Bonus: Prof. Greg Jackson interview on The Road to Now with Dr. Ben Sawyer

Professor Greg Jackson is interviewed by Professor Ben Sawyer on The Road to Now podcast https://TheRoadToNow.com to discuss Jackson’s new book, Been There, Done That: What Our History Shows What We Can Overcome https://www.htdspodcast.com/book. As we approach the 250th anniversary of the United States, the conversation centers on the resilience of the American experiment. Rather than viewing the current political climate with despondency, Jackson argues that American history provides a proven blueprint for endurance. The conversation was recorded live at sea on The History Cruise That Doesn’t Suck! Order Prof. Jackson’s book now https://www.htdspodcast.com/bookListen to all episodes of The Road to Now https://TheRoadToNow.com

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Greg Jackson?

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• 0:44Greg Jackson?

  They even offer the same incredible quality in bath essentials, bedding, and home furnishings. Find your next fall favorites at Quince. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK, too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know that it was History That Doesn't Suck. It's the best way to support the show. History That Doesn't Suck is supported by VistaPrint. This podcast is a small business passion project, and seeing our vision come to life offline is cool, too, thanks to our expert partner, VistaPrint. On my recent book tour, we were able to order custom, high-quality banners for book readings. It also added a nice professional polish. It also made the events more memorable

• 1:28Greg Jackson?

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• 2:25Greg Jackson?

  Hello everyone, Professor Jackson here. As you know, we're in mid-June 2026, a mere few weeks away from the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the effective birthday of the United States. I trust I hardly need to explain how meaningful this is to me, and I expect it is for you as well. In the buildup to early July, I'm going to share some special episodes. Don't worry, our World War II narrative isn't going anywhere. But this moment is special. It's hallowed. It deserves reflection. And I want to do that reflecting with you, perhaps especially because I know this anniversary comes with a mix of feelings. There's celebration, yet also a despondency on both sides of the aisle.

• 3:10Greg Jackson?

  Fear that we aren't what we were. I understand that fear, the view that these are unprecedented times, but I don't share it. My only real fear is that we will convince ourselves that the American experiment is past, that we will talk ourselves into giving up. Like Abraham Lincoln, I believe that is our only real threat. To quote the gangly rail splitter, who I can't help but read and hear in my own head in that nearly falsetto voice of his: "If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men, we must live through all time, or die by suicide."

• 3:50Greg Jackson?

  I am so deeply concerned about this possible self-fulfilling prophecy that I've poured my blood, sweat, and tears into researching and writing a book that counters this narrative. Not a Pollyanna history assuring everyone everything will be okay, but a history that reminds us we have faced today's supposedly new challenges of fake news, contested elections, and political violence from day one in this nation. That these are old demons, that we have beaten them before and we can beat them today. But the American people are stronger than all of this. I was recently interviewed by my colleague, Dr. Ben Sawyer, on his podcast, The Road to Now,

• 4:31Greg Jackson?

  about my book, Been There, Done That: How Our History Shows What We Can Overcome. Ben pulled answers from me in ways only an old friend and fellow historian could. And I realized that this conversation captured something I hadn't fully articulated anywhere else. That's why it belongs here, with you. And before we dive in, the book is now out, hardback and audio, yes, the audio is read by me, and available from all booksellers. You can also find a link at htdspodcast.com/book, or catch me on the road during my book tour as well. Details at htdspodcast.com.

• 5:12Greg Jackson?

  And it would mean the world to me if you'd get a copy and let me know what you think. Look forward to more America 250 specials this month, including the story of the Second Continental Congress preparing that world-changing declaration. And now, please enjoy my conversation with my dear friend, Professor Sawyer.

• 5:31Speaker 01

  I'm Ben Sawyer and this is The Road to Now. On a boat, please welcome to the stage, my guest, my friend and yours, Dr. Greg Jackson. Greg, how you feeling, man?

• 5:49Greg Jackson?

  I'm feeling good after your warm-up back there. My goodness, I didn't know I could laugh that hard at 8:00 a.m.

• 5:55Speaker 01

  These guys are awesome. We're on a boat, by the way, for you guys who are listening, you don't know this, we're on a boat, we're on a cruise that doesn't suck, and it's living up to its name, it's awesome.

• 6:03Greg Jackson?

  We are having a good time, 100%.

• 6:05Speaker 01

  If you would have told me when I started a podcast 10 years ago, that a history podcast would bring people onto a boat for five days and four nights of just sheer pleasure, I'm not sure I would have believed it, but here we are.

• 6:17Greg Jackson?

  I was having the same thought this whole week. This is not, I mean, you can relate to this, we got PhDs in history, we're professors. This was not, they didn't put this forward as an option in grad school, when they were talking about the career opportunities.

• 6:33Speaker 01

  They didn't.

• 6:34Greg Jackson?

  They failed to mention podcaster and go out to sea.

• 6:38Speaker 01

  They did, and in fact, I was invited to do some things by colleagues this week.

• 6:45Speaker 01

  And I go, I can't, I'm going on a cruise and they're like, oh, where's the cruise to? And I was like, I'm not even sure, but it's a history cruise. And they're like, you're going like to do a history cruise? And I was like, yes, I'm gonna be at work.

• 7:01Speaker 01

  This is delightful, man. And you've got this new book out and we're here to talk about it. And I couldn't be more excited, man.

• 7:07Greg Jackson?

  Thank you.

• 7:08Speaker 01

  Greg, upfront, I'm gonna say that I had the privilege of being one of the early readers on an earlier manuscript. And

• 7:14Greg Jackson?

  Sure.

• 7:15Speaker 01

  I, I took so many notes then. And since then, it's been revised. I've had, I've been lucky enough to, to read the book. And, uh, in its, in its final form, and somehow it got better. And I just wanted, I want to start off by reading to you what I wrote originally after I finished the manuscript.

• 7:32Greg Jackson?

  I don't think I've heard this. I've had it, man.

• 7:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. Um, and what I still think is true.

• 7:35Greg Jackson?

  Should I be nervous?

• 7:36Speaker 01

  And I don't normally read things that I've like written down here. No, you shouldn't be nervous at all. Everybody else should be nervous because they're gonna try to sell their books and you've got yours in the way.

• 7:46Speaker 01

  All right. So I wrote, uh, Greg's book speaks to the present with an element that's rare these days, wisdom. He finds what's universal. He shows you how people can violate their own dearly held convictions without seeing their own hypocrisy. How good people find their way to bad decisions. And he does it in a way that the reader can't help but contemplate their own place in the story. But he also shows us the way back. And he gives us well grounded calls for optimism, even while staring straight into the eyes of our darkest moments. Greg, could you start off by telling about the project, the stories that you bring into this? And, you know, how this explain, how these dark stories explain your enduring optimism about the American project?

• 8:29Greg Jackson?

  First, Ben, thank you. That's exactly what I was trying to do. So thank you. Yeah, I know it's counterintuitive in a way, right? When we talk about the bleakest moments in history, it's usually, well, just that. We're, we're, we're focused on the shortcomings, the, the failures. Look, we, we're living through an era. I've, I've heard it in the classroom. I've heard it on the road as I've, as I've done the live show and we've done talk backs afterward. So I'm, I'm meeting people across the country. I have these distinct memories burned into my mind. And I even mentioned one or two of them in the book. Of people expressing just absolute despondency at where we are currently.

• 9:14Greg Jackson?

  And that is what drove me to need to interrogate. Uh, well, basically the validity, the truthfulness of that statement or the lack thereof. Now, my gut was that, no, it's, it's not. And in my mind, the civil war, easy, right there, right? It, it should be dispelled that this is clearly not the low point. Now that's of course, a pretty sad place to have to go to. If you have to point to the civil war to say, it hasn't been worse. So it, this to me became a project that deserved interrogation. And it brings a lot of what the podcast, what HTDS has, has filled my mind with. Right? For nearly nine years, I, I did feel perhaps uniquely capable to do this project.

• 9:56Greg Jackson?

  I don't think I could have done it without having done HTDS for as long as I have on top of the, the education. Right? But, you know, I feel like I stared into the abyss and I, I mean, I mean that truly. Uh, stared into these ugly, dark moments of political violence, of contested elections, of biased or fake news. Actually, I'll say, and I get into some distinctions in the book as I really interrogate. What do we mean when we say fake news? And how does that differ or rather overlap from, right? With, with hyper partisan news. And what I came to was the realization of just how,

• 10:37Greg Jackson?

  how tough both the American people are and the system that we have is. And there's a combination between the two that doesn't mean we will endure forever. But I would argue, and I do in this book, that we can, that this republic can endure forever. If we, the people continue to choose that. So in these dark, ugly, bleak moments is actually a blueprint to remind us that we can overcome, we can surmount.

• 11:09Greg Jackson?

  Anything and everything that we are facing at present.

• 11:12Speaker 01

  You start us off with the founders, which is a good place. You bring us, you know, and you take, you, this book goes places, and I want to talk about this in a little bit, stories that I didn't even know. As someone who's been teaching US history for years, and I want to get to that. But you start off, and what I love about it is, you know, I think there is this idea that if you have faith right now, or you're in any way optimistic about the American experiment, that somehow you're naive.

• 11:38Greg Jackson?

  Yeah.

• 11:39Speaker 01

  That somehow you must be blind. And you start off with the premise that the entire system itself is not rooted in some optimism about human beings, but it's actually rooted in a very, very, very skeptical view of humanity. And so you, did you go back and talk about James Madison, Federalist Number 10, and how that kind of sets up the story?

• 11:58Greg Jackson?

  Yeah, so one of the things I did not, I conceived of this project, and I would say like any good project, any good book, the author doesn't realize what they've signed up for. Right? I mean, you've felt that with research in your life. You think you know what you're getting into, and you have no clue what you have just bit off. I felt that so many times. And one of them was how deep this took me into political philosophy. And within that was James Madison. I did not expect to be citing Madison half as much as I did in this book, but in Federalist Number 10, he, he lays out this premise that, and I want to be clear on this, just because it's said by Madison,

• 12:44Greg Jackson?

  that does not make it true or right. Right? So we come back to the Federalist Papers, to, to things that Madison wrote, Hamilton wrote, you name it. Not because we're worshiping these men, or at least that's not why we should come back to it. We come back to it because, at least in my experience, as I've interrogated these ideas, they hold. They had ideas that were greater than themselves. That's where we get to Federalist Number 10, and Madison articulates a premise that I completely agree with, as I have deeply thought about this for the last several years, and that is, you cannot have liberty and, at the same time, not have to experience factionalism. That's the word he uses, but partisanship is the word we use today. So, that isn't to say that all partisanship is good, I want to be clear on that.

• 13:28Greg Jackson?

  There are absolutely bad practices. But it is actually evidence that liberty exists when you have partisanship. There's no utopia, there's no having this thing that we love, right? Liberty is a word that we bat around in the United States, and sometimes we can even get cynical about the word liberty. Or we, well, we two-dimensional it either way, right? We either get cynical about it, or we treat it like this overly worshipped, misconstrued concept. But there's a very real and meaningful idea to liberty, in the American sense.

• 14:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think that people conflate liberty with what I want to do right now. But liberty is not yours, it's ours.

• 14:10Greg Jackson?

  Precisely, and that's where we get to social contract, right? So, within that important framework, Madison is saying, and I completely agree with him, if you're gonna have liberty, where you can do a lot of the things you want, but within these spaces where we're also respecting the unalienable rights of others, that's true liberty, one, but two, you cannot have that without having to deal with partisanship constantly. That, for me, was a real aha moment. And I feel like maybe it shouldn't have had to have been, but it's something where, you know, we kick around this idea that, oh, they should agree, they should disagree better all the time, that we shouldn't have to deal with these fights.

• 14:52Greg Jackson?

  Oh my gosh, Ben, oh, the preceding generations were no better than us. And I just saw that time and time again, the violence, the vitriol, the cruel things said by the founding fathers, the ones who gave us our highest ideals, and yet, while the ink is still drying on the Constitution, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton are writing the biggest burns about each other and publishing them under pseudonyms in the press, you know?

• 15:20Speaker 01

  Greg, this is, uh, this gets your comments here. People have asked me what I think, you know, when the statues have come down of people.

• 15:27Greg Jackson?

  Yeah.

• 15:27Speaker 01

  You know, and what are my thoughts on it? And I say that, uh, that my thoughts on it are probably gonna irritate everybody.

• 15:37Greg Jackson?

  That means there are probably some interesting thoughts and worth interrogating.

• 15:39Speaker 01

  But I, if you gave me the choice, I would tear down every statue of every human being that was ever put up. And that's because there, we, when we turn people into stone, they cease to be flesh and blood. And you forget that they had the same blood in their veins that you've got.

• 15:52Greg Jackson?

  I can hear that.

• 15:53Speaker 01

  James Madison, though, I think the, the other reason to look to him is, I mean, he comes in with the Virginia Plan, right?

• 15:59Greg Jackson?

  Yeah.

• 16:00Speaker 01

  So we, we live in a world that's not exactly, but it's like shaped by his thinking.

• 16:04Greg Jackson?

  Heavily.

• 16:05Speaker 01

  Understanding how he builds that in, that, that notion of what people are and it's honesty. I think it still holds true. It's fundamental to understand in the way that a vision of the government was set up.

• 16:15Greg Jackson?

  Well, and that is where, and I, I get to this later in the book, as you know, but when we get to Federalist Number 51, right, he says that men are not angels. I'm not even paraphrasing, I'm quoting the guy. Men are not angels. So while the founders did, and, and you, you hear this sometimes when we lament our present situation. I've read, I read so many articles to this effect that, oh, well, public virtue is, is dying. And don't get, don't get me wrong. Uh, public virtue, this is an idea of, of the founders about the need for education, for informed voters, for us participating. These things have to happen. I'm not dismissing that, but as important as that is, and as, as much as they push that, they also, I, I see this in Federalist 51.

• 16:59Greg Jackson?

  They also recognized that people suck.

• 17:05Greg Jackson?

  Right? Like, that's what they were working with. They made that assumption. So yes, we need public virtue. And at the same time, we're purposely building a structure that is ready to endure the worst of humanity.

• 17:18Speaker 01

  So talk about that, Greg, because one of the things I do love is that you, you explain, you know, the Constitution is a document that I feel like people talk about all the time and don't read.

• 17:29Greg Jackson?

  Yeah, I completely agree with that, unfortunately.

• 17:32Speaker 01

  And I know that I teach, you know, I teach US history and I see the education that people are coming out with. I mean, It has gotten worse and worse. And by the way, I want to be clear on this. When I tell you the story, I'm not in any way casting shade on my students. My students are good. They've learned what they're supposed to learn. Many of them. I've got great students, right? But they've clearly not even been taught the Constitution. I have them read it every semester, no matter what US history class I teach. And I got this semester, like three or four people saying, um, okay, you said we have to read the Constitution. Do we have to read the Articles?

• 18:05Speaker 01

  And I was like, that's like saying, so you said we have to eat this cheeseburger. Do we have to eat that, that meat patty and the cheese in the bun?

• 18:13Greg Jackson?

  Yeah.

• 18:15Speaker 01

  It's like, I get there's a preamble that's the lettuce, but uh, you know.

• 18:21Speaker 01

  But um, they're like, oh, we've memorized the lettuce. We had to do that. We didn't know why, but we had to. Um, so could you talk about that, the way that you put this, this balance of power? And you kind of explain its origins, which everything makes more sense than a story and you do this well. So could you talk about that?

• 18:36Greg Jackson?

  Yeah. Uh, so when we, again, the, the premise, first of all, is that people are the worst and we're building not just a republic, but with careful study, how, how to build a republic that can be bridged across a bunch of small republics. Right? That's what this union is. And very intentionally leaning into separation of powers and checks and balances. These are two separate ideas. We sometimes just throw them all together, right? It gets blurred it out and, and much like the word liberty, right? That these terms that we don't think very much of, we, we just say them. So you know, separation of powers, as, as Madison tells us in the Federalist Papers, it can't just be a separation on, and I'm quoting him, parchment.

• 19:22Greg Jackson?

  There has to be a meaningful uh, systems in place that force that separation. So that's where the checks and balances come into play to maintain that separation. So intentionally putting teeth into each of the branches. So they're mostly separate, yet they do overlap slightly in, in as much as they're positioned to be lobsters in a bucket. Whenever one starts to climb up too much, the other branch can or will. It's incentivized to pull down. That doesn't mean that it will, or that it will do it as fast as we want it to. Right? But the systems are in place to take, to make it so that when one of those lobsters is getting too far up, eventually.

• 20:07Greg Jackson?

  That that's there, right? The so one of them's gonna go, okay, no, no, no, no, no, no. You're getting too much. I like my power, so I need you back down.

• 20:14Speaker 01

  Are you guys all imagining lobsters with like James Madison's head and George Washington's head? Just being like, no, I marked that line, by the way, that made me laugh out loud when I was reading the book.

• 20:24Greg Jackson?

  Thank you.

• 20:24Speaker 01

  I was like, I'm like, yes, this is it. I think it is great, too, because you get into this and you you you come at this from a, you know, the angle of politics, which I think is interesting. I've always described the Constitution as a generational affair. You know, there's this concept that in history that all revolutions are a generational affair. And you have the first generation that lives it and the second generation knows it because they were there, but they were kids. And by the third generation, the revolution's dead. And that's the Civil War generation, really, in America. But when you think about it this way, what I say to them is, my students, anyway, that the American Revolution for these for these founders was a masterclass in every which way the government could abuse you.

• 21:05Speaker 01

  And when they sat down to write the Constitution, the original text is about trying to, you know, trying to set up a system that cannot reproduce that. And then the Bill of Rights, you can read the Bill of Rights as everything that happened to them. I mean, it's

• 21:19Greg Jackson?

  Absolutely, you can.

• 21:20Speaker 01

  Literally, you go, that happened, that happened, you can't do this. And and yeah.

• 21:24Greg Jackson?

  I mean, some of the things, they're just so specific, right? Yeah, it absolutely reads like a, if I may, it's like a divorcee listing all the things that they do not want in another partner, right? Yep, I remember when he did that. So that's never happening again.

• 21:40Speaker 01

  And the government can only have our son every other weekend.

• 21:43Greg Jackson?

  Boom.

• 21:46Greg Jackson?

  And it makes sense, right? Like, what are they gonna think through? What what are they've seen these very specific abuses? And and they're also very careful to say that this isn't that this isn't the limit. We're not putting a cap to to call these the only rights that a citizen has, but there are some that we definitely know get abused by government. So we're gonna list those right now.

• 22:07Speaker 01

  The Ninth Amendment, you know, all, you know, the way I always do it is I have hand signals to remember it, and I put up ten fingers and I hide my thumb. And I say, are you see nine fingers? Doesn't mean the tenth isn't there, right? Just because you don't see it doesn't mean it's not there. And I think when you consider it this way, you've tapped into the wisdom that these guys gained from it. But I think collectively, if you understand the story, what you really look at the Constitution is, as a love letter from a past generation trying to do what all generations do, which is, is to prevent their, the next generation from going through what they went through.

• 22:41Greg Jackson?

  Yeah.

• 22:42Speaker 01

  And you can't replace that. That's the thing to remember. We, we got lucky. The stories you tell, and you know, if there's any you want to go into, let me know. But the one that got me in this book was about the War of 1812. A war that we, that we just kind of gloss over, you know, we, we know anything about it. We're like tariffs or something, Andrew Jackson. And, but you've told this story about what it looks like on the ground. And could you, could you tell a little bit about that story as a teaser for this book? Because that, that story had me really upset, like upset as I was reading it.

• 23:13Greg Jackson?

  Sure. Yeah. So as we get to the War of 1812, I mean, I know this is really hard to wrap our heads around, Ben, but hear me out. We have two political parties. Two. Okay. And they are both convinced that they are the real patriots. Again, I realize this is very unfamiliar turf. They go so far as to think that the other party are actually filled with traitors to the nation. Again, inconceivable today, I realize this. And so, as the Jeffersonian Republican dominated Congress, so there, this party is also called Republicans, and let's, let's, let's be careful and clear, this party will eventually collapse,

• 23:58Greg Jackson?

  and then there will be another party started, right? In the 1850s. That, that's the GOP's origin point. But these early Republicans, these Jeffersonian Republicans, they control Congress. James Madison is a Republican. He's the founder of the party along with Jefferson. He just didn't get the credit. You know, you know how it is. Tommy's always like, hey, little Jimmy, go do this thing. And he's like, sure. And then Tom's like, oh, was it a good thing? That's my credit right there.

• 24:21Speaker 01

  Actually, I think Thomas Jefferson was like, hey, Jimmy, go do that. Didn't he have like a really high, he was like six foot two and had a highest pitched voice? I love it.

• 24:29Greg Jackson?

  You know, him, Lincoln, I guess that was a thing, you know?

• 24:31Speaker 01

  The taller you were, the more you lost, right?

• 24:33Greg Jackson?

  There it is. Yeah. So.

• 24:37Greg Jackson?

  But the Republicans, they control Congress. We have a declaration of war. Federalists are, of course, a gas. That's the other party. And we have this gentleman, Alex, living in Baltimore. He is a hyper partisan Federalist, and he has a newspaper confusingly named The Federal Republican. Yeah, that's great. But in it, he puts on blast the Republicans. I mean, he rips them apart

• 25:06Greg Jackson?

  for the declaration of war. He basically calls them, you know, all traitors. You're the worst. James Madison is a puppet of Napoleon, things to that effect. And the Jeffersonian Republicans, you know, respond just the way you'd expect in a responsible republic. They literally level his office building. The building, the entire office building. They rip it down as the mayor stands on the side saying, please don't do that. Yeah. So Alex and his buddy, Jacob, his co-editor, they respond in the only way one would expect. They come out with another paper. And when that

• 25:48Greg Jackson?

  one comes out, this is where things truly go off the rails. They have a new office building, and they've defended it. It's like Home Alone, right? Like, they have set up, it is booby-trapped, it is ready for the attack. And there they are with the likes of Light Horse Harry Lee. He's a Federalist, so he's in the house with them. General James Lingen, another former Continental Soldier, Officer. And it turns into a full-on street battle. The Republicans respond. They come throwing stones. Stones turn into musket fire. A cannon is brought out. And by the end of the night, to not give the whole story away, but to tell you where this goes, by the end of

• 26:31Greg Jackson?

  the night, these Federalists are placed in the jail, both said for protective custody and as being under arrest. The narrative is two different sides.

• 26:44Greg Jackson?

  The Republicans break into the jail to kill them. And the night does not end with everyone alive. I will leave it, I will say that. They are beaten with sticks, axes and swords are swung at them. They are poked with pin knives. My absolute gut turning moment, though, of all the violence carried out against them. Again, this is, this is partisanship driving it, right? The Republicans, to check if they're alive, hold their eyes open. Their fellow Americans hold their eyes open as they drip candle wax, burning candles drip candle wax on their eyeballs to see if their body, right, convulses, reacts. Yeah.

• 27:25Greg Jackson?

  And as they do that, this being a very gendered era, this is the men doing this. Their wives are present screaming, "Kill the Tories." And this is right out of primary sources. Children are dancing and clapping around them as the Republicans call these Federalists, quote unquote, Tories, which anyone who knows their revolutionary history knows exactly what that means. Basically, traitors. So, again, this is our allegedly enlightened early years. And this is where I just don't know what these enlightened years that we're supposedly trying to get back to are.

• 28:01Speaker 01

  Yes, there's the nostalgia.

• 28:04Greg Jackson?

  Yeah.

• 28:05Speaker 01

  Right? That we could just get back to, and it's like, be careful where you stop when you go back.

• 28:09Greg Jackson?

  Exactly.

• 28:10Speaker 01

  You know, this is a, this is a point that I think that your book makes really well here. You show that making good policy and creating a country we want to live in, you know, we want policymakers to have great foresight. But I think your book makes the case that great leaders also need to have great hindsight.

• 28:32Greg Jackson?

  Yes.

• 28:34Greg Jackson?

  I would absolutely agree with that.

• 28:35Speaker 01

  I think we all should too. Yeah, that story, the story of the War of 1812. It hit me because I thought about how many of the people that were involved had been part of the founding.

• 28:47Greg Jackson?

  I mean, the, the, the moment in that chapter, I'll, I'll go ahead and share this one too. The thing that hit me the most. It was General Lingan's death. So General Lingan, a Federalist, when he was a young Continental, he was, um, he was nearly killed by, by Hessians. In, in New York, in George Washington's campaign in 1776, right? The year that tries men's souls. Hessian bayonet rips through his chest. He's taken prisoner by the British. He's on a British prison ship, which is pretty much the most miserable experience any American could have in the American Revolution. It's a death sentence, nine times out of 10. I may be making up that statistic, but you take my point.

• 29:29Speaker 01

  Got it.

• 29:30Greg Jackson?

  Okay. Uh, he's approached by the British. This is true. He's approached by the British. He's offered a commission as a British officer. Clearly speaks to his intelligence capability and he's offered a huge signing bonus. Traditionally, that number is reported as 10,000 pounds. We don't know how accurate that, that is though. But that's the reported number. That's a fortune. He says no. He believes in the revolution. Fast forward to 1812. He's a Federalist. Again, a patriot, he believes in this vision that aligns more with Hamilton's vision than James Madison and Thomas Jefferson.

• 30:08Greg Jackson?

  But in this hyper partisan moment, these Republicans are convinced that Federalists are traitors. So he has been abused. He, he's been physically beaten along with this fellow Federalist. They're in this jail yard in Baltimore. And there's a conversation actively happening between the various Republicans about what they're going to do to Lingan. And as one of them calls him a Tory and a traitor because they know his past, right? So there's this moment of cognitive dissonance where the mob mentality breaks just a little bit. And this realization, wait a minute, this, this guy has given a lot for this country and we're calling him a traitor. What are we going to do to him? And someone yells out something to the effect of, he might have been a patriot then,

• 30:52Greg Jackson?

  but he's a traitor now. Lincoln tears his shirt open and says, does this look as if I was a traitor? That nasty purplish hued skin on his chest where a Hessian bayonet nearly ended his life. The crowd responds by hurling a stone that strikes him and knocks him over. It hits him right on the scar. And then the pin knives come out, the mob mentality is there and they just fall on him. He's dead by morning. This hero of the revolution is killed by people who call themselves patriots.

• 31:26Speaker 01

  It's heartbreaking. That's why I said when I, when I read this chapter, I didn't know the story and I, you know, it, it hurt. And I think it's a good reminder though, and this gets into an issue that you talk about in the book, that we allow ourselves to be overwhelmed by stories that are, you know, that you're directed with, with clear evidence, don't track.

• 31:50Greg Jackson?

  Yes.

• 31:50Speaker 01

  But your gut gets a hold of you instead of your mind.

• 31:53Greg Jackson?

  Yeah.

• 31:54Speaker 01

  And we see the worst things happening whenever you allow that to happen. You know, when you make these moves, this man who sacrificed, a man who could, you know, could have, I mean, his last moments must have been thinking like, did I make the right decision? I mean, this is this revolution is what he, he risked his life for. And now it took, the outcome took his life.

• 32:12Greg Jackson?

  Yeah. Well, arguably, he ultimately lived for and did die for that dream, right? He, he is effectively our first documented death. And remember that this goes back to a fight over the press, right? Over a newspaper saying things that the other party didn't like. You could arguably say that James Lincoln, general in, in a state militia, is effectively our, our first documented death for the first amendment, right? For the freedom of the press.

• 32:42Greg Jackson?

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• 33:26Greg Jackson?

  Taking that step can help bring a lot of clarity. If you've been waiting to start therapy, BetterHelp works with more than 125 health plan networks, and eligible members have an average copay of just $23 per session with insurance. Don't have insurance or don't live in the United States? You can still get 10% off your first month. Visit betterhelp.com/htds to explore your payment options. That's betterh-e-l-p.com/htds. History That Doesn't Suck is sponsored by Cash App. For all the parents out there like me who are raising teenagers, I see you. I know you're already trying to keep a million different things under control. Cash App is here to help make sure your teen's money and their spending isn't adding to that craziness.

• 34:11Greg Jackson?

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• 35:20Greg Jackson?

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• 36:04Greg Jackson?

  And listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to help get your job the premium status it deserves at indeed.com/podcast. Just go to indeed.com/podcast right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com/podcast. Need to hire? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs.

• 36:26Speaker 01

  Now, again, as I pointed out earlier on, one of the things that you're really good at is you take us from just staring straight into the darkness.

• 36:34Greg Jackson?

  Yeah.

• 36:35Speaker 01

  And you pull us back out. And one of the things that you say that I like, you know, we can feel overwhelmed whenever we see all of it at once. And, and I get it. And you know, your opening line, you say, it's never been worse. The refrain is common, and although I reject it, I get it. And this is what I love about your approach. You're not telling people they're wrong. You're saying, I get why you feel this way. But I want to walk you through a story that pulls you out. And your simple solution, and I think this is why, in a weird way, this book can be called Practical. It says, "To fix the big things, what you can do is you can, as an individual, begin to steel yourself against the worst impulses." So could you talk about that?

• 37:18Greg Jackson?

  Absolutely. And, you know, I'm grateful to my editor. She pushed me on this. She's part of the reason why this book took more of that approach. To get back to where we started with this conversation in a way. Again, the founders assumed rightly that the worst of human impulses would attack this republic. And so they built it ready and able to endure our worst. But for it to truly endure, it also requires at least a core of us to give it our best. So that's where this concept of public virtue, it's a phrase that the founders used, right? Comes up.

• 38:03Greg Jackson?

  Now, what does that idea of public virtue mean to us today? That's where I ultimately go. By the time we get, after we go through these stories that I hope convinces all of us that we can get through our present because we've been through so much worse. But how do we continue on? This isn't just hope for hope's sake. That's a fairy tale. This is hope based in reality, which means we have things that we have to do. So that public virtue, that comes down to civic engagement. It comes down to perpetual learning, right? Not just going to college to get a degree.

• 38:44Greg Jackson?

  And I think fewer people do that than sometimes is perceived. But, you know, Ben, we both had those students where you're like, okay, you're definitely here to get a piece of paper.

• 38:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:54Greg Jackson?

  But so many others, and I think anyone listening to this podcast, right? These are people who want to learn. You want to better yourself constantly. We need that. And that's what sharpens our mind to be able to discern and judge as we vote. And that brings us to civic engagement. Now, that can look like a lot of different things. Things at the high level. Sure, it means running for office, but I also want to remind those listening and those who read the book that running for office doesn't mean running for Congress. Your city needs someone on, you know, on the library committee, right? These appointed offices or volunteer positions. All of those things need to be done. And that is how we

• 39:37Greg Jackson?

  carry this republic forward. It's it's service. It's being educated. And and we've got to curate our own media consumption in order to do that.

• 39:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, the the golden thing to me about history is that it is not a class. And people think of it as a class. You know, my students go, I'm not good at history. I go, you're not good at anything that's happened before. Like, no, what you think is you're not good at memorizing names and dates outside of a context, you know, I always tell them, I'm like, how many of you guys have seen the Avengers movie? And, you know, a bunch of them raise their hand and I go, tell me about Iron Man. And they'll, okay, well, you know, he seems like he doesn't care, but he does, you know, and then go into all these end up stories. And I go like, how many hours have you spent watching Avengers movie? And they're like, probably like eight or nine. And I'm like, but what if I just gave you a list of all those characters with traits listed underneath them?

• 40:29Speaker 01

  And sent you home right now and said, in nine hours come back, there's going to be a quiz on all these characters. Could you memorize like 30 characters and their traits? No. Well, yeah, exactly. Because if you think of history as random dates and on a list and not a story, then you're gonna fail because because you can't just, it doesn't matter, you know?

• 40:49Greg Jackson?

  No, it doesn't. You have to have stories. And I've been right that this is, this is what informs our approach. History has to have the story in it. That's what makes us care. It's when you're invested in the characters that it comes to life. And I think it's perfectly appropriate to think of these historical figures and sure, we approach it, I mean, on HD, yes, I approach this with rigor, primary and secondary sources. We never make anything up, but think of these past figures as characters and we're following their arc.

• 41:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, everything you read in history is just a previous chapter to the one you were born into.

• 41:24Greg Jackson?

  Exactly.

• 41:25Speaker 01

  You're writing a chapter now, but you're not, you weren't born into nothing. You were born into a story that was already being written. And if you don't know it, your editor's a vanity.

• 41:32Greg Jackson?

  And Ben, this is where I understand why we can feel like today is so bad because you're on the blank page as it's being written. That's terrifying. It's always terrifying. It doesn't matter how, how, how bad those previous chapters were. You know that they end okay because your chapter exists, right? So we can look at something as bleak as Antietam, the bloodiest single day in American history, and we can read about that. And it's not that we're dismissing the violence and death, the astounding figures of over 22,000 Americans becoming casualties that day. But we read that and we know that the Republican doers, that those deaths weren't in vain, that it led to the American experiment continuing.

• 42:16Greg Jackson?

  And there is a calming peace to that. And even if the Battle of Antietam, so, so long ago, we're not looking at those sorts of casualty numbers here in 2026, but we don't know what comes tomorrow. And that makes our tomorrow more scary than this awful day a century and a half ago.

• 42:36Speaker 01

  But not scarier than their tomorrow.

• 42:38Greg Jackson?

  Correct.

• 42:39Speaker 01

  They had every bit the doubts and uncertainty about where things were going. Like you know how it ends. They did not.

• 42:44Greg Jackson?

  And that's what I want the reader to get. And they not only saw that sort of harrowing moment, but they passed this republic on to us, this republic that we have continued two steps forward, one step back. And your politics will, will inform what you think were those steps forward and those steps back. But I think most of us would agree, if we really pause and think about it, this is a better republic today than it was 250 years ago. That's longer than the constitution, but let me embrace that number as we, you know, live in this America 250 moment, right? This started beautiful as the ideas where this started as a limited republic that by and large you had

• 43:28Greg Jackson?

  To be a property owning white man in order to have a vote in. We have expanded this for all of our concerns in the present. We have expanded this to truly be in a republic where, again, we can talk about policy issues. But the premise is that as an adult with citizenship in this nation, no sex nor creed, you name it, is denied the vote that you have that right. This is a wildly improved republic. If they could overcome their challenges and they could deliver us something better today, how on earth can we say to ourselves that we are incapable of doing the same for the next generation?

• 44:10Speaker 01

  This is, this is why I think staring into the darkness is important. You know, I, you know, there's two moments that I really in my, in my 20th century US history class, I say, you know, if you're looking at what's going on in Europe in the 40s, right? With the Nazi war machine.

• 44:25Greg Jackson?

  Right.

• 44:26Speaker 01

  You can be for, you could look at someone, you could look at you and go, they're unstoppable. And you can understand why they would say that. But people didn't let that stop. And there are people who died on the beaches of Normandy to leave a world behind. They never got to see.

• 44:40Greg Jackson?

  Yeah. And they don't know how the story ended.

• 44:42Speaker 01

  They don't.

• 44:42Greg Jackson?

  That's it.

• 44:43Speaker 01

  But they went in and, and they left this to us. When you look at the Freedom Riders, you know, 1961, they go through the South. You look at that and you go, this isn't even a couple of years of a war machine. This is hundreds of years of white supremacy.

• 44:57Greg Jackson?

  And Ben, can we just pause and, and think about the, you're, you're now naming a date that there are, there are listeners right now who have memories. Right? It is not that long ago when you really pause and think about it.

• 45:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, but my father was born in 1945 and once we get past this, I constantly say, you know, okay, so the Freedom Riders faced this in, in 1961. My father was 16.

• 45:22Greg Jackson?

  Right.

• 45:23Speaker 01

  Roughly the same age as you guys are in this class that are right now. There's two ways that I always try to demonstrate to them, and this is why you got to stare into the darkness. Cause you got to say, there were people up against things that when you look at, you say, how would they ever get out of that?

• 45:39Speaker 01

  And then they did.

• 45:40Greg Jackson?

  Bingo.

• 45:41Speaker 01

  Cause they didn't stop. They didn't let any, they didn't believe the other stories. They said, well, either it will endure or I will go down trying to bring that to life.

• 45:50Greg Jackson?

  And you know, Ben, we can. Even go right back to the founding for that. I am so glad that that founding generation had the spirit of seventy six that they did not say, well, yeah, we have these concepts of liberty, but you know, they'll just never happen. Look at the way King George the third abuses us. Oh, well, we don't, we don't have the vote in parliament.

• 46:09Speaker 01

  What are we gonna do? Take on the world's greatest empire? We don't have a navy. Okay. Um, the two, the two ways that I, that I try to drive this home to my students is I go, all right, you guys are all like rah rah democracy, like seventeen seventy six. Okay. Let's just do this experiment. This is great in a college classroom. I go, all right. White people, raise your hands. You know who you are, right? And they all raise their hands. And I go, all right. Everybody put them down instead for white men. And then you got hands. I go, okay, cool. Now keep your hands up if you own property. And then a couple of them have their hands up. I go, not if your dad owns property, if you own property. And then all their hands go down. And then I go, oh, just me?

• 46:50Speaker 01

  I love this democracy. Let's get to voting. And then I go now, and then I kind of laugh, and then I go, now put your hands up if you can vote now.

• 46:57Greg Jackson?

  See, and that's beautiful, Ben.

• 46:59Speaker 01

  I go, that's the difference. And I also remind them that, you know, I can tell you, this isn't even, this is even from seventeen seventy six to now. My father was born in nineteen forty five. In nineteen forty five, it was legal to segregate. Segregation was the, the practice of the day. My father was born in nineteen forty five and segregation was endorsed by the federal government. When my son was born, we had a black president. That's a hell of a swing for three generations.

• 47:22Greg Jackson?

  That is.

• 47:23Speaker 01

  And it didn't happen because people gave up. Now, I want, I want to interrogate something here. I want to, I want to bring something up here because I know that anytime you say responsibility ultimately starts with yourself. There's a lot of people who go, oh, you can't do that because people are too dumb. And you have a great point in here. And you say that if you don't trust ability, Americans' ability to judge news sources and sort through this, uh, then you really ultimately don't trust Americans' ability to self govern. And to talk about this, back this up.

• 47:55Greg Jackson?

  Yeah, Ben, I mean, writing this book, this project, it took me to places again that I, I just didn't expect. Uh, I didn't, I didn't see coming. And they. I think our most profound moments often are the simplest, right? You know, you're capturing something meaningful when, as you see it, you have the thought, "How did I not see that before?" That seems just so painfully obvious, and yet it crystallizes for you. For us to say, and you know, this is built on, keep in mind, this book has been three years in the making, so I have now pored over the hyper-partisan print wars of the 1790s,

• 48:37Greg Jackson?

  the fake news, fake news being defined. I use only the definition given by journalists and academics, which is that it's not only incorrect information, but it is intentionally so. That is a meaningful delineation, right? That the reporter, him herself, does not believe that it's true. They are trying to sow doubt. They're trying to obscure the truth. And we see that. I've found it throughout the 19th century, but really coming to bear in a painful way in the yellow journalism of the late 19th century. Seeing these intentional attempts to obfuscate, to lead Americans astray, seeing political

• 49:21Greg Jackson?

  violence on the level of hot wax being dripped on people's eyeballs. So just stick with that example, there are plenty of authors in the book, right? And contested elections that led to candidates for the highest offices both insisting that they won. I'm looking at all of these moments, and I see the American experiment enduring, and it is because our better angels refuse to give up. And that, to me, is government by the people, for the people, hanging in there. I think for us to cynically say that we can't do it today, when the vote has never been more accessible, when we have never been more able to communicate...

• 50:07Greg Jackson?

  To only see the weaknesses of the ability of new technology to further sow seeds of doubt and not see the other side of that same sword, which allows us to better get information out. That is to admit that we do not actually believe in the American experiment, that we do not trust the American people to read, to evaluate, and to make decisions, and to mess up, absolutely, to cast votes that you will later regret. That is a part of the process. We don't get it right every single time, but in the long run, to believe that we will get to the right place, that we will keep this ship afloat. You cannot simultaneously reject the average American's ability to participate in the political

• 50:49Greg Jackson?

  process and state that you believe in the republic. That really came, to be clear for me, as I watched, as I read through and saw Americans imperfectly, generation after generation, sort through all of these same challenges with the news, with electoral processes, with political violence that we see today.

• 51:11Speaker 01

  There's a line in here that I'm gonna say right now, and then it goes along with this, but I want to say this because I realize that there will probably be an army of thousands of people who do not like this line and immediately go to debunk you. And the line is that the 24-hour news cycle that began in the 1980s was a, quote, "small-scale technological revolution." Not that big of a deal.

• 51:32Greg Jackson?

  Sure.

• 51:33Speaker 01

  So go get the book right now and write something meaningful. Don't just argue with me. I just said it, right? The book makes a good case, and if he's wrong, you need to read the book just to prove that. I wonder, Greg, I want to pull outside the bounds of your book for a minute.

• 51:50Greg Jackson?

  Okay.

• 51:51Speaker 01

  And throw an idea at you that I have that I think might work well with us in terms of understanding it. And that is, you know, if we look at the founding generation and understand how their world shaped, you know, the decisions they made and how they saw the world, then it's worth contemplating where we are and where we might be. And I just want to lay out an idea for you. I have this, it's not a perfect kind of way to put about it, but that there's really two things that happened to the United States that continue to shape us and our perspectives on government. And the first thing is the end of the World War II moment.

• 52:28Greg Jackson?

  Yeah.

• 52:28Speaker 01

  I mean, I don't think Americans recognize, you know, when the rest of the world is destroyed, you come home having defeated some of the greatest war machines ever, ever created. You, you unlock the power of the atom.

• 52:42Greg Jackson?

  Yeah.

• 52:43Speaker 01

  You do all of that and you come back to a world that is, major cities are destroyed. You've convinced the rest of the world to use your currency as their currency backed up by gold. You then loan hundreds of millions and I don't even know what the number is in today's terms to the rest of the world and they pay you back with interest. Uh, it's the best buy model, right? That's the reason they always try to get you to get the credit card. Because the sale is sweet, but getting interest on it's even sweeter. And we had a 60% of the world's industrial, uh, you know, capacities by the highest estimates, somewhere between 50 and 60%. And it happened in the Cold War at a time where we needed to tell the world that we were the best. And I think what happened is we started believing we were just special.

• 53:28Speaker 01

  That we're just special. That is not work. It's not something that somehow some higher power has made us great. And that all fell apart in the seventies because the rest of the world rebuilt and started catching up with us. And that occurs at the same time as, as the, as the public confidence breakers, which is Vietnam, Watergate, I would throw Iran contra in there, which often gets written out. Series of presidents from multiple parties. And between them, Jimmy Carter having the gall to tell Americans to buy less. Are you kidding me? You guys ever seen that jerk? He's up there all like, we have enough. Should we love our families and just have, just be fine with this? And America's like, we're gonna crucify you in 1980. But I think there's these two things, which is this break in trust.

• 54:13Speaker 01

  The Cold War era belief that we're just special because of a momentary thing that happened. And I think that we are, the analogy I use is, uh, we're in mourning. And what's happened with, with our partisanship is that when Carter said to everybody, hey, look, you can't always, you can't have everything forever. For, you know, infinitely, the Democrats said, nah, let's not do that again. And they've been locked in the denial phase of mourning. But the Republicans have advanced to the anger stage of mourning. And that's the reason they're winning. Because they're more advanced. But I think that that's what shapes us is this kind of, we don't want to acknowledge what's

• 54:55Speaker 01

  happened, but that we need to really to be able to process all this, get to the acceptance phase. What do you think about this?

• 55:02Greg Jackson?

  Ben, I'm processing some of the, what you put before me here, man.

• 55:06Speaker 01

  I wish Greg goes, no, that was stupid.

• 55:08Greg Jackson?

  No, no, not at all. No, not at all. You know, you know how slow, methodical and meticulous I am.

• 55:15Speaker 01

  Let me put it another way.

• 55:16Greg Jackson?

  No, no, no, no, no. I, I, I'm, I'm, I'm with you. I, I actually really think that this is, this is an interesting framework. My, my reaction to that is to say that I, I definitely believe, and I believe it because of my studies, not, not out of some gut sense. I believe that the American republic, the constitution as conceived, and the way that we have altered and amended those crucial concepts to what we are today, continues to be imperfect, but a still more perfect union. It is special. I do believe it's special. That's not a special that allows you to stop working.

• 56:01Greg Jackson?

  And that is what gets to what you're, you're pointing to. And that is the failure that I, I think we do grapple with in the present is that the sense that we're, we're supposed to, because of the specialness of this framework, just have special outcome all the time. Rather, you know, Uncle Sam, if we can personify the, the nation, has to remember that being an elite athlete means continuing to train.

• 56:27Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 56:27Greg Jackson?

  You don't get to sit back and just call it a day just because you've got gold medals. If you want to keep winning gold, you have to stay sharp. And I suppose in, in a way, we might say, well, I'm begging Americans to do, what I'm pleading with Uncle Sam to do in this book is to remember that, one, you're complaining about a race today that is shorter.

• 56:50Greg Jackson?

  And has a lower threshold in order to qualify than races you have smoked in the past. Please remember that. And two, you know what? You are right that you can't qualify today if you're not going to train. And that is where I get back to this being a reality grounded hope. This is not a promise that everything's going to be great, butterflies and, you know, ponies for everyone. No. This republic is something special and delivers something special when the American people live up to the hard work that it is to have those gifts. And that hard work does include constant parsonship. It can be better than it is right now. I do

• 57:35Greg Jackson?

  believe, but you do have to accept that parsonship is a constant.

• 57:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I like it. That's, that makes me happy because I think that in this is the idea that sometimes we, sometimes we, what we have here is an inheritance. And that's what history is, is studying the inheritance that was left to you. And if you're not careful, you can squander it. But if you understand it was an inheritance that you didn't earn and study the people who passed you the inheritance, then you can be a good steward to it.

• 58:05Greg Jackson?

  This is an amazing trust. Don't blow it.

• 58:08Speaker 01

  Yes. Because I just, I just think that if you believe that you're inherently special and things don't feel really great for you, you are prone to be duped by the worst people. You know, because of mindfulness, right? A mindfulness that this was passed to you when things go wrong, the smart question is what happened? But the demagogues always say, who did this? And feeling like you're special means you're supposed to be special. It must be someone's fault whenever you don't feel good.

• 58:37Greg Jackson?

  Well, and that Ben, that is why I do like pulling to the idea that our ideas, our framework, that is special. I do not want to mistake myself for being special.

• 58:50Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 58:50Greg Jackson?

  What we have is special. It deserves my blood, sweat and tears to hold it together. And I can't do that by myself. It is we, the people, we are in this together. And that means across the aisle, too. I need smart people who disagree with me to participate.

• 59:08Speaker 01

  That's, that's beautiful. I like that distinction because it's like, we're not special, but we have something special. It's ours. That's beautiful. To conclude here, I want to, um, I want to ask you about something that's different about this book than your podcast.

• 59:23Greg Jackson?

  Okay.

• 59:25Speaker 01

  Your podcast is beloved and I love it too, because Greg, I just want to say this, you and I have become friends over the idea that at the starting point, from moment one with history, it belongs to all of us.

• 59:35Greg Jackson?

  Yes.

• 59:36Speaker 01

  And it never fits what you want it to fit. And, you know, when you tell the story honestly, no one gets exactly what they want.

• 59:43Greg Jackson?

  Amen.

• 59:44Speaker 01

  But you've still got to tell the story to understand how it processed. And this is what I love about you, Greg, and this is why this book is important. And this is why this country needs you. And I'm honored to be here with you right now. But you do something different here, because in this book, you really engage with very recent history in a way that I think both your audience will find different, but also even us as historians sometimes hesitate to step outside the bounds of, you know, at least 25, 30 years ago.

• 1:00:10Greg Jackson?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:10Speaker 01

  And this comes with your discussion of the election of 1876 and the parallels with the election of 2020. And I was wondering if you could talk about that and how you came to the decision to, to step into that, um, when it is different than, than what we've seen from you before.

• 1:00:27Greg Jackson?

  With my gut in a knot then, because I didn't want to. We get back to projects being bigger than ourselves, right? Where we end up in places we didn't foresee. And so many times as I work through, whether it's getting to political philosophy, as I'm diving into Madison in a way I didn't expect, but you know, that, that kind of feels a little bit better. I did not foresee, and, and upon reflection, I feel like I should have. I felt compelled as a historian. I had to. How could I write a book in which I engage with

• 1:01:06Greg Jackson?

  the election of 1876, which I, I selected because it's truly the most corrupt election. I stand by that. Is the most corrupt election, presidential election in American history.

• 1:01:20Greg Jackson?

  It is an election in which four states sent more than one set of electoral votes to Congress.

• 1:01:29Greg Jackson?

  Sent three. Yeah, Florida, of course.

• 1:01:31Speaker 01

  Well, Greg, can I also add, I'm from North Carolina. So I'm obligated to point out that South Carolina sent totals that were 101% of the population, thus proving my North Carolinian claim that South Carolinians can't count. Anyway, go ahead.

• 1:01:45Greg Jackson?

  So, you know, I started there because this is such an egregious failure, right? And South Carolina is 101%. You talk about voter fraud, that's when it's obvious. That is when it's obvious. Even the humanities guy can look at that and go, something's wrong. Yeah, I can handle that math. But for all the talk of bribery, the actual murder, right? Deaths at the hands of paramilitary groups, the white league and so forth, killing black voters. What I did not appreciate, even though I lived through this, right?

• 1:02:29Greg Jackson?

  But the way it hits after I have torn through this election and the history of all the moments at which Congress had to sort through contested elections. The way that 1876 was so pivotal in what Vice President Mike Pence had to say that very day and what Senator Lindsey Graham said that night after January 6th, as the Senate reconvened. In my mind, to be the historian that I am, the historian that my audience knows and beyond audience, the historian I want to be, I have to follow the sources. That's what a historian does. It doesn't matter if it's uncomfortable.

• 1:03:12Greg Jackson?

  That discomfort is much easier to handle when it's 150 years ago. You know, even now, as HTS gets into World War II, it's still easier, but now I'm dealing with this discomfort right in my face in 2020, having not appreciated how into the present that assessing the election of 1876 was going to take me. One, I think doing this in a book gives me a space to be able to do this without broaching that on HTDS, right? But two, I did realize that.

• 1:03:43Greg Jackson?

  January 6th deserved the same sort of analysis that I brought to the Baltimore riots of 1812, right, to try and tear through the sources and tell the story, as you said, Ben, without, you're not looking to make heroes, you're not looking to make villains, you're trying to let the sources do the talking. And it was an important component of showing how the election of 1876, this moment that broke us, or at least that's how Americans felt. Jeremiah Black, an attorney who represented the Democrats, as the election turned into an absolute nightmare of a fight in Congress, he exclaimed that we will never have such a

• 1:04:26Greg Jackson?

  thing as an honest election again. He wasn't being hyperbolic. He was confident, he was sure that this election had broken America, that the presidential election of 1876 had ensured it. And for me to then tear through this moment in 2020, this moment that, to this day, it hurts for Americans of all sorts of political convictions, to feel that same sort of sentiment, and for me to be able to look at Jeremiah, see that same despondency, right, to look into that abyss and see him there, see his face reflected back at mine, and then to be able to think that we've gotten to a place that this is such a forgotten

• 1:05:08Greg Jackson?

  election, that there's this vague recollection that something seedy happened, but that we could have these great highs, this golden era that followed, that we all now look back upon, and romanticize. This was far before America's peak 20th century moments. If we could build to that and be in a place where the senator from the state that cast 101% of their votes has to remind his colleagues on the Senate floor of that election and how it went, because even they don't remember the details, that tells me 2020 is not insurmountable.

• 1:05:52Greg Jackson?

  This republic is absolutely viable. And that is where we get hope out of the darkness, man. And how could I not bring that to bear?

• 1:06:02Speaker 01

  I agree, Greg. And you guys should read the book. Check it out for yourself. I couldn't recommend it more. You know, this is a book that I feel like Americans need to read. And I feel like, I don't know how you guys feel, but I feel like we're finally getting tired of it. I feel like we're finally getting tired of being told that we shouldn't trust our brothers and sisters, that fellow Americans, that we shouldn't talk to them. And I think this book right here is a bridge that we need between that divide to hopefully eventually just close the chasm, because it doesn't need to be there. The book has been there, done that. How our history shows what we can overcome. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in applauding for Dr. Greg Jackson.

• 1:06:45Greg Jackson?

  HTDS is supported by fans at htdspodcast.com/membership. My gratitude to you kind souls providing funding to help us keep going. Thank you. And a special thanks to our patrons whose monthly gift puts them at producer status. Adam Goran, Ahmed Chapman, Amy and Ross Hensman, Andrew Nissen, Andrew Sherwin, Anna M. Huta, Art Lang, Baby Nico, Bob Stinnet, Bonnie Brooks, Brian Gavigan, Brian Boils, Brian Goodson, Bruce Hibbert, Kayden Hallitz, Charles Clendenin, Charles Starkey, Charlie Majes,

• 1:07:27Greg Jackson?

  Christopher Merchant, Christopher Lyle, Christopher Pullman, Christopher Young, Cody Brown, Colleen Martin, Colin Ferris Pennington, Connor Hogan, Craig Burhost, Dan G., Daniel Beacham, Daniel Lucana, Darren Chambers, Daryl the Kid Lovell, David Rifkin, Dean Heiser, Deronte Spencer, Donald Moore, Eli Edwards, Elizabeth Chris Janson, Ellen Stewart, Ernesto Franco, Ernie Lomaster, Ethan Lowery, Even Thompson, G2303, Jeffrey Nelson, George J. Sherwood, Gareth Griffin, Gina Johnson, Gordon Garwood, Henry Brunges, Holly Hamilton, Jake Gilbreth, James Bledsoe. James Blue, James Schlender, Jarrett Zangora, Jeffrey Moots, Jennifer Minjioni,

• 1:08:07Greg Jackson?

  Jennifer Ruth, Jessica Poppin, Joe Dobis, John Booby, John Frugal Dugal, John Huber, John Messmer, John Oliveros, John Radlavich, John Schaefer, Jonathan Schaff, Jordan Corbett, Joseph Curry, Joshua Steiner, Julian Wright, Justin Tolman, Karen Bartholomew, Carl Friedman, Carl Romer, Ken Culver, Kim R., Kimberly Pruitt, Kristen Pratt, Kyle Decker, L. Paul Goringer, Laura Norman, Lawrence Neubauer, Linda Cunningham, Mark D. Worl, Mark Ellis, Marcia Smith, Mason Glenn, Matt Siegel, Michael Longus, Michael Sullivan, Nick Caprell, Nicholas Powell, Owen W. Sedlak, Paul Huguenron, Philip May, Randy Keen, Rich Ruckel, Rick Brown, Rob Dravovic,

• 1:08:49Greg Jackson?

  Robert Shelton, Brock Gay, Ryan Fogelman, Sam Holtzman, Sarah Prescott, Sarah Traywood, Scott Hurst, Shane Smith, Shannon Hoagland, Sharon Thezen, Sean Baines, Sean Collins, Stacy Ritter, Steve Williams, The Creepy Girl, Thomas Churchill, Thomas Matthew Edwards, Thomas Sabbath, Tim and Sarah Turner, Todd Curran, Tom Bestafka, Travis Cox, Walter M. Ames, Wesley McKee, William Durham, William Curry, William Thompson, and Zach Jackson. Join me in two weeks, or I'd like to tell you a story.