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Andrew Jackson was born in 1767 in the Waxhaws on the border of North and South Carolina, weeks after his father died. During the Revolution his brother Hugh died after a battle, and at 14 Jackson was captured with his brother Robert. When he refused to shine a British officer's boots, the officer slashed him across the head and hand. Robert died of smallpox after their release, and their mother Elizabeth died of cholera while nursing American prisoners in Charleston. Jackson read law, was admitted to the bar in 1787, moved to Nashville and built the Hermitage, where he held roughly 300 enslaved people over his lifetime.

His fame came from war: the Creek War campaign ending at Horseshoe Bend, the Treaty of Fort Jackson that took 23 million acres from the whole Creek Nation, and victory at New Orleans in 1815. After losing the 1824 election in the House, which he called the corrupt bargain, he won in 1828, days before his wife Rachel died. As president he signed the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which led to the Trail of Tears, threatened force during the Nullification Crisis, and dismantled the Second Bank of the United States. The episode closes on how his standing in historical rankings has fallen in the 21st century.

• In the 1806 duel with Charles Dickinson, Jackson let Dickinson fire first, took a bullet near his heart, then killed him and carried the bullet for life.
• A runaway advertisement he placed offered an extra ten dollars for every hundred lashes, up to 300.
• He hosted Aaron Burr at the Hermitage and readied boats and militia before backing away when Jefferson ordered Burr's arrest.
• After the Creek War he adopted an orphaned Native boy named Lyncoya and raised him at the Hermitage.
• He fired two Treasury secretaries before moving federal deposits into state pet banks, and became the only president to pay off the national debt.

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William Rufus King was born in North Carolina in 1786, studied at the University of North Carolina and won a seat in the U.S. House in 1810 at age 24, turning 25 before the 12th Congress convened in November 1811. After diplomatic posts in Naples and Russia, he moved to the Alabama Territory in 1818 and built the Chestnut Hill plantation on the Alabama River. His family became one of the largest slaveholding families in the state, holding as many as 500 enslaved people, and he was elected one of Alabama's first U.S. senators in 1819. Over roughly three decades in the Senate he allied with Andrew Jackson and rose to president pro tempore.

From 1834 to 1844 King shared a Washington boarding house with James Buchanan, a relationship rivals mocked and historians still debate, with some of their letters later destroyed by family members. A defender of slavery who opposed the secessionist fire eaters, he was chosen in 1852 as running mate to Franklin Pierce. Suffering from tuberculosis, he went to Cuba to recover, and under a special act of Congress a U.S. consul swore him in near Matanzas on March 24, 1853. He returned to Chestnut Hill and died on April 18, 1853, at 67, without performing any official duty.

• He supported Senate gag rules that automatically tabled petitions relating to slavery.
• Andrew Jackson mocked King and Buchanan as Miss Nancy and Aunt Fancy.
• While King served as a diplomat in France, Buchanan wrote that he had gone wooing several gentlemen for a new housemate without success.
• King cofounded Selma, Alabama and named it after the poem The Songs of Selma.
• King County, named for him by the Oregon Territorial Legislature in 1852, was rededicated in 2005 to honor Martin Luther King Jr.

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Ralph Flanders was born in 1880 and grew up on subsistence farms in Vermont and Rhode Island. With college out of reach, he finished high school in 1896 and entered a two year apprenticeship at the Brown & Sharpe Manufacturing Company, then taught himself Greek, German, French and Latin. After five years editing the trade magazine Machinery in New York and a nervous breakdown in 1909, he moved to Springfield, Vermont, joined James Hartness at Jones & Lamson, married Hartness's daughter Helen in 1911, and became company president in 1933. He and his brother Ernest won the Franklin Institute medal in 1942 for an automatic screw thread grinding machine tied to jet engine production.

The Great Depression pulled him into public policy: he led the New England Council, served as president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston from 1944 to 1946, and helped found American Research and Development, widely considered the first venture capital firm. After losing the 1940 Senate primary to George Aiken, he was appointed to the Senate in 1946. A staunch anti communist, he spoke against Senator Joseph McCarthy in March 1954, and on June 11, 1954 introduced the resolution that led to McCarthy's censure by a vote of 65 to 22 that December. He did not seek reelection and died in 1970.

• He held side conversations in Latin with Senator John Sparkman during committee meetings so the press could not follow them.
• His 1940 campaign brochure showed him in a three piece suit holding a muddy piglet, and he lost the primary by a wide margin.
• He welcomed the United Electrical Workers into Jones & Lamson, making it the first unionized company in Springfield.
• In a June 1954 speech he compared McCarthy's conduct to the comic strip character Dennis the Menace.
• Telegrams to his office praised his stand against McCarthy by a ratio of six to one, while the Eisenhower administration urged him to drop it.

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This episode examines a Wikipedia disambiguation page for the name Paula Hawkins, a short routing document that exists because two notable women share the same name. The first entry is Paula Hawkins the politician, who lived from 1927 to 2009 and served as a U.S. Senator from Florida. The page defines her with three tags: her profession, her lifespan and her Senate seat, a closed historical record anchored to American public policy and a single state.

The second entry is Paula Hawkins the British novelist, born in 1972, whose record has no end date and is defined by creative work rather than public office. The hosts look at how the page treats a U.S. senator and a novelist with complete neutrality, why the two overlapped for decades while generating records under the same name, and what the page's instruction to fix incorrect internal links says about how the web depends on human upkeep to keep identities apart.

• The page describes itself as a list of articles about people with the same name, meant to resolve mistaken identity.
• Paula Hawkins the politician is listed as a U.S. Senator from Florida who lived from 1927 to 2009.
• Paula Hawkins the author is listed as a British novelist born in 1972.
• The page asks readers who arrived through a bad internal link to change it to point to the intended article.
• The two women's lives overlapped for decades, one producing political records in the United States and the other literary records in Britain.

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William F. Knowland was born in 1908 in Alameda, California, heir to a lumber fortune and son of Joseph R. Knowland, a congressman and publisher of the Oakland Tribune; his mother died less than a month after his birth. At 12 he gave campaign speeches for Harding and Coolidge, married at 19, finished UC Berkeley in three and a half years, and won a state Assembly seat at 25. Drafted in 1942, he rose from private to major. When Hiram Johnson died in 1945, Governor Earl Warren offered the Senate seat to Joseph Knowland, who asked that his son get it instead; William learned of his appointment from Stars and Stripes after military censors blocked his wife's call.

Called the Senator from Formosa for his support of Chiang Kai-shek, he won both party primaries in 1952 through cross filing and took 88 percent of the vote. In 1953 he succeeded Robert Taft as majority leader at 45, worked with Lyndon Johnson to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and wept at how diluted it became, and denounced Joseph McCarthy over attacks on John Foster Dulles. In 1958 he pushed Governor Goodwin Knight into the Senate race so he could run for governor, tied his campaign to the Proposition 18 right to work measure, and lost to Pat Brown by more than a million votes. He later took over the Oakland Tribune after his father's death.

• V.K. Krishna Menon suggested he needed psychiatric treatment during an argument over admitting China to the UN.
• Eisenhower's diaries described him as meaning to be loyal but personally cumbersome.
• His father sold family assets, including a radio station, to cover the 1958 campaign debts.
• After the 1973 killing of Oakland superintendent Marcus Foster he offered a $100,000 reward, and the Patty Hearst kidnapping left him fearful for his safety.
• Nearly $1 million in debt, much of it to organized crime, he died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound by the Russian River on February 23, 1974.

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Karl Mundt was born in 1900 in Humboldt, South Dakota, earned an economics degree from Carleton College in 1923, and taught speech, psychology, sociology and government at Bryant High School while coaching debate, soon becoming superintendent. He married Mary in 1924, both earned master's degrees at Columbia, and by 1928 they taught at what is now Dakota State University. He was national president of the National Forensic League from 1932 to 1971. After losing a 1936 House race, he won in 1938, backed U.S. membership in UNESCO, and coauthored the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948, which made the Voice of America permanent while barring its material from domestic distribution.

From 1943 to 1948 he served on the House Un-American Activities Committee during the Alger Hiss and Hollywood investigations. Appointed to the Senate in late 1948 after Vera C. Bushfield resigned, he narrowly beat George McGovern in 1960, sat on Appropriations and Foreign Relations, and chaired the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings. He voted for the civil rights acts of 1957, 1960, 1964 and 1968, the Voting Rights Act, the 24th Amendment and Thurgood Marshall's confirmation. After a severe stroke on November 23, 1969, he never returned to the floor, yet his wife Mary ran his office and refused calls for him to resign for more than three years.

• On HUAC he pushed for an investigation of the Ku Klux Klan, an effort that failed.
• He used his Appropriations seat to bring the EROS satellite data center to Sioux Falls.
• In 1972 the Senate Republican Conference stripped him of his committee assignments.
• He stayed in office until his term expired in early 1973, was succeeded by James Abourezk, and died in 1974.
• Richard Nixon dedicated the Karl E. Mundt Library at Dakota State in 1969, and John Goodman plays a character named for him in Barton Fink.

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Henry Clay of Kentucky, John C. Calhoun of South Carolina and Daniel Webster of New England dominated American politics from roughly 1828 to 1852, the era of the second party system. Clay, who had served as defense counsel for Aaron Burr in his treason trial, was elected Speaker of the House as a freshman in the 12th Congress, and he and fellow freshman Calhoun led the War Hawks who pushed for the War of 1812. Webster, elected from New Hampshire in 1813, opposed the war because it crippled New England shipping. After the war Clay and Calhoun backed the Second Bank of the United States and the Tariff of 1816 under Clay's American System, which Webster fought.

Webster then left Congress to argue Dartmouth College v. Woodward, Gibbons v. Ogden and McCulloch v. Maryland before John Marshall's Supreme Court, winning for the very bank he had opposed. Calhoun served eight years as Secretary of War and became vice president, while Clay engineered the Missouri Compromise of 1820. In the 1832 Nullification Crisis Calhoun resigned the vice presidency to enter the Senate, and the three served there together for most of the rest of their lives. Their last clash came over the Compromise of 1850, which admitted California as a free state alongside a strict Fugitive Slave Act.

• The Missouri Compromise paired slave state Missouri with free Maine and drew a line at 36 degrees 30 minutes north.
• Webster argued in McCulloch that the power to tax involves the power to destroy.
• Clay and Webster each ran for president several times and never won.
• Too ill with tuberculosis to stand, Calhoun sat in the chamber while James Mason read his final speech against the 1850 compromise.
• Calhoun died on March 31, 1850, and Clay and Webster were both dead within three years.

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In February 1950 in Wheeling, West Virginia, Senator Joseph McCarthy claimed to hold a list of 205 Communist Party members working in the State Department. When Republicans took the Senate in 1953 he chaired the Committee on Government Operations and its Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, hiring 26 year old Roy Cohn as chief counsel, Robert F. Kennedy as assistant counsel, and hotel heir G. David Schine as chief consultant. That year the subcommittee probed alleged communist infiltration at the Army Signal Corps laboratory at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. When Schine was drafted as a private, the Army charged that McCarthy and Cohn sought special treatment for him, and McCarthy countered that the Army was holding Schine hostage to stop his inquiry.

McCarthy stepped aside as chairman in favor of Karl Mundt, and ABC broadcast the hearings live for 36 days from April to June 1954, with Boston lawyer Joseph N. Welch of Hale and Dorr representing the Army. On June 9, as Welch pressed Cohn, McCarthy broke a private agreement and named Welch's young associate Fred Fisher as a former member of the National Lawyers Guild, prompting Welch to ask whether he had no sense of decency. McCarthy's approval fell from 50 percent in January to 34 percent by June, and on December 2, 1954, the Senate voted 67 to 22 to censure him. He died in 1957 at 48.

• Cohn reportedly forged McCarthy's signature to get Schine into the Senate's private baths.
• Welch showed that a photo of Schine with Army Secretary Robert T. Stevens had been cropped to remove others, including Colonel Jack Bradley and McCarthy aide Frank Carr.
• Attorney General Herbert Brownell Jr. confirmed that a supposed 1951 J. Edgar Hoover memo McCarthy produced was neither written nor authorized by Hoover.
• After McCarthy called him sanctimonious Stu, Stuart Symington replied that McCarthy was not fooling anyone either.
• Fred Fisher went on to a highly successful legal career in Boston.

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Albert Gallatin was born in Geneva in 1761 to a wealthy aristocratic family, was orphaned young, and was educated at the Academy of Geneva, where he absorbed Rousseau, Voltaire and the French physiocrats. In 1780, at 19, he and a classmate slipped away and sailed to America, where he traded in Machias, Maine, tutored French at Harvard, and then built a stone house called Friendship Hill on 400 acres in western Pennsylvania. Elected to the U.S. Senate in 1793, he was removed by the Federalist majority on the grounds that he had not been a citizen for nine years, and the dispute pushed the Senate to open its doors to the public for the first time.

He urged his western Pennsylvania neighbors to stand down during the 1794 Whiskey Rebellion, won a House seat, and served as Treasury Secretary under Jefferson and Madison from 1801 to 1814, the longest tenure in that office. He cut the national debt from $83 million to $45.2 million, required specific appropriations, financed the Louisiana Purchase with bonds bought by Barings in London and Hope & Co. in Amsterdam, and helped plan the Lewis and Clark expedition. When the national bank's charter failed by one vote in 1811, he had to fund the War of 1812 with new taxes and loans from John Jacob Astor and Stephen Girard, and he later helped negotiate the Treaty of Ghent.

• He persuaded a hesitant Jefferson not to wait for a constitutional amendment before buying Louisiana.
• At Ghent, John Quincy Adams envied his ability to cool tempers between Adams and Henry Clay.
• He helped found New York University in 1831 and became known as the father of American ethnology.
• He criticized forced removals such as the Trail of Tears, yet in 1799 argued against normalizing relations with revolutionary Saint-Domingue.
• He died in Astoria, New York, in 1849 at 88, the last surviving member of Jefferson's cabinet.

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Daniel J. Evans was born in Seattle in 1925 to a family that reached Washington Territory in 1859. An Eagle Scout and scout camp hike master, he went through the Navy V-12 program, served as an ensign on Pacific aircraft carriers after World War II, and returned to service during the Korean War. With two civil engineering degrees from the University of Washington, he helped design Seattle's double decked Alaskan Way Viaduct. He entered the state House in 1957, defeated Governor Albert Rosellini in 1964, and became one of only three Washington governors to serve three terms, from 1965 to 1977.

A Republican, he founded the Washington State Department of Ecology in 1970, the first state agency of its kind and a blueprint for the federal EPA, built the community and technical college system, signed a bill legalizing abortion in the first four months of pregnancy, and pushed an unsuccessful state income tax. He gave the 1968 Republican convention keynote but had backed Nelson Rockefeller and refused to endorse Richard Nixon. After leading Evergreen State College from 1977 to 1983, he was appointed to Henry M. Jackson's Senate seat, beat Mike Lowry in the special election, and retired in 1988 after publicly lamenting Senate gridlock.

• During his 1972 campaign, Ted Bundy volunteered in disguise and secretly recorded opponents' rallies; Evans never met him.
• He was considered for vice president in 1968, 1974 and 1976.
• In 1976 he persuaded President Gerald Ford to sign the Alpine Lakes Wilderness bill despite Forest Service calls for a veto.
• After the Senate he cofounded the Washington Wildlife and Recreation Coalition with Mike Lowry, his former opponent.
• The Olympic Wilderness was renamed for him in 2017, and he died in Seattle in September 2024 at 98.