Hollywood Film LIES, American Revolution & Human Nature | Reel History

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Shopify takes care so much that you're not going to have to worry about that, and you can focus on the things that matter. Today, Shopify powers millions of businesses worldwide. From household names like Mattel and Jim Shark to small businesses, just getting started with Shopify. Nothing stands between your idea and a real business. So go make one. Start your free trial today at shopify.com/julian. That link is in my description below. Once again, that shopify.com/julian. Link in my description below. All right. You got me in costume today. I like it. Yes, sir. So they would wear some yellow. I always thought the American Revolution side had like a little blue and a little bit of red with the black. And you're telling me that there was like yellow. There was sometimes variation depending upon where you came from or what regiment you were in. So you are wearing the uniform of the 13th Virginia infantry, which fought the Battle of Germantown, Brandywine, and then they helped to guard Fort Pitt and what later became Pittsburgh in Western Pennsylvania. No kidding. There you go. Now, were they descendants as a regimen of like what George Washington was commanding when they were still under Britain back in DeFrench and Indian war times? And it just translated into this. So they come from the same region. But it's entirely different from internally. Generally, yeah. Got it. Well, Jair, it's great to have you here, man. Thank you for having me. And obviously, you have a very unique background because I know as we're coming up here on the American 250th, you know, we've been trying to cover some good American history in here. I had some cool people, but you're unique in the sense that not only do you cover all the different hours of American history through your work and your writing and your teaching, but you also have the whole aspect of like comparing it on YouTube to what we see in Hollywood media and what's accurate and what's not. In some cases ruining my life. I'm sorry. With things that I really, really like. So we'll discuss that today. But what got you into American history in the first place? And I also forgot to say this. Just pull that mic up towards you when you're talking. I've always had an interest in vintage things. And I can even remember the first history books that I bought. You know, they're like those little scholastic book orders that you would get in grade school and elementary school. So the first of those that I bought were biographies on George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. Oh, wow. And I still have those books today. Many hundreds more on top of it. But really my interest in history grew in earnest when I was seven years old. And I saw the movie Gettysburg. You ever seen that one? So it's a four hour movie. It might seem odd that something that long would hold the attention of someone who's in first grade. But perhaps that spoke to just how unusual of a grade school or if it was. But the following year, my parents took me on a summer trip to Gettysburg. Oh, wow. And there's a certain power to place. I mean, when you go somewhere, when you go to the World Trade Center Memorial, when you go to Gettysburg, when you go to Valley Forge, you feel something when you go there that you can't feel by just paging through a book or even watching a movie in some cases. And so the story of that place really resonated with me. And the bug bit me and there was no turning back. Hey, guys, if you're not following me on Spotify, please hit that follow button and leave a five star review. They're both a huge huge help. Thank you. And long story short, 15 years later, I found myself working. There's a park ranger at Gettysburg, at Gettysburg, giving tours to the very sort of people that I once was, a tourist who was interested in learning more. So it's been a hell of a journey. And I love it. That's fascinating, man. I actually, similarly, I obviously didn't take the full history jump that you did and go and teach it and everything. But I do love history. And when I was young, around when I was 10 years old, my grandpa took me to Gettysburg as well. And it's one of those things. I forget what what section of it it's called. But when you're standing on the rock wall, where you can see the full vantage point of like a lot of the battlefield there. And you're just kind of quiet for many. Even as a 10-year-old, where you can't fully understand it, there's still something very heavy in the fact that you get it. And you're like, wow. And it's not only the fact that you're absorbing what happened there. But it's about family as well. Because you have a fun memory of being with your family while you were there too. So yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So, and you became a park rager, then you said? Yes. So I worked there from 2009 through 2013. And so cool. It is such an incredible experience. It's one thing to be an educator in a classroom and an indoor environment. But you have the greatest PowerPoint background in the world when you get to work in a national park. And one of the really fantastic things about it was being able to interact with people from all over the world. People are drawn to that place for all sorts of different reasons. Some people hike there. Some people love the history. Some people do bird watching. But everybody seeks a connection. And it's almost spiritual. And how it resonates with people. So yeah. Now for people out there who are brushed up on the American Civil War and the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863, what made that battle of all of them the most consequential? And also like one of the largest, I think it was the largest casualty battle in the world, right? Yes, so 165,000 people fought there. 165,000. 165,000. So I teach Penn State Outtune and how I always frame it for students. Our football stadium holds about 110,000 people at the university park. And so I tell them picture that stadium full on a game day, like against Ohio State or something like that. And then picture another 50,000, 55,000 people outside tailgating. Give each one of them a musket and then shoot a third of them. That's what the Battle of Gettysburg is. A third of them died. Killed, wounded, captured or missing. Yeah. It's wild to me that, you know, the country we enjoy now had these two moments. The first words like this should never happen because a bunch of rebels got in a bar and said, "Fuck England," right? And then it turned into something. And then the second being, they get the ultimate tests, roughly 85 years later, to where it literally splits off from itself and could have just made the world a whole different place if that war went a different way. Yeah. And even people who fought in the Civil War, they thought of it as the continuation of the American Revolution, really. And people on both sides, I mean, when you look at the Confederates, who are looking to create their own country to perpetuate the growth of slavery, they think of themselves as the rebels, like we are fighting against big, authoritative government that won't let us have our way. And meanwhile, you have people like Abraham Lincoln, they're saying, "No, we need to uphold the country that the founding fathers created 85 years ago." And so it's, and history's kind of the same way today, whether you look at it left or right, people often appropriate history to suit their own purposes. I mean, you can look at the Tea Party on one end and you can look at the No Kings rally on the other. And both of them harken back to some of the themes of the American Revolution. So in that regard, we've never really changed that much. Yeah, that's kind of wild to me, like how you can literally take the same thing and make different, or take pieces of it to create like a different narrative today. But it's, it's also, it's reflective of the fact that even though we are 250 now in the eyes of the world, that's an infant country. And it's the ultimate experiment that's ever happened. I mean, we don't have a, you go to these countries in Africa, you go to these countries in Europe, you go to these countries in Asia, they have people and ethnicities that have been there for thousands of years in some cases. We have everything that's come in here to form America. And we're still obviously trying to figure it out these days. Like as a historian, it's got to be interesting living through the continuation of that, no? I think of the United States right now. We're kind of in our teenage years. It's how I think of it. And the late great Robert DeVal kind of made a similar comparison. He is, he said America is like this big-hearted, big muscular teenage football player who's kind of standing at the crossroads. And we're trying to figure out where we want to go and what we want to do. And so I think the teenager analogy, especially in the broad scope of human history and other nations is a very apt one. Because we're kind of trying to figure ourselves out. We've kind of gone through a rebellious phase. We perhaps don't know where we want to go. We're questioning what do we stand for. And us as individuals, we all go through those sorts of questions and crises in our own lifetimes. And so I think looking at it through that sort of personified lens might be a little bit helpful and determining where we're going to go. I agree. And I think again, it puts it in perspective like how young things are here. And like that can go the wrong way. You know, you see kids go off the deep end and suddenly their whole life is over and whatever, because they make bad decisions. So we have to make, I guess collectively, some good decisions. But being as it is like 250 years since these guys, pointing at Mel Gibson. Oh, Mel Gibson. He was there on the table. Yes, that's my American Revolution guy. The guys wearing my uniform though decide to do this whole thing and create the country. I guess let's start there. So obviously we know the story about the Declaration of Independence. And they go against Britain because they didn't like taxes and everything. And eventually we're able to beat the big bad Mahimuth and then somehow form this country under this thing called the Constitution. After some years of hammering and fighting about it and everything comes together and it's all hunky-dory. But what do you think the most misunderstood part about the build up to the Revolutionary War is the people out there often get wrong? I think people often underestimate just how complicated a conflict that it was. We think of it as a revolution, but as H. W. Brands has pointed out it was also a civil war within a revolution. And under certain circumstances, especially if you're a Native American or an African American seeking your freedom, it's also a race war within a civil war within a revolution. And so it's incredibly messy. You have neighbors turning against neighbors. You have region turning against region. In many ways our civil war was a sectional war, more so than a civil war. It was geographically divided north versus south. Whereas the American Revolution from a textbook definition is more along the lines of a civil war because you have people in the same regions and sometimes in the same neighborhoods who are turning against each other. And so even though we think of the American Revolution in kind of star-spangled awesome ways, it's important to note the incredibly tragic consequences that it unleashed for untold thousands of people who experienced it. On one hand, the Patriot-minded folks who gained their freedom, they form a representative government, they embark on this great experiment as you alluded to. If you're a Native person now, chances are you're going to be displaced, perhaps beyond the Mississippi River. If you're a loyalist living in a place like Philadelphia or even right here in the New York area, chances are you're going to be sent on a ship and you're going to go back to England to live with people who are more like-minded. 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It wasn't as black and white as we often like to make it. Yeah, it's actually it's ironic because I had a great conversation with HW but we didn't get a ton to the civil war aspect of it. We touched on it but to your point where you're saying a lot of at the end of the war a lot of loyalists had to go back to England. There's also apparently a lot of loyalists that were like forced into Canada and everything and effectively the way I understood it correct me from wrong here is that if you had been a loyalist throughout the war, you were pretty much kicked out of the country. Like there weren't really loyalists that were able to stay behind and be like, well, you guys won. Congratulations. We'll just fucking stay with our farm here. Yeah. And on top of that too, just to add another wrinkle to all of it, we can also think about the Hessians, the mercenary soldiers brought in from Bavaria and different areas of modern day Germany. Interestingly enough, George Washington took a more forgiving tone with them than what many patriots did with the loyalists because many Americans, even though they feared the Hessians saw them as renta soldiers, if you will. They are being brought here against their will and many of them became Americans. They became US citizens in the years after the war and hence why many places like Pennsylvania have very strong German ethnicity to this very day. Yeah, there's still obviously Germantown famous neighborhood in Philadelphia, but I think I think that was even established like in the 17th century as well as that. Yeah. And in fact, Germantown was the site of the first formal anti-slavery protest in American history. And so it goes, that's all full century before the American revolution. And it just goes to show that people were already debating these really consequential issues that had the capacity to tear the country apart. Can we take a quick tangent there? 1688, there was a full blown slave rebellion. Not a slave rebellion, so Quakers who helped to establish Pennsylvania with William Penn a few years prior, their whole attitude of course was brotherly love, treat by neighbor as thyself. And even though many Quakers themselves own human property, many of them also rebelled against the system in a diplomatic way. And they released a formal protest, a written statement against this horrible institution in which people were being sold and bartered like cattle. What do you think, you know, because that's going way back now to where that's at least one solidly large community doing it in America is just being founded. Do you think it took other than just the pure economic argument, why do you think it took basically 250 years give or take for America to abolish slavery? I always frame it this way to my students because I think that this is a simplistic way that can be understood. So slavery was like a drug, people were addicted to it. And even though many of them knew. knew that it was wrong. They couldn't kick the habit. It was so inherently tied into the moral, spiritual, political, economic lifeblood of the American system that they couldn't break away from it. In some of the first drafts of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson wanted to include denunciations of slavery, despite the fact that he himself owns several hundred human beings throughout his life and fathered children with one of them. Interesting. Yeah. Thomas Jefferson is the perfect person to use as a vehicle in framing the sort of question that you just posed because on one hand, an earlier part in his life, he denounces it in other moments. He kind of stigmatizes the enslaved people that he owns. He says these really horrible things by our standards today that they don't have the intellect to learn. They have this horrible odor, so on and so forth, really horrible things. But yet, at the same time, he refers to those same people as my family in his written documents. Yeah. And he said it perfectly. He said slavery was like holding a wolf by the ears. You don't want to let it go. But at the same time, you have to kind of hold onto it as well for fear of what it might do. So that's that's kind of an interesting dynamic. See, now Thomas Jefferson, because he's also so famous and well, as you said, some well reported history about his, I guess, both sides of that argument, and speaking out of both sides of his mouth with it, you know, that one doesn't surprise me as far as someone who was always seemingly in the back of his mind, struggling with the morality of it. But it is almost surprising to hear you say that many people actually thought it was probably morally wrong, but we're still going to do it. I don't know if it's ever been framed that way to me. I have always had it more framed than how I've learned about it is like people were just brainwashed and genuinely thought like, wow, these aren't humans, you know, and they just, it was passed down generationally. But you're saying there was a lot more nuance than that. Yeah. Now, and you're not wrong in your assumption, because, you know, this was an inherited institution. It was inherited wealth. And it was something that grew generation by generation in the years and decades leading up to the civil war. But there were some, including some of Thomas Jefferson's neighbors who saw the humanity and the people that they owned. And when the American revolution comes to an end, they free their chattel, they free their, their human property. That's not universal. Not everybody does that. Some people wait until they pass away. That was the case with George Washington in his will. The catch there was is that his enslaved people were to be freed upon the passing of his wife, Martha. Right. And so she is now living on this plantation with people whose freedom depends on her death. So there's some complications there. Yeah. But on that note, I am actually working through HW's latest biography, George Washington right now. I think I'm about halfway through. It's amazing. So go check that out. But, you know, he's one of those guys. Again, you have to look at all people throughout history and the time they lived, which includes the social flaws that exist at that time and judge it accordingly, but judge it by the standards of the time as well. So you laid out, obviously, there were some interesting moral conundrums with George Washington as a related slavery for sure. On the rest of him as a guy and what he did though, obviously, this was the man who commanded the army and and wanted incredible by every military standard victory over over the British. And then was our first president. So easily has an argument to be maybe the most important American ever. But, you know, what made him so special and made him a guy that, you know, the continental Congress looked at and said, that's our man. That's who's going to lead this. Yeah. And the author, Rick Ackinson, who's in the process of writing an incredible trilogy on the American Revolution. I think he said it best when he said that George Washington had a mind for executive action. He knew how to take command of a situation. And of course, some of his contemporaries joked that that might have had something to do with his height. He's always, he should always be the tallest man in the room. But even as he was a young officer from Virginia in the French and Indian War, he had this sort of command presence. That was apparent on the battlefields of Western Pennsylvania during the French and Indian War. When the second continental Congress forms up in and around the time and the aftermath of the battles at Lexington and Concord, George Washington shows up wearing a uniform. You know, he dusts off his, he didn't want to job though. Yeah. No, he, he was definitely advertising the point that, you know, I think I might be a suitable leader in this capacity. But I think one of his greatest strengths of all, and to use some lingo from the time that the founding fathers would have been familiar with, he had something called Republican virtue, Republican virtue, small or Republican virtue, which I will also add was a key tenant of Rome as well. So it was, we think of about somebody like Maximus, all right, he is driven by historically accurate to it. Well, that's a different conversation for a different not doing that. 100% accurate. If you say so, if you say so, yeah, wink, wink. I'm New Jersey right now. Yeah. So absolutely. But I'll give you this. You know, we can think of George Washington and kind of a similar vein as the fictional character of Maximus. They're driven by Republican virtue. What do they want to do? They want to serve in the military. They want to serve their people. And their greatest ambition of all after they achieve victory is to go home. They want to be gentlemen farmers. That's right. That is the ultimate sign of being a virtuous citizen when you have all the power in the world. And you give it up to go back and live a simple agrarian existence on your farm. How about him also given it's set in that precedent with the two terms and being like, I'll go home. That's so cool. Yeah. And you know, in a way, in the long term, Dwight Eisenhower kind of does the same thing for a little bit after World War II. He buys a farm in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, very much kind of following the George Washington motif. I've done my service. I've helped save the country. In this case, helped save the world as well. I'm going to be a gentleman farmer. But the presidency came back in and interrupted that. That's how it goes sometimes. We'll talk about I, too. Sure. I know you've done a lot of amazing work on World War II, which I love. And you have a lot of great videos on band of brothers, which I think is like, that might be the best mini series ever made. I don't know if a bias, but we could do a whole session just. Yeah. We'll get to that. Maybe I'll have to lose the. I didn't bring it home for that part, but we'll figure it out. But yeah, I just, I don't know, I feel like there's a lot of, there are a lot of traits in George Washington that was really captain, obvious statement that like maybe our politicians today could take a little bit of a page out of the book from, you know what I mean? Like a little humble nature step in a side when it's someone else's game. Maybe we don't have a bunch of fucking congressmen that are 85 years old, being wheeled in there with Alzheimer's because they still want to have power. You know, it's like there's a time in a place and like each generation kind of has to have its moment. And he seemed to understand that. Yeah. No. And I think you're right on the mark about politicians because the sort of career politician that we see today is something that the founding fathers did not envision, right? Nor did they think would be healthy for a republic. This sort of generational or institutionalized power of people who have been in Washington for 30 and 40 years, it's completely antithetical to what the founders had in mind. Really what they wanted is the hope that increasingly a wider and wider segment of the American citizenry would have opportunities to serve. And I think some of my historian friends have put it very well, that every politician should be a seasonal politician. Yes. That you should have one season in your life of public service, whether that be serving on as a county commissioner, running for the state legislature, maybe running for the school board. You know, it doesn't have to be Congress or the presidency or anything like that. And this too goes back to that idea of being a virtuous citizen that you need to look beyond yourself in a chapter of your life. And you need to think about the greater good of your society. And that's the only way that a republic can grow and flourish. Yeah. I agree. I think, you know, even if it was like, let's say I had to be realistic and someone has to kind of start. a political career, maybe in the state legislator or something like that. And after a term, then they have to run for like federal government. And then maybe they run for the presidency. Meaning, you know, maybe it's like a 16, 20 year career where there are different layers. I'm cool with that. I could understand that. I take issue with someone having the same job for like 38 years. Yeah, for sure. It's like that, you know, that kind of gets old. And then, you know, like now we see all foreign wars happening again. And it's the same people who were voting for the last ones 25 years ago voting for it again. It's like, well, maybe that's not reflective of like all the people who have now grown up from the last one to see where we're at now, but I don't know. It speaks to why people of every generation need to get involved. You know, regardless of your political affiliation and really the core of that, what should be the nucleus of that is being engaged and being informed. And the chief ingredient of that, I think, is reading. You know, we are in an increasingly illiterate society where people read less and less. We see libraries under siege in more than one way. And really, you got to read. I agree. If you don't read, there's no reason I should debate you in anything. That's how I look at it. Yeah. All right. Well, stealing his whole flow. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Honestly, like this conversation has come up with different people in different contexts. I couldn't agree more, man. Yeah. And yeah, I don't care if you read science fiction or current events or romance. You need something to stimulate your mind other than 30 second bits on your phone. And certainly the founders didn't have that sort of digital distraction that we have today. But when you go and visit the homes of these guys, when they're being Mount Vernon or Monticello or Montpelier, what's one of the most impressive rims that they have in their house? Their library. Their library. That was the internet of the 18th century. And they had, they took full advantage of it in placing the building blocks of our country. Yeah, there's some, there is an enormous difference between getting all your reading every day. Let's not even say just tweets, like reading articles every day. Just that. Not saying that's not useful. It is. But like, there's an enormous difference between just stimulating yourself with 30 of those every day versus also, you know, maybe working in, I don't know, a 500 page book where you really get to sit with it, learn about something. Like, I think way better when I'm able to read a lot. Yeah. Period and a story. And then when I go through these periods where we get so busy where I can't do that, I can, it's almost, it's hard to explain, but it's like original thoughts come to your mind a lot less because you're just filled with all these quick hits that you saw on Twitter. And it's not, it's not useful. But HW had a, he was talking about this and you know, he's like a really just kind of report it like he sees it kind of guide without seemingly without a lot of opinion, which I respect a lot. But you know, he had this viewpoint as a guy who's obviously spent his entire life reading where he's like, yeah, I feel like we're moving to a world where people aren't going to do that. And I was like, how do you figure? And he goes, it's just a different medium. He wasn't even saying the 32nd quick hits, but he's like, everything is, is digitized. So like people will get their information doing something different. And I'm like, well, what does that, what does that mean for like the future of how we function as a thinking society? He's like, it's just change. I don't know, but like the way that I do it, maybe won't be around in 100 years. I would like to think he's going to be wrong about that with natural adjustments that happen as humanity progresses that support a thing. But I would like to think that, you know, the way that people like you may go back and read Socrates and stuff like that because we have it as written word, I would like to think that people 200 years from now are doing that. And you know, reading your books and, and reading his books and, and, you know, reading fiction as well from the time period. Yeah. Yeah. I'm hopeful for that. I'll say though that the the one major challenge for historians of the future will be access to digital records. You know, if there's less and less on paper, I mean, there's no guarantee that 500 years in the future there will be a digital archive. It's right. We don't know. We can't say with any certainty. So I question how my colleagues of the future, many generations from now will start to file and filter through everything that we're going through in the present and certainly an interesting conundrum. And it's going to it's going to get interesting. But going back to the revolutionary time period, we have this sitting right here. Yeah. A good mental. Uh huh. So at the Patriots, one of my favorite movies ever for sure, it's probably top 10 for me. And this is a really cool book. You gave me because it's all the behind the scenes like imagery and really high getty image quality, which is very cool. But I have always understood this movie to be 100% historically accurate. And I'd like to not be moved off that opinion today. But I feel like I feel like you're going to ruin my life a little bit. I feel that's why you invited me almost. It might be part of it. But you know, Mel Gibson felt like he really nailed it. This is my George Washington. Yeah. It's how I always think of it. It's American Braveheart. Running a business means you're always reachable until you're not. And the moment you miss that call, that text, that follow up, it sucks. I know a lot about that. And you know what sucks more? Usually it's your competitor picking up the phone on the other end and getting the business. That's why today's episode is brought to you by my friends at Quo. They're the business phone system built so you never miss an opportunity. With Quo, all your calls, texts and voicemails live in one place. So anyone on your team can pick up a conversation, see the full history and respond best. We love that. Quo is the number one rated business phone system on G2. You don't know what that is. I don't know what that is, but it sounds important. 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You have this provincial who's just mining his own business and the forces of empire, metal in his life, destroy his family and he goes on a spree of vengeance and in the process becomes somewhat of a patriotic and symbolic figure. So there are definitely strains of similarity between this movie and the one that he directed just a few years prior about William Wallace. But yeah, you know, how I think of it is we look at it from a cinematic standpoint. I mean, I think it's a really great movie. The production value is through the roof. I mean, John Williams' music. I mean, one of the most underappreciated John Williams scores, I think. The cinematography is fantastic. They spared no expense. But as we see with other big budget movies like Pearl Harbor, a lot of money doesn't always necessarily equate to historical accuracy or authenticity. So I'll give you a little bit of the true life story behind the Patriot. The Trump Focker? Yeah. So the fictional character of Benjamin Martin played by Mel Gibson. He's kind of an amalgam of Francis Marion, known as the Swamp Fox. There's a little bit of Daniel Morgan and his marksman thrown in with it as well and a hodgepodge of other continental leaders too. But I'd say one of the great bits of authenticity about the film that they easily could have cheapened out on. They actually did film it in South Carolina. Yeah, that's cool. Where the film is set. And so they filmed it in Charleston, beautiful historic city. They filmed it in the Carolina backcountry. They could have easily filmed it in California or South Africa or whatever, and probably saved a whole lot of money. So I'll give credit where credit is due. And one of the big issues though is how the British are depicted in the film, almost Nazi like. They were not in there. Let's be honest. Come on. No, not universally. I know our Brits out there. You know the truth. But in any regard, it condenses things quite heavily. It villainizes quite heavily. I mean, Jason Isaacs. I mean, he's like one of the top 10 movie villains all the time. He is perfect. But the funny thing is, is in subsequent years, like he himself said, "Oh, this isn't something that you want to show your children in the classroom in regard to authenticity." So it's kind of funny in that regard. He was based on, so he was based on Tarleton, he is based on a guy by the name of Bannister Tarleton, who was this aristocratic gentleman from Liverpool, who gained quite a reputation for his ferocity. And one of the stories of his ferocity comes from a little known battle of the American Revolution and is the Battle of Waxaws. And in that fight, as his men, the Green Dragoons are charging into continental forces. Yeah, look at that. He has his horse shot out from under him. And his men think that he has died or he has wounded in the process. And so that enrages them and they plow into the Americans. And purportedly, don't take prisoners among some who try to surrender. And so that act of perceived brutality became known as Tarleton's quarter, no quarter. And so that is where this reputation of him as a take no prisoner's officer emerges. So maybe that first scene, one of the first scenes where they go execute all the people of Mel Gibson's house, he might have done that. No, no. They they they want to have been executing wounded people like that, unfortunately. Sure. But cinematically, it works as the perfect foundation for a story of Revenge and Retribution at work. Like when I, when that movie, what's that first line where he's like, "I have long since feared my sins would come to visit me. And the cost is more than I can pay." All right, very good. Let's fucking go. Uh-huh, yeah. But like there's this such a after that scene where, you know, they execute all the people and then his spoiler alert is one son is also killed. And then they go to take his other son to be hang, Heath Ledger, RIP. You know, that whole thing back in the woods, I thought that was perfect because obviously like he's a composite character, it's not a real thing that happened. But, you know, the way this war's fought, yes, there's a lot of conventional warfare where they're on the, where they're on the battlefield facing each other and shooting. But because it was also like the British are fighting on, I guess like the away field, you know what I mean? Like they're, they're not the home team and they're fighting on the land that these people live in. That means that in some parts of the colonies, you're fighting out in the woods. You're fighting, you know, from in ways that are not conventional war. And like when you see Mel Gibson just be like, all right, you killed my son, I'm gonna fucking kill all of you. And he goes out in the woods and he just hunts these dudes from the side. You're like, that's my, that's Mel Gibson. Let's go. It's incredibly entertaining. No doubt about that. Oh, don't do it. And well, in reality, what, what would have been a more likely scenario under a situation like that is that Mel Gibson's character would have gathered some farmers from surrounding properties. They probably would have gone after that British column together. Well, he did have his sons. Well, yeah. There's some expertly trained marksman, they were not missing a single round in the whole thing. But you know, the scene that you speak of, it really sort of doubles down on the perception that we have of British soldiers during the revolution that they were inflexible. They were rigid. They wouldn't adapt to this new mode of warfare, especially on the American frontier. In reality, what the British would have done under a situation like that. They would have been maneuvering. They would have bayonetted Mel Gibson like a stuck pig. And now before he got in six feet of like, okay, all right, this is Mel Gibson. Mel Gibson does not get bayonetted by a bunch of people who drink tea. It's true. No disrespect. It's true. All right. Like he's, he, this is it. Didn't he do like hatchets, hacksaw raise with a hatchet and shit like, you see him throw that thing? Yeah. There's a picture of it. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah. I feel, I feel like he could have pulled that off. I don't know. That's just me. But what else did they allegedly get wrong in this movie? Oh boy. Let me think. All right. That's not a good start. It, you know, it probably shows many of the battles. It's slightly, and this is forgivable in my mind from a cinematic perspective. Most of these battles, especially in comparison to civil war battles that would take place 80 years down the road, most of these battles, especially in the South Carolina, back country were fairly small, maybe 3,000 men total in comparison to Gettysburg, like I mentioned a little bit ago, 3,000 versus 165,000. It's a huge gap in regard to what we think of as a big battle. But I would say one of the greatest flaws of the film is its treatment of slavery. Yeah. No, that's fair. There's the moment where Tabington's character rides up to Mel Gibson's farm, and he informs all the African Americans on the property that they're now free, and they can serve with the king. And one of them kind of timidly comes up and says, we work this land freed man, that would have been highly unlikely in South Carolina, where then slave population actually outnumbered the free population at the time of white restaurants. Yeah, I would think South Carolina that wouldn't be it. Yes. And there you go. There's the picture. Right. Well, with the hatchet. Yeah. I'm saying, I can't shut it out, I'm screened, YouTube is fucking. But yeah, it treats slavery with kids gloves. And in actuality, Mel Gibson wanted his character to be a slave owner in the movie, because that gets into the character complexity that makes for a really rich story, because then it poses the question to the audience, how can this man be fighting for freedom when he simultaneously owns people and denies their freedom? I mean, you can't argue that that is a very interesting element from a storyline perspective. But apparently, the filmmakers disagreed, they wanted it to be a little bit more black and white. And so that's how they went with it, missed the opportunity. But they also, isn't it, they pretty much, because his character is saying, I don't want to go to war because I fought in the French and Indian war. I don't like what the British are doing, but like, let's figure this out in another way. So he doesn't go to war, but then they vote to go to, like South Carolina votes to agree with the colonies to go to war. His son goes to war. And then like when he ends up joining the war, it's supposed to be way down the line, right? Like the movie is effectively supposed to be maybe like 1780, 81, something like that. Yeah. So the movie begins in 1776. And then rather seamlessly, there's a very big four year jump that they don't even really alert you to that. It's been a long time. Yeah. And it goes from 1776 to 1780 because that's when the war in the Carolina backcountry really heats up. Why did it take so long for that to heat up there? Well, the war was always present, but it's useful to think of the revolution in this slide. It happens in three major phases. It begins in New England. And also Canada too for that matter. Canada is garnal, the quest for Quebec, Canada almost becomes the 14th American colony. When you think about it, you guys could maybe, maybe, maybe 51, we'll see. And then the war drifts into the area where we are right now and bounces back and forth like a pinball between New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania between 1776 and 1778. And that's really the hinge point of the war. And you have both highs and lows for George Washington in that time. I mean, what happens here across the river, utter disaster, but like Dunkirk kind of in hindsight, right? Yeah. That's a good analogy when you think about it. And so the war regains traction. George Washington delegates certain commanders to the South and the Thanuel Green being prominent amongst them. I mean, so that final phase of the war happens in the Carolina, New York is occupied by the British for almost the entirety of the war. This is a loyalist city for almost the duration of not any more. Yeah. There you go. Yeah. Right. And so there's just some really fascinating, I think often overlooked episodes of the war that are happening in South Carolina, North Carolina, and then ultimately culminating in Virginia in 1781 with the Battle of Yorktown. Right. So it is all over the continent. It's being waged in Canada. It's being waged in New England. It's being fought in the Caribbean. It's being fought in Florida. by the Spanish against the British. This is a world war. - Yeah, Richard Bell, who was in here, that's what his book is about. - Yeah, it was happening in India, it was happening in Europe, it was happening all over the expanse of the North American continent. And so in addition to being a race war, a civil war, a revolution, it's also a world war. - Crazy. - It is. - So what are the most overlooked aspects of what was happening in the theater down in North Carolina, South Carolina, in your mind? - Boy, that's a great question. It really what it does is that it's immense that idea of guerrilla warfare in the American psyche. And we often think, yeah, that's a great image to think about there. And it helps to instill this idea that every American soldier, every American fighting force was going to be hiding behind stone walls and trees and running away into swamps. - Where in reality, the vast majority of full-fledged battles during the American Revolution were face-to-face shoulder-to-shoulder fights, like we see in some scenes within the movie. - Right. - And so for the likes of Francis Marion, he hardly fights in a full-fledged battle in that last phase of the war. Now he does serve at the battle of Savannah. He actually injures his ankle right before the battle for Charleston, and he goes off to recuperate and he misses being captured when Charleston falls. And so that stroke of good luck that allows him to go on with this motley crew, if you will, who perfect this idea of irregular warfare. - And you mentioned it, though, the battle of Yorktown in 1781 is effectively, what ends up in the long-term deciding the war, because Cornwallis just gets captured and trapped. With the help of the French fleet who bottle him up in the Chesapeake. So there are still British forces in New York, as that is happening. Of course, the Treaty of Paris isn't ratified until 1783. So that's the official end date of the war, but for all intents and purposes, Yorktown is seen as the military end to it. And of course, there were a few other skirmishes and engagements that happened thereafter, but that's the big one that we remember. And effectively, like another really, even though they made a series on, you know, loosely based series on AMC about it, a really overlooked part of the war is to roll the espionage played. Is the way I understand it is that Washington spies who were emanating, he had a cell and operating on a Long Island, New York, and in New York City, while I was occupied by the British, it was their intelligence that led to the trapping at Yorktown effectively. So you don't win the war without having, really solid undercover people operating in a high stakes environment like that and getting information. And even so too, in places like South Carolina, and especially the more rural areas that weren't quite as well to do as people along the coast, they were thoroughly supportive of the Patriot cause. And so people like Francis Marion and Nathaniel Green, and Daniel Morgan, whether it be in South Carolina or North Carolina, in many ways, they have the support of the people. You have those informal intelligence networks that are going from village to village and community to community spread by career after career. And so having eyes and ears on the ground amongst the people who live there as a crucial element of all of it. - Yeah. Now, I think a really overlooked part of the history during this time period is the laps in years between the official end Treaty of Paris in 1783 and then the creation of the Constitution itself. I believe you have things like Shays Rebellion during that time period where veterans hadn't been paid from the war and you have this really, really nascent, not even agreed upon country yet that has 13 colonies to where it could have gone a totally separate way and not formed a country. But what was, if you could take people back to that time period, that four to six years, what was it like to live in America as someone who had not been a loyalist to had actually been a part of the cause? And now you're like, okay, it's not like you have a TV and you know what's going on every day. - Yeah, absolutely. To be in their shoes would have been an incredible thing. And really, I think the best way of putting it's a time of exciting opportunity because they've just defeated one of the largest militaries on the planet. At the same time and the founders could look back at history and recognize this themselves. Most revolutions in history fail. - Almost all of them. - Yeah, most, we like to think of ourselves as the American experiment. Most experiments fail until you find a good outcome. And there were certainly a share of people who feared that that might be the case in the 1780s or the 1790s. And so there are intense growing pains that are felt in certain geographic regions as well as nationally. And it was a little bit a prologue to that. Shortly after George Washington takes command of the Continental Army, Cambridge, Massachusetts, he has to break up a fight between new englanders and soldiers from the Mid-Atlantic. These are people who think that they have nothing in common with each other. People from Massachusetts, if they were to converse with somebody from Georgia, it would seem like they were speaking a different language. - For sure. - You know, when we think about accents today, yeah, it's true to an extent, even in the present. On top of all of that, each region is often defined by different religions. I mean, you have Puritans in New England, you have Congregationalists in Pennsylvania, you have Quakers in Maryland, you have Catholics in the South, you have Anglicans, and that's one of the chief reasons why there is no official religion and why the founding fathers were steering towards separation of church and state because they believed that in order to unify these 13 separate countries, you can't let religion get in the way of all of that. And so that's a really crucial element of all of it. So those are some of the things that are in mind immediately after the war, and this is even before ideas about, well, how we get to pay off the war, what sort of banking system are we going to have, are we going to have uniform currency, are we going to ditch the articles of confederation, which is a loosely binding agreement that ties together or 13 colonies. All of that is taking place in the build up to the Constitutional Convention. And then even after the Constitutional Convention, you have growing pains like the whiskey rebellion that takes place over the course of three years in 1790s, Pennsylvania, where Alexander Hamilton wants to institute and excise tax on distilled spirits to help pay for the debt of the war. There's going to be a 25% tax. 25% on distilled spirits. Yeah, that's exactly what the farmers of Western Pennsylvania thought. Shout out. And for people growing, for people cultivating the grain, the wheat, the barley, all of the ingredients that are necessary for something like rye whiskey, they said, this is going to destroy us financially. And grain and whiskey, it was a form of currency on the Pennsylvania frontier. If someone helps you clear your backfield and you give them a kega whiskey or you give them grain. And so they rose up in rebellion and they were going tauring and pitchforking against tax collectors and whatnot in Western Pennsylvania. And that's during Washington's first term. That is during his presidency, yes, his first term. And for the first and only time in American history, George Washington puts on the uniform while he is president. And he goes out and he leads a command in the field himself as president. So he's acting as commander in chief in the truest sense. Oh, I don't remember this. And he takes several thousand regular troops and militia into the Pennsylvania countryside to disperse these rebels who refuse to pay their taxes. Shoes on the other foot. Yeah, and so the concern here was a people are thinking, have we merely replaced King George the third for King George the first? People thought that George Washington had these monarchical or dictatorial aspirations because of how he was treating the whiskey rebels in Pennsylvania. But ultimately, by demonstrating this show of force with these thousands of soldiers and meeting with some of the leaders in a more diplomatic sense, he essentially tells them disperse, uprisings will not be tolerated. I will hear your grievances, but first, you need to send your men back to their farms. And so with that, he, I think very diplomatically diffuses the situation. It could have grown a lot more violent. and ultimately most of the whiskey rebels are are led off the hook. Very few of them have charges brought against them and hardly anybody does jail time for it. What about the taxes? They remained in place until the administration of Thomas Jefferson, who was more, he perceived himself as more farmer friendly. And so they stayed on the books through the presidency of Washington and John Adams, who were both federalists. Well, that's an under-reported part of history. Yeah. Imagine that like George Washington in full uniform. It's like as president. It's like Jordan come back to the Wizards. That's a great parallel. He's like, all right, I'm gonna draw 20 on you, my focus. Uh-huh. Here we go. Yeah, pretty much. Wow. Pretty much. So something that's that's what's crazy though, because I that's the part of when you look at history back then was something that's so new and spread out with all different colonies. Like we're saying that do all different things and have different, you know, some places are rural, other places are cities. It's like keeping all that organized and together when there's not this long-term story, right? Like my buddy, Eric Zooliger always has a great quote, "Countries are just stories." You know, so like England, France, these are places that have been established for thousands of years. So you live in in, you know, the South Coast of France or Paris, like we're just France. We get it. That's what it is. You know, you live in London or you live in Scotland, you know, we're a part of this thing. We're on the same island, whatever. But in America, when you have all these people who just watch the rebellion work and then see something instantly in the new government that they don't like, the idea that that didn't split off into a bunch of Mad Max Ferry roads is pretty crazy. It is. And I think that's the award of what a lot of people think of like as the American miracle story, the American origin story. But history shows us that there were plenty of speed bumps and obstacles along the way. It was anything but perfect. Not everything can gild all at once. There were plenty of growing pains, like I mentioned. And those are things that we can likewise learn from as well. Yeah. What made the constitutional convention itself work and the constitution like actually come to be? That is the million dollar question. Yeah. The fact of these 55 guys from all walks of life from across all 13 colonies could hatch this out over the course of three months is really quite defeat. Sometimes it takes college students three months to just write a paper. So it comes down to a lot of different things. And this could be a whole conversation in and of itself. These guys knew their history. People like James Madison was getting book reading recommendations from Thomas Jefferson who was across the Atlantic serving in Paris at that time. And Madison is looking back and he's thinking, what forms of government have worked? What were the ancient Greeks doing? What were the Romans doing? What were the Peloponnesians doing? He's looking at all these ancient civilizations of the past and he's using history as his compass. And certainly that concept or that idea of the past is prologue. You know, it's something that really resonated with these men. And so one, they have a good sense of history. They are an intellectual bunch who are, we would call them political science junkies today. In many cases, they devour it. They absorb it. They try to make it applicable to their own lives. And then there's the story of compromise as well. And some of those compromises work out better than others in the long term. I mean some of the the framers wanted a president who would serve for life, for life, for life. Others, there were conversations on the pros and cons of a unicameral form of government versus a bicameral form of government. Like, do we have a one-legislature body or do we have a two-legislature body? And so ultimately they determined that, okay, well, we're going to have the Senate where there's going to be equilibrium among the states, regardless of their size. And then in the House of Representatives, that's where that idea of virtue comes from. In the House is like what the people want. You know, the Senate, the senators are going to be like the brainy institutional types and the House is going to be reflective of the people. Interesting. So they viewed them as separate, meaning like today when we see someone run for the House and do that for a few years in their state. And then a Senate seat comes open and they run for Senate. They didn't look at it that way. Like that would happen. And there were people who did switch houses over time. But they truly saw them as separate but equal branches that appealed and applied to different mentalities and aspirations of the American people. And so there are all sorts of questions. And really, what it took was good drawn out conversation over the course of the summer of 1787. And one of my favorite stories, and this is a digression, but it's just a fun side story, when the Constitutional Convention almost came to an end. God, I love this story. George Washington helps to host this big celebratory bash at City Tavern. And they dumped like the equivalent of close to 20 grand on alcohol. It was a keger. It was a keger, you know, and they had like rum punch and port and wine and Madera and beer and everything like that. There's nothing in the record about hookers. That sounds like a historical protectionism right there. Perhaps that wasn't on the receipt at least. We have the receipts for that. Yeah, it's true. It's true. So I can't say what happened after hours, but they had a really good time at the party itself. So a treat well-earned, but as history shows us, well, and we see it every day, you know, the Constitution still poses complications and people still question it and the questions of, who does the Constitution apply to? And how can it be applied here? And one of the unfortunate compromises that is made is the three fifth schools that says that African Americans are to be considered as only three fifths human beings. And that was used to give Southern legislators in the House of Representatives an upper-edge numerically speaking, right, in an opposition to northern politicians. And so already, unfortunately, we see the seeds of civil war growing out of this very fertile soil that was the revolution. Yeah. And as a side note, by the way, are you familiar with the fourth turning? No. Okay. You got to read that. Okay. I don't want to give the whole speech and piss people off because I've done it before. Essentially, these historian sociologists, Straus and How in the 90s, did an amazing job of charting. They could have gone back farther, but they're like, we'll just start with the American Revolution and charting generational patterns. And they realized every cycle is around 80 to 85 years. Yeah. It involves four generations that are always followed the same order and exist during the same time period. And they formulate these moments where these things happen. So like, for example, the greatest generation, which we'll talk about in a little bit that served in World War 2 was coming of age 21 to 42. Yeah. During the time the war is happening and was fighting it, they're on the same exact cycle. Yeah. Like the same exact type of time period. And in the same exact generation as the guys who fought the Civil War. Yeah. And the guys who fought the Revolutionary War. I've made that exact same point. I'm not familiar with their work, though. So yeah. All right. You got to check that out. Yeah. So what you're saying right now makes a lot of sense too because this is the earliest time of what would be called the profit generation being born in like the, I forget what their name for it was, but the post revolution 20 years would be like the hooray, like we won, which obviously there was a struggle going on, but it's like now we get to chart a new course and then slowly over time it descends by generation into we're starting to fight over more shit, fight over more shit, fight over more shit. Boom. Something big happens. Yeah. And that culminates with the Civil War itself. But nonetheless, the constitution, you know, nothing's ever perfect in history for sure. And there was, there were lack of perfections in that without a doubt. But when you think of all the things that they were able to foresee in the world that only they knew at the time for what could apply today, it's like blows my mind. How forward thinking that document was to say nothing of the fact you could get these, whatever it was, 37 guys to agree on it and sign it. - Absolutely amazing. - Yeah. and going back to your generational point. It's something that I think about often, because you do have the Revolutionary War generation, and then roughly 85 years later, you have the Civil War, and roughly 80, 85 years, World War II. And where are we now? - Uh-huh. - Where 85 years passed, World War II. Yeah, it gives me some cringe as a historian, because historians notice patterns. - Yes. - And yeah, and you gotta wonder, what is it about that 85-year cycle? - It always manifests in some different way, and it gets a little more different each time with the context and how it's done. And obviously, we've had exponential technological growth during each of those hours. Exponential means he gets bigger and bigger. And we've seen a huge one since World War II. - And what's really troubling is, with World War II, it's not just Pearl Harbor, that's World War II. - No. - It's regional wars that metastasize. - Yes. Which is exactly what we're seeing right now. - That's right. - And Ukraine, the Middle East, the Spectre of War and the Greater Indochina Pacific Region. Yeah, it's not good indicators. - Yeah. What's interesting, though, is in general in history, how, and I'm guilty of it too, like when I just look at something from 30,000 feet in the air, but so many different things go into something happening and popping off and throughout world history. But to make this story simple, moving forward, it's like, I'll use the example you just did, we'll think of from the American perspective. Oh, yeah, Pearl Harbor happened. Europe had been popping off and then suddenly we were in. But it's not that, at all, that's simple. There are a million things to go into this. I for one, until a few years ago, was not aware of just how, for example, Isolationist America was prior to Pearl Harbor. Like it flipped overnight. But like when you see all the gymnastics FDR had to do just to try to like throw Churchill a bone while they were under attack over there. It's like, wow, they don't talk about that as much in the textbooks in school. - Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, we get a very close notes version. Oftentimes, just because of time limitations, it's hard to teach the entirety of the American story, even half of the American story in a single year or a single semester. So, how do you do it? - Well, I have a little bit of flexibility that's granted to me because I can, I have subject specific classes that I often teach. And so, just to give you some frame of reference with some classes that I've taught. I've taught two different American history survey courses, one of which goes up to the Civil War and one has since the Civil War. I teach Pennsylvania history, American railroad history, baseball history, history in Hollywood, World War II, a class on Abraham Lincoln public history, which teaches students how to work at museums and whatnot. I'm teaching a history of the FBI this fall, which will be a lot of fun. So, I wear many hats and I really enjoy it because it keeps me on my toes. I'm always looking for the next class to develop, whether it be on sports history or history of the 1960s is another one that's a lot of fun to teach. So, it keeps me on my toes, it keeps me well rounded because I really like being able to have conversations like this where we can easily switch gears and go from topic to topic. - Yeah, that's really, that's a range right there. You just gave me. So, you're, wow, history of Hollywood. 'Cause like you're obviously you're like a movie buff and film expert as well. - I'm a movie buff. - What was the idea of that class where you'd focus it on the Genesis of Hollywood or like going all the way to present day? - Well, this one in particular, it looks at history and Hollywood. So, it's very much aligned with my YouTube channel where we look at films and we not only assess their fidelity to history, but something that I always say on real history is that every history movie that's ever made tells us as much about the time in which it was made as it does about the historical time period that it depicts. Every movie is a cultural product. - Interesting. - I mean, if we think about the Patriot or Gladiator which come out the same year in 2000. - That's right. - With something like Gladiator. How does a movie like that resonate with a theme like the 2000 presidential election is where you're thinking about a republic and the balance of power and who holds power. And what is the will of the people in such volatile circumstances? And so there are these moments where you can align commentary from a film and you can juxtapose it against the real life backdrop in which it was filmed. And you can do that endlessly. - It's going to have the millennium too, which is so symbolic because people are like they're thinking about the course of history and like that leap is just like, whoa, now we're 2000, you know? - And if you think about the end scene here on the wall behind me, I mean, it's so steeped in symbolism. When you think about the symbolic power of wheat in Roman life, I mean, it stands for vitality. It stands for their economy. It symbolizes rejuvenation and resurrection. And so certainly, I think that's how people were looking at the year 2000. Perhaps this is a new beginning as well. I might be reading into it too much. - No, I don't think you are. You're making me think of something, I never really thought of this before, but not for the Patriot, but like with Gladiator, a big reason why it worked is because it resonated with women. Instead of just making it a revenge story with blood guts and gore, they made it a love story to where Maximus is chasing to go after his wife and son in the afterlife. And that's what he cares about. And on the way there, he gets to get revenge and he gets to be this masculine piece. But they also did like an amazing job with showing him as like this dual person, like even with the first scene. They have Maximus before this big battle, but he sees a bird land on a tree and kind of gets lost in the transfer minutes of people who are like, oh, this guy's a soft man of nature and knows how to turn on the war. So like you could kind of get both genders on board with the Patriot, like his wife's dead as well. He's trying to be here for his kids and give them a better life than he has. While also dealing with trying to, you know, I guess make up for the sins of his past, but they show him as a guy who's just trying to make Mel Gibson, they show him as a guy who's just trying to make a chair that he can rock back and forth in and live a simple life and live out his days and whatever. And then that's kind of how the movie close spoiler alert as well. Like he gets to live out his days on the farm. - Republican virtue. - Absolutely. - They both go back to the farm at the end. - That's so interesting. Same year they come out different eras as well. - That's cool. So you get to teach a whole class on that. Deepen I would nerd out on that. - It's a super fun class because yeah, we show some oldies as well. - Good. - And sometimes when students, you know, when you turn on like a black and white movie and I come, my God, what are we watching? But I always say it this way, there's no such thing as an old movie if you've never seen it before. - Oh, that's a bar. - Yeah. - So it doesn't matter if it's from the 1930s or if it came out last week. And if you are open-minded enough, you can learn as much from a movie that was made 90. - 100%. - And so I'm a big classic movie fan. - Me too. - Top of all. - And that's deep too. - Yeah. - What's your favorite classic film? - Well, I'm going to blink it out. I want about $200. I watched it a few months ago. - He's got a full, yeah. - Okay. - Think on it. - Yeah. - Okay. - My favorite classic, I almost have to do like a one in one aim. My favorite classics are Godfather one and Godfather two. - Sure. - 'Cause it's the greatest movies I've ever made. But then like I watched-- - Paper mode. - Oh yeah, Paper Man. - Yeah, like I watched after the first-- - Yeah, Ryan O'Neal. - Great. - Yeah, Peter Buggdonovich film. - Yeah. - Great stuff. - And there's, I watched all of Brando's entire catalog when I was in college. And he, some of the movies in there, like he was so fucking good. Obviously, street card name, desire, incredible. On the waterfront, which is filmed right here in Hoboken, I think is incredible. - It is. - What was the other one called? - I forget what it's called, but where he leads the motorcycle gang. That's another great one. - Oh yeah, the wild one. - The wild one. - That's right. Like, and what they did, cinematically with the camera work and that, also was like pretty revolutionary at the time. But yeah, I completely agree. And like, you look at all the great directors today, even the guys that are like older that are still making amazing films. Like Martin Scorsese, they're completely influenced by all those old pictures. Martin Scorsese was watching shit from the 20s that he was influenced by. A lot of great directors are influenced by Italian cinema from the 50s, 60s, and 70s in particular, which something might took like three different classes on throughout college, like amazing stuff there. So that's cool that like you should be able to bring that in and see something in black and white. Like, Al Pacino's got a line that I love. He goes, it's easy to fool the eye. It's hard to fool the heart. - Yeah, beautifully said. And when you watch, I don't care. if it's black and white when you watch a great movie that was made a great way, maybe they didn't have all the technological tools you can have today to make certain things work or whatever, but it's like, you get immersed in, you see what a real actor is. You're like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa." - Absolutely. - When it has a historical backdrop, you get to do both. - Yeah. - Get to be like, this is all fake. Your life is ruined, or this is all real. All right, well, real quick, I gotta go to the bathroom. This has been awesome so far. We gotta talk, we got a lot to talk about. We'll see what we get to today, but I haven't said this yet. You gotta check out the channel, real history. You mention it. This is where you break down all this stuff. If you and I collab this, people can literally just click it on the title right there and go subscribe, but it's really, really good stuff. So make sure you guys are hitting that out there. We'll be right back. All right, before we do this very scary quiz that you got in front of you right there, I forgot to ask you this part. I mentioned it a little bit, but, you know, people always go back and forth with this because a lot of these guys, be it Ben Franklin, George Washington. So I wanna say John Hancock, some of the others, like they were free masons. And then we talk about like the symbolism we see on the dollar, with the eye and the pyramid and everything. How much of it historically just based on the facts we can actually glean through, is real that America was at least built in part because of the free masons? Well, I think we can look at religion in the same way because a free masonery, much like Christianity, was part of who these people were. They also had the capacity to filter that out and separate it from their public lives. And so when we think about the civic as opposed to the personal, I don't know if there's necessarily some grand scheme or design in regard to the free masons, but certainly the aesthetic is there. The theme is there. Some of the guiding principles are there. And I think that we can look at in the same way as we do religion, history, their global political outlook. I don't think it's the pillar, but I think it is a pillar. - What drew guys like Washington and Franklin to join the free masons in the first place at that in that time period? - It was very much a status symbol. People of affluence and people with connection were members of the free masons. In the same way that certain clubs are quicks, that people wanna get into today. It's not merely about the title, it's about the prospect of association and how you can use that politically, financially, find a wife, build a business relation, whatever. And it's all about the connection. - Yeah, not obviously it was an international organization that were a lot of free masons and Britain and stuff like that. Was that ever a conflict of interest? I guess to where guys that maybe it could be as simple as guys that they were in the lodge with in America decide to be loyalists. And yet they're still part of the secret society together. Or even someone like Ben Franklin who spent a lot of his life in London and stuff, guys that he was in lodges with over there were literally on team Britain. Did that ever cause a problem? Well, if I told you I would have to kill you. - No, I was just kidding. - I just had Randall Carlson in that chair who was a free mason, so I'm a little on edge right now. - No, I don't think so because something else that's crucially important to keep in mind is that every founding father knew somebody on the other side. - Right. - And sometimes they maintained those associations and relationships and they were able to mend those fences. - Afterwards. - Yeah. And in other cases they were not. If you look at the relationship that Benjamin Franklin of course had with his son being the royal governor of New Jersey and being incarcerated as a result. And Franklin sees him exactly one more time in his entire life after the war and that is it. - That is one of the, I've read a lot of Franklin stuff like man that's heavy. - It's incredibly tragic. And I think that's in many ways the perfect representation of what the American Revolution did to American families and American communities. As we think of it as a unifying event, something that merged these colonies together but it also meant permanent separation for so many as well. - Yeah, I've never known how to grapple with that one with Franklin and his son. I think it's the ultimate representation of like from a visual symbolic perspective of the exact thing you're talking about here. But Franklin, he was a loyal subject until probably around 1773. And then he was attacked and stuff and got all the way there and was like, all right, we're gonna stop this thing. And it's like you would think afterwards like there's a father-son kind of thing where it's like, okay, it's over. My side one, but like this is bigger and there wasn't. And I'm never, when you look at Franklin's history and how he communicated with people and how he built relationships and stuff, like everyone else, he was a flawed guy, but I could never understand how he couldn't get over that one. He saw it as a betrayal and it was a cut that was just too deep to heal. - Yeah, he loved his grandson. - Yeah. And in part is perhaps not only did he love his grandson, but it was also perhaps in part retribution to get back at his son as well. You betrayed me now, I'm gonna take your son. Yeah, on top of it. I forget did his son end up going back to Britain afterwards? - Yeah, he resided both in England and Britain for, England and France for a spell alongside his grandfather. - No, no, I'm sorry, Ben Franklin's son, the former governor of Europe. - Oh, yes, so he went back to Britain afterwards. - Yeah, that's correct. - Yeah, that's crazy. That's wild. HW wrote a great biography on Benjamin Franklin Isaacson did one that was pretty amazing. It's like in the full picture. - Yeah, you gotta check out the Ken Burns film on Ben Franklin as well. I were on the topic of film, gotta give Ken Burns some love. - Yeah, Ken Burns is a game. He's an OG, he's about that life. Ken Burns is like, you don't even gotta smoke weed to sit through those ones, you just gotta sit there and be like, I'm about to learn. - Uh-huh, yeah. - I'm like, I'm about to learn some of my stuff about that. - You are, you are. - So, this is an activity. - An activity that seems like a fourth grade nightmare. (laughing) - It's age appropriate for anybody, really. Do you have a pencil or a pen? - I got one right here. - So, what I have here, so I have a British flag an American flag. - No offense to our British listeners, I love you guys. - Uh-huh. - I'm not gonna be picking up that one. - Okay, all right, so what I'm gonna do, I'm gonna ask you a question, and then I will raise one flag or the other to indicate what side you would be on. - I'm gonna get in so much trouble for this, try to answer these the right way to be on the right side. - Okay, okay. - Just, I'm not a racist, I'm gonna just throw it out there. - All right, so, do you think native Americans should be able to keep the land they live on? Yes or no? - Absolutely not. It's not reflective of my beliefs, it's just if I were in the time. - Okay, so, yeah, don't pick it for the historical reason. I mean, just follow your gut. - Hey, listen, that's, that was my gut. So, - But they should be given casinos. - I actually tricked you on that one. So, the British believed in that. - Okay. - So, do you believe that? Yes, so. - Well, no, I think the name of America should have their own land. - Uh-huh, yep, so that was something that the British believed in as well. - Uh-huh. - I had to trick you there for a little bit. - Goddamn it. - I still don't know where that one landed. - Okay, okay. - All right, do you think we should refuse to buy things that are heavily taxed by our government? - Who's the government? Like, what they're telling us is the government? - Any government? - Yeah, I'm a hard, no, like, I think we should be able to refuse to buy it. - Okay, so you should put a check under the Patriot. - Okay, yeah. Okay, do you think we should pay for our nation's military to protect our land? - See, that involves tax dollars, but, like, I like a good protected land. - Mm-hmm. - Now, do I get to choose which military it is, meaning, like, am I paying for a bunch of dirty red coats or am I paying for a bunch of melt gipsons? - They got a good navy, though. - They got a good navy to pay for. - Yeah, but-- - We're thinking in the abstract here. - Eventually, you know, the U-boats are going to knock that out. - So do you want a standing military? - Yeah, I do. - That's a question. Okay, so British there, as well. The founders had a great fear of a standing army because they believed it would lead to tyranny. - Okay. - Yeah. Do you think-- - Tell that to the Pentagon. - Yeah. Things have changed. Do you think individual states should print and use their own money? - This is going to make me a-- - Instead of, like, a federal-wide currency. - Do you have your mic on, Dave? - Yeah. that. Let's get that. So he was saying instead of a federal currency. Um, it's just like if I'm trading a chicken down South Carolina, then I got to travel like fucking 16 days to get to Philly and now I got to trade grain because that's what they do there. That would piss me off. No, I want individual states. You want individual states out their own currency because it's inherently more freedom at the end of the day. Once the Fed gets a hole. Well, that's the thing. The Fed sucks. Yeah. I'm I'm really torn on this one. Okay. I want one currency. I just don't want your own power to fucking go bur every day. Okay. It's a Tuesday. Okay. If you think individual states should have their own currency, you're a patriot. Yeah. It'd be a patriot. Well, I'm a Brit there. All right. Do you think we should be able to gather in public to talk freely? Oh, fuck yeah. I'm right. Yeah. Okay. So that's that's that's the easy one. That's the easy one. Okay. American. Number six, do you think enslaved people who've run away from their owners and then serve in the military should be given their freedom as reward? I do think that the British came up with that. The Americans eventually latch on to it. Yeah. Yep. Not good. Do you think soldiers should be able to move into our houses without asking permission? Absolutely. Fuck off. All right. So yes, that is later incorporated into the constitution. And then finally, for number eight, do you think that people should be paid back for what was stolen from them during the war? Stolen from them? Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. They should. Okay. Yeah. British. Yeah. Because that happened to many loyalists and they wanted their compensation. I still don't know where number one landed here though. All right. So do you think Native Americans should be able to keep the land that they live on? Yeah. So I do think so. Yeah. So that was with the British proclamation of the royal proclamation of 1763, the agreement was that natives would get all the land west of the Appalachian Mountains. Now, here's my problem. Yeah. This is only eight questions that you very willy-nilly picked. Mm-hmm. There's another 80 that you could be. You know, do I think we should have a standing militia to stand up against depression of a foreign government that claims that this is their land? Yes. Uh-huh. Do I think that, you know, we should form a constitution that's our own government and has nothing to do with Britain? Yes. Mm-hmm. Absolutely. Do I think that we should form an army and not necessarily pay right away because we're forming it, but promise to pay later? Yes. Like, you see what I'm saying? There's a lot of American flags popping up that you left off here. These are plenty of alcohol takes. The reason I choose these ones and have them in a concise format as such is it's just a helpful little exercise to show people that it's never as simple as we often make it to be. Yeah. It's an important and all jokes aside, an important point because this has come up in a lot of context on a lot of different podcasts. Something about a lot of different things, but like the old quote, history is written by the victors. Of course it is. It's also like, it doesn't mean you throw the baby out with the bathwater. Like, we're told all this history of the revolution, for example. And then even some things that are actually written down in history, just don't make it to the documentary because there's not enough time in two hours that like, doesn't make the Americans look good. Whether it be some of these things or even like the most famous story with Benedict Arnold, obviously he was a traitor that's real and like it was wrong, but like they really kind of fucked him up before they did that. And they don't talk about that, you know? It's like, you should be able to talk about all of it without saying all of it's not true. We're seeing that with World War II now. We're suddenly people are like, oh, some things we heard aren't true. Therefore, the entire thing was alive. There's people who genuinely believe that online. It's like, you know, and to me, you have to, you have to look at things objectively and nuance when the history. Yep. Seek out the gray area. Yeah. That's what frustrating is a historian when you see like things just kind of whips all one way or the other with parts of history. Yeah, I'm all about having a conversation really. That's what historians do best. We try to keep it as objective as we can. I don't really have an axe to grind, but just getting people to think is really the chief objective here. And for as simplistic as this little exercise may be, it did make you think a little bit. Yeah. I knew where a lot of these were going. Yeah. How are our scores on it? Five to three for the Brits. Okay. Yeah. I'm a true moderate. Yeah. So there you go. Because he like currency by states. Okay. I just think that's inconvenient. That said, like I said, this is interesting because you you alluded to this earlier. We got off it, but like they they end up forming the Fed years later in 1913. But there's also the whole argument famously where Alexander Hamilton, not with the Fed itself, because it wasn't for me up, but like he was more for trying to centralize the currency and be able to control how much is printed versus not. And then other guys were like, we want to do it by state or we want to do it differently than that. But what's what's, because he ended up dying in a duel with Aaron Burr, wasn't it? Was it over that? Just a few blocks from here. Yeah. Yeah. New York. Uh huh. Right here in Hoboken. Well, Hoboken. Yeah. We Hawking nearby. Yeah. No. Yeah. There's a memorial. I didn't know. Yeah. Not far away from here. You could walk. Was that over the monetary policy though? I forget. Well, he had a long standing feud with Aaron Burr that is really kind of the perfect representation of the Federalist versus Democratic Republican mindset. So just to quickly sum that up exactly what it was all about, is that the Federalist increasingly headed by Alexander Hamilton wanted centralized banking system, centralized federal authority. They wanted to be able to initiate trade on a national scale. They wanted things to be industrialized, whereas the Democratic Republicans of whom Thomas Jefferson is going to be leading, they wanted the more agrarian lifestyle. Thomas Jefferson thought that the ultimate form of freedom is to be a farmer. You are self-dependent. You are self-reliant. You answer to no one. No glyphosate back then, which is why he eventually purchases the Louisiana territory from France. How can you be a small government-minded individual and more than double the size of the United States? Well, he wanted it to be a nation of farmers and that was chief and his rationale behind all of that. So those are the two opposing views and Burr and Hamilton come to be the representative figures of those two opposing sides. How did they end up doing like whose idea was it to do the duel who called for it? I forget which one of them actually called it. He wasn't a good shot. Hamilton's shot hit a tree branch above Burr and Hamilton got hit. He was transported across the Hudson River for treatment in present-day Greenwich Village where he did what a place to die. Following day. All right, so it was a scrimmage. His animosity towards Burr was severe and well documented in personal letters. Let's keep going. If it's got to be somewhere down there, he detailed many charges. It became clear that Jefferson would drop Burr from his ticket because it was involved in being with him. Both men have been involved in duels in the past. Hamilton had been involved in more than a dozen affairs of honor prior to his fatal encounter with Burr. Wow. And then so different times. Who called it? Hamilton also claimed that he had, "Can we ask like AI?" AI would never lie to us, right? Who called for the duel between Burr and Hamilton? Burr called for it. Called his shot. Wow. But you know what he didn't get out of it? He's a kid on the $10 bill. That's what he's on, right? If the funny thing is that I recall watching a documentary made some 20 years ago and one of the historians prophesized that Alexander Hamilton will never be in the limelight in the way that Thomas Jefferson is. And of course we can see how popular culture and in this case a Broadway musical changes that dynamic entirely. So if you can have the right movie or the right play made about you, it can resurrect you from the ashes of history. And that's what somebody like Alexander Hamilton reveals. That's true. Yeah. That's true. But he was like, it's over a hundred years ahead of the curve of what ends up happening with the Fed. Because like I answered on this question that for convenience state, yeah, I'd love to have like one currency within a country so that we can interoperate across states and be able to do things. But that doesn't mean therefore that I think like international bankers should come in and decide who gets to sit on this independent commission that is appointed by people that they pay for to get into office. And then these people get to just decide, you know, every quarter are we going to raise rates? Are we going to lower them? Are we going to print more money? Aren't we? Because it's like, you know, this is where I think like the hard core Bitcoin or people make some really good points. There's other things that I think can be a little unrealistic, but some of the points they make about, yo, you get taxed without voting for it. Through inflation, look at the charts, especially since we officially came off the gold standard in the early '70s. It's kind of hard to argue with that, no? - Yeah, I mean, it's really beyond my area of expertise, but I just like that the range of this conversation can take us from 1804-dolling to Bitcoin. - That's right. - That's the beauty of history. - That's what we do here, we do everything. - Yeah, it's interesting. I'd love to actually, I've been thinking about that recently, I really wanna do, even if it's with like a hardcore Bitcoin or just really knows the history well, I really wanna do a podcast where we go through the entire history of currency in the United States, and just cover it, or just what happened, let people figure it out. Like a lot of us know the high level details of when, you know, as it relates to gold standard and stuff, but like mathematically, what does that do? Each time and then, unfortunately, the world's always worked, everything's downstream from currency and money, so every war happens, however you know, how society falls or rises, so it's interesting to look at. - It is. - Sure. But, you know, we've been talking about the revolution a lot, which is great, that said, you know, we referred to the greatest generation earlier who you've done a lot of work on that fought in World War II, which was an unprecedented war of its size and scale and kind, at the time, you know, as we sit here on the 250th of America, how much do we owe the guys who went and fought that in the Pacific, and in the European theater for, you know, us at least, being able to have the opportunity to bitch and fight over all the things we bitch and fight over today. - Yeah. And I think here is the compelling crossover between the American Revolution and World War II, because these were two generations of people who understood the significance of the social contract. - The social contract. - They weren't merely fighting for themselves, they were fighting for something that was much larger than they as individuals. And just as how many people who fought the American Revolution were reluctant revolutionaries, many people went, kicking and dragging and screaming into World War II, but their circumstances make them this profoundly important and pertinent generation in historical memory. And so in both cases, one on because of the developing economic system and the American colonies and the other one because of the Great Depression, these are wars that are mostly fought by people who are scratching their way to get to the top. - Yes. - The economic catalyst for many people who fight in the revolution is because they're promised land bounties for their service. And if you are a young revolutionary living in Todd Water, Virginia, or in rural Connecticut, a land bounty might be the only way that you can own real estate, which is the ultimate status symbol. And so economic incentive is something, and it grows into something bigger. And as you mentioned, there was very widespread isolationism in 1930s and early 1940s American H.W. Brands has written wonderfully about that as well. And something that a lot of people don't realize is that a majority of Americans who served in World War II were drafted, about 60% of them. - I actually were drafted. - Yeah, now the draft system worked in a few different ways. And it's here too. It's a little bit more complex than all of that. But these were children of the Great Depression. Many of them grew up poor. And in fact, they grew up so poor that they didn't know how poor they were because all of their friends and neighbors and schoolmates were as poor as they were. - Can we pull up an image of central park during the Great Depression? I know you've seen a bunch of this, but just for people out there, I always think this is the best visual described exactly what you're talking about. - Yeah, absolutely. Or any of the Hooverville's. - Yeah, we have. - There's a great one of a Hooverville that was in Seattle. - Yeah, that's perfect. These are the one you got right there. There's a colored version on Reddit right below it. Yep. Look at that. And then that's a good idea. Let's pull up a Hooverville too. 'Cause I mean, that's how that was a brilliant political marketing, by the way. - Yeah. - Like FDR, look at all these Hooverville's. - Very much so. - Don't mind my hide park on Hudson. Damn. That's just, these are all like, it's like a, it's a Chantita. - Yeah. At the height of the Depression, unemployment was around 20%. And at the worst, on a weekly basis, a six of the country face starvation. - A six. - One six of the country face starvation. - Right after the roaring 20s. - Damn. - Yeah. And so, Louie's Amperini, who is-- - Breakable. - Yeah, from Unbroken. - Unbroken. - Yeah, sir. He never liked to phrase the greatest generation. And I find that in a lot of World War II veterans. They think it's too self-aggrandizing. And I think Louie's Amperini said it best. She said, we were the heartiest, the heartiest generation. We put up with these two, we contended with these two great calamities back to back, the Great Depression. And the Great Depression made it stronger to embark on that next great challenge, which was the Second World War. Because out of the Great Depression, there was a sense of community. There was a sense of looking out for your neighbor because you really had to. I mean, your neighbor might provide you food from the cabbage patch next door. And you would grow something else and you would swap and you would look after each other and so on and so forth. Going back to that idea of virtue, which is kind of the repetitive theme of our conversation today, looking for something beyond yourself. And so, those are some of the, I think, key tenants of what makes the World War II generation a unique generation. And I think that's how they look at themselves. That label, the greatest generation, is something that is kind of placed upon them. But it's not something that they promoted or created in and of their own right. The last book I wrote was with a World War II pilot. He was now 102 and he's doing great. His name's John Homan and he flew 34 combat missions with the 489th bomb group, age 20. So he did that, find this half million dollar plane in a country where he wasn't old enough to vote and he wasn't old enough to drink. That's insane, isn't it? And when I tell my students that, many of whom are, yeah, there it is, who are 19 or 20. I say, imagine yourself in a situation like that and put yourself behind the controls of a B24 flying at 20,000 feet over Germany, getting ready to bomb a rail yard. That's powerful. Oh, yeah. Because you can, they can empathize with that. They can think of a 20 something, somebody their age themselves in a situation like that. And I think that's, that's how to teach history. Do it through, I don't need to make judgments on people in the past. Their words can speak for themselves. And so wherever possible in the classroom, I hand out what I call primary sources in essence, eyewitness accounts of history. And people can draw their own conclusions from what people in the past were thinking saying and doing. Do you think that the 20 year old flying jets in World War II in 1943 was biologically due to a litany of factors just more mature than a 20 year old today? Or do you think they were a product of the things that had happened to them such that if similar things happened to a 20 year old today, they could do that as well? I think youngsters today could do it as well if the circumstances called for it. Because people who grew up in the 1930s couldn't have envisioned themselves doing the things that they were going to do within a decade's time. With John Homan who grew up right here in New Jersey in Sayerville, now cool. I mean, he rode around in a jalopy and tried to do acrobatics with it and broke the axel on his dad's car and got into the shenanigans that many teenagers in the 20s some things do today. What history shows is that human nature doesn't really change. We're programmed differently generation by generation but we're still driven by the same universal themes and ambitions and yearnings as people who were living 90 years ago or 250 years ago. And so having empathy is a huge part of what it takes to be a historian. That's what I try to incorporate into the classroom. Having, I like that, have an empathy 'cause you're judging people in their time too. So human nature doesn't change, but people are still a product of the social forces around them and the things that are accepted or not accepted at the time that today would seem in one direction or the other crazy. You know, that's interesting. And I think that's what great historians do. You have to be as objective as possible for sure. We've actually, so one of my favorite things I ever did, I had two World War II veterans in here, Jake Roozer for episode 255 back in November, 2024. I've met Jake. Yeah. RIP, Jake, he actually passed away about six, seven months ago, amazing guy. Like he was talking for over four hours and I like, I had to stop him because I'm like, take I have a meeting in the city like he would have kept going. And then I had Ernie Mogher in for episode 263 as well. And it's just like, and he gave me this. That's a great, purple heart thing right here, which is really cool. But it just hits home. It's like, you know, they were, they were that age once and that's what they had to do. Yeah, absolutely. And Jake actually served in the same division as my grandfather. What? That's a, well, I just got chills. Yeah. Yeah, my grandfather, Thomas Nickham was in the fourth Infantry Division and he came ashore on Utah Beach the day after D day. Wow. And they knew each other? No, they didn't. Not to my knowledge because it was like 30,000 men in a division. It's possible that they could across paths though at some point. But yeah, no, Jake's story is, is very special. Yeah. And I'm glad that you had time to chat with him. Yeah, it's, it gives me chills that like that's, that, that connection is in here as well. Yeah. And the fact that like now it, because he's deceased, like we have that on record. Yeah. So what about my Instagram real quick and scroll down to summer 2024 when we weren't really posted videos or anything there? So Jake came with this kid, Rishi, who's amazing, who just shout out Rishi. He does, you guys are probably seeing him on TikTok and stuff. He has effectively traveled the world for the last, I don't know, nine, 10 years documenting any and all stories of World War II allied veterans who are still alive. And he cares about these guys more than anyone I've ever seen. It's, it's an amazing, amazing thing. And so he hooked up these two podcasts that happened and he came here with Jake. So they go, they park on the street right out here. You'll see, he's holding the gun, but they park out on the street out here and Rishi calls me up. You think you could come outside and help us get stuff in here? And I'm like, great. So I walk outside, Jake comes out of the car. He's fully uniformed up and everything. I'm like, that's fucking awesome. And obviously a ball of energy, I was shocked. He died. Like when he died, I'm like, man, he must have, I don't even know, because I thought this guy was going to live to like 180, you know, but he comes out and introduce himself, yeah, yeah. I just put my German beretta. I think that's what it was at the time. I was like, I'm sorry, what? And he opens up the car door. This is like on a street in a city in New Jersey in front of a, you know, pretty public establishment and stuff. And he's just whipping this out. I'm like, whoa, let's put that back. I had to bring my suitcase down. The thing was so big that it didn't fit in my giant, you know, 50 pound suitcase. So I, I zip it up. You've seen this suitcase, Steve. And the whole fucking muzzle is just sticking out the suitcase and I'm rolling it through the streets. And it's just a tie and dudes looking at me ripping boats just like Michael, I said world board two veteran, but coolest thing ever. And that was a great story. Is there another image? I think there's like a slide show there of like us holding out that one. Incredible human being. Yeah. Look at how big that thing is on the room right there. And that's us with Rishi. He took it off a, off a battlefield in, in Berlin and he was showing a lessie who, who's on my team here at the time like where he got the weapon. And then they're on the map right here on the screen that we're looking at. And then that was the, that was the weapon, yeah, which is pretty, yeah, it was a German Mauser. That was it. Not a Beretta, but really, really fucking cool. Yeah. It's, it's an incredible story. I've naturally done a lot of research on that outfit. And in the 11 months between D day and VE day, that division suffered 250% casualties. Oh, I'm sorry, 250. Yeah, that means that the replacements of the replacements are getting killed and wounded, yeah, which is astounding. Wow. Yeah. That's nuts. It is. Yeah. And he survived it. That's the incredible thing. Yeah. I forget where he closed, but he was all the way deep in Germany, a VE day. Pretty sure. Yeah, they would have been down in the, down the Munich area. Yeah. Yeah. That's crazy. Now, there were two, well, three when you include the Pacific, which we can talk about as well, but around the same time period, I believe, 1999 and 2001, there were two amazing Hollywood pieces that came out, one movie and one series, "Saving Private Ryan" and then "Band of Brothers" that depict different aspects of, you know, the World War II campaign specifically in Europe, starting with "Saving Private Ryan" and I know you've done a lot of work on that. Yeah. I have asked a lot of my special forces guys over the years to tell me what movie of any war movie most accurately depicts combat to them. And almost every time the answer is the opening of "Saving Private Ryan" and they're like it just, and they describe it, it just gets it from like the sounds you hear, the things you see. Obviously, it was an extreme situation where many guys were dying because they're just getting shot from the high ground, but like, you know, they're creating a fictional story for that movie to tell the true story of one of the wildest campaigns in human history. Yeah. To me, as a non-historian, it seems like they did an amazing job of how do you see it? The first half hour is incredible. It was groundbreaking when it came out. And the one downside of it in the long term is that people have become desensitized just to how traumatic that movie opening was because every war movie since, including "Hacksaw Ridge" is tried to mimic that level of violence. But for moviegoers in the summer of 1998, when that movie came out, it was unlike anything that had ever been depicted before. So much so to the extent that the Veterans Administration had to open up a hotline for people whose post-traumatic stress was triggered as a result of seeing that. And I was a bit too young to see it, unfortunately, when it came out. I was only 11 years old, 10 years old, when that came out. So my parents were like, "Oh, we're going to hold off." We've heard some rough things about it, you know, wait a few years until you can see it. We're going to get to see it on the big screen. But for fellow historians of mine who took World War II Veterans II, go see that in theaters. It was an incredibly emotional experience. And so I think the greatest thing that that movie did, I mean, it not only generated interest in World War II history, and it kind of revived that genre of the long drive spell between movie patent in 1970 and saving Private Ryan in 1998, not many World War II movies. Yeah. And that's because after Vietnam, more movies weren't really in Vogue and there wasn't really much of an audience for them in the way that they had been beforehand. And so not only did it rejuvenate a genre of filmmaking, but most importantly of all, it encouraged World War II veterans to finally open up about their stories. Now there was genuine public curiosity, you know, their kids been like, "Oh, yeah, dad served in the war, but man, if I had a dollar every time I heard somebody say he never talked about it." Yeah. If I had a dollar for every time I've heard that from a kid or a grand kid of a World War II veteran, I could buy a car with that. But that's the greatest legacy of all is that after a half a century, these folks opened up about their stories and their experiences and it just happened to come inside with the rise of the internet. And so much of that stuff has been digitized and recorded over the years. And so I give that movie major kudos, not only for its cinematic and historical depiction, but also this sort of indirect gift that it's given us in the years since. Yeah. That's interesting. The point you make though about the gap really between that and the story, Tom, because of things going on in the real world, where people were less enthused a war. What's even more interesting though is the fact that 1998, you know, it's pre-9/11 and everything. Obviously, we're well-passed Vietnam at that point. Desert storm had been a few days in the early 90s, which was largely, I guess, like somewhat of a positive story in the sense that it didn't prolong into a long war. But, you know, people weren't thinking about war at the time in any lens, maybe, maybe not even positive or negative, and for them to kind of do that and then be like, "Yeah, you know, by the way, at the time, 50 years ago, we did something kind of important." And maybe we should talk about that more. Yeah. And never thought of that. In 1994 was the 50th anniversary of the invasion. I'd say that's like phase one of a greater conversation about what World War II veterans did. There were a lot of ceremonies, veterans started going back, there were a lot of speeches, it was highly publicized. And then that dovetails into, you know, in the late, you know, I'll say this all throughout the 90s in the early 2000s, there was this sort of zeitgeist about American history and history in general. That I think is waned in years since. I mean, in the 90s, you have dances with wolves, you have the Ken Burns series on the Civil War, you have the movie Gettysburg, you have saving private Ryan, the thin red line, in 2000, you have gladiator in the Patriot. I mean, that's when we're coming of age. It's a little wonder we love these movies because there were so many of them. Yeah, that's so special. Like a couple years after the Patriots, like nine years old, - Yeah. - Yeah. And it's a style of movie that is sort of out of vogue now. Like the big historical epic, unless somebody like Christopher Nolan is doing it, chances are there's not gonna be much of an audience or much of a budget dedicated to it. But yeah, I was very fortunate and I think that this helped to fuel my interest, is that it was just so prolific in our popular culture that I couldn't help it to become more and more interested. So, yeah, there's a lot of tangents we can go down there. For sure, on one of the things you were saying though right away, it's like, I think there's this weird thing that's happened with us having so much access to information online that's made the allure of things less. And it comes down to content, sports, anything. It's like, if I look at sports 25 years ago, when I'm a kid, Alan Iverson didn't have social media. He was just a superstar who three nights a week showed up on my TV was five foot nine, 150 pounds soak and wet and would drop 40 on check. - Yeah. - You know, and you didn't see him on Instagram live at 12 at the Casino. You didn't know what he was doing. You always wondered, it was like a thing. Now, you know, guys, you know their whole life, you know, where they date, you know, where they're at. There's like, it makes them human, which is fine. But less magical. - Less magical. - Exactly. - Couldn't say that. - There's a mystique that's taken away. - That's right. And I think in a different way, there's also like that with history and the way we show it in art and stuff because everyone has such a goddamn opinion about every little thing that's ever happened that it's talked about so much in 280 character tweets every day that like you can't even just make something and let it sit there and marinate for people to enjoy it. Do you ever kind of see that downstream effect as it comes to like the art we do as well? - It's a good question. Yeah, it makes you wonder, do people have the patience to sit through a three or four hour network like that used to? I mean, even with the Lord of the Rings films, I mean, those were over three hours, but the storytelling was so good. But that's a rarity. And so I think that there is a danger in trying to simplify a narrative to make it more accessible to the masses. I think that's the way to look at it. I kind of take the opposite approach and I think that the more complicated a story can be in certain instances. Now, it's hard to pack this in a cinematic form. You don't want to make something too overly complicated. But I think dumbing down a narrative for the sake of just trying to appeal to as many people as possible definitely gets you on a slippery slope. - Yeah, but they also have the weapon of like TV being something it wasn't now. In large part, thanks to shows like sopranos, many series like "Band of Brothers" and stuff. 'Cause like, you know, "Band of Brothers" was what? 8 to 10 episodes? - 10 episodes. - 10 episodes. So they got the show basically over, call it 9 to 10 hours, a campaign of this one regimen within the war and you get to see everywhere they went. You could never put that and let it marinate the way they did in a two and a half hour movie, ever. - Yeah. - Now, you've done a lot of work like we were saying on "Band of Brothers" and what was the, so that was "Easy Company"? - "Easy Company" of the 506 parachute infantry regiment in the 101st Airborne. - Now, what made them the natural selection for HBO to be like, this is the one we're making this year? - That's a fantastic question. And it's really all rooted in the experiences of historical writer Stephen Ambrose. - Yeah. - So in the 1980s and the 1990s, Stephen Ambrose was going around the country, interviewing World War II veterans, gathering their oral histories, filtering through their memoirs. And he was a history professor in New Orleans. And so over time, he started to have like veteran reunions in New Orleans where he would invite them and they would, you know, have a, it would be an opportunity for them to get together and he would also interview them, gather their materials, get their addresses, so on and so forth. And really the key ingredient here is the meeting of Stephen Ambrose with Dick Winners, who is the main character in band of brothers. Dick Winners actively maintained personnel files of the veterans who were in his company for decades following the war. He had two full-filed cabinets in his home in Hershey, Pennsylvania. - Wow. - And anytime that he wrote a letter to one of his men and they wrote back like he would make photo copies, he would put it in a folder, he would keep in touch with everybody, he would know their addresses and have their phone numbers. He kept in touch with his dudes. - That's cool. - And so Stephen Ambrose meets Winters and Ambrose already knows just how much of a bad ass Dick Winners is. And then Winters tells him I have all the information for almost every living member of the company. And so Ambrose had a go-to directory through Winners already in place. And that is how he was able to interview these guys, get their photos, their materials, absorb their stories, and ultimately created the book, "Band of Brothers" in 1992. And so after the success then of saving Private Ryan, Hank and Spillberger thinking, "Let's do a mini-series." Let's do a World War II mini-series. We can do it on HBO. It gives us a far greater range in storytelling. And at first, Spillberger wanted to adapt the book, "Citizen Soldiers," which is also another book by Stephen Ambrose. And that was gonna take a more anthology perspective, I suppose, like a more episodic. Like I think each episode was gonna be a different soldier and you were gonna follow him throughout the war. But Hank said, "No, no, no, no, no, no." Here is the book that you wanna use. If you're gonna-- - Tom Hanks did it. - Yeah. And Tom Hanks, of course, "Big World War II" buff. And so the concept of following a single company from their indoctrination and training through the end of the war in such a multifaceted way, it had never been really attempted before. And so it really up the standards of prestige, television, and the scope of sort of telling a historical epic as well. So that is how it came to be and that is how easy company came to be chosen as the subject matter. - Yeah, it's so cool seeing the evolution. But it's what, over basically like a three and a half year period, something like that. - Yeah, their training starts late 1942, early 1943 for some of the characters. - And then it closes after they take Germany. - Yeah, okay. - Yeah. - Now, how from a historical accuracy perspective, let's just start at the beginning. - Yeah. - What was the name of the base they were training on again? At first, and that's in America. - Ah, in Georgia. - In Georgia. - Yeah. - How accurate was all that from like a draft and training perspective for them to come together and become the company? - The production company really went above and beyond in creating an authentic environment. They of course put the actors to like a two week boot camp as well to instill that sort of camaraderie during their boot camp. They were only able to refer to each other by their character's names. Like, I don't think they even knew their real names throughout much of the process. Like, oh yeah, you're winners and yeah, you're Lipton and so on and so forth. And it really worked. It worked really well in building that sort of camaraderie. And that friendship is seen on screen. - Absolutely. - Like these aren't just random actors pulled together. They went through this experience together and that translate to authenticity on screen. But, I would rank it, no historical films perfect. I mean, that's the big takeaway on my channel. I think it's as good as we're going to get though in getting a sense of what World War II combat was like for an outfit that was elite as easy company was. And I've read some of the behind the scenes documents though. Winners had a pretty active conversation in relationship with Tom Hanks, It was also the exact. of producer and directed one of the episodes. And winners had a number of problems at the outset. He's like the men are cursing too much or a man went and talked to an officer in this way or that way. You know, this guy's wearing his stuff wrong or you know, whatever. - Tom's like Hollywood. - That's pretty much exactly what he said. He's like, "Major look, here's how it's good to go." (laughing) If we get 12% of this right, people will think we're geniuses. So we're going to aim for 18%. We're going to aim for 18% fully authentic. You know, that's without cutting any corners or you know, doing any-- - You shut the bar low. - Yeah, you know. And winters appreciated that sort of candor. And he, I think he gained a better understanding of where tanks was coming from and really what it takes to make a movie because even with 10 hours, you're going to have to condense things. You're going to have to put people in places where they weren't. You're going to have them conversing with people that they didn't converse with, et cetera, et cetera. And so all of that said, I still think it's probably the best that we're ever going to get out of Hollywood as far as a World War II cinematic depiction is concerned. - What are the main things that lead you to that conclusion? Like if we could go through parts of the campaigns and what happened versus what really happened, like why do you say that? - Yeah, so one is the realism of camaraderie that is depicted in the series to incredibly authentic uniforms, costumes, props and weapons. So much said to the extent that the production company sent out forms to the surviving veterans like with a uniform diagram. Saying, like list on this or circle or highlight or write down what you wore in a specific moment. So like we're going to try to even get down correctly what weapon you had, what you wore, did you have some special scarf on your neck, whatever. And so they went to that degree, reaching out to the veterans on a case-by-case basis, saying what did you wear? We want that to be reflected in the series. And then there's the recreated terrain, the geography, the towns, the production sets were unreal. - Yeah, it was one of the biggest sets I think that had ever been constructed up until that point. And when you look at an episode five, which is my favorite where winners is charging a German company along a dyke in Holland. We got to mark that spot 'cause the YouTube AI reads that for the other meaning of that. - Okay, oh, yeah. You want me to rephrase? - No, you're good. - Okay. - You're good, we're just, I said, you got to make sure that I literally had episodes demonetized 'cause someone said they put their thumb in the-- - Oh, okay. - Like the-- - Uh-huh, yeah, yeah, gotcha, gotcha. I mean, restart there. - No, you're good, you're good. You were talking about how dick winners is going along and fighting the-- Seizing the German town along that thing. - Yeah, yeah, I mean, I'll just rephrase that. - Yeah, they're thing. - Yeah. The moment where winners is charging a German position in the Holland country side, I've been to that actual spot where that charge happened. Whoa. And I'm standing there, I'm thinking, this looks exactly like it does in the film. The company did such a good job of recreating it and showing how that small unit action in October 1944 played out. And so once again, go into the power of place, when you go to these sites and you compare them with what you've seen on screen, it opens up the door to a whole new level of appreciation with something like band of brothers. - The part that really got to me in that series when you talk about setting and battlefield elements and everything is how they showed the battle of the bulge. And they're down in these literal foxholes, like spread out like animals and caves in the middle of the woods. And then you go and read what Ambrose wrote about it literally from their testimony and how guys died or survived there. And then you look at what they did on screen with whether it was the planes coming ahead or dealing with Germans in the middle. I mean, just unbelievable. - It is so surreal to go to that place in person. So that's an heavily wooded area known as the Bojac which is like active bombs there and stuff. - Now and again, not so much in that area. There's other places in Europe that are a little bit more precarious, but their foxholes are still there. - That's crazy. - And when veterans came back, they would identify like who was in what foxhole. And they could remember exactly where they were. It all came back to them. So yeah, you should definitely go on like a Banda Brother's tour, trip or something like that at some point 'cause it'll blow your mind and it'll make the story even more powerful. - I feel like I'm seeing something in my head right now and I can't place if it's the same thing, but I want to say I've seen documentary footage of one of the Banda Brothers guys standing in those spots in the woods, maybe Garniery, somebody. - Yeah, Garnier and Heffra went back fairly often. - That might have been it. I hope I'm not making that up in my head, but I think it was them where they're like, yeah, I was right there. And you're just like, whoa. And I don't even know how you forget even just all the war, like the elements that you're dealing with. How you communicate with the other foxholes to even come up with a strategy. It's insane. It was, would you say World War II was like, when you move from like trench warfare of World War I to World War II warfare, it's like the biggest warfare type leap ever, maybe. - Well, certainly in regard to aircraft and happy weapons, happy, heavy weapons development. It certainly is a big upscale, but those wars are connected together at the hip. Including in leadership because all the generals who became commanders in World War II, they were really tensed captains and majors in World War I. - Or they were really pissed off about what happened in their trench and became leaders of countries. - Yes, or gets rejected from art school. - That's. - Who was the dean? - Yeah. - Who was the dean of that school? - Yeah. - We need to shame them. - Yeah. - Yeah. - There's a lot of for you. - That's what a Hitler had been accepted in art school. - I would have bought that art like Hunter Biden's art. Like I would have been like, "Hey, whatever is gonna keep you, I'm buying it." - I've seen some of his art for sale. - Probably so. - Yeah, it's not good. Yeah, that's mediocre street side water colors. - But he could have had better. - He could have, yeah. He could have had a great art teacher, if you taught art, you know what I mean? - Yeah, sometimes it's better to take out your frustration on a piece of canvas instead of at a political podium. - Absolutely. But you're right. The world war one is so ignored as well, which is crazy 'cause it just, you know, how many people died and what it all entailed. But they're-- - At least in America, maybe not so much in Europe where it's remembered more. - They do a better job there. - Yeah, well, it happened there. It happened in their backyard and their Europeans are fairly active at commemorating. - That's cool. - The war that happened in their own region. So yeah, something else worthwhile to check out if you're ever, ever they're exploring those battles. - Yeah, I would love to do that. As a little side note, so Deep and I were just back in Rome and Italy again, we were there in December as well, used to live in Rome years ago. But like the thing that's always struck me about places in Europe, especially at places like Rome, and all of Italy is how well they preserve history. And you're talking about that with like battlefields that involve bombs and stuff in the middle of forest that they still preserve over there. When in fact in America, like the youngest country, one of them in the world, our first president lived in three houses and they're all gone. Like we don't seem to have that appreciation here. We're constantly just building shit and we're like, ah, whatever it was nice, take a picture called a day. Like what is that? Like why did they focus on that much more than us? - Yeah, it's a good question. There's a counter argument to that too though, because as far as like battlefields are concerned, most European countries don't have our equivalent of national parks. You know, when I've been denormity, I'm thinking man, I wish this was a national park because it's all owned peace mail and museums and attractions are kind of privately operated and that's fine, there's nothing necessarily wrong with that. But now you're right on the mark in that regard. I mean when you think about a lot of the battles that took place in this vicinity, the Battle of Harlem Heights, you know, for instance, or even the Battle of Bunker Hill. Many decades after the Battle of Bunker Hill, they actually sold off parcels of the battlefield so they could raise money to build the monument that stands there today. And so the whole mentality of historical preservation has changed, but there are heroes out there that are trying to save these places. Chief among them is an organization that is near and dear to my heart And that's the American battlefield trust. encourage all the viewers to check that out. Over the past 40 years, that organization has saved 60,000 acres of battlefields from the American Revolution War of 1812 and the Civil War. And there are a lot of other great organizations as well that are out there. - Daughters of the American Revolution? - Yeah, they're more like civic-minded and they'll raise money for monuments or their upkeep or things like that. With entities like the trust or smaller versions thereof, they actually just buy the land and then they'll hand it over to a national park or a county park so it's accessible and it can stay the way that it looked. - That's cool. - Yeah, the whole objective is, and this is, it's really powerful when you think about it. Let's return a piece of land. So if you plop the Civil War soldier from a time machine on this patch of ground and they would be able to recognize it. - Yeah. - That's incredible. - That's pretty well. - Yeah, so they can do that at Gettysburg for sure. - Oh, they have been. - Yeah, yeah. The trust has been doing that for years at Gettysburg and there's a lot of other organizations. - I'm saying that soldier would recognize it today. - Oh, yeah. - They were alive, we'd recognize it today. - Yes, that's very special. - So yeah, if something like historic preservation is near and dear to your heart, the American battlefield trust is a really good organization to support. - Okay, shout out the American battlefield trust. - Did you see Sam Mendez's 1917? - I did. - Yeah. - What'd you think of that? - You know, it is incredibly immersive. - It's unreal. - It is unmatched in its artistry and its editing and its cinematography. There's a few moments that kind of stretch believability. - Why you gotta do that? - Yeah, it's what I do, I'm sorry, it's just second nature. Have you seen this, Steve? - Yeah. - Yeah. - There were alternatives to sending couriers by foot. You could drop messages by point, you could send pigeons, you know, so on and so forth. - A little raven from insurance. - Yeah, yeah, that would work too, for sure. But once you get past that initial discrepancy, I think it's an incredibly compelling piece of art. And here too, I think it got a lot of people interested in World War I, which like you said, is often neglected in the history books. - What made them fight that war in trenches like that? I mean, it's brutal. It's so, it's just a complete war of attrition. - Yeah, and here too, it wasn't universally fought in trenches. That's just the part that's most transfixed in our mind, just because it's so dramatic, and we think of it as so futile. I mean, it happens in the Mediterranean, it happens in Africa, it happens on the western front too, of course, it happens on the high seas. So there are many, many modes of combat in World War I, but trench warfare is what is most frequently depicted in movies or video games, or anything like battlefield, you know, something like that. But really what it is, is that it's a mix of the old world blending with the new. - How so? - Well, when you think of the old school cavalry charge, we're sending a massive man across an open plane. You know, if you think back to the times of Napoleon, when that was the tactic at hand. And this was true in the Civil War as well, where the weaponry and the technology had outpaced the tactics and the strategy and what that equates to is a massive loss of life. And so these were very steep learning curves. I think that's the best way I can answer that. - Yeah, and they, you already pointed it out with the people that it bridged the gap to to World War II, but like the lion starting even at the Treaty of Versailles, just setting off basically like the fused of the dynamite that would cause it, I, when I look back on it, the way that they decided to close up World War I, I'm not sure, like even if it wasn't Hitler or something like that, I'm not sure how there wouldn't be another major war to happen, you know, 20 years later, 30 years later, whatever it was going to be strictly because of what they set up there. It was a system kind of built to fail. - Yeah, when you think about the pressures that were placed on post-war Germany, and it's understandable because France and England had lost so many of its people that there was a natural inclination toward vengeance there. And there was also economic opportunity and advantage that could be granted to France and Great Britain by knocking out the German economic system as well. And so it's a very multifaceted issue, but yeah, you're right on the money, that that sort of political homegrown volatility on the German home front, we see where it leads to. - Yeah, I think it's just like, you know, there's a lot of things that came out of World War II afterwards where maybe part of the World Order got a rye and stuff like that, but I feel like, and there's no real way to do this. If you could just take a minute and put yourself back in the shoes of that time and just how basic survival, like the future of the world was on the line, maybe we'd have some different perspectives in how we fight about things today around the world. It's not just in America, there's political strife everywhere, you know? It's just, I have this phrase I've talked about before, I've never Googled it, so hopefully I came up with it, but I probably didn't, you know, where it's like, especially in America, with the exception of terrorist attacks on Pearl Harbor and 9/11, and then you got to go all the way back to the war at 1812, we've never been invaded, and it really shows, whereas like these other countries be it in Europe or Asia or whatever, they're not, they don't have oceans between all these other places, like they've been invaded in some cases, they're being invaded right now. And so they understand, you know, even generations later, in some cases, like what that could look like, whereas here we're like, ah, yeah. - Yeah, we're geographically blessed. - Yes. - In every guard we have the two world's biggest modes on our flank. - Exactly, so. - How do you change society from getting complacent, though, when they've had that as an advantage for generation to bond generation? - You know, I would say that the best way to start to tackle that is that if you have it within your means, travel, go and meet people, go and see things, interact with people who don't look like you, try foods that you've never seen before, go to places that you've never dreamed of, and Mark Twain said it best, he said, travel is the best way to break down prejudice. And going back to that concept of empathy that we address a little bit earlier, when you have empathy toward people, who you otherwise see as another category, it can open up all sorts of revelations about who we are, who you are, who they are. I really think that's the only answer is to be open-minded about society at large. - So. - You sound a lot like Anthony Bourdain, too. - Yeah, no, and he did it with food, I tried to do it with history, and food and storytelling are the best ways to break down barriers in that regard. - Right, that's so true. I think that I couldn't agree more with all that, and like, I've been making it a point to travel more now recently, that was not something I could do the first five, six years doing this job. It's kind of locked inside, but the advantage I have in this job, you know, 440 episodes in now is, I get to talk with people of all different backgrounds from all over the world. I think we've had every continent except Antarctica now, in here, right? So on all different topics, all different types of things, and it's like I get to have these long-form conversations that other people get to see on camera as well, and you just have such a wide-ranging world view of so many different things, because you see all these different perspectives, and even if you disagree with everyone in some way, which you always do, you talk to people for three hours, you don't agree on everything, it's like you can understand better where people come from, and I think that's a huge advantage of doing a job like this, that a lot of people don't have the opportunity to do a job like this, and they do something else where they're kind of in their world, you know, and they know what they know, and they can't, maybe they can't see certain things another way, 'cause they've never been exposed to that. So for those people, I do think like, again, if it's like within your means to be able to do it, you know, once a year ago, travel, you know, stick your finger on the map, somewhere and be like, I think I'll go there. - Yeah. - Out of all those conversations that you've had, what's the most important thing you've learned about yourself? - Ooh. Probably the one, there were two things out of college when I was coming out of college that I was right about. about myself. One of them was I knew I could never live more than five minutes from wherever I worked. Now it's five steps, you know, and I was right about that. And the second thing was that I assumed I knew jack shit about the world. And I was very right about that as well. And I think in doing this job, like I had done something else for five years before doing this to where I had had a lot of exposure to a lot of new things and a lot of different types of people. And it kind of set the bar for my ability to do this job. It like really added to that. But at that point, there was some, maybe some assumption of like, all right, I at least have some idea of how things work and how people are. And then my world over time got opened up so much more doing this that I was like, oh no, I'm really, you're just always learning. And I would talk to people, you know, I'd have people in here who were 40 years older than me, who I could tell still and were experts in certain things. You still looked at the world that way. Like I'm constantly figuring out new things. And I'm like, you know, life is just one quest to see how little you still know. Yeah. I think that's probably the number of things. Absolutely. I learned something new every day. And it ties in perfectly with what I tried to tell my students on the first day of class. And I asked them, are you here to get a job? Or are you here to actually learn to be, to get the most out of a college education or any education, whether it be trade school, college, whatever, you need to have a willingness to learn. Yes. Because it's part of your maturation process. That's what separates you from being an adult and a child is an openness to learning. It also opens up your possibilities. If you're just there to try to get a job, you're just trying to create the ends without the means in a way. If you ask me, that's a great quite, I'd never heard someone talk about that before you teach us like in college. That's a great question, ask students. And it gets the gears turning. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, you're going to have students because you're teaching all these cool parts of history, right? And you're going to have students who go do a job. Maybe they're, they're an engineer somewhere. Something that you think is just totally divorced from what you're doing. But something about like the liberal arts of like understanding human history and how things work, it's going to work its way into some sort of world view that's going to help them better prepare to do something in their job or interact with people in the future. Yeah. History is the only subject where you can say that every other subject has its own history. And so that's, I try to tackle it from that interdisciplinary stance because in case in point with what you just said, there is a history of engineering. There is a history of nursing. There is a history of music. There is a history of rail transportation. And so you can kind of trick students into learning things that are applicable to their own realm of study. And that's what really makes it all worthwhile in the long run. You make it fun too. You clearly do that. I mean, you really try. You do the reenactments and everything as well. Yeah, you're wearing some of it. I know. Yeah. You got a whole. It smells like gunpowder. Can we, can we pull that box up you have down there? Oh, I brought a whole crate full of like just clothing documents. I get excited when people bring this. So fucking Nicholas Cage over here, stole a declaration of independence. Yeah, here's this is here's the copy of the declaration. So this is yeah, I guess like the fourth National Treasure movie comes soon. But like stuff like this is so cool because it brings it home. And then I'm sure like your students get a kick out of the fact that you go and like reenact this stuff as well. It put yourself in those shoes. Yeah. And it goes back to the empathy thing. It's far as I'm concerned. What other than going into an active combat zone, which I have no desire to do. What better way can I talk about the life of a World War II soldier, but to go live the life of a World War II soldier? Where do you do that? There's all sorts of places that do it. Most of our events are in Pennsylvania. The biggest one is called D-Day Ohio. And it is a D-Day reenactment that takes place when Lake Erie stands in for the English Channel. And there's about 2000 men on the beach. And we go in on landing craft and there's planes flying over. Like the real. Yeah. Yeah. You ever worry about how useful those planes still are these days? Or are they more? Oh yeah. Well, you know, some of them get really close to the beach because you know, they pretend to like strafe it. And you know, these like sheet heater type planes that actually have like modern day stuff for you. No, they're vintage. Oh yeah. They've been to Jaircraft. Yeah. I'll pass on that one. Yeah. They stay like creek. They got duct tape on the windshield. They're a little bit better than that. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. That is cool though. 2000 people reenacting now. Yeah. Someone's got to play the Germans, right? Yeah. They do. You got a good German accent? I don't do that. But I can see it. Yeah. Yeah. This is tried to kill my grandfather. I'm not dressing up his name. So all right. Yeah. You're principles. Yeah. That's good. I'm with you on that. No disrespect. But you know, wasn't a good time for you guys over there. Yeah. But someone. So how do they they decide the guys that are going to do that? I'm just going to German. Yeah. Yeah. They do it on their own inclination. I think for them. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. One check out their psyche. Yeah. Did that internal terror watch less? Maybe. Maybe those are some good candidates. I'm not ready to be like, I want to play as I don't get near that. Yeah. I don't get near that. Okay. How often do you do this? Like a few times a year? It's six or eight times a year. Six or eight. Holy shit. Yeah. You can make it to the bit. Yeah. So yeah. I do uh, revolution, civil war sometimes as well. Now when you're doing the revolution, do you like do it in the middle of winter with no shoes? Like it's Valley Forge? I've never gone that far actually. Some people do though. That's that. Some people do. I some people actually retrace part of the march toward the Delaware River or on the opposite side of the Delaware River and in the winter. Yeah. In the snow. Yeah. Yeah. Fuck that. Those guys were savage. So it's it can be very immersive. Yeah. I used to live like right by the George Washington slept to your house in Morristown. Okay. That's cool because they did. They kept that one. Yeah. I've been there. They still have that very, very cool place, but that's where they went. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The Morristown encampment was just as brutal as Valley Forge. Yeah. But it doesn't get the sort of attention that Valley Forge does. Why does Valley Forge get so much attention? I think it's its proximity to Philadelphia being so close to the national capital and the cradle of liberty. As we know, it has a huge part to do with it, I think. And I think also tourism has a lot to do with it. I go over going to go visit Independence Hall and Liberty Bell. Let's go visit Valley Forge as well as sort of part and parcel of a connected story. I mean, Morristown is not too far from New York City. Yeah. Yeah. It's a cool place there. I'd recommend people go. But you said you did a lot of work on you've done a lot of work on like the history of rail in America. That's something we were just talking about because like they have amazing railways and stuff over in Europe. You could take a train anywhere and here it's like kind of limited. But that is also what built a lot of this country. Yeah. So you're looking at the time period like when Vanderbilt's building stuff and things like that. Oh yeah. The full gambit. I start off by looking at colonial and early republic turnpikes and how that evolves into canals and how that evolves into the first rudimentary railways and going up to the present. I come from an old railroad town in Altoona, Pennsylvania. Wow. It was once the largest railroading center on the planet with the Pennsylvania railroad. And almost a third of the 80,000 people who lived there worked on the railroad. So it's an incredible number. It's an incredible story. And so that's in part why we offer that class is to tie into that history and to cater to students who are going to be working for North Oak Southern or CSX or Union Pacific in the future. But yeah. So it's an incredible story in and of itself. Yeah. I love that series. They did back in 2015, the men who built America where they go through all the guys to effectively came out of the industrial revolution. But one of the episodes is obviously Vanderbilt. And then they tie them all together as well. But that shit came together pretty fast. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. And it's, you know, I get asked all the time, you know, why don't we have railroads like that anymore? And ultimately it was the interstate highway system of the 1950s that brought an end to it. The federal government really lost interest in supporting or partially funding rail travel and commuter travel in the United States. And certainly the airline lobby had a major part to do with that as well because they wanted to prioritize people going on planes instead of course. But yeah, when you go to Europe, it's a stark contrast to what you see in this country as far as the availability for sure of mass rail transit is concerned. It's my hope someday that we can have a train that can take you from New York to San Francisco in six or seven hours. That should be able to do that. Yeah. This is America. Yeah. Yeah. You know, like we could - I could figure that. I feel like we could figure that out. - Get Eli. - It would be great. Think about you wouldn't have to go through all the airports you wouldn't have to get connecting flights Yeah, I mean, there's it could follow route 30 it could go follow the Lincoln Highway the whole way like the infrastructure set up that we could be able to do that right now Um, I don't know about the infrastructure being set up. I need a little M&E domain theoretically. Yeah, probably Sorry That's for the greater good greater good great There's been a lot of things said that that goes the wrong way. That's true greater good. It's true people die It's true. I want to see that. Yeah, but which is why we need to study history. That's right absolutely But have you watched like Some of Taylor Sheridan's period pieces and stuff like that. Yeah. What do you think of 1883 and 1923? Yeah Really bad costumes historically speaking but good rich Like old-school television style historical soap opera Yeah, it's a real throwback to like roots or north and south from the 1970s and the 1980s sort of grand storytelling devised through television where you have fictional people interacting with real-life characters and circumstances. I think it's a great way of getting sort of just novice TV viewers pulled into the past a little bit and if it gets them to open up a book about the 1920s or the 1880s I think it's entirely worth it. Yeah, the brutality of those times Oh, yeah, yeah. No, that was something that really struck me as I was Watching 1883 um You know, life was hard Life was hard and it pulls no punches and articulating that. Yeah, they had to figure out how to kill dinner Yeah, well also surviving and so like I remember the scenes where they have to cross a very narrow river and How it's like oh my god, we might not make it like shit like that. They were like what? Yeah, you know There's one in my park over here. I walk right over it with a bridge. It's not like that But it's also like 1883 is take a place at a time where they're going up the Oregon Trail The West is still kind of being built and it's for lack of a better term cliche, but like the wild wild west. I feel like You know, I'm not a historian at all of that time period and stuff, but like it it I felt like I understood the difficulty of it. Yeah, that's fair. Yeah That and Sam Elliott. I mean you can't go wrong with him. Sam Elliott you ever shapes that stash fire Like you got you got to keep that thing, but yeah, I thought that was really good and then 1923 like they kind of had to The second part of the series. They kind of had to truncate some stuff and it got a little crazy, but I Thought that especially like that first season where you see these places that eventually become like Big resorts for the rich and powerful back then. It's just like a a Western standoff Pretty cool and yeah, that is definitely some contemporary critique and conversation about current happenings in the West because you know Like tons of rich folk are moving to Montana and stuff like that and they want the luxurious lodge and you know The resort community or the ski community or something like that. So yeah history can sometimes be repetitive absolutely now and It leads to all sorts of really fascinating conversations about conservation resource availability Who's to use this land? And of course, there's you know widespread conversations about that in the federal realm in regard to Timbering resource extraction What do we preserve these federally answer? Do we make them open to Corporations right if you will so those are the same sort of themes that are relevant and Sheridan's narrative and they continue to be relevant today Yeah, I just think some of the work he's done is really really cool and like you said it pulls in people as well to get more Curious about those time periods. I think that's definitely a win for sure But that guy's a machine. I don't know how it's insane right and set out like there's all kinds of shows people tell me about I'm like wait, that's him too, and they're like yeah, doesn't he do that Tulsa king one too with with so that's the word yeah crazy. Yeah I mean, I got to see that out of all prescription. There's something going on a lot of creativity Something's happening there, but what do you think you know across the two hundred fifty years at least since we've been a country What do you think the most ignored part of American history is? Oh boy boy The most ignored part of American history You know really it's You know a great documentary that you just referenced the men who build America You know, we haven't had a counterpart to that of the women who build America the story of the suffragists and people marching on behalf of civil rights and female and franchisement I mean, can you name a movie about the suffragist? Not one they did have an appearance at boardwalk empire. Yeah, they did they did but the very fact that That very dramatic episode of American history and we can't think of there there is one called iron jawed angels that HBO made about 20 years ago That's really the only one And so I think it harkens back to the need for like we as a story and minded people to be open-minded Yeah, about what sort of history We prioritize and what sort of history should be focused on A little bit more. I mean um by heart a military historian It's a very like male-centric story, but none of that exists in a vacuum Sure, and if it weren't for the efforts of women during world war one They may not have had the the capital or the momentum or the political agency To get the right to vote just two years later. That's right And so I encourage people to think holistically About our history. History is often used as a wedge issue It happens all the time And you know whether you want to talk about monuments being taken down or Certain content being stripped off, you know panels and national parks or you know whatever We really need to have an open mind about What we've done good bad or in between because if we don't have an honest conversation About that there's no possible way that we can grow and mature in the manner that our founding fathers wanted us to Uh So yeah, there's there's my answer for you. We need to look at the contributions of women and American society a little bit more And I think your point is unbelievable Take it about like you just have to have good well intention honest conversations about things that are objective And there's no story that is 100% anything that's ever happened It's not 100% like great or 100% bit like you can pick a part Little things here and there and and like it's like the old Bruce Lee quote like take what's good discard. What's bad? It's a great quote, you know like why not and that's that's what history can do and we and we can learn from it But you know, we've been hinting on it today. I guess this is like a good way to close it out But as a historian who's now looking at this experiment 250 years in there's a lot going on around the world right now And obviously all effects here and is sometimes literally caused by here and everything are you optimistic About the future of America over the next half century I have reservations But here's the thing the founders also had reservations Mm There's not a generation and American history that hasn't had worries about the future right Uh in the 1780s and the 1790s the question is can this fragile young republic comprised of a loose coalition of former colonies that have not much in common with each other can it long endure Over a generation later Abraham Lincoln asked the same question in the Gettysburg address Can a government of by and for the people long and door For those who went through the great depression The darkest days in history since the dark ages literally Uh They questioned if the republic could survive in the face of fascism and totalitarianism And so 85 years beyond that. Yes, I do have reservations But they aren't reservations that nobody before me didn't have either And so We should be on our guard We should be cautious. We should be well informed Because that's what citizenry requires We need to be informed. We need to be up to date about what is happening. We need to read. We need to look out for our neighbors and History can be our moral compass And helping us achieve that And so that is what I would like to see every the next two hundred fifty years I don't want to add anything to that because that was pretty perfect So we'll close it right there. That was a great way to put it I'm an optimist and I think I think we'll I think we'll be We'll be good, but I think like you said you also got to You got to have a cautious eye on on trends that you don't like for sure But yeah, there's been awesome man. Thank you so much for doing this Everyone go check out the full channel real history. You're going to get a blend of Hollywood and history and and sometimes have your life ruined when he tells you Mel Gibson wasn't everything that he was in the movie, but. - Aim small miss small. - Aim small miss small, that's right. It's an excellent channel and you do a great job and it's really cool to see someone who's like, actually like living what he does as well and you definitely do that. - Some people work for a living. I get to live to work. - Love that, yeah. - I would like to think I do the same thing. I love what I do. So cool shit, everyone go subscribe to Real History and give it a thought, get back to me, peace. - Hey guys, if you're not following me on Spotify, please hit that follow button and leave a five-star review. They're both a huge, huge help, thank you.