Can Form 8854 Greenback 2023-2024

Hi, I'm John Green and this is Crash Course US history. Today, we're going to continue our look at the Gilded Age by focusing on political science. Mr. Green, Mr. Green, so it's another history class where we don't actually talk about history? Oh, me from the past, your insistence on trying to place academic exploration into little es creates a little echo chamber that you yourself will live in for the rest of your life if you don't put your interdisciplinary party hat on. So, the Gilded Age takes its name from a book by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner that was called "The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today". It was published in 1873 and it was not that successful. But while the Gilded Age conjures up visions of fancy parties and ostentatious displays of wealth, the book itself was about politics and it gives a very negative appraisal of the state of American democracy at the time, which shouldn't come as a huge surprise coming from Twain, whose comments about Congress included, "Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress...but I repeat myself." And also, "It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly Native American criminal class, except Congress." So, when faced with the significant changes taking place in the American economy after the Civil War, America's political system, both nationally and locally, dealt with these problems in the best way possible... by becoming incredibly corrupt. Oh, Stan says they have to take off my party hat. So, former House Speaker Tip O'Neill once famously said that all politics is local. And although that's not actually true, I am going to start with local politics today, specifically with one of America's greatest inventions, the urban political machine. So, a...