Why did Russia sell Alaska, and why did the US buy it?

Russia colonized Alaska in the first place mainly because it was the only place they could reach that didn't have six other nations elbowing each other in the face to claim land there. We all laughed at Tina Fey, but Russia is pretty much right next to Alaska, a lot closer than any of the European colonial nations to the Americas, which just about makes up for how long and cold the winter is. There used to be a whole lot of seals and bears in Alaska, neatly making up for thousands of years of killing everything that could make a pair of mittens in Siberia. So people started making their way east, and making a fair amount of dough skinning the wildlife.

The Russian Empire got antsy about Alaska not too long after the Crimean War against Great Britain, from 1853 to 1856; British Columbia was right next door, and when they found gold people started coming there enough that the crown established a full-fledged colony. Tsar Alexander II figured that next time Russia went to war with England, they'd probably lose Alaska anyway, so selling it would at least give them some cash for their trouble.

So they started trying to get some interest from England and the US in 1859, but we were busy with the Civil War (it hadn't started yet, but flames were in the air and it would have taken a miracle to stop) and England didn't much care, so nothing happened for a few years. In that time, Russia also borrowed a crapload of money, and now really needed to sell Alaska.

William Seward, Lincoln's Secretary of State, got a lot more receptive after the war ended, and agreed on a price of $7.2 million, a bit more than 2 cents per acre for a place twice as big as Texas. There was a lot of grumbling in the press over this, since we were hardly pressed for space or flush with cash as it was, but on the upside, Russia liked us a lot more, and hemming in British Columbia made annexing it eventually more of a possibility. (Spoiler warning: we didn't.)

Still, those two justifications probably wouldn't have been enough without the fur trade: Russia had set up 23 trading posts, and around 10,000 people lived in Alaska where the harvesting company was working. We started charging an annual $50,000 fee for being allowed to club seals, and $2.625 per skin; with a hundred thousand skins per year, it would be around twenty-five years to recoup the costs of the purchase, assuming more people didn't move there to hunt seals, and nobody found gold.

Of course, we did find gold in Alaska, first in Klondike and then in Nome. Around a hundred thousand prospectors trekked up there from 1896 to 1899, but less than half of them made it, since traveling up through Canada was an incredible pain in the neck at the time. Maybe four thousand people actually made any appreciable money on the gold rush, and everyone else ended up with plenty of pain, but no gain. Of course, the real victims here were the natives, since they weren't allowed to buy land (and thus couldn't mine without risking getting pushed off), and the miners wrecked the environment something awful.

Why are presidents limited to two terms?

Because George Washington ran twice and then retired. This was hailed as an immensely humble and self-sacrificial act, since he could have gotten reelected indefinitely due to getting most of the credit for winning the war, but he didn't want to run for the second term in the first place. He only did it at all because the vast majority of his advisers told him that he was still needed in office, for national unity. Washington was certainly a more unifying figure than Jefferson or Adams, who ran against each other in 1796, so that's pretty plausible.

Washington served two terms, and in those days people were awfully eager to follow his example, so from then on the tradition was not to run for a third term. Jefferson left the White House after two, as did Madison, Monroe, and Jackson. After Jackson left, several men in a row went for only one term, though that tended to be more a matter of an inability to be renominated and increasing strain of keeping the nation together.

Ulysses S. Grant was the first to buck the trend; he initially succeeded Andrew Johnson from 1869 to 1877, and then duly left office and spent three years traveling the world. On his return, many colleagues urged him to run again, and he got pretty close to the nomination at the convention, but never managed more than 312 votes, 67 short of what he needed. James Garfield was chosen instead, and shot a year later; the bullet didn't kill him, but massive infections from several doctors poking around with filthy hands finished the job. (Not joking about any part of that.)

Two terms were again the norm, until Roosevelt, having been in the White House from 1901 to 1909, got pissed at his protege Taft, and ran against him. Taft, as the incumbent, managed to have sufficient party loyalty at the convention to vote to accept pro-Taft delegations from the wavering Roosevelt states, and narrowly kept the Republican nomination, though when Roosevelt formed the Bull Moose party and stayed in the game, it was pretty clear that neither of them could win.

It was the other Roosevelt who finally outlined the need for change; granted, his situation was unusual, following the popularity of resolving the Great Depression with an antipathy for changing presidents in the middle of a huge war, but he established that third and even fourth terms were possible. Nobody wanted that to happen again, since that ran perilously close to an indefinite presidency. So they started drafting the 22nd amendment, barring anyone who had served more than a term and a half from running again; it didn't apply to Truman, who was halfway through his only rightful term when it was ratified in February 1951, but he lost the New Hampshire primary anyway, and pulled out of the race.

Section 1. No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once. But this article shall not apply to any person holding the office of President when this article was proposed by the Congress, and shall not prevent any person who may be holding the office of President, or acting as President, during the term within which this article becomes operative from holding the office of President or acting as President during the remainder of such term.
Section 2. This article shall be inoperative unless it shall have been ratified as an amendment to the Constitution by the legislatures of three-fourths of the several states within seven years from the date of its submission to the states by the Congress.

Why wasn't the Bill of Rights part of the Constitution?

Because it was the last motion proposed at the Constitutional Convention of 1787, and the delegates were mostly satisfied with what they'd drafted; most of them also thought it was unnecessary, since the states protected individual rights, and there was no reason to specify a list of freedoms the federal government could not violate when it was not authorized to take any away.

Now, the Convention was called in the first place because the Articles of Confederation, which had been the basis of the federal government's operation since 1781, was proving quite inadequate for governance. States were not required to provide tax revenue, which in turn had no effective mechanism for management or expenditure. Four years after the end of the Revolutionary War, they were still paying it off. Regular bills could only be passed with nine out of thirteen states consenting, and amendments had to be unanimous.

So in 1786, Virginia called for a convention addressing interstate conflicts, which itself passed a resolution calling for a convention to improve the Articles of Confederation. Once that convention began, however, it was clear that most of the delegates regarded the Articles of Confederation as fatally flawed, and their goal was to create a new document that would fit their needs better.

The convention devoted itself to working out several key points of the structure of the federal government, and its relationship with the states; the idea that the legislature would be separate from the executive and judiciary was already accepted, as was having two houses in that legislature -- one representing the common people, and the other being a more elite, thoughtful chamber. As they settled the details, the delegates got more irritated and weary (you try sitting in a closed room with no AC in Philadelphia in August), and wanted to send the final draft out. That last motion mentioned above was about civil trials; George Mason proposed a bill of rights dealing with the rights of the people, but the only other vote for that was Elbridge Gerry's. The draft was approved and sent to the states; then the fight for ratification began, but this is not the time to cover that in detail.

The Constitution was ratified by the requisite nine states in September 1788, many with the understanding that a series of amendments protecting the rights of the people would be high on Congress' priority list, and more followed thereafter. Many opponents of the bill of rights began to support it, recognizing that many people wanted that explicit protection, and desperately wishing to avoid another constitutional convention setting them at square one. James Madison was one such opponent, and he submitted twenty proposed amendments to Congress; that was condensed and cut into twelve amendments by the House and Senate committees.

The first two were never approved; the other ten are what we have today. Article the First, as it is known by historians, dealt with Congressional apportionment; Article the Second prohibited Congressional pay raises from taking effect until after the next election, and was initially unable to garner even majority support, with six states ratifying it; Ohio joined that list in 1873, and Wyoming in 1978. Over the next 14 years, a movement spearheaded by Gregory Watson managed to push it through thirty more state legislatures, and in May 1992 it became the Twenty-Seventh Amendment. Unfortunately for its proponents, Congress is just as able to increase its cost of living adjustments, and while Watson and Congressman Bob Schaffer of Colorado challenged those automatic increases, the Supreme Court ruled that Schaffer had no standing, as he could not demonstrate any harm from a higher COLA.

How does DC's government work?

The idea was that we needed a single place to base the national government, but putting it in a state would create all sorts of funky problems; for one thing, relying on the state's defense forces would either be inadequate or a burden on the state. The Constitution provided Congress with the power to create the capital, and govern as it saw fit:

To exercise exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever, over such District (not exceeding ten Miles square) as may, by Cession of particular States, and the acceptance of Congress, become the Seat of the Government of the United States.

The Residence Act of 1790 did just that, cutting chunks out of Virginia and Maryland that formed a square ten miles on each side. This area then contained the cities of Georgetown and Alexandria, and construction began on the federal city of Washington east of Georgetown in 1793, after a couple of years designing it and picking the exact place.

Things muddled along from there, with DC returning the part that originally came from Virginia in 1846, and Washington and Georgetown governing the area jointly with mixed success. After the Civil War, people started coming to DC a lot more, and in 1870 the district had a population of 132,000, though the infrastructure was laughably unable to deal with that many. Some members of Congress, with the sense we've come to expect, proposed that the capital be moved due to the lack of proper roads and sanitation, rather than, you know, fix them.

That didn't happen, but in 1871, Congress combined Georgetown, Washington, and the rest of the district (where nobody much lived) into a single city for the whole district. The Organic Act (bills establishing an agency's authority over federal lands are always called organic acts) also established a new legislature, with an eleven-member upper house appointed by the President and a lower chamber consisting of 22 elected delegates. President Grant appointed a member of that upper house as governor in 1873, but after Alexander Shepherd spent three times as much money as was actually in the budget trying to make the place less of a craphole, Congress rescinded all home rule privileges. For the next century, DC would have a board of commissioners running the place, with two members appointed by the President with Senate confirmation, and one from the Army Corps of Engineers.

Well, okay, not quite a century. In 1967, Johnson revised this to eleven people (nine in the council, one mayor, and his assistant), but they were still all appointed by the President. Six years later, DC finally got the right to elect its own leaders.

The 1973 Home Rule Act, which is still in effect, established a mayor and a thirteen-member council, eight of whom were elected by the wards and five at-large. Unfortunately, the whole thing was still hamstrung; Congress could veto any act of the council, and in fact DC's budget is included in the national bill. In addition, DC's council can't tax anyone who works in DC but doesn't live there, and cannot tax federal buildings. Of course, nobody can do that, and the Payment in Lieu of Taxes program exists to supply funds to make up for the lack of property taxes, but according to the General Accounting Office (now the Government Accountability Office), DC doesn't get as much as it needs, since the formula doesn't take into account the constraints DC operates under which no state has.

Basically, DC has the government that Congress allows, and there is no way for residents to petition for change, since the elected delegate, Eleanor Holmes Norton, cannot take part in any vote where her input would change the outcome, thus eliminating any actual influence she could have in the body.

Why didn't Canada join the Revolution?

Because a lot of things that pissed off the proto-rebels were for the benefit of the colonies Great Britain had recently taken from France, and there wasn't any sense of community between the two groups.

Quebec was largely French, and what wasn't French had come from GB recently, which was very much not the case with Massachusetts et al. Thus, there was little cultural connection, and much less discontent with the tyrannical colonial overlords, since GB was also a lot nicer to Quebec in terms of actual representative government.

The Quebec Act of 1774 pretty much solidified the divide; the British and French legal systems were given equal weight in Quebec, tithes to the Catholic Church became mandatory, and the province expanded east to Labrador and west to the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. The last part was the worst, since it meant the thirteen colonies couldn't settle there themselves. Quebeckers very much liked this, but Ben Franklin organized the first Continental Congress largely in response to the Intolerable Acts, of which this was the fifth and last.

Relations between Quebec and the United Colonies went downhill from there, and in 1775 American armies invaded Quebec, taking Montreal but being halted at Quebec City; once the British navy came in the spring, they fell back. In Nova Scotia, privateers raided small outposts, and any chance of bringing the Canadian colonies into the American fold disintegrated with the New England sympathies burned and robbed.

Once the war began, Canadian settlers were also the sole traders with England in the New World, which boosted their economy nicely, and British forces ensured the safety of fur transportation. Plenty of pro-British colonists in the rebellious provinces moved to Canada, moving the popular sentiments of both regions further apart.

So, Canadians didn't join the Revolutionary War because they didn't have good reason to do so, and plenty of reason to stay with the Crown. This isn't to say that the people of the former French colonies particularly liked Great Britain, but the Americans were a lot less appealing, especially once the raiding and invading started. The Continental Congress mostly liked Canada okay, despite the religious and cultural divide, inviting the province to join in the Articles of Confederation (which accepted Canada as a member if it ratified the Articles), which never happened; there were no such special accommodations in the Constitution.

Was John Quincy Adams one of the Founding Fathers?

"Is X part of group Y?" tends to be a difficult question to answer when there are multiple definitions for group Y; West Virginia is frequently classified as Southern despite splitting off from Virginia to join the Union. There is no strict definition of the Founding Fathers; there were a lot of men centrally involved in the transition from thirteen interconnected colonies under the British Crown to thirteen states banded together under a single government. However, the general idea is men who signed the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and/or the Constitution.

It's important to remember also that the men who participated in this process were not friends. Oh, some of them were, but they were different people, with different occupations (although most of them had legal knowledge, and by the end practically all of them had served in government one way or another), and different interests. They quarreled over the power of the federal government, both in terms of its general ability to require things of the states and the people, and actual specific things that it would be allowed to do. They fought over commerce in the colonies, and to what degree which American industries needed to be protected from established manufacturing of goods overseas -- British lumber and French wine were a threat to American lumber and wine. And, of course, they fought over slavery, though many northern men still owned slaves, working in their houses. So when people invoke "what the Founding Fathers meant/wanted", there isn't really any such thing; they were not a monolithic group that agreed on everything, or even many things.

Anyway, we've got something of a definition of the Founding Fathers; did John Quincy Adams sign any of those documents? Of course not. Quincy was only nine years old when the Declaration was written, and twenty-one when the Constitution was ratified. He was with his father John Adams learning how American government was going to work for much of this period, but that doesn't make him influential in the process.

What's the Cabinet about?

Well, the word itself comes from sixteenth-century England; normally, the monarch would be advised by the Privy Council, but smaller conversations would take place in a cabinet, which back then had more of a connotation of a very small room, which might also have been called a closet, a study, or an office.

In the United States, the purpose of the Cabinet is twofold; each member directs part of the executive branch (largely carrying out the desires of the president), and advises the president on matters pertaining to that area. The secretary of every executive department (State, Treasury, Commerce, etc.) is part of the Cabinet, along with a handful of others: UN Ambassador, Trade Representative, Chief of Staff, Small Business Administration ... Administrator, Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, Director of the Office of Management and Budget, and the Vice President.

All of those posts have to be confirmed by the Senate with a majority of the vote, with the exception of the Vice President, who is normally elected, and the Chief of Staff, part of the Executive Office of the President. They also all serve at the pleasure of the President, again except for the Vice President, meaning that he can request their resignation at any time, though most secretaries spend two to five years in the job anyway. This is as opposed to regular civil servants, below the level of Deputy Secretary of [department] for [area], who don't require Senate confirmation, typically work through multiple administrations, and cannot be fired without justification.

The first cabinet was quite small: State Secretary Thomas Jefferson, Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, War Secretary Henry Knox, and Attorney General Edmund Randolph. Initially, the Attorney General had no department, and wasn't even a full-time job, serving primarily as legal advice and taking care of legal matters, which is probably why the job title wasn't Secretary of Justice. That's far from true nowadays, but it would seem no one has been sufficiently bothered to want to change it. The War Department also got renamed to the Department of the Army in 1947, with the Navy and Air Force split off into their own departments, all answering to the Secretary of Defense, which became the executive department in 1949.