We report, you decide.

There's actually a lot of stuff we HAVEN'T done

Welcome back to the This Day In Esoteric Political History newsletter. Each week, a member of our team (or a friend of the show) gathers together bits of America’s past and attempts to find a throughline that might add a little understanding to our current moment.

Before we get going, as you may be hearing, the annual Radiotopia fundraiser has begun. Thanks to everyone who has supported us so far. If you can, please take the step from listener to member, and help support this show and independent media. We need it, and appreciate it!

Here’s what happened over the week ahead in American political history…

November 21

• 1922: Rebecca Latimer Felton becomes the first female Senator (for 24 hours).

• 1973: The existence of an 18.5-minute gap in Richard Nixon’s Watergate tapes is revealed

November 22

• 1910: A group of the most powerful bankers in the country were invited to the secluded Jekyll Island, off the coast of Georgia, to develop a plan for what would eventually become the Federal Reserve

• 1903: FDR and Eleanor Roosevelt are engaged

• 1990: George H.W. Bush visits troops on Thanksgiving in Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War 

November 23

• 1914: U.S. forces withdraw from Veracruz during the Mexican Revolution

• 1939: To boost the economy, President Franklin D. Roosevelt moves Thanksgiving up a week to create an extra seven days of Christmas shopping.

• 1970: The US cedes a tiny portion of land south of the Rio Grande (Horcon Tract) to Mexico

• 1981: President Ronald Reagan signs a top secret directive giving the CIA the authority to support Contra rebels in Nicaragua

November 24

• 1832: South Carolina declares certain protective tariffs null, beginning the Nullification Crisis

• 1835: The Texas Rangers are created by the Texas Provincial Government

• 1917: A bomb kills nine Milwaukee policemen, the deadliest event in US law enforcement until 9/11.

• 1963: JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald is killed by Jack Ruby

• 1971: A hijacker calling himself Dan Cooper parachutes from a plane with $200,000, never to be found.

November 25

• 1864: Confederate operatives attempt to burn down New York City.

• 1874: The US Greenback Party is established

• 1947: The 'Hollywood Ten' are blacklisted by movie studios after they refused to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee 

• 1963: JFK is buried at Arlington National Cemetery

• 1986: Attorney General Edwin Meese announces that profits from covert weapons sales to Iran were illegally diverted to the anti-communist Contra rebels in Nicaragua

November 26

• 1863: President Abraham Lincoln proclaims November 26 as a national Thanksgiving Day

• 2000: George W. Bush is certified the winner of Florida's electoral votes

November 27

• 1894: A group of 19 Hopi men are arrested in Arizona and brought to Alcatraz Island in California, imprisoned for their resistance to the US government’s re-education efforts

• 1924: The first Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade is held

• 1954: Alger Hiss is released from prison after serving 44 months for perjury

• 1978: San Francisco mayor George Moscone and city supervisor Harvey Milk are assassinated by former supervisor Dan White

In which we take the above collection of events and find themes, throughlines, rabbit holes and more. This week it’s Jody Avirgan’s turn at the typewriter.

My brain is starting to turn into pre-Thanksgiving mush, in a good way. This next stretch is one of my favorites of the entire year. I always find that the weekend before and days leading up to Thanksgiving are some of the most creative of the year for me. The pace of meetings slows down, I enter a kind of transitionary space between reflecting to the year and thinking about my goals for the next. It’s the time for big ideas and schemes — and coquito.

In that spirit of looking ahead, as I cruise through the list above, I’m thinking about all the topics that we haven’t covered. We’ve never really done anything about the JFK assassination! DB Cooper, that could be fun! So, let me put it to you to help scheme. What should we find an excuse to do an episode on in the coming months.

Okay, here’s to a mushy, flexible brain, and lots of big ideas in the months to come.

-Jody-

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A little more esoterica

We’re jumping on BlueSky! Jody, Niki, Kellie, Jacob, and the show are all there. And we made a “starter pack” featuring as many friends of the show — guests, behind the scenes supporters, etc — as we could find. Check it out!

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