Teddy Roosevelt challenged a staffer to a boxing match WHILE he was president, and the man blinded him in the left eye.

I'm a Senior Staff Writer based in New York City, where I've been covering classic BuzzFeed-style content since 2020.

The rule remained in the House, where it was invoked a few years later, proving its relevancy; today, you still cannot filibuster in the House of Representatives.

We can actually also blame then-Senator John Quincy Adams, who brought up Burr's comment in 1806 while shortening the rulebook.

"Also, mammoths! He wrote a lot about mammoths in the only book he ever published, Notes on the State of Virginia. It was his attempt to counter Europe's idea of American degeneracy — that the climate or environment of the New World caused animals, including humans, to get smaller, weaker, and just overall inferior over time. If he could just find a mammoth or a giant sloth, he could prove degeneracy wrong and show that America wasn't inferior to Europe."

If you don't know what a mastodon is, it's a giant elephant relative, similar to a woolly mammoth; in fact, at the time, it was not known that the mastodon and mammoth were different species.

The letter where he talks about this is pretty disgusting. He states that he doesn't think freedom would "benefit" them but that they may not be able to resist the "temptation," or that it might make his enslaved people "insolent" to even know they had the right to freedom. He also worried about having to pay for them. Instead, he suggested sending them back to Virginia "under pretext that may deceive both them and the Public," so no one would realize he was cycling enslaved people out in this manner, suggesting having it coincide with his wife visiting him in Philadelphia.

"There is a debate as to whether they had this right even earlier, with the 1776 state Constitution, because it uses the vague 'they' in reference to voters. In 1790, they used the terms 'he or she.' The 1790 law gave property-owning women the right to vote in seven out of the 13 counties in 1790, and then that right was extended to all property-owning women in 1797. They did take their vote quite seriously — we have few voter rolls, but the ones we do have show them making up close to 15 percent of the voting total."

It wasn't quite 120 years for many states: in 1869, Wyoming became the first state (post-Jersey) to pass a law allowing women to vote — though technically, Wyoming was not even part of the US until 1890. Other states followed suit, and women's suffrage was secured nationwide via the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920. 

*Revels was voted to a Senate seat vacated by a Confederate leader, so he only finished out that former senator's term, which was about a year.

The "Grandfather" clause stated that you could vote if your grandfather had. As Black Southerners' grandparents had been enslaved, they obviously had not had this right.

"On November 10, 1898, two days after the election, an armed mob of roughly 2,000 white men attacked and burned down the city’s Black-owned newspaper. The violence quickly escalated into a coordinated massacre in the streets, resulting in the murder of an estimated 60 to 300 Black residents. Later that afternoon, the mob marched on City Hall and forced the democratically elected mayor and biracial board of aldermen to resign at gunpoint, immediately replacing them with coup leaders.

Following the coup, prominent Black citizens and their white political allies were forced onto trains and permanently banished from the state. The newly installed regime used Wilmington as a blueprint to pass sweeping Jim Crow laws, including poll taxes and literacy tests, which effectively stripped Black citizens of their voting rights across North Carolina for generations. For over a century, the event was covered up and falsely framed as a 'race riot' until a 2006 state commission officially recognized it as the only successful violent overthrow of a government in US history."

*Quick note: This is oversimplifying it, but you can basically think of Republicans and Democrats as switched in ideology in this era. 

"I grew up in the Tulsa area. There is a whole untold history that is still considered rumors or hearsay. My hometown had stories amongst the older people, in the 1990s, about how the survivors were attacked along the railroad tracks while fleeing. Given the city was a haven for the KKK up until the 1990s, I'd be willing to bet there's some truth to it."

"Believed to be the single worst incident of racial violence in American history, the bloody 1921 outbreak in Tulsa has continued to haunt Oklahomans. During the course of eighteen terrible hours on May 31 and June 1, 1921, more than 1,000 homes and businesses were destroyed, while credible estimates of deaths range from 50 to 300. By the time the violence ended, the city had been placed under martial law, thousands of Tulsans were being held under armed guard, and the state's second-largest Black community had been burned to the ground."

"Between men, the 442nd Regiment earned:

—21 Medals of Honor (The highest military decoration in the United States)

—9,486 Purple Hearts (Earned by soldiers wounded or killed in action)

—Eight Presidential Unit Citations (The highest unit level award)."

"People think Hitler didn’t have a choice and was forced into it by Japan. He wasn’t. Their alliance was defensive in nature. He was under no obligation to declare war after Pearl Harbor. But he chose to do it to be able to sink American shipping to Europe."

"Yep. Hitler also publicly praised American immigration quotas. US laws such as the Immigration Act of 1924 served as a primary inspiration and legal framework for Nazi lawyers drafting the Nuremberg Laws.

The American eugenics movement, which had successfully pushed for compulsory sterilization laws in states like California, was widely praised by the Nazis and directly influenced Germany's 1934 sterilization laws.

Hitler also deeply admired the American idea of Manifest Destiny and westward expansion. He viewed the brutal displacement and marginalization of Native Americans as a blueprint."

"Quebec was a colony. So was Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland. And, perhaps most interestingly, East and West Florida. There were also a large number of Caribbean colonies.

So yeah, Florida refused to join us. And when the British were losing, a lot of crown supporters fled from the Carolinas and Georgia to Florida, desperate to stay under the dominion of the crown.

And then only a short time later, the British just gave Florida to Spain, really, really pissing off those people who uprooted their lives to move there, and who suddenly found themselves under the control of a very foreign sovereign.

Every time I read a Florida Man headline, I like to reflect on this historical fact and remember these were the people who populated the state."

The French colonies were selling sugar at a lower price than these British colonies, as they had more fertile land and were able to run their plantations better, as they lived on-site. To keep this from sinking their sugar industry, the government required that the British could only buy sugar from the British colonies. If the Caribbean colonies had rebelled, they would have lost this lucrative deal and had to compete with the French, who had a close trade relationship with the northern British colonies.

Also, white Caribbean colonists did not want to risk their access to the British slave trade, considering how many enslaved people they needed for the labor-intensive sugar plantations. Enslaved people only lived an average of 13 years after arriving in the Caribbean, due to how intense the work was and how terribly they were treated, so the white colonists needed an endless access to the slave trade. The 13 colonies had less need for this access because they'd force their enslaved women — who generally survived longer than their southern counterparts in places like Jamaica — to give birth. Also, enslaved people vastly outnumbered white people in the Caribbean, and the white colonists relied on British troops to keep them protected from enslaved people rebelling.

I'm essentially just summarizing this video, which is a great watch that breaks this all down and goes more into enslaved people rebelling in the Caribbean.

"Freed enslaved people didn't have many educational or vocational options, so they largely worked in the service industry, such as servers, maids, porters, etc. When minimum wage was discussed, racist business owners lobbied for a carve-out for the service industry, i.e., a lower minimum wage with the expectation that tips would make up the difference. If only they worked hard enough, then customers would tip them a lot more. Except that racist white patrons tipped poorly, helping to keep Black people in poverty."

*Wage laws state that it must reach $7.25, the federal minimum wage, with tips, or the employer must give the extra amount so that it reaches this minimum. However, this was not always the case, and even now, this is often just not happening, with one report finding that almost 84% of restaurants had committed wage theft.

"He also complained that while the bald eagle does hunt, it is just as likely to scavenge or even steal prey from another animal, which he believed made it a poor choice."

Schrank's motive was to prevent Roosevelt from taking a third term, which he felt was wrong. He spent the rest of his life in an institution after being deemed unfit to stand trial.

"It was with a staffer that had a reputation in the Army for being a good boxer. Teddy's opponent was a young Army colonel (Daniel T. Moore) who was a military aide to the White House. Roosevelt had heard he was a good boxer and asked him for a bout. Roosevelt kept his injured eye a secret; Moore only found out about it when it leaked to the press more than a decade later.

It's also worth pointing out that this was not a one-time thing. Roosevelt was an enthusiastic boxer and regularly did full-contact sparring with various aides and staff at the White House, usually men far younger than himself to boot. I find this comical, like can you imagine your boss's boss's boss, who is also the most powerful person in the world, coming up to you at work and going, 'Hey son, heard you're a bully good boxer, fancy a bout in the gymnasium later?'

When Roosevelt's doctor forbade him from any more boxing or wrestling, he took up judo and jiu-jitsu instead."

"John Adams and Thomas Jefferson hated each other due to opposing ideologies. Adams's last words were 'Thomas Jefferson survives.'

Meanwhile, Thomas Jefferson had died earlier that same day, 200 years ago today."

"That is far too simple a summary of their relationship. During the revolution, they were good friends and had massive respect for each other. But they were nasty political rivals in the 1780s–'90s, with some of the most mean-spirited mud slinging in the press this country has ever seen!

Years later, after they both were effectively retired from politics, Jefferson reached out with a letter, and they rekindled their deep friendship over mail. And yes, amazingly, they both passed away on July 4th, on the 50th anniversary of the USA! The John Adams series on HBO does a great job with this."

•⁠1 quart brandy (VS or VSOP works great)•⁠1 lb fresh or frozen cherries, pitted•⁠¾ cup sugar•⁠Zest of 1 lemon•⁠1 cinnamon stick•⁠2–3 whole cloves

1. Muddle the cherries and sugar together in a large mason jar or wide-mouth bottle.2. Add the lemon zest, cinnamon stick, cloves, and brandy.3. Shake the jar every few days.4. After steeping, strain through a fine mesh or cheesecloth. Bottle and store.

His wife Martha also had a killer Rum Punch recipe he kept in a tureen near the entrance at Mount Vernon and had a ladle of it coming into the house."