Ridiculous history is a production of I Heart Radio. The Welcome back to the show Ridiculous Historians. Thank you as always so much for tuning in. That's our super producer, Mr. Max Williams,

Ben Bullen, Noel Brown, part two, very special series for us.

That's right.

We are joined once again already in progress

with A.J. Bahamas Jacobs, the author of the Year

of Living Constitutionally. I think we should just jump right in.

So this vagary we're talking about, uh, cruel and unusual punishment is an excellent

example. It leads us to the current ongoing debate

about things like the death penalty,

things like mandatory sentencing.

But it also, I think you're talking about these vague qualifications of things.

Like you said, these are big pages, but they are four big pages. They are not 8,000 pages listed in depth. The stuff these guys were

trying to go for.

They purposely made the amendment process really difficult.

And you also found another unsung hero for amendments and I think you know I don't know

about everybody listening here but usually if you're most Americans when you think of amendments you just think of the

Bill of Rights. You're like yeah the they made the first document and then they

fixed it.

Exactly.

Yeah, the first 10 are definitely the stars.

Although in my book I get into the fascinating history of those

that we might not even have time to talk about but they were very differently

...