Anti-Social Studies

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Five midterm elections that changed the course of U.S. History Oct 21, 2026

Show notes

The midterms are on Tuesday, November 3rd. The president isn't on the ballot, which is exactly why a lot of people skip them, and exactly why this video exists to convince you to STILL VOTE.

Midterms have flipped Congress, reined in presidents, launched careers, and quietly reshaped the country more than once. In this video, I walk through five midterm elections that changed the course of U.S. history, in chronological order (the algorithm wanted a dramatic countdown, but I'm a historian and I have my limits):

1858: A brand new Republican Party, a very bad president named James Buchanan, and a Senate race in Illinois where a lanky challenger named Abraham Lincoln lost, and got famous anyway.

1866: The first election after the Civil War, and a president (Andrew Johnson) who basically campaigned his way into irrelevance, handing Congress the power to run Reconstruction, write the 14th Amendment into the Constitution, and impeach him for good measure.

1874: Reconstruction fatigue, an economic crash, and violence at the polls. A midterm that helped end Reconstruction and set the stage for Jim Crow.

1974: Watergate, Vietnam, and gas lines. The "Watergate Babies," the Church Committee, and a Congress that decided to take back some of the power it had handed to the president.

1994: Newt Gingrich, the Contract with America, and a strategy to turn local races into a national referendum, one that's been the playbook ever since.

The through-line: your state and local elections are always on the ballot, and they matter even more to your day-to-day life than the national ones. And as 1874 reminds us, elections only change history if people can actually cast their ballots.

So check your registration, make a plan to vote, and, I'm sorry, but it's the only way those 5-7 daily fundraising texts will eventually stop.

📺 Confused about the whole "the parties switched" thing? Watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRmwaCyzdfE

🌐 antisocialstudies.org 📱 Instagram: @antisocstudies · TikTok: @antisocialstudies · YouTube: Anti-Social Studies

🎓 Want the deeper dive? My U.S. History courses and classroom-ready curriculum cover 1858, 1866, and 1874 (Course 1: 1491-1877) and 1974 and 1994 (Course 3: 1945-present) in a lot more depth: antisocialstudies.org

#midterms #ushistory #midtermelections #history #vote

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Freedom of the Press or, "The U.S. used to rank 20th for press freedom. Now we're 64th." Sep 29, 2026

Show notes

In 2010, the United States ranked 20th in the world on the Reporters Without Borders Press Freedom Index. Pretty good. Today, we're 64th out of 180 — officially "problematic." That's a strange place to land for the country that put freedom of the press in the very first amendment to its Constitution.

So this episode traces exactly how we got from "this is one of the most important rights we can give people" to "problematic" — through jury nullification, a president who made it illegal to criticize him (but not his own VP), a Civil War's worth of newspaper editors arrested without trial, two world wars' worth of speech crackdowns, and a Supreme Court that's been arguing about all of this, more or less nonstop, for almost 300 years.

Along the way: Peter Zenger, the colonial printer whose 1730s trial planted the first seeds of American press freedom before the First Amendment even existed. John Adams' Sedition Act, which criminalized criticizing the president while conveniently leaving his own vice president fair game. Lincoln's Union government arresting Northern newspaper editors without due process. Woodrow Wilson's Espionage and Sedition Acts, which imprisoned thousands of anti-war activists and gave us Schenck v. United States and the original "clear and present danger" test — a standard the Supreme Court doesn't even use anymore. And a rapid-fire tour of the modern rulebook: what counts as libel, why media antitrust law exists, why the Pentagon Papers got published, whether the First Amendment applies to your Instagram comments (yes), and where the actual legal line sits today, care of a 1969 case involving a Klan rally that most people have never heard of.

Whatever happens to journalism next — and between political pressure, the changing internet, and AI, it's genuinely unclear — at least now you'll have the actual context for what the government can, and can't, do about what gets published.

???? antisocialstudies.org ???? Instagram: @antisocstudies · TikTok: @antisocialstudies · YouTube: Anti-Social Studies ???? Want more on this era and the courts that shaped it? My U.S. History courses and curriculum go deeper on every case in this video: antisocialstudies.org

#pressfreedom #firstamendment #ushistory #supremecourt #freespeech

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The U.S. Used to Rank 20th for Press Freedom. Now We're 64th. Sep 29, 2026

Show notes

#pressfreedom #firstamendment #ushistory #supremecourt #freespeech

When did we become civilized? or, "Emily Teaches World History #1" Sep 23, 2026

Show notes

Welcome to Emily Teaches World History — a new series where we go all the way back to the actual beginning, starting with the discovery that changed everything: farming.

This episode covers the Neolithic Revolution (aka the invention of agriculture, aka the reason you're not currently living in a small nomadic hunting tribe), why it probably wasn't invented by any one person or culture, and why it happened almost everywhere on Earth within a few thousand years of each other with zero communication between continents. Then we get into the real question: once farming shows up, what actually makes a "civilization" a civilization?

Turns out historians have a checklist — seven characteristics, more or less agreed upon across textbooks — and some of them hold up better than others. A stable food supply and specialized jobs? Sure, makes sense. A required, organized writing system? That one's a problem, and it's the one I have the most beef with: it's a rule written by historians who value written documents (because their whole job depends on written documents), and it conveniently writes off civilizations that kept extraordinary records a different way — like the Inca, who tracked accounting through a system of knotted rope called khipu, or societies across Africa with long, rigorous oral history traditions carried by trained griots. Built Machu Picchu on top of a mountain with no wheels and no draft animals, but didn't leave a grocery list? Historians have questions.

Also featured: my dogs Betty and Amby as a case study in domestication, an extremely strained Hunger Games metaphor, and my husband Zach's dishwasher-loading crimes.

This is the first of many — if you want the long-form, no-TikTok-time-limit version of how the world actually got here, this is the series for you.

???? antisocialstudies.org ???? Instagram: @antisocstudies · TikTok: @antisocialstudies · YouTube: Anti-Social Studies ???? Want the deeper, classroom-ready version of world history? Check out my curriculum and courses at antisocialstudies.org

#worldhistory #history #civilization #ancienthistory #education

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When did we become "civilized?" (Emily Teaches World History #1) Sep 23, 2026

Show notes

Welcome to Emily Teaches World History — a new series where we go all the way back to the actual beginning, starting with the discovery that changed everything: farming.

Also featured: my dogs Betty and Amby as a case study in domestication, an extremely strained Hunger Games metaphor, and my husband Zach's dishwasher-loading crimes.

This is the first of many — if you want the long-form, no-TikTok-time-limit version of how the world actually got here, this is the series for you.

#worldhistory #history #civilization #ancienthistory #education

The Party Switch or, "Follow the money, not the names" Sep 15, 2026

Show notes

"The parties switched" is the most confidently repeated, least accurately explained sentence in American political history. Sometimes a party shifted its platform over time to hold on to core voting groups. Sometimes a voting bloc switched to another party. But there was never a simple "Switch."

This clip is a segment from one of my live monthly History Lecture Party sessions — the Patreon series where subscribers get a full deep-dive lecture plus live Q&A every month. This session, we traced three voting blocs through American history to see what they actually wanted from government — and it turns out the answer barely changed at all:

Wealthy merchants and business owners have wanted a government that protects their money since before the Civil War. Sometimes that meant a strong federal government (tariffs, national infrastructure, a unified economy to grow into). Sometimes it meant "get out of my way" small government. Same voting bloc, opposite asks — because the goal was never "big government" or "small government," it was whatever kept the money moving in their direction. The party willing to deliver that just happened to change.

Black and other marginalized voters have wanted the same thing since Reconstruction: a federal government strong enough to overrule states and actually enforce the Constitution. That bloc backed the party delivering it — Republicans in the 1860s, Democrats from the New Deal through the Civil Rights Act — not because they kept switching teams, but because the team delivering federal protection changed.

White Southerners backed the Democratic Party from Andrew Jackson through Jim Crow, as long as "Democrat" meant "economic support for the common (white) man." The second the national Democratic Party got serious about civil rights, that bloc left for a Republican Party actively recruiting them with the Southern Strategy.

None of these groups changed what they wanted. The parties changed who they were willing to serve to get elected.

Want to attend the next lecture live? It's a Patreon perk!

????️ Join History Lecture Party (Patreon): patreon.com/antisocialstudies ???? antisocialstudies.org

???? Instagram: @antisocstudies

· TikTok: @antisocialstudies

???? Want the deeper dive? My U.S. History courses and curriculum cover every era in this video in a lot more depth: antisocialstudies.org

#ushistory #politicalparties #history #patreon #civilrights

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How 'The Party Switch' really worked (follow the money, not the names) Sep 15, 2026

Show notes

None of these groups changed what they wanted. The parties changed who they were willing to serve to get elected.

Want to attend the next lecture live? It's a Patreon perk!

????️ Join History Lecture Party (Patreon): patreon.com/antisocialstudies ???? antisocialstudies.org

???? Instagram: @antisocstudies

· TikTok: @antisocialstudies

???? Want the deeper dive? My U.S. History courses and curriculum cover every era in this video in a lot more depth: antisocialstudies.org

#ushistory #politicalparties #history #patreon #civilrights

Contextualizing 9/11 or, "WHY did Al-Qaeda attack the United States?" Sep 11, 2026

Show notes

There are adults walking around right now, almost old enough to rent a car, who weren't alive on September 11, 2001. And a lot of the rest of us watched it happen live and never actually went back to learn it as history. We lived through it. We never studied it.

This episode covers both halves of that problem. First, the basics of what happened that morning — the timeline, the casualties, why historians are seriously discussing whether 2001 marks the start of an entirely new era of human history. Then the much longer, much messier story underneath it: who al-Qaeda actually was, why Osama bin Laden considered the U.S. his enemy, and the 50+ years of American coups, arms deals, wars, and occupations across southwest Asia that built the conditions al-Qaeda grew out of — from the 1945 Quincy Agreement through Cold War-era Iran and Syria, the Eisenhower Doctrine, the Afghan-Soviet War, the Gulf War, and al-Qaeda's own escalating attacks throughout the 1990s that most people have never heard of.

I want to be completely clear about something up front: none of this is a justification. Nothing excuses the deliberate murder of 2,977 people. But there's a real difference between "this came out of nowhere" and the truth — al-Qaeda had been trying, and failing, and trying again to hit American targets for almost a decade before September 11th, and had said exactly why. The scale of that day was shocking. But the fact that al-Qaeda attacked the U.S. was not (at least for anyone paying attention to history.)

I also correct a myth in this one that I used to believe myself: that the CIA directly funded and armed Osama bin Laden. The record doesn't actually support that. What the U.S. did fund was the broader infrastructure — money, weapons, training — that the entire anti-Soviet jihad ran on, and bin Laden built his own organization inside that ecosystem. That distinction matters, and it's more interesting than the flattened version anyway.

This is a long one, and an important one. Please watch the whole thing before drawing conclusions from a single clip out of context.

???? antisocialstudies.org

???? Instagram: @antisocstudies · TikTok: @antisocialstudies · YouTube: Anti-Social Studies

???? Want the deeper dive on U.S. involvement in the modern Middle East and the rest of the 20th century? My Course 3 (1945–present) covers this era in a lot more depth: https://emily-glankler-s-school.teachable.com/p/u-s-history-course-2-modern-united-states-1945-present

#september11 #911 #ushistory #alqaeda #history

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WHY did Al-Qaeda attack the United States on September 11? Sep 11, 2026

Show notes

This is a long one, and an important one. Please watch the whole thing before drawing conclusions from a single clip out of context.

???? antisocialstudies.org

???? Instagram: @antisocstudies · TikTok: @antisocialstudies · YouTube: Anti-Social Studies

#september11 #911 #ushistory #alqaeda #history

The Birth of Political Parties or, "Washington warned us." Sep 08, 2026

Show notes

George Washington's Farewell Address is basically a 1796 subtweet aimed at the entire rest of American history. He warned the country against "the baneful effects of the spirit of party" — and by the time he finished writing it, political parties had already formed. Nobody listened. Nobody has ever really listened.

This clip is a segment from one of my live monthly History Lecture Party sessions — the Patreon series where I do a full deep-dive lecture (plus live Q&A) for subscribers every month. August's topic was the history of the political party "switch."

Here's the arc: the ratification fight over the Constitution split the country into Federalists (strong central government, hi Hamilton) and Anti-Federalists (deeply suspicious of that same strong central government). That fight didn't go away after ratification — it just put on a suit and became the first real party system, with Hamilton's Federalists squaring off against Jefferson and Madison's Democratic-Republicans. Washington watched this happen from inside his own cabinet, hated it, warned everyone about it on his way out the door in 1796 — and then it got worse anyway. The Federalists eventually collapsed (turns out flirting with disloyalty during the War of 1812 will do that to a party), and the Democratic-Republicans ended up so dominant that historians call the period that followed the "Era of Good Feelings" — a name that is doing a lot of heavy lifting, because "good feelings" is not exactly what one-party dominance actually produced.

Want the full lecture, live Q&A, and invites to future History Lecture Parties? That's a Patreon-exclusive perk — link below.

www.patreon.com/antisocialstudies

???? antisocialstudies.org

???? Instagram: @antisocstudies

TikTok: @antisocialstudies

???? Want the deeper dive on this era? My Course 1 (1491–1877) covers the founding and early republic in full: course website.

#ushistory #foundingfathers #politicalparties #history #patreon

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