between their arrival in 1620 and the 1770s, the only event most people can name is the period in 1690 when people in Salem, Mass started executing suspected witches.

No one knows what Columbus looked like; thisfamous portrait is said to be of him, but is probably
just some random jerk from Bologna:

It's easy to take shots at Columbus on the grounds that he was a massive jerk who couldn't navigate his way through an outhouse with a map and a compass, but still: he bumped into continent that none of his contemporaries knew was there, which is more than YOU did.

John Cabot (which is what the English called Giovanni Caboto)
points to the ground as if to say "Okay, guys, who did this?"

From the Salem Witch Trials... you'd probably act like this, too, if you
were raised by Puritans:

Incidentally, a lot of what you hear about the witch trials isn't true. None of
them were burned at the stake - most of the "witches" were hanged. And they didn't really dunk suspected witches under water to get them to confess (at least not in Salem - that was more of a European trick). One way they had to root out witches was to make a "witch cake" out of rye and the pee of a suspected witch. They'd feed it to a dog and see
how the dog (or the suspected witch) reacted. Just another reason to be glad you're not a puritan. Or a puritan's
dog.

SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL

Transcripts, maps, and other neat stuff from the
Salem Witch Trials

Here's a cool New York Times article about

Amerigo Vespucci,
the guy who MAY have had two continents named after him. Some people say it was named after someone else. There are lost of historical mysteries still to be solved - and plenty to argue about!

For instance, some people say the continents were named after Richard Amerike, who funded fishing voyages that went to Canada in 1479 (and John Cabot's voyage in 1497). Records indicate that fishermen were using the coast of North America to get cod years before Columbus came - but, having found a good fishing spot, they kept it a secret.

Did the lost Roanoke colonists get adopted into Native American tribes? These guys are trying to prove it using DNA.

NOTE: the first copies off the line say that the Roanoke Colony was near present day Virginia. It was actually closer to North Carolina, and the football teams in the area are the Braves and the Nighthawks, not the Patriots, the Colonels or the Quitters. See why we keep saying to double check before you quote something out of a history book - including ours? Info-literacy, folks! We're all about info-literacy!

And now, a commercial:

If the early colonists were here today...
...they'd be zombies.

I KISSED A ZOMBIE
AND I LIKED IT!

A new novel

Jan, 2010

Chapter 2: The Colonists are Revolting

2009-12-28T15:02:00.000-08:00

In the 1770s, colonists rebelled against British rule. In this famous portrait, General Washington rebels against the basic rules of boat safety.

Lonely ol' Chuck Carroll.

John Adams and Thomas Jefferson both died on July 4, 1826. Adams' last words were "Thomas Jefferson smmffffss." Those around him decided he was going for "Thomas Jefferson still lives," but he COULD have been saying "Thomas Jefferson smells" or "Thomas Jefferson still owes me five bucks." What he didn't realize was that Jefferson had died a few hours before. And what NEITHER of them probably knew was that Charles Carroll, another signer of the Declaration of Independence, was also still alive. And, judging by his portrait, so, so alone.

Paul Revere contemplates the important question of whether to bust the painter over the head with a tea pot or brain him with a chisel. Revere didn't say "The British are coming" (the colonists WERE British). He said "the regulars are out," which either meant that they were being invaded by soldiers or guys who ate a lot of fiber. Either way, the colonists knew to be ready for something messy.

ASSIGNMENT ALERT!

Write a rambling poem about Prescott or Dawes, the OTHER guys who made midnight rides that night, but failed to become American heroes because their names didn't rhyme with "you shall hear." Send it to the Smart Aleck Staff - we may post a few right here!*

See Assignment Gallery

* - As always, by sending it in, you grant us the right to post it in the gallery. We will give extra credit for any entries that include the line "out of the bed and onto the floor / fifty yard dash to the bathroom door," as the "joke version" of Longfellow's poem does.

SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL

To the Royal Academy of Farting
How Ben Franklin used his new independence: in 1785, he wrote to a group of scientists asking them to find a way to make farts smell better.

Extra verses to "Yankee Doodle."
Including some slightly naughty ones - check the one about Dr. Warren. Soldiers make up naughty verses to popular songs in every war.

The Declaration of Independence
Full text. Good reading. What do YOU think Jefferson meant by "all men are created equal," exactly? It's not like the founding fathers granted equal rights to everyone, after all. Was he just saying we shouldn't have "lords" and a class of nobles, like the English did, or was he reaching towards actual equality?

Thomas Paine's "Common Sense"
Loaded with quotes you'll recognize. Some have said that to be for independence in 1775, you had to be either a fool or a fanatic. "Fortunately," Bill Bryson once wrote, "there existed a man who was a bit of both." Almost no one was for independence in 1775. But after this pamphlet came out, everyone tried to say they were for it back BEFORE it was cool. Paine later wrote another pamphlet that got the French started on their own revolution. But most who knew him said the guy was nuts - and people eventualy turned on him, largely due to his controversial religious views (short version: he was against it). He died broke and forgotten; his bones were dug up to be heroically re-buried, but they somehow got lost. No one knows where they are now, but every now and then someone claims to have a couple of them. Meanwhile, some of the Founding Fathers who didn't even really SAY the quotes they're known for, and didn't do much besides sit around the back of the room in the continental congress whining their heads off, were buried as heroes. Kinda sucks, huh?

Chapter 3: A Nation Declines to Bathe

2009-12-28T15:00:00.000-08:00

Having formed a new nation, Americans expanded westward, fought a war or two with pirates, and elected a bunch of rather forgettable presidents who didn't even have the courtesy to grow comical facial hair of which future historians could make fun.

President James K. Polk:

Business up front, party in the back, baby.

Polk was actually a pretty effective president - he made a list of goals and accomplished them all in one term. He may not be MEMORABLE, but he got the job done.

When Frances Trollope wrote a book saying Americans were dirty and rude (which, by all acounts, the early Americans were), they responded in the most mature way possible: drawing a picture of her that made her look like Jabba the Hutt.

ASSIGNMENT ALERT!

Above: John Brown, subject of the song "John Brown's Body Lies a-Mouldering in the Grave," one of the solid gold smash hits of the 1850s. Your assignment - write a better song about mouldering. Send it to the Smart Aleck Staff - we may post a few right here!*

SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL

Some of Jefferson's letters to John Adams

The Diaries of Lewis and Clark
(with the spelling cleaned up by thoughtful archivists - these guys could NOT spell)

A "coffin handbill" on Andrew Jackson

*As always, by sending it in, you grant us the right to post it here.

Chapter 4: The Civil War - America's Puberty

2009-12-28T14:59:00.000-08:00

"The Civil War was like America's puberty. It was growing rapidly, things were getting hairy down south, and blood was starting to flow down there." - Brian Eddlebeck, Smart Aleck Staff

(come on - you didn't REALLY think you were gonna get through a whole YA nonfiction book without something about 'your changing body,' did you?)

Most of the "scary letters" we get are from people who don't believe the Civil War was about slavery. It's true that the initial goal of the war was to preserve the union, not to end slavery, but the idea that it wasn't about slavery is nonsense. Here are sources to back us up- all of them make it awfully clear that the number one issue on the minds of the seceding states was slavery. The issue of abolition in 1861 was sort of like gay marriage is in 2010 - the President said he wasn't planning to do anything about the issue, but people who were against it didn't believe him and could see the writing on the wall.

Can you tell which soldier is fighting for slavery and which is fighting for "state's rights" or something like that? Get ready to duck; no matter what your answer is, SOME historian is probably going to throw a folding chair at you.

SPECIAL WEB-ONLY PIC!

The grave of Stephen Dougas

Douglas was one of Lincoln's rivals. At his monument, you can walk right into the burial chamber. They have brochures set up on his sarcophogus. Get your act together, and maybe someday there'll be brochures on YOUR coffin, too!

Lincoln's funeral train in New York.

One of the kids in the window is either a young Theodore Roosevelt or someone who snuck into Roosevelt's house (the kind of thing no one would have dared to do if they knew he'd grow up to be the kind of guy who made speechs right after being shot in the chest).

ABE LINCOLN: SMART ALECK

Everyone has heard the stories of young Lincoln sitting by the fire, doing sums in his "sums book." But what was he writing in it, really? He did, in fact, do math problems in it, but he also wrote the following:

Abraham Lincoln is my name
and with my pen I wrote the same
I wrote it with both haste and speed
and left it here for fools to read!

See more on "writing in books" in The Smart Aleck's Guide to Naughty Playground Songs.

SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL

People who say the war wasn't about slavery often claim that General Grant said that if it WAS, he would have fought for the confederacy instead. This quote started going around in the 1870s and is still turning up in books and blogs. But he didn't say it; it was a quote made up to make him look bad when he ran for President. Here's an article from the 1870s backing us up:

The Truth About Grant's "It Was Not About Slavery, or I Would Resign My Commission And Offer My Sword to the Other Side" Quote

ALL of the states that seceded and gave any reason WHY made it VERY clear that they were seceding because it was the only way to preserve slavery. Here's what the states themselves said:

Articles of Secession: Georgia

Articles of Secession: Mississippi

Article of Secession: South Carolina

Articles of Secession: Texas

Speech Given at the Alabama Secession Convention

The Bonnie Blue Flag - one of the confederacy's catchier anthems. The second line refers to either fighting for "our liberty" or "our property," depending on which version you have. Both versions are great fun for smart alecks; the author's lines about Maryland getting ready to leave the union show he wasn't much of a psychic, and he really has to stretch to find a few of his rhymes for "star."

THE REBEL YELL
Exactly what the famous confederate battle cry sounded like is in dispute - this film footage of a 1930s reunion of veterans may be the only recording of it. However, this doesn't match up with with descriptions of the yell made during the war itself. Most likely, there were several different versions of the yell, and this just was one of them:

(note: we embed the video rather than linking because youtube comments make us weep for humanity).

Works By Frederick Douglass
a better writer than anyone on staff will ever be

The Conch Republic
The RIGHT way to secede from the Union!
The Florida Keys seceded in the early 1980s over a government roadblock that was cutting off their income by blocking tourists. They declared war on the U.S., then immediately surrendered and asked for financial aid. Today, many Keys residents consider themselves dual citizens of the U.S. and the Conch Republic, and have made millions off of "Conch Republic" souveniers.

"What's so civil about war,
anyway?" - Axl Rose,
historian, political philosopher.

MORE ARTICLES RELATED TO CHAPTER FOUR:

Drafting the Confederate Constitution

The Civil War and Slavery

Chapter 5: The Gilded Age (or, Screw the Poor!)

2009-12-28T14:57:00.000-08:00

As the nation got back on its feet following the bloody civil war, it also entered the Age of Invention and the age when a handful of rich jerks owned most of the country. The presidents got hairier - and even MORE forgettable. We LOVE the picture (above) of the Farman Flying Machine - look how excited these guys are to have gotten this thing off the ground! How could it have barely taken a century for flying to get so, so boring?

ASSIGNMENT ALERT!

Charles Guiteau, the assassin of President Garfield, sings a song he wrote for the occasion entitled "I'm a-Goin' To the Lordy." It was awful. The full text is in the book. Your assignment: using only stuff from this chapter, complete this sentence: "'I'm a-goin' to the Lordy' sucks even more than______"
Some of our suggestions include "being a capitalist at one of Leon Czolgash's dinner parties," "sitting downwind of Taft on three bean casserole day," and "getting Woodrow Wilson's dental bill."Mail your answers to the staff - some MAY be posted here!*

Researchers on staff have not been able to figure out whether President Rutherford B Hayes was cross-eyed or just had a real talent for looking confused. People can explain to you how he managed to win the election when the other guy got 51% of the vote (and probably won the electoral college, too), but they can't do it without confusing you. Trust us. People in Hayes' day often called him "Rutherfraud Hayes."

Join the Rutherford Hayes: Not My President facebook group!

*If you send us your assignment, you're granting us the rights to post it here. We reserve the right NOT to post things, either due to quality, content, or sheer laziness on our part.

SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL

"It Takes More than that to Kill a Bull Moose!"
Full text of the speech Teddy Roosevelt gave shortly after being shot in the chest during the 1912 presidential campaign - he made the speech with his bloody shirt still on, while people offstage begged him to go see a doctor.

The Bull Moose Party's Platform - which was a generation ahead of its time in its calls for equality, fair labor practices, and social reform (though they were unable to put their money where their mouth was in terms of racial equality - members pressured Roosevelt to exclude blacks from the convention so they'd have at least a vague hope of winning in the South, where voters had never quite forgiven Roosevelt for inviting Booker T. Washington to the White House. They lost the South anyway, and Roosevelt ended up regretting not letting blacks in).

Jane Addams
seconded Roosevelt's nomination and became the first woman to speak at a major convention. She went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize.

Library of Congress Stuff on the Gilded Age

Upton Sinclair's The Jungle.

If you ate any meat this week and DIDN'T get sick, you have this book to thank. When it came out, Chicago's stockyards were notoriously unsanitary - a popular rhyme went:

"Mary had a little lamb
when she saw it sicken
she sent it to Chicago and
now it's labelled 'chicken.'"

Reporters were always kicked out of the stockyards, or only shown the clean spaces, but Upton Sinclair found that if he just walked around with a lunch bucket, everyone assumed he worked there and let him go wherever he pleased.

An inventor shows off his latest doohickey. Don't look at this shot too closely, or you may get a mysterious urge to eat Dorsch's bread. And you'll drive yourself to madness trying to find any. Trust us. We lost six interns that way.

Chapter 6: A War To End All Wars (ha!)

2009-12-28T14:56:00.000-08:00

Many history books just gloss over this whole affair rather than try to explain it to you. The short version of what it was all about: all sorts of new weapons had been invented, and every old army was obsolete. So countries started to build new ones, resulting in an arms race that, like most arms races, was really just a big "who has the biggest thingie" contest (and by "thingie," we mean "stamp collection," of course.) Once they had a bunch of shiny new weapons, they were all just itching to use them, either to show that they were now a major power in the world or to show that they were STILL a major power in the world. The war was an accident waiting to happen. We got involved largely because President Wilson knew that when it ended, the leaders of the world would meet to decide how the world would work for the rest of the 20th century - and he knew that being involved in the war would get him a better seat at the table.

ASSIGNMENT ALERT!

Here's a propaganda poster designed to make people support President Wilson:

Your assignment: make a propaganda poster about your history teacher. Mail your results to the staff; some may be posted here!*

*As always, by sending them in, you grant us permission to post them, but we probably can't post everything we get.

MAKE YOUR OWN MUSTARD GAS!

Yes, kids, you can make your own mustard gas from the things you find at home!

You'll need:

1/3 cup of milk
1/2 cup of corn syrup
3 oz chocolate, unsweetened
4 tablespoons margarine
4 1/2 cup sugar, powdered
1 tablespoon water
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Melt the margarine and stir everything else in slowly. Pour the mixture into eight inch pan, cool, and serve. You will notice that this doesn't look, smell or taste anything LIKE poison gas. You see, we DO know how to make poison gas, but our lawyers said that, even though we've already told you to hire an intern and poke them in the liver, saw off your friend's legs and hang them, and all sorts of things that we assume that you know are just jokes, providing an actual recipe for poison gas might violate international law. So we replaced it with a recipe for fudge. Everyone just LOVES fudge!*

* - see, Kirkus? The recipe in the book is not real.

SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL

Songs That Won the War

(and learn the "playground version:" "Over there...over there...go and sit in your chair over there...")

Around the world, about 65 million peope participated in the war, and there were some nine million casualities. Some say that a whole generation of leaders was lost, leading Europe to be led by the b-team for the next half century. Countless kids fought in the war.

Today, some of the kid soldiers are among the
tiny handful of veterans known to survive.

In 2009, the Smart Aleck Staff swung by Jefferson Junior High in Naperville, IL. We heard they had a WW1 exhibit at which you could see a TRENCH. You know how often we've wished we could go back in time and see trenches for ourselves? Well, never. We're not stupid. But the exhibit was AWESOME, and the kids really knew their stuff. Here's Adam getting all excited about the trench:

We sort of thought they'd just dig a trench in the football field, but the trench they made was really cool. No actual mustard gas or rotting corpses, though (history just doesn't come alive for us unless someone gets maimed), but this was about as close to a real trench as we'd ever recommend getting:

Here's the staff's youngest intern, putting on a doughboy outfit. When asked if he knew how to make mustard gas, he said "out of my butt!"

Chapter 7: The Roaring Twenties

2009-12-28T14:55:00.000-08:00

Soldiers came back from the war ready to party. There was just one problem: as of January 20, 1920, it was illegal for anyone, of any age, to buy or sell alcohol. But no one paid any attention to that particular law - in fact, in many cities, people drank MORE. The 1920s was an age of glitz and glamor and decadence. But it all came crashing down towards the end of 1929, and many war veterans spent the whole decade jaded, disillusioned, and depressed.

For years, people had said that if women got the vote, they would start drinking, smoking, swearing, sleeping around, and wearing short skirts. In the early 1920s, women began drinking, smoking, swearing, sleeping around and wearing short skirts. Of course, they'd always done these things (except for the skirts part - right up through WW1, women kept their ankles pretty well covered), but in the 1920s, women, particularly those known as flappers, became much more open about it.

This new openness wasn't because the women had FINALLY gotten the right to vote, though a few people (the 1920s equivalents of message board trolls) probably said it was. In fact, it was just a natural progression for society after the war and the famously stuffy Victorian era (most of the 1800s), when women couldn't say words like "pants" or "toes" out loud without blushing. Periods of repression like that happen now and then, and they're almost always followed by periods when anything goes - especially if people are looking to blow off steam after a devastating war that didn't seem to accomplish much.

THE ALGONQUIN ROUND TABLE
The Smart Aleck Staff of the 1920s

While we have your attention, let us once again plug Adam's new novel:

I KISSED A ZOMBIE
AND I LIKED IT!
Coming in Jan, 2010
Algonquin "Alley" Rhodes, the main character, is loosely based on Dorothy Parker, a smart alecky author of the 1920s who was part of a group known as The Algonquin Round Table - a group of authors who ate lunch together just about every day of the 1920s at the Algonquin Hotel in New York. Reporters in the group published the witty remarks the members made during lunch in their columns, making the group the most famous smart alecks in the country. "It was the 20s, damn it," Parker later said. "We had to be snarky."

SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL

Lillian Collier: Teenage Flapper
This Chicago girl coined the term "snugglepupping" before being sentenced by a judge to read a book of fairy tales to teach her proper values. Seriously.
We've been trying to find out whatever happened to her for years - can YOU find out?

Catch Hooverball Fever!
We didn't, but, uh, you can.

By what right do you refuse to accept a vote of the citizen of the United States?" - Victoria Woodhull.

Did she just mean adult citizens?

Today, people say that citizens under age 18 shouldn't be allowed to vote because they'd just vote for whoever their parents tell them to, or that people under 18 just aren't smart enough to vote. Sound familiar (to those of you who read the book)? Many of the arguments against letting kids vote are the same ones that people used to stop women and black people from voting in centuries past. Some people say that the voting age should be lowered, and we here on the Smart Aleck Staff are all for it (except for Prof. Rosemont, who isn't wild about ANYONE voting) . Some of us on staff (Adam, for instance) have been paying income tax since the age of 14. And we could all have been tried as adults in court at 12. And while some might point out that kids aren't always savvy enough to make wise political decisions, we can surely point out that many adults aren't, either. So why keep the voting age at 18? Why not let anyone who pays income taxes vote? And, while we're at it, why should a person who was born in Mexico but moved here when they were six months old not be eligible to be president? And if there's a person under 35 who could actually get elected president, why shouldn't that person be allowed to serve? Make noise. Act up. Call your congressman.

Chapter 8: The Depressing Thirties

2009-12-28T14:53:00.000-08:00

Every textbook's go-to image of the Great Depression, when the economy collapsed, unemployment levels soared, men who had fought for their country in the war ended up waiting in line for bread, while banks failed right and left - taking people's money with them. When John Dillinger started robbing banks, people weren't all that angry at him. In fact, they thought he was a hero. Is there anyone you could rob (or at least hit in the face with a pie) and look like a hero today? We can think of a few.

The current rent on this place is $1050 a month plus utilities, no pets allowed - it's a "cozy pre-war efficiency oozing with vintage charm featuring exposed pipes and breathtaking city views."

Woody Guthrie wrote over 1000 songs, including "This Land is Your Land" and others that you've probably heard before. Every now and then they STILL find another notebook full of songs he wrote and never got around to recording. The sign on his guitar reads "THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS." A fascist is an authoritarian dictator (call your teacher one at your own risk). To say that a guitar could bring them down seems like a bold statement - until you consider that many people felt that it was "blue jeans and rock n roll,*" not politics, that brought down communism in Europe in the late 1980s. And when Richard Nixon got in trouble for erasing eighteen minutes and twenty seconds from the Watergate Tapes, a few people noted that that was EXACTLY the length of "Alice's Restaurant" a comedic song about the draft written by Woody's son Arlo. Did Nixon tape over a recording to hide the fact that he was an Arlo Guthrie fan? Well, probably not, but, as Arlo himself asks, "how many things in this world are 18 minutes and 20 seconds long?"

Bank robber John Dillinger in the morgue after being shot by the FBI in Chicago. That's his ARM under the sheet, but this photo inspired The Legend of Dillinger's Ding-a-ling.

* -Okay, we got that quote from guitarist Keith Richards, who is not exactly an economist, but still - lots of people DO think this. The guy who became president of Hungary after their "Velvet Revolution" has been known to claim, with a straight face, that they named their revolution after the band The Velvet Undergound, and a recent PBS documentary showed some high level officials in the current Russian goverment talking about what a role the Beatles played in making kids think for themselves instead of letting The State do it for them (In Soviet Russia, hand wants to hold you!) There's no doubt that music can, at least in a small way, change the world.

SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL

The song referred to in the end-of-chapter experiment:

"Brother, Can You Spare a Dime" became an anthem of men whose country had sent them to war and then to work, but ended up in breadlines.

This is Al Jolson's version. There was a time when it was generally agreed that he was the greatest entertainer in the world - he starred in The Jazz Singer, the first successful talking movie. However, many people remember him today mainly because he often wore black makeup when performing African American music. Performing in blackface is (quite rightly) considered horribly offensive today; however, it's rarely fair to judge people of the past on the standards of behavior we have today, and Jolson is a good example: blackface wasn't considered offensive at the time (dressing as someone of another ethnicity was standard costuming), and Jolson was by no means a racist. In fact, he helped introduce "black" music to a much wider audience at a time when blacks were often not allowed onstage.

Great Depression Cooking:
Try "the poor man's meal." We did! It's good!

Outside of the Depression, Hollywood became even MORE glamorous as improved movie technology allowed moviemakers to do all sorts of new stuff. This is a musical number from "Gold Diggers of 1933," a film directed by Busby Berkeley, who was known for really weird, extravagant choreography with dancing pianos, giant bananas, and water ballets. This risque number has chimpanzees, perverted babies on roller skates, a snow storm, and metal underwear. Now THAT'S entertainment!

Chapter 9: World War 2 (out of....)

2009-12-28T14:51:00.000-08:00

ASSIGNMENT ALERT !

Make a diorama based on the song "Blood on the Risers", a song about the death of a paratrooper that was sung by soldiers. We spent a whole week on our "Blood on the Risers Action Playset." Send in a picture of yours to the Smart Aleck Staff. Be SOMEWHAT tasteful, please. We're trying to run a classy website around here (sort of).

"Rosie the Riveter"

With the men off fighting in the war, women were urged to take jobs that were traditionally done by men. Of course, the minute the war ended, they were expected to head right back into the kitchen.

SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL

"Der Fuhrer's Face" - a ww2 cartoon featuring Donald Duck. No, this has NOT been "banned," they just don't show it on TV much any more. People like to call cartoons like this "banned" so they can whine about "political correctness," which is how jerks claim victim status.

Private Snafu: a series of cartoons shown as training for soldiers. This one was written by Ted Geisel (better known as Doctor Seuss).

Bugs Bunny and friends urge Americans to buy war bonds

Daffy Duck urges people to turn in their scrap metal for use in tanks, planes, ships, etc.

Franklin Roosevelt gives a speech for his 1944 campaign. He looks about 80% dead here, but he wasn't. He was actually closer to 99% dead:

Chapter 10: We Still Think Billy Joel and His Gang Started the Fire

2009-12-28T14:50:00.000-08:00

Throughout the 1990s, many history teachers assigned their students to look up everything from Billy Joel's song "We Didn't Start the Fire," which was a big list of stuff that had happened in the world while Billy Joel was alive. Some teachers are still doing this. In Chapter 10, we try to determine whether you can learn all you need to know about 1949-1989 from Billy Joel. The result: you can come awfully close!

Baseball great Joe DiMaggio before his marriage to actress Marilyn Monroe (obviously).

A meeting between rock singer Elvis Presley and president Richard Nixon. Nixon wore a suit, and Elvis wore what appears to be a wrestling championship belt.

Russian satellite Sputnik. The Death Star it ain't - but it scared the crap out of people.

SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL

We Didn't Start the Fire lyrics

Build Your Own R-7 Rocket!
and get an honorary doctorate from a presigious university (probably).

Communist Bloc

We made an intern record our parody of "Jingle Bell Rock!
Click here to download "Communist Bloc.".

It's itunes-ready - the artist is "Smart Aleck Staff Intern," and this is the first cut off his new album, Whipped Interns and Other Delights.
LINK FIXED 1/5

Chapter 11: On Into the Future

2009-12-28T14:48:00.000-08:00

President Obama with four former presidents. How long will it be before Obama, too, has gray hair?

The book stops on inauguration day, 2009, the day the final draft was turned in to Random House. You can't keep history books TOO up to date. Few history teachers make it much past World War 2 by the end of the year, anyway.

A picture apparently taken just after George W. Bush blew up the Death Star

Some people didn't believe that a person with a funny name like Barack could be elected president. Never mind that we've had presidents named Rutherford, Ulysses, Millard, Grover and Lyndon already.

ASSIGNMENT ALERT!

In the back of the book, we came up with a mnemonic to remember ALL of the presidents in order by replacing their name with a word that starts with the same letter, forming a more of less coherent paragraph (Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Adams ---> Well, Actually Just My Main Activity.....). Your assignment: come up with a better one, and turn it in to the Smart Aleck Staff. As always, by turning it in, you grant us the rights to post it here if we like.

F.A.Q.

2009-12-28T14:47:00.000-08:00

FAQ

Why didn't you talk about.....

This is by no means a comprehensive book - we only had so much space. Some people got left out just because we didn't feel very good about ourselves when we made jokes about them. Our hope is that people will read this and then go read much more comprehensive history books. The Smart Aleck's Guide is a good starting place for people who want to learn more about history, but there's a lot we couldn't get to.

I disagree when you say that _______. You're biased.

History is subjective, no matter how hard we try to make our book unbiased. Trying to get into the head of someone from 200 years ago to figure out what was motivating them is almost as hard as trying to guess what they'd think about any given issue now. We made every effort to fact check, allow for error, and cover both sides when there's room for debate (things are hardly ever black and white; when there are two opposing points of view, the truth pretty generally lies somewhere in between). Trust us: if we wanted to use the book to push a political view, it would have been a very different book.

I think Thomas Jefferson was more religious than you make him out to be. Here's this quote....

Like all of the founding fathers, and everyone else, Jefferson didn't roar out of the womb with all of his opinions fully formed. They all had different ideas and those ideas changed over the course of their lives. Some of them went back and forth between being very religious and being atheists at various times in their lives. If we had any point to make about religion, it's that the impression some people have that before, say, 1992 everyone was either a devout Christian or the town atheist is not realisitic.

Why don't you have a bibliography? Did you think you were too cool to cite your sources?

Excellent question! And thank you for believing that we're cool. The fact is, as hard as we tried to fact-check everything, we're not academics, and the book is not a scholarly work. And, anyway, bibliographies are sort of out of date, in a way, aren't they? I mean, we could put in a list saying we got this fact from that source, but how do you know that source isn't full of crap? We ran into that a lot - we'd run acoss a surprising anecdote in some book, look it up in the bibliography, and it would turn to come from something totally unreliable. If you want a source on something nowadays, you can just google it. You'll get better results, anyway. We put up this web page to put up some supplemental material and provide links to back us up on some of this stuff we thought people would be most likely to call us on. History is full of things to argue about!

THE CIVIL WAR WAS NOT ABOUT SLAVERY, YOU YANKEE SCUM!

Yeah, it really was. Of course, it wasn't exactly a Northern crusade against slavery (at least not at first), and your average southern soldier probably felt more like he was defending his family from an invading army than anything else (many, if not most, soldiers on both sides just joined because it was the thing to do at the time). But the southern states made it VERY clear that they were seceding to preserve slavery, and once people figured out that the war wasn't going to be over in a month, they also figured out that if the war didn't resolve the slavery issue, they'd just have to fight the same war again in twenty years. Prior to the war starting, Lincoln didn't feel he had the power to end slavery - and he really didn't. It wasn't like he could just wave a magic wand and say "Okay, guys, no more of this crap!" As far as he could go was to try to stop slavery from spreading beyond the south and hoping that it would die out on its own within a hundred years. But we digress. Check out the links over at Chapter 4 and read The Articles of Secession.

Why do you moderate the comment form on these pages? Don't you like free speech?

We think comments forms always end up looking like the one at the bottom of this.

Meet Your Smart Aleck Staff!

2009-12-28T14:45:00.000-08:00

ADAM SELZER(left)
is the author of several novels, including
HOW TO GET SUSPENDED AND INFLUENCE PEOPLE (which people try to ban now and then),I Put a Spell On You (which holds the world's record for Most Richard Nixon Jokes in a Kids Book), and the new I KISSED A ZOMBIE AND I LIKED IT!
Consider him for a school visit
or a Chicago tour!
He also writes gory true crime under the name "Wild Bill" Griffith.

SJ ADAMS
(no known photograph)
A super-high ranking, Cornersville Trace-born staffer and uthor of the upcoming novel SPARKS. SJ has a blog about life on the staff and frequently makes fun of Adam on twitter.

ELI SELZER
is a big fan of Billy Joel. Dr. Joel once noted that "if you are (a straight A student), then you think
too much." Eli was a straight A student, but he sure didn't think too much. Trust us. He lives in Los Angeles and got this job by being the boss's brother.

PROF WILLIAM ROSEMONT, ESQUIRE
is our resident conspiracy theorist. He has SEVERAL advanced degrees, but we mostly keep him around to fix the pinball machines.

BRIAN EDDLEBECK
is the one responsible for all of the poop jokes
that didn't get cut out by the good folks at Random
House. Blame him.

KENSINGTON ANN CHELSEA
is wanted in three states, but arrived at the Smart Aleck headquarters one day to teach us a song about how to build an Anderson shelter. It came in surprisingly handy.

BEN BRUSH
joined the staff because he had the same music teacher as Adam in the 80s, and SOMEONE had to back up Adam's stories that his music teacher once claimed not to believe in shampoo. Seriously. He preferred to stick his head in a rain barrel. And this guy taught Adam to rap, which explains a lot. Ben's first job was to find out if rain barrels really better than shampoo (experiment still in progress). HIs second was to find a bank foolish enough to give us a mortgage. He's traveled as far as Nebraska. No luck yet.

RONICA SELZER
Just promoted from intern, having read every historical "American Girl" book. Welcome aboard, Ronni!

Not picured:

About 50 interns not important enough to name!

They usually answer The Staff Email that people use to call us "yankee scum" or "revisionist pigs" (which is how historians insult each other).

End of Website Quiz

2009-12-28T14:43:00.000-08:00

End of Website Quiz » Fun Trivia Maker

Here they come!

2009-12-24T07:27:00.001-08:00

The book was released on Tuesday, and assigments are coming in already! As busy as we are with all of the important stuff we do at the Smart Aleck Headquarters (such as watching C-SPAN to see if any cane-beatings break out, arguing about what the civil war was really about, and playing Pete Rose Baseball on Atari 2600) we can't promise to get them all up in a timely manner, but we wanted to at least get started!

Thanks,
The Smart Aleck Staff

Propaganda Poster

2009-12-24T07:23:00.000-08:00

From a student who "wishes to remain anonymous."

Note from the student: I was gonna put a joker smile on him, like that Obama poster, but I thought I might get in trouble!

Our note back: whoever made the Obama/Joker poster didn't get in trouble - people just said he was a jerk! The first amendment doesn't protect you from being called a jerk, an idiot, or any other unpleasant name. It won't always get you out of trouble in school, either - and this Summers guy COULD respond by giving you a lot MORE homework! So you're right to be cautious - freedom of speech doesn't mean you shouldn't THINK before you speak!

Samuel Prescott Poem from Ben B.

2009-12-23T06:53:00.000-08:00

Here's one from Ben B. of Springfield, Nebraska, who is out for the extra credit for using the line "out of the bed and onto the floor / fifty yard dash to the bathroom door!" Yes, we here at the Smart Aleck's Guide are strongly of the opinion that Longfellow's poem (and, therefore, Revere's fame) wouldn't be nearly so enduring if it weren't for the parody version!

Listen my friends and you shall hear
A bunch of garbage I pulled right out of my rear
I must admit I’m not an author or poet
And from what you’re going to read you too shall soon know it…
So sit back and enjoy this gobble-de-gook
Because I write this stuff, my friend writes the book

Twas early one morning on April Nineteenth 1875
When Samuel Prescott made his most famous ride
Who is Sam Prescott you may want to know
He rode with Revere but has no credit to show

He met up with Dawes and the famous Paul Revere
They rode all together to tell the colonists that danger was near
Our trio met up with four British spies
Who caught Paul Revere, but not this Prescott guy

On horseback in darkness our hero Sam ran
And pulled a 180 some dumb British man
And off through the forest he darted and ducked
To warn the townsfolk of Concord they were about to get invaded.

After warning Concord it was off to Acton, Mass.
To tell those who lived their to hurry their brass**
The British were coming and coming up fast
With their guns ready and loaded and ready to clash

Out of the bedroom and onto the floor
A fifty-yard dash to the bathroom door
So was the stunt that Sam’s Brother Abel
Had to run quickly in route to the stable

For Abel you see would take it from here
And Samuel went back to see the folks in Concord kick some rear
Yes Sam went back to see the Brits and colonists fight
Then tended to the wounded with all of his might *

History you see is an awful political game
Sam did the work and Revere got the fame
But now you all know what happened that night
Paul Revere got captured, but Sam Prescott got the colonists ready to fight

So now that you’ve listened to my rambling verses
When folks talk of the great Revere you now know what the truth is
Thanks to Sam Prescott, a true American Hero
And with the rhymes of this poem, he’s no longer a zero.

* Dr. Samuel Prescott was a surgeon and did tend to wounded soldiers after the Battle of Concord and beyond.

ASSIGNMENTS!

2009-12-20T08:12:00.000-08:00

The Smart Aleck's Guide to American History includes several assignments. Under "No Reader Left Behind" we have to include these along with several standardized tests, but we're not too picky about #2 pencils. Use a crayon if you feel like it. And chew yourself some gum!

ASSIGNMENTS:
CHAPTER 2:

Write a rambling poem about Prescott or Dawes, the OTHER guys who made midnight rides that night, but failed to become American heroes because their names didn't rhyme with "you shall hear," like Paul Revere's did.

CHAPTER 3:

Most of us agree that "Battle Hymn of the Republic" was a better song than the one it was based on, "John Brown's Body Lies a Mouldering in the Grave," which was one of the solid gold smash hits of the 1850s. Your assignment: write a catchier song about mouldering.

CHAPTER 5:

Just before Charles Guiteau, the assassin of President Garfield, was hanged, he wrote for the occasion entitled "I'm a-Goin' To the Lordy." It was awful. The full text is in the book. Your assignment: using only stuff from this chapter, complete this sentence: "'I'm a-goin' to the Lordy' sucks even more than______"
Some of our suggestions include "being a capitalist at one of Leon Czolgash's dinner parties," "sitting downwind of Taft on three bean casserole day," and "getting Woodrow Wilson's dental bill.

CHAPTER 6:

Make a propaganda poster for your teacher.

CHAPTER 7:

Convince your congressman or senator to back legislation to lower the voting age.

CHAPTER 9:

Make a diorama based on the song "Blood on the Risers"

CHAPTER 11:

In the back of the book, we came up with a mnemonic to remember ALL of the presidents in order by replacing their name with a word that starts with the same letter, forming a more of less coherent paragraph (Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Adams ---> Well, Actually Just My Main Activity.....). Your assignment: come up with a better one!

By turning in your assignments (to the email address on the left), you grant us the right to post them here. Assignments may or may not be posted at the sole discretion of the Smart Aleck Staff.

2009-12-20T07:56:00.001-08:00

2009-03-04T15:20:00.000-08:00

Newsflash: Assignments are coming in! (2 new added 3/22/10)

FINALLY! A young adult nonfiction book that's NOT about "your changing body!"

Above: Washington rebels against the British
(and the basic rules of boat safety) in 1776.

THE SMART ALECK'S GUIDE
TO AMERICAN HISTORY
by Adam Selzer
and the Smart Aleck Staff

"In the vein of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert...witty, comedic and appealing..."
- School Library Journal

"Speeding along on humor, Daily Show-style...the laugh-out-loud approach should win over reluctant readers."
- Publisher's Weekly

"Pretty darn entertaining...valuable lessons about info-literacy...will enlighten, entertain, and might well motivate students to go on to check out in-depth books."
- Richie's Picks

It's hard to believe, but most history textbooks never make a single joke about General Ambrose Burnside's facial hair! That's him on the right. He helped win the Civil War*, which ought to count for something, but LOOK at the guy!

Now, at long last, there's a history book that dares to take cheap shots at comical mustaches! It's more factual than the new Texas history textbooks will be - and a whole lot funnier!

Many people have tried to write "smart alecky "history books, but most of them end up spending all of their energy patting themselves on the back for being "politically incorrect" or trying to make Abe Lincoln look like a racist. That's not our style. The Founding Fathers may have been a bunch of jerks with wild sex lives in private, but they DID form a new nation that has lasted over two centuries, which is more than YOU did. We're not trying to make them look bad... we're just not above cracking jokes about their stupid hats and striped spandex pantaloons** .

There's no better way to make history come alive without somebody dying of scurvy!

Here at our webpage, you'll find a few samples from the book to give you some idea of what we're all about, plus a bunch of supplemental material (the kind of stuff more reputable textbooks usually have in the back of the book), as well as a place to turn in your assignments from the book.

* - well, he TRIED to help. He was better at growing facial hair than he was at being a general.
** - look on the back of a two dollar bill. See page 40.

We're the Smart Aleck Staff. We're here to help. Email us.
Or get your principal to have Adam (our boss) come to your school!

Check out "What Our Founding Fathers Would Have Wanted," the Smart Aleck's Guide video that the Texas Textbook committee doesn't want you to see!

How to Make History Come Alive:

Jefferson and Adams (another video Texas doesn't want you to see, having stricken Jefferson from the history books)!

SEE ALL OF THE SMART ALECKS GUIDE VIDEOS!

Your Founding Fathers...

2008-12-29T11:19:00.000-08:00

...and why you shouldn't go around claiming they agree with you politically.

How To Make History Come Alive

2008-12-28T17:36:00.000-08:00

Tons of history books try to "make history come alive" for students. We say that history doesn't come alive until someone gets smallpox!

Historical Big Shots Making Frowny Faces!

2008-12-27T17:42:00.000-08:00

Smile, darn ya, smile!

Jefferson vs. Adams

2008-12-27T17:39:00.000-08:00

Was John Adams a jerk? Was Thomas Jefferson a pervert? Well, probably. But be fair - no one looks THAT good when held under the presidential microscope. All in all, these guys did a pretty fair job. Anyone with the nerve it takes to take on an empire has the right to seem a bit unbalanced if you look too hard. They didn't just take on King George, though...they also took on...each other.

Forgotten Presidents - Part 1

2008-12-27T17:37:00.000-08:00

We've only really had a handful of GREAT presidents. The most your average president can really hope for is to break even and come out with his dignity intact. The way history remembers some of them, a few would probably prefer to be among the large number of forgettable ones: