The Red River rivalry between the flagship universities of Oklahoma and Texas is one of college sports’ best, and Saturday’s game did not disappoint. As a west coast transplant to Texas, I was a little surprised at the high level of animosity these two schools have for each other. As a history enthusiast, I couldn’t help but think of another episode in the Red River’s history that deserves to mentioned.

On Oct. 7, 1759, Spain and Tlaxcala lost a decisive battle to a hodgepodge alliance of “norteno” Indians and forever ceded control of the frontier to the Comanche. The Battle of Twin Villages was fought long before the establishment of the United States, but it nonetheless provides another peek into the bloody history of the American experience.

Two villages of Wichita Indians were built along the north of the Red River in reaction to Spanish attempts at bringing the region to heel in the mid 16th century,  just a few decades after Spain and Tlaxcala defeated the Aztec Empire. Spain sought to bring all of what is now Texas and Oklahoma under its domain, but a number of agricultural (stationary) Indian nations, as well as a few nomadic Indian nations like the Comanche and Apache, preferred to remain sovereign and free from Spanish rule. The Apache eventually forged an alliance with Spain, as they believed the Spanish were a lesser evil than the Comanche, but the Wichita allied with the French, who had a very sparse presence in the region, dominated by fur trappers and merchants rather than conquistadors, but enough of one to broker alliances and frustrate Spain.

The villages themselves were fortified and manned by French soldiers, a rarity in that region and those days, and the leader of Spain’s expedition north noted in his diary that a French flag flew from the fortified walls. To make matters worse for the Spanish, the Comanche had joined the French-Wichita alliance after hearing that the Apache had joined forces with Spain (the Comanche and Apache really hated each other), and the same diary of the Spanish military leader noted that several hundred Comanche tipis were present just outside of the village. Spain, in modern metaphorical parlance, had brought a knife to a gun fight.

Thurgood Marshall was approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee (69-11) to become the first African-American to sit on the Supreme Court on Sept. 2, 1967. There are volumes upon volumes of literature on our first black Supreme Court Justice, but a connection between Marshall and today’s justices exists that needs to be better explored: that of their law schools.

Marshall attended Howard Law School and when he sat on the court (1967-91) the law schools of Stanford (Rehnquist, O’Connor), Yale (Fortas, Stewart, White), St. Paul College of Law in Minnesota (Burger), Northwestern (Stevens), NYU (Harlan), Harvard (Souter, Blackmun, Powell, Scalia, Kennedy, Brennan), Cal-Berkeley (Warren), Columbia (Douglas), and Alabama (Black) were all represented alongside Howard on the Supreme Court at one time or another.

These law schools represented almost every region of the United States and catered to all socio-economic classes and ethnic groups. With Marshall on the court, the third branch of government, the least democratic of all the branches, steered the republic through much of the Cold War and oversaw a dramatic cultural shift through the late 1960s and 1970s. The court did not avoid divisiveness, or accusations of unfairness. The court, with only one black man on it, and only one woman, also could not avoid charges of racial and gender bias, but it was generally seen as a bulwark against the prejudices of the day, and an exemplar of justice in an era of segregation.

Sure, there were uncomfortable debates in the Senate Judicial Committee and bitter rulings that divided the country. These were done in the midst of unpopular overseas wars and constant geopolitical challenges to liberal democracy abroad.

On Sept.  26, 1960, the first televised presidential debate in American history took place, between John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon. The result of the debate was stark: those who watched it on television believed that the young, handsome Catholic from New England had done a better job, while those who listened to the debate on radio thought the old codger from California was a better fit for the job.

From that day on, as television surpassed radio as the most novel form of communication in American society, presidential candidates have had to take their appearance into account.

Today, Sept. 25, 2018, a former host of a television show is America’s highest-ranking elected official. You may think that the end result of television itself has been a net negative for American society, as careful statesmen have steadily given way to boastful showmen with little respect for the fact that ours is a republic governed by laws, not men. This pessimism is understandable, and unyielding, but should not be embraced. Freedom requires an optimistic mindset. Here are two reasons to become (or remain) upbeat about the future of American society.

For one thing, television has all but been replaced as a form of communication by the internet, especially for people under the age of 50. Americans have increasingly eschewed television as a form of knowledge, preferring instead to do research on candidates and issues on their own, using what is essentially the world’s largest library (the internet). There are issues that come with this, too, of course, as partisanship has become sharper since people began doing their own research. Yet the influence of large media corporations - ABC, NBC, CBS - has declined precipitously as Americans have become free to shape their own opinions once again. The fact the traditional press - the printed word - once again has a role to play in shaping American culture, through the internet, is also cause to celebrate. Sure, American society has become more polarized over the past two decades, and technology shares some of the blame, but the question has to be asked: so what if Washington can’t seem to get anything done? Gridlock is a feature, not a bug, of our constitutional system.

On Sept. 18, 1947, Congress made its military air forces an official branch of the Department of Defense with the passage of the National Security Act. A major overhaul of America’s military and intelligence agencies, the N.S.A. was meant to give the American government room to maneuver in a world where Washington suddenly found itself the leader of the democratic world and at odds with the authoritarian world led by the Soviet Union, an ally in World War II just two years prior to the Act being passed (the Act also established the Central Intelligence Agency).

After the Army’s air force performed exceptionally well during World War II, many strategists argued that air superiority was going to be the key to maintaining primacy in war. In the past, either land or sea power was considered to be the key component in maintaining a military that was capable of lording over swathes of the globe, but with the advent of the air forces of Japan, the U.K., the U.S., and Germany’s Luftwaffe, and how they changed fundamentally how militaries collided, “air power” became the buzzword of choice for many policymakers in world capitals.

Aside from decentralizing a military geared toward a total war, there was also a need to scale back the sheer size of the U.S. Army and Navy after World War II and the National Security Act was the path Congress took to get there. Even though the Soviet Union and its authoritarian government was already pushing for violent revolution abroad as part of its new foreign policy platform, Washington believed that a leaner, meaner military was more desirable thanks in large part to the fact that America had always demilitarized after major wars. The Chinese and Soviet support for North Korea’s invasion of South Korea was still three years away, and Washington was, at that time, sympathetic to the decolonization efforts of rebels in British, French, and Dutch colonies, so demilitarization still seemed sensible.

The Navy continued to object to the formation of an independent Air Force up until Sept. 18 due to the fact that it would lose a significant portion of its power, but the National Security Act was supported by the likes of Eisenhower and Carl Spaatz and the Air Force became an equal partner of the Army and Navy.

It’s been 17 years since al-Qaeda hijacked two commercial airliners and flew them into the World Trade Center towers in New York City. In the years that followed the attack, the United States became intricately tied up to the fate of the Middle East, as the republic invaded densely-populated Iraq and sparsely-populated Afghanistan, and its operations there moved fully from the shadows of Cold War diplomacy and espionage out into the open. Today, the U.S. is actively engaged in the Middle East and its dealings are heavily monitored by the press. Washington constantly makes convenient alliances with state and non-state actors alike (groups such as anti-Turkish Kurds in Syria or Iran’s elite, anti-Taliban forces in Afghanistan) in order to protect its interests (rightly or otherwise).

Yet the United States did not arrive in the Middle East overnight. It has a long presence in the Middle East. Below are 5 snapshots of American history in the Middle East:

5. The Barbary Pirates. Perhaps the most famous, pre-9/11 conflict between the U.S. and the Muslim world, the Barbary pirates were in reality a group of small political units who were almost completely autonomous, but relied on the Ottoman Empire for military protection. These North African Barbary states engaged in piracy with the Ottoman Empire’s unofficial blessing (this was common throughout the world). When Jefferson sent military ships to the region and began attacking the Barbary states, the Ottomans appealed to their North African suzerains to cease attacking American vessels and recognize the fledgling republic’s sovereignty on the high seas.

4. Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman Empire itself had a long but relatively undistinguished relationship with the United States. After the Americans seized the Philippines from Spain in the Spanish-American War, they had to begin the long, bloody process of stamping out anti-American rebellions. The Ottoman sultan, in an act of good faith toward Washington and in his capacity as caliph of the Muslim world, instructed the sultan of Moro, the Muslim area of the Philippines at the time, to avoid getting involved in the conflict, which the Moros mostly did. The lack of hostilities between Americans and Filipino Muslims allowed the former to pacify much of the archipelago, but a Moro rebellion eventually broke out in 1904, and it was bloody.

During the darkest days of the Cold War, in moments of extreme tension when the fate of the world was at stake, the only thing that saved America from certain doom was the red telephone on the president’s desk. It was of a basic design, and it had no numbers. All he had to do was pick it up, and an identical phone would ring on the desk of the Premier of the Soviet Union in Moscow. They would speak directly and hammer out the problem before nuclear missiles reached the sky.

A chilling image, except that reality was never like this. Contrary to news reports, movies, and books of the era, there was no red phone on the president’s desk. There was a hotline between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, but the leaders of the two countries never spoke directly on it. The language barrier, the time difference, and their busy schedules would have made that impossible, anyway. However people may have imagined the hotline, it did succeed in easing tensions between the two superpowers during the Cold War and kept small crises from turning into big ones.

The hotline was formally known as the Washington-Moscow Direct Communications Link. It went live on Aug. 30, 1963, just under a year after the Cuban Missile Crisis, a confrontation that brought the U.S. closer to the brink of nuclear war than any other time in history.

During the Cuban crisis, communications between Moscow and Washington were frightfully slow. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s first 3,000-word message took 12 hours to receive, decode, and translate. During that period, tensions rose significantly as American and Soviet warships began piling up in the Caribbean. While the U.S. was crafting a response, Khrushchev sent a second message that escalated the situation.

On Aug. 31, 1786, a nearly year-long uprising began in western Massachusetts over tax collection that was so large it required pleas from the State of Massachusetts to the national government for assistance. The help never came, mostly because the national government, then a confederation and not yet a union, was unable to raise the funds nor garner the political support necessary for such an undertaking.

Instead, the Massachusetts state militia mustered up enough support to march into the wilds of the western part of the state and crush the rebellion in its infancy.

The result of this uprising, known as Shays’ Rebellion, has been the subject of debate by historians for decades, if not centuries. What is known is that in 1789, a constitution enacting a federal union between 13 sovereign states went into effect, just three years after Shays’ Rebellion.

Daniel Shays was a veteran of the Revolutionary War who, after being wounded in the war, was sent home - unpaid - in 1780 and immediately summoned to court over unpaid debts that had accumulated while he was away fighting the war against the United Kingdom. Because Shays had not been paid for his service to revolution, he was unable to pay his debts and soon began to be hounded by creditors and tax collectors. Shays found that many other commoner-veterans of the war against the U.K. were in the same position as him, and soon they began to meet in public locales to discuss their problems.

The Civil War was filled with horrors inflicted on both sides that have not been matched before or since in the American story. Perhaps none reach the level of bloodshed, violence, and sheer depravity, however, that took place on Aug. 21, 1863 in Lawrence, Kansas.

Between 160 and 190 men and teenage boys, all civilians and many unarmed, were murdered by Confederate guerillas in a day-long raid that also witnessed the destruction and looting of the town. The man who planned and ordered the massacre was William Quantrill. His guerilla band, known as Quantrill’s Raiders, were not formal members of the Confederate Army. They were Bushwhackers, men who fought against the Union by unconventional means, resorting to robbery and harassing local citizens who did not support the Confederate cause.

To understand how the massacre in Lawrence happened, it’s necessary to step back a few years to the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act. After several failed attempts to solve the slavery question, Congress elected to allow each new state that entered the Union to decide by popular sovereignty whether it would be a free state or a slave state.

Kansas was a free state, but people in the neighboring slave state of Missouri had a different idea in mind. Pro-slavery forces crossed the border and attempted to persuade Kansas to vote for slavery. They tried newspaper editorials, rallies, ballot stuffing, and election rigging. When that didn’t work, they resorted to threats, kidnapping, and murder.