Hello and welcome to a history of the United States. Episode 156, The Federalists.

Now, before we begin today, I'd like to do a bit of housekeeping. I've been recently interviewed

about my origins in podcasting and my thoughts on the situation in Ukraine by my good friend

Broilfield from Intelligence speech. That's available on

the clubhouse app. If you search for intelligent speech in the app, it should come up.

I was also on last week's episode of History of Westrose podcast. They're currently in the middle

of doing a valar re-readus of the World of Fire and Ice,

and brought me on to talk about the expansion of the Valerian Freehold and the Wars Against Old Gis.

George R.R. Martin uses a lot of historical inspiration for coming up with his world of Westrose,

so we talk about the ancient world of Greece, Rome and Carthage, and how

that serves as an inspiration for the series. It was a ridiculously flat episode record, and they

are great people over at History of Westeros. And those who say that my episodes of this series

are too short, the episode we recorded is about two and a half hours long,

so if you like listening to me geek out on history and Game of Thrones, you can go listen to that.

But anyway, enough plugs. On with the show. Quote, what a triumph for the advocates of despotism

defined that we are incapable of governing ourselves,

and that systems founded on the basis of equal liberty are merely ideal and fallacious.

Would to God that wise measures may be taken in time to avert the consequences we have but too much reason to apprehend."

End quote. That is from George Washington's reaction to Shea's Rebellion, which was the subject we covered last time.

Over the last few episodes, we've been focused primarily on economics. We looked at the economic

war with Britain, the shortage of species, the post-war economic depression, and the creditor-debtor

conflicts that were playing out across the United States. It was a powder keg about to explode,

...