The United States has been a divided nation plenty of times. It’s been divided about slavery, about politics, about culture and, very importantly, about when to celebrate Thanksgiving.

Related Links:

Holiday Highlights, a 1940 Merrie Melodies cartoon, showed the date of Thanksgiving as November 21st for Democrats, and November 28th for Republicans.

Daily Kos, Huffington Post, and Washington Times on Franksgiving.

The 1941 bill that finally established Thanksgiving as an official federal holiday.

Before and during World War II Japan (just like Britain, France, and the United States) had a considerable empire. The Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere encompassed the Korean peninsula, several Pacific Islands, and holdings in China. Probably the strangest part of the Japan’s empire was Manchukuo, an artificial country in northern China that Japan made by (among other things) bombing a train and kidnapping the former Chinese emperor.

Related Links:

This 1937 pro-Japanese propaganda film presents a laughably glowing vision of Manchuria under Japanese control.

Listen to Manchukuo’s national anthem! It sounds like lots of other national anthems.

The New Imperialism and Post Colonial Development State: Manchukuo in Comparative Perspective is one of the better scholarly essays I read about this topic in preparation for this episode.

Scientists are motivated by curiosity, by the desire to help their fellow humans, by compulsion and, sometimes, by irrational personal vendettas. Edward Drinker Cope and Othneil Charles Marsh were two leading paleontologists during the late 1800s, and discovered approximately 130 species between them, and were instrumental in confirming the then-new theory of evolution by natural selection. They also hated each other, and each tried to cut the other down to size with methods and tactics that simply would not fly in the scientific world today.

The 1897 painting below by Charles Knight is not at all a historically accurate depiction of dinosaurs, but it is amazing. It’s also apt. The art is called Leaping Laelaps, and uses Cope’s name for the dinosaur. The species was later renamed dryptosaurus, a name that Marsh gave it.

Related links:

Cope’s backward elasmosaurus, with the head on the end of the tail.

A profile of Uintatherium, the prehistoric mammal discovered by Joseph Leidy, but claimed by both Marsh and Cope.

The World of Charles R. Knight is a website dedicated to the artist that briefly worked with Cope.

The Olmecs are the oldest known Mesoamerican civilization, and we know little about them compared to, say, the Mayans or Aztec. Several people, though, have made a few outlandish claims about who the Olmecs were, and where they came from.

Related Links:

This article from Cultural Anthropology is the definitive takedown of Van Sertima’s Olmec claims, in great detail.

A more readable debunking of claims regarding African and Chinese Olmec origins.

And, just for fun, one of the best 80s cartoon openers ever.

The Korean Demilitarized Zone is a strange place. In 2008 I was a tourist visiting the peninsula, and I learned about one of the strangest incidents in the DMZ’s history. It was something straight out of a slasher movie, and has gone down in history as The Axe Murder Incident.

Related Links:

Footage of a DMZ tour. I did not take this footage, but the tour shown here is very similar to the one I went on.

A photograph of the fight itself. While the picture is old and blurry, it does portray fatal violence, so I felt it would have been in poor taste to put it directly on the sight.

An article about the Soviet defector who ran across the DMZ, mentioned briefly at the end of the episode.

A famed artifact, the Cyrus Cylinder, has often been cited as an early proclamation of human rights. The Shah of Iran, the UN, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, and an American president all hailed Cyrus the Great as an early innovator of liberalism and tolerance. Unfortunately, though, the historical record does not bear those claims out. Cyrus the Great was a monarch, and the world still falls for his ancient propaganda thousands of years later.

Related links:

View the Cylinder at the British Museum’s site.

Read the text of Shirin Ebadi’s (sadly erroneous) Nobel lecture.

Spiegel Online International on the fake translation and the use and abuse of the Cylinder.