Hello and welcome to this day in esoteric political history from Radiotopia.

My name is Jody Avergan.

This day, it's July 4th. There are lots of ways that we could mark this day, but we are going to go to 1845, the 4th-ish of July, when a Texas convention in Austin ratified the decision for Texas to join the United States.

After about a decade or so of being its own republic, it was now taking very concrete steps

towards joining the USA, which it would do later that fall.

This was a very long and winding path to this moment.

Lots of questions about expansion and slavery in the Louisiana Purchase and of course conflicts

and confusion with Mexico Mexico the Great Britain even gets up in there for a little bit too.

So let's talk about all of this and this larger question which is sort of, of does Texas really want to be part of the United States?

Because that is actually feeling like a pretty salient question right now, given that the Texas GOP put it in their platform just recently that Texas has the right to

succeed and they called for a referendum next year to determine whether or not the

state of Texas should reassert its status as an independent nation.

Gosh, this stuff feels really real right now.

It's incredible, you know, yeah.

And we're living in one of those moments where sure,

everything feels on the table including this.

So maybe there are some interesting

clues in history around the 4th of July 1845 here to discuss as always are

Nicole Hammer of Columbia and Kelly Carter Jackson of Wellesley hello there how d'E jody of up in Texas and one of them did not. I'll let you guess. Oh my gosh howdy is all I hear

especially because like my whole family is like Texas A&M alum and so howdy is

just how you greet people but yeah I'm really excited to talk about this because I feel like for all of our Texas and listeners out there like like Texas history is just so entrenched in the curriculum like you have to know this and there's so much pride about Texas being like its own country, you know like that that feeling is very much palpable even to this very day.

Yeah, and I mean, growing up and getting that curriculum, I mean, did you also come to understand just the wild twists and turns

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