{"id":5789,"date":"2022-11-29T15:04:43","date_gmt":"2022-11-29T21:04:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/chicagoshadydealer.com\/?p=5789"},"modified":"2025-01-01T20:01:41","modified_gmt":"2025-01-02T02:01:41","slug":"history-phd-candidate-realizes-zachary-taylor-not-interesting-starts-thesis-from-scratch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chicagoshadydealer.com\/index.php\/2022\/11\/29\/history-phd-candidate-realizes-zachary-taylor-not-interesting-starts-thesis-from-scratch\/","title":{"rendered":"History PhD Candidate Realizes Zachary Taylor &#8220;Not Interesting,&#8221; Starts Thesis from Scratch"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">CHICAGO &#8211; PhD Candidate Mary Lowell decided Thursday to scrap her history thesis and start anew after realizing Zachary Taylor was \u201cshockingly dull.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Lowell says the epiphany came to her during a visit to the Adler Planetarium, where she marveled at the mysteries of the universe that had been unveiled through astronomy. \u201cI thought to myself, \u2018Wow, I wish I knew more about black holes.\u2019 That made me wonder if anyone had ever wished they knew more about Zachary Taylor. And then it hit me: No. No one ever had.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u201cProbably the most important thing he did was get killed by a bowl of spoiled cherries sixteen months into office and make\u00a0 Millard Fillmore president. Not even, like, Teddy Roosevelt or someone cool. Millard fucking Fillmore.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Lowell says she tried asking her best friend for advice on what to do if you realize the subject of your doctoral thesis is tedious and irrelevant. The friend, a philosophy PhD student, didn\u2019t understand what the problem was.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">After a great deal of soul-searching, Lowell resigned herself to scrapping her thesis and writing a completely new one. \u201cIt sucks to have to throw away six years of painstaking research on the 1848 Whig Convention, but it is what it is. If I\u2019m dedicating a good chunk of my life to writing about someone else, they should be someone who didn\u2019t lose the party\u2019s nomination to John J. Crittenden.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">At press time, Lowell was desperately searching for a more interesting pre-Civil War president to write about. \u201cDid you know Franklin Pierce was really good friends with Nathaniel Hawthorne? That\u2019s interesting, right? Right? Right? Please say right.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;If I\u2019m dedicating a good chunk of my life to writing about someone else, they should be someone who didn\u2019t lose the party\u2019s nomination to John J. Crittenden.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2089,"featured_media":5791,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5789","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arts-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chicagoshadydealer.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5789","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chicagoshadydealer.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chicagoshadydealer.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chicagoshadydealer.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2089"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chicagoshadydealer.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5789"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/chicagoshadydealer.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5789\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5792,"href":"https:\/\/chicagoshadydealer.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5789\/revisions\/5792"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chicagoshadydealer.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5791"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chicagoshadydealer.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5789"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chicagoshadydealer.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5789"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chicagoshadydealer.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5789"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}