i can go into more detail later, but essentially you have james k. polksus henry clay, who are the two main candidates. spoiler alert, james k. polk wins, and his victory leads to a pretty distinct direction for the country compared to what it would have been under henry clay. ken: wonderful. jeff. what's your book about? hold it up. jeff: so we have a book here on the tennessee state capitol building, published by arcadia publishing company. many of you all know arcadia very well. i'm sure. it's a wonderful publishing company that does a lot of historic images of america, locales, just different local histories. this has been a career-long sort of passion of mine as part of my duties at the state museum. i manage the tours of our capitol building, and so i've given countless thousands, i guess, thousands of people, tours of our state capitol building. i dearly love this building and all the stories that have come out of it and the people that have that have served the state of tennessee in it. and and so it's just been a passion project for me. and then

what was james k polk really like? i mean, you're talking about the election, but you got to know this guy and administration, everything so far way. sure. so, james kay paul is usually thought of as the first dark horse presidential candidate in u.s. history. so that means that he came out of nowhere. no one expected him to be the nominee to run for president. and that's not quite true. there was a lot of intrigue that went into polk winning the democratic party's nomination in may of 1844 in baltimore. so maybe just trace that briefly going into the democratic national convention, most democrats thought that martin van buren would be the democratic nominee. martin van buren had served as president for four years during a pretty severe economic depression, had lost his reelection bid in 1840, and many democrats, some democrats were still upset with him about losing. but most that the whig victory in 1840 was a fluke. the whigs had run on a really the first modern type of presidential where they were rolling balls down