Anti-Social Studies

The midterms are on November 3rd, so this is a history of the many ways American voting has been made harder, from poll taxes, grandfather clauses, and impossible literacy tests to violence at the polls, the long wait for Native American citizenship, felony disenfranchisement, voter roll purges, voter ID laws, gerrymandering, and, yes, why Election Day is on a Tuesday. The through-line: whenever the U.S. has legally expanded who gets to vote, some people in power have worked to make actually vo

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

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 critic

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 communicat

"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 t

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 histor