Twelve Fun Facts I Learned Researching My New Book

Dear Reader,

My new book AMERICA IN 25 REVOLUTIONS is out two weeks from today, and I wanted to share some of the fun and interesting American history I learned in the research. Writing this book was the most fun I’ve ever had as a historian.

Across the 25 chapters, the book covers a broad sweep of the nation’s 250 years, from the Bill of Rights right through 2020, and I loved the chance to dive into a whole host of chapters of America’s past that I hadn’t explored before. Each chapter explores a different moment when America has experienced a leap forward and gotten “better,” closer to achieving the Founders’ still-never-achieved vision of a country more just, more equal, and more free.

It’s a hopeful and optimistic look of American history — at a time when we very much need hope and optimism! — that I hope will challenge readers to pick up the hard work of making tomorrow better than today.

You can preorder the book here — and all preorders through my local indie Phoenix Books in Burlington come signed and with this amazing set of original bar coasters, drawn by POLITICO political cartoonist Matt Wuerker, that feature nine figures from the book who I believe should be considered American “Founders” in their own right:

Without further ado, here’s my own David Letterman-style Top Ten List (okay, it’s really 12!) of fun, interesting, and mind-blowing facts in the book:

1. In the early days of the California gold rush, when there was a paucity of women to handle the laundry in San Francisco, an enterprising group of merchants began what might have been America’s first large-scale “offshoring” business: Collecting soiled laundry and shipping it to Honolulu or even Canton, China, for washing — the cost was much cheaper, but the turnaround time for a dirty shirt or pair of pants was roughly three months! (Chapter 4: Yick Wo v. Hopkins and the Right to Equal Protection (1886))
   
   

2. Thomas Paine, best known for Common Sense, also outlined the first old-age pension scheme. Yet by 1809, when he died at 72 in Greenwich Village, he had alienated nearly all his friends with his attacks on Christianity and bitter screeds against many of the other Founders, including George Washington himself. Most biographies of Paine note that just six people attended his funeral — a fact that appears to be incorrect. It was actually eleven; according to a June 20, 1809, letter, his funeral followers consisted of “two negroes, the next a carriage with six drunken Irishmen, then a riding chair with two men in it, one of whom was asleep, and then an Irish Quaker on horseback.” (Chapter 11: The Social Security Act and the Right to Grow Old Without Fear (1935))

   
   

3. By the late 1800s, a period journalist Yoni Applebaum calls the “heyday of American mobility,” roughly one-third of Americans moved and changed addresses every year. (Chapter 2: Mobility, Voting, and the Right to Move (1800–1850))
   
   

4. When first introduced in 1901 — in a recipe by Julia Davis Chandler, published in the Boston Cooking-School Magazine of Culinary Science and Domestic Economics — the PB&J was initially recommended as a fancy elite society tea sandwich that combined jelly with the new spreadable delicacy, peanut butter, recently patented by cereal pioneer John Harvey Kellogg. (Chapter 8: Harvey Wiley’s Hygienic Tables, The Jungle, and the Right to Safe Food (1906))
   
   

5. The first barcode scanned in the United States was on a 67-cent pack of Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit chewing gum, scanned on June 26, 1974, at 8:01 a.m., at Marsh Supermarket in Troy, Ohio. (Chapter 21: The Gender Equality Revolution, Title IX, and the Right to Equal Opportunity (1974))

   
   

6. When notorious New York political machine Boss Tweed fled to Spain to evade criminal charges, he amazingly was recognized at the Spanish border from the caricatures of him published by political cartoonist Thomas Nast. Tweed was arrested, brought back to the US on a navy ship, and ultimately died in prison. (Chapter 4: The Merit Revolution and the Right to Honest Government (1883))
   
   

7. The famous Miranda warning — “You have the right to remain silent” and so forth — is read to criminal suspects across the US approximately twenty thousand times a day, which works to about thirteen times a minute. (Chapter 16: Gideon, Miranda, and the Right to Due Process (1966))
   
   

8. It was only at the start of the 1900s that the odds a 20-year-old would live to age 65 improved past 50-50. (Chapter 11: The Social Security Act and the Right to Grow Old Without Fear (1935))
   
   

9. Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924 insisted that anyone with “one drop” of Black blood and ancestry was officially categorized by the state as “colored.” The sole exception, carved out for Virginia’s historical pride, was the “Pocahontas Exception,” which allowed people who claimed “one-sixteenth or less of the blood of the American Indian” to continue to identify themselves as “white,” an exception made because so many wealthy and socially prominent white Virginian families claimed to be descendants of Pocahontas and John Rolfe. (Chapter 17: Loving v. Virginia and the Right to Love (1967))
   
   

10. Mississippi didn’t ratify the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery, until 1995. (Chapter 3: Reconstruction and the Right to Equal Citizenship (1865–1870))

    
    

11. Justin Dart Jr., who would be the driving force behind the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, broke the record for the most demerits of any Andover student ever — a record held until then by Humphrey Bogart. (Chapter 23: The Americans with Disabilities Act and the Right to Accessibility (1990))
    
    

12. In arguing for the passage for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Sen. Hubert Humphrey illustrated the need to expand civil rights by reading from two contrasting travel guides — the famous “green book” for Black motorists and another written for families traveling with pets — and used them to point out that Augusta, Georgia, had five hotels or motels that allowed dogs while only one that allowed Blacks. (Chapter 14: The Civil Rights Act and the Right to Equal Access (1964))
    
    

There’s obviously a lot more in the book — and a whole host of chapters and “revolutions” I haven’t mentioned here — but I hope this whets your appetite for more!

GMG

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