Today's episode dives into the fascinating interplay between geography, history, and national identity through the lens of the United States and its national anthem, "The Star-Spangled Banner." We unravel the intricate tale of how a poem born from the chaos of war became a symbol of patriotism, all while considering the complexities of its author, Francis Scott Key, and his contradictory legacy. As we explore the historical context of the War of 1812 and the unique meteorological conditions that contribute to the U.S. tornado phenomenon, we reflect on the cultural significance of a simple peanut butter and jelly sandwich as a national comfort food. With a dash of geometry to map our journey and a sprinkle of wit to keep things light, we unravel the deeper meanings behind the anthem’s verses and their resonance in American life today. So, whether you're a math enthusiast or just in it for the musical journey, there's something here for everyone as we navigate the fascinating tapestry of a nation’s story.

1. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/why-the-u-s-is-leading-the-world-in-extreme-weather-catastrophes
2. https://www.battlefields.org/learn/biographies/dr-william-beanes
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4. https://chorusamerica.org/singers/star-spangled-mythbusting
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9. https://archive.org/details/marylandhistoric3219mary/page/340/mode/2up
10. https://amhistory.si.edu/starspangledbanner/pdf/TRANSCRIPT%20Official%20Account%20of%20the%20Bombardment%20of%20Fort%20McHenry.pdf
11. https://web.archive.org/web/20070814024634/http://www.nps.gov/history/history/online_books/hh/5/hh5l.htm
12. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-vikings-a-memorable-visit-to-america-98090935/
13. https://web.archive.org/web/20120726213322/http://www.questia.com/read/66002285
14. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/real-story-behind-star-spangled-banner-flag-inspired-national-anthem-149220970/
15. https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/video-do-you-know-the-star-spangled-banners-third-verse/
16. https://www.cnn.com/2016/08/31/opinions/star-spangled-banner-criticisms-opinion-clague/index.html
17. https://www.allmusic.com/artist/john-stafford-smith-mn0001694662
18. https://www.preceden.com/timelines/4647-john-stafford-smith
19. https://web.archive.org/web/20190824211634/https://www.mayflower400uk.org/news/2019/july/cathedral-to-ring-out-star-spangled-banner-in-honour-of-its-english-composer/
20. https://www.imdb.com/name/nm2397901/bio/
21. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/francis-scott-key-the-reluctant-patriot-180937178/
22. https://web.archive.org/web/20161019201446/http://www.hofmag.com/francis-scott-key-star-spangled-banner/184235
23. https://web.archive.org/web/20200808113230/https://openstax.org/books/us-history/pages/16-3-radical-reconstruction-1867-1872
24. https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_First_American/TLdOMa1MEqsC?hl=en&gbpv=1&pg=PA232&printsec=frontcover
25. https://starspangledmusic.org/an-erroneous-francis-scott-key-quote/
26. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/wheres-debate-francis-scott-keys-slave-holding-legacy-180959550/

Hello and welcome to the Anthems Podcast. I'm Patrick and I'm here to tell you the story of a song that helps to tell the story of a nation.

Today we are taking a 12,569 kilometer launch which is a 7,810 mile launch on a country to country trajectory and I'm going to indulge in some geometry. If you were considering the last three countries as the three vertices of a triangle on the nearly sphere that is our planet, we know a few things.

Flat triangles always have 180 degrees, but spherical ones always have more than that but less than 540 degrees. Why is a thing that a different podcast covers?

I sincerely wish to podcast about mathematics as well as history, so I am currently willing the universe to make that happen for me here. The angles and degrees are 107, 58 and 55. That sums to 220, meaning we get a spherical excess of 40 degrees over a flat triangle.

You're wondering what I'm talking about right now?

Unless you're a specific type of math nerd, and if you are that specific type of math nerd, you will eventually figure out that today I'm talking about the United States. Officially the United States of America. We are in the country where most of the tornadoes happen, which is honestly a surprise for me.

I assumed they were as common all over the world because it had a 250th birthday three days ago if you're catching this on the release date.

Anyway, obviously I am going into this one with much more background knowledge than usual, but that didn't stop me from learning a whole bunch more stuff. First though, why all of the tornadoes? It's mostly geography.

The center third of the continental US is flat and the Mississippi is a great source of moisture for warm air storm fuel. Many listeners will immediately note that a whole bunch of places and countries have those conditions. To start, think Russia, Australia or Brazil.

Consider though that annually There are about 20 reported tornadoes in Australia and more than a thousand in the us.

That can't actually be accurate for the island continent, but in the United States we have better reporting for this stuff in that particular place because more of tornado country is more populated and we have lots of farms there. At least that is my semi informed guess about what's going on.

Something seeming like it happens more because you're actually taking data on it when it happens seems like a certain kind of prescient reason to tell you about the Star Spangled Banner. Now, as a guy that loves to cook and eat and lives in the United States. I have eaten a whole bunch of the food here, but what is the national food?

I honestly think that it has to be peanut butter and jelly, which is going to sound crazy to some people I know.

Almost nobody though lives here that doesn't eat a variation of peanut butter and jelly, some sort of nut butter and some sort of jelly or jam or something. And people from other countries often find it to be a bizarre thing to eat as a sandwich.

Many people will disagree with this and at first, until I looked into it and did some homework, I almost picked hamburger. But please let me know what you think later and think about it while you listen to this song. And. Ram.

My initial reaction is that I really like this version of it because you all heard what Whitney did there too. Incredible singer with a nice understated version of the music. It's not really a march anthem, more of like a proclamation style song here.

It's good enough though, and this version is on my list, but it's definitely not my favorite anthem. That's a topic for another time and place.

And there is a particular place where you can go see the inspiration for this poem and that's fun because I usually don't get to direct you to physical things like that. Not a spoiler for me to say this either because when the singer declares that our flag is still there, it actually still is.

As in we have the garrison flag that withstood in hours long British bombardment after being hand stitched together by flag maker Mary Young Pickersgill, which is an incredibly American name.

The banner was specified to be large enough that the British could never miss it, and at 30 by 42ft, which is 9.1 by 12.8 meters, it was certainly large, even though today it has lost about 8ft of length due to the former practice of giving away cuttings as souvenirs. The best part about going to see the flag though is all the museums that are full of endlessly interesting other material. So where is this stuff?

Well, we were just in Canada, so again you're gonna get the line this is not really that hard to find. But really though it's not.

Because Canada and the United States are pretty much all of North America, and North America is a big difficult to miss chunk of land. The larger and northernmost country is obviously Canada, and the next one to the south is the United States.

It is the third largest country and so it's another one that very much sticks out on a map.

Bordering countries of mainland US are Canada to the north Mexico to the south and very nearly Russia to the west, along with 574 recognized sovereign native nations, the roughly 340 million people that live here are in one of the 17 megadiverse countries. It's also the country that, in part because of the tornadoes, experiences the most high impact weather events.

Again mostly because of geography and meteorology, a topic that I don't know enough about to fully explain.

Also, something else I'm struggling to explain is literally anything else about my country because of the wide variation in most things that one can find here.

I will qualify that statement though, lest it sounds like I think that where I live is better, which is a pretty dangerous thing to think about a country actually, because I suspect that most of us feel kind of like this about the place we grew up in, because it's the place that we know the most stuff about, and it's as simple as that.

The dangers of nationalism that we are unaware of is another topic for another day and another time, but also something definitely in my head thinking about this show and specifically for my own country, because despite the all caps, many, many failings of this ridiculous republic I live in, it's still my country. For this episode's geology diversion, we are going to of course talk about the Grand Canyon. Well, it's not the deepest canyon in the world.

This thing is absolutely enormous in scope at over 277 miles long.

The emergent consensus from scientists is that the canyon, that which serves as a window into 2 billion years of geology, was formed in three main pieces starting around 50 million years ago. This area has long been settled in and around and is considered sacred ground by certain indigenous peoples.

Additionally to the great scientific and cultural value that the canyon represents for the United States, it's also stunningly beautiful.

I was in Arizona once about 27 years ago, but I did not see it might get back out there sometimes, but onto a far more recently developed aspect of the region. So that makes it three in a row for the British Empire.

It is not intentional, but it certainly says a lot about how much of an influence on history they've had.

Again and again I am forced to fast forward to the point of essentially skipping tens of thousands of years of first nations histories to get to a useful starting point for a cohesive story about the Phantom that is here, as it frequently is the first arrival of Europeans. That is, if you disregard the Norse.

Colonies were established along the coast as far south as Delaware. The last two colonies developed on the next 20 years were Carolina and finally Pennsylvania.

But unfortunately, we cannot get into the details of that or the variations and interesting religious and governmental makeups of the various colonies. It bears mentioning that there were a bunch of enslaved people here too, and indentured servants in the British American colonies.

Indentured servitude, if you have never heard of it before, is basically voluntary slavery under contract for a specific period of time to pay a debt. Of course, given my country's objectively racist past, African slavery does bear mentioning as well.

Recall that the first original US art form was the minstrel show. Before writing to me an angry email about how we were not that bad or racist.

Those are in fact grounds for revolution in some countries, but not the US Revolution.

But I can say for sure that he attended the Gloucester Cathedral School.

That school still exists and it has been there in some form since the 11th century, which is an impressive run of time, actually there Smith was a singer as a boy and later studied under William Boyce to further his musical skills. By the time he was in his 20s, John had a reputation as a composer and an organ player and scored himself in invite to the Anacreontic Society.

This was an informal club of guys that promoted music as a form of culture and entertainment. Kind of like a rich guy club of amateur and professional musicians that were actually in it for the art and the love of playing.

Interesting stuff, I guess.

But perhaps the most important thing to come from John Smith's life was not the anthem that he wrote, but was that he was the first English person that is a serious student of musicology. And he was also an antiquarian. His collection of English song might be the very first published scholarly collection of English music.

It is often said that he choked on a grape pip, but that is how the poet Anacreon in Greece is supposed to have died. And that is way more of a coincidence than I am willing to blindly accept this reality.

He married Mary Taylor Lord and they settled into the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington D.C. and had 11 children there.

That same year, he assisted his uncle in a thing I newly learned because the guy that shot Alexander Hamilton, Raymond Burr, was charged with treason in a situation completely unrelated to shooting the former Secretary of the Treasury. Read about that whole complicated tale on your own listener, because tangents abound.

The next year, Key assisted Thomas Jefferson's attorney general in US vs Peters and was involved in other foundational cases. But it's like early in US legal history, so kinda everything is considered significant and it's way more stuff than I'm gonna list here.

Now, there is enough weight to it in the historical record that slavery enters into Keys bio in my show because he definitely thought that owning people was okay. Here we are presented with a complicated but still objectively wrong guy. What do I mean?

In fact, he was actively leveraging his legal position against a free and equal society. He was also a devout Episcopalian his entire life. And you can check this listener.

He left a small legal legacy, a posthumously collected poetry collection, but is most remembered for writing the poem that became the Star Spangled Banner. We're going to pick up the timeline past the U.S. revolution and into a war that I said just two episodes ago. I was not sure that I'd mention again.

The cause of this war, and indeed any war, are foggy and victims of nationalist propaganda.

But it seems mostly to actually be a result of British aggression of various kinds of that itself was prompted by lingering irritation at a successful revolution.

This is a war that we technically learned about in history in the us But I don't remember any of it, and I feel like I learned about it for the first time in the past couple of months. This episode took a little while to write.

Neither country was ready for a war, though, because the British were fighting Napoleon and the US was like 15 years old or something. James Madison just assumed that we were gonna march into Canada, take that whole place, and then sue for peace.

Actually, I'm sorry, that is a thing that you're gonna have to read about on your own, and we're going to look just past that to September of the same year. At that moment, Key was on a British ship trying to negotiate Dr. William Bean's release.

And that's another very interesting story that you should read about on your own, because we're brushing completely past the why of that, too. You can see source number two in the show notes if you're interested.

What really matters here is that they were allowed to go back on the ship that Key had chartered to get out there, but they were not allowed to go back ashore because the British were about to spend 25 hours shooting rockets at Fort McHenry. Key and Bean saw the British positions and the allotment of ships, and no one involved here was dumb.

They absolutely would have shared that intelligence with the US Government. And the British knew that. So they made them stay there and made them watch.

It's hard for me to remember that it might be impossible for us as modern humans, at least the kind that listen to this show, to remember what it was like to just not know stuff.

Like, for instance, I know that 67.2% of my listeners have heard me on a mobile device as of this writing, meaning that the vast majority of us, always connected folk probably just can't understand the apprehension that Key felt before the sun came up and he saw the flag.

Any one of us might have been inspired to start writing a patriotic poem on the back of a letter that they happen to have in their pocket when they returned to Baltimore.

They gathered 5 million signatures, petitioned the song to receive national anthem status. With that we have our anthem and I can go on to discuss the song itself.

Musically speaking, Smith's tune was probably commissioned to fit the lyrics to the song praising Bacchus, Venus and the things that they represent, which is like partying and drinking. But this is not actually a tavern song though, because it was composed for an elite club of skilled amateur and professional musicians.

The tune is simple, but the range is difficult for most of us non trans singers.

Spanning from C4 to A5, the tune is composed in 68 time and in the key of C major in what I learned is called the convivial style, that is, it uses uplifting music designed for a group around a thematic focus.

This piece is a 32 bar form that was used to accompany many, many American and English songs of the time and was suitable with active conversational verse as well as dramatic and sweeping renditions. It's pretty good stuff and I far prefer it in the original harpsichord to any modern rendition.

Lyrically speaking, we have four stanzas of eight lines, each structured as something called a broadside ballot. This is the single sheet of cheap paper printed With a ballad rhyme or possibly news on one side.

They were cheap to print, cheap to buy, and were the most common form of printed material between the 16th and 19th centuries. The stanzas have an aabb, C, D, D rhyme scheme, with lines five and six forming a couplet in each verse.

It was, in fact, specifically written for the music of the Anacreontic Song. I will be reading the entire thing out, and for a bunch of my American listeners, this may be the first time they've heard the entire four verses.

I know that before the reading for the episode that was the case for me. It will be read in the original English.

Oh, say can you see by the dawn's early light what so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight O' er the ramparts we watched Were so gallantly streaming and the rocket's red glare the bombs bursting in air Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there oh, say, does that Star Spangled Banner yet wave O' er the land of the free and the home of the brave on the shore dimly seen through the mists of the deep where the foe's haughty host in dread silence reposes what is that which the breeze O' er the towering steep as it fitfully blows Half conceals half discloses now it catches the gleam of the morning's first beam in full glory reflected now shines on the stream Tis the Star Spangled Banner O long may it wave O' er the land of the free and the home of the brave and where is that band who so vauntingly swore that the havoc of war and the battle's confusion at home and a country should leave us no more? Their blood has washed out their foul footsteps Pollution.

No refuge could save the hireling and slave from the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave and the Star Spangled Banner in triumph doth wave O' er the land of the free and the home of the brave oh, thus be it ever when free men shall stand between their loved home and the war's desolation Blessed with victory and peace May heaven rescued land Praise the power that hath made and preserved us a nation Then conquer we must when our cause it is just and this be our motto In God is our trust and the Star Spangled Banner in triumph shall wave O' er the land of the free and the home of the brave so if I step away from whatever feelings that I may have about the current state of the country, that I live in.

Hopefully the context of my show and the content of my show and what I have said on my show make how I feel about things reasonably easy to surmise for my listeners. So I can skip that part.

So I'm going to compartmentalize that and observe that this is some really formulaic patriotic writing for this period and place in time and space. While we again have a song that was not written with anthem intentions in mind, it kind of fits the bill very well in some ways.

And in my not a historian opinion, it's probably what really led to this song becoming the anthem. Stuff like this hits hard in youngish countries, at least based on these 42 episodes that I've written.

Content wise, though, it's actually kind of another odd choice for an anthem because this song is about a very specific episode in a very long campaign. It's not a bad song, but it does not have most of what you think should be in an anthem like in general.

But remember that context matters, and maybe in this specific part of history it matters especially a lot. Kind of seems like that for what I've been doing the past couple years.

Anyway, this this came at an especially existential feeling moment in US history, and moments like those are rife with patriotic fervor of all kinds.

In reality, Fort McHenry was in little danger because rocket technology was actually super terrible in the western world at the time, and 19th century British didn't hit much because they were parked way offshore to avoid the fort's formidable artillery.

However, all that the public knew, and a bunch of the people involved actually was that there was lots of exploding happening and still the United States persevered. It's not my favorite anthem, even though I seed that it's pretty obviously the right sort of choice for the us.

That said, the writing is not actually bad stuff, and it is in fact quite an American song, even if the range being written for a trained vocalist means that a lot of people can't quite get there, myself included. In my country, our flag is everywhere in ways that probably seem kind of insane to people from a bunch of other countries.

The first two verses of this ballad are at least partially responsible for that, because watching the flag through the chaos and haze of warfare was Keys visual writing anchor. It's important enough to be the evolving refrain, is it still there? Long may it wave, and then may it wave in triumph.

Since anthems tend to be patriotic things, there is overlap that exists between patriotic songs and national anthems in general sometimes. And we do hear Anthem appropriate lines in here, referring to a free, brave people willing to fight and die and shed blood for their country.

The last verse, to me, is actually the most anthem like, in my opinion, because it's the one that is explicitly praising and speaking about the country and not a specific battle. And sure, because it's early American writing, or name most early American stuff.

Actually, there is racism layered into this thing because Key was a racist dude. Sure, it's complicated and the racism is not actually the point of the writing, but it's there. We're not gonna pretend it isn't.

Overall, though, we have something that is very American because it is overtly and wildly patriotic and in some ways kind of misses the point entirely while still being extremely confident in itself. It's a good story, though, and it has taught me even more about my own country.

So hopefully when this goes to print, the Republic still stands because most of us are far more like Cato than Caesar. Here's some credits the writing, recording and production for the show are done by me, and I wrote and played the theme music.

The music was used with my permission. Unless otherwise noted, the anthems I play are free to play.

I have reached out to the company that currently holds the rights to Whitney's music, but as of this recording I have yet to hear back from them. My sources are in the show notes and they live at Anthem's podcast. I can be found on Facebook as the Anthems podcast.

I post about the show and the rare Anthem news, but I'm pretty quiet there and I'm mostly asking you to help me by using the hashtag anthemspod because word of mouth is best.

It would be cool if you shared this content and it might even help slow the inevitable transitional period and evolution that every country has endured before. That sure feels existential at times, even though all times probably feel like that sometime. But this is the time that I'm actually living through.

It's a chance to chat with people nearby, using facts from this very episode as icebreakers. Or perhaps not, because reality exists and we're living in that. Either way, you're still pretty cool.

And you should share your snacks because we're not currently in a pandemic. Anyway, see you next time. And also, none of the writing for this show is done with generative AI.

It's all my fault, and it's my copyright too, and it may not be used to train AI.