Julian Dorey Podcast - #445 - "IGNORED History!" - Hollywood Film LIES, American Revolution & Human Nature | Reel History

Episode Date: July 8, 2026

SPONSORS: 1) AMENTARA: Go to amentara.com/go/julian and use Code: JDP22 for 22% off your first purchase. 2) QUO: Try QUO for free PLUS get 20% off your first 6 months when you go to Quo dot com slash JULIAN. JOIN PATREON FOR EARLY UNCENSORED EPISODE RELEASES: https://www.patreon.com/JulianDorey CLIPPERS DISCORD: https://discord.gg/8QmWEKJ3BT (***TIMESTAMPS in Description Below) ~ Jared Frederick is an instructor of history at Pennsylvania State University, Altoona. For five years, he served as a seasonal park ranger at Gettysburg National Military Park, among other duties with the National Park Service. FREDERICK'S LINKS: - FB: https://www.facebook.com/HistorianJared/ - BUY HIS BOOKS: https://historymatters.biz/index.html FOLLOW JULIAN DOREY INSTAGRAM (Podcast): https://www.instagram.com/juliandoreypodcast/ INSTAGRAM (Personal): https://www.instagram.com/julianddorey/ X: https://twitter.com/julianddorey JULIAN YT CHANNELS - SUBSCRIBE to Julian Dorey Clips YT: https://www.youtube.com/@juliandoreyclips - SUBSCRIBE to Julian Dorey Daily YT: https://www.youtube.com/@JulianDoreyDaily - SUBSCRIBE to Best of JDP: https://www.youtube.com/@bestofJDP ****TIMESTAMPS**** 0:00 - Gettysburg, uniforms, and history interest 10:12 - Revolutionary War nuances and slavery 20:01 - Washington, Republican virtue, and reading 29:44 - Historical Accuracy of Mel Gibson's 'The Patriot' 39:00 - Guerrilla Warfare Realities 59:37 - Constitutional Convention 01:08:17 - Movies & Freemasons 01:17:56 - Burr-Hamilton duel 01:32:20 - Hamilton and the "Greatest Generation" 01:42:06 - WWII & Private Ryan Breakdown 01:53:46 - Band of Brothers Accuracy 02:04:00 - Hollywood & Modern Warfare 02:13:21 - Preserving History 02:26:58 - Historical Reenactments & Early Railroads 02:38:14 - Ignored History, Suffragists 02:45:13 - Jared Frederick's Work CREDITS: - Host, Editor & Producer: Julian Dorey - COO, Producer & Editor: Alessi Allaman - https://www.youtube.com/@UCyLKzv5fKxGmVQg3cMJJzyQ - In-Studio Producer: Joey Deef Julian Dorey Podcast Episode 445 - Jared Frederick Music by Artlist.io Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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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. And 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 regiment of like what George Washington was commanding when they were still under Britain back in the French and Indian War times and it just translated into this? So they come from the same region, but it's entirely different from generationally, yeah.

Got it. Well, Jared, it's great to have you here, man. Thank you for having me. And obviously, you have a very unique background because, you know, as we're coming up here on the American 250th, you know, we're trying to cover some good American history in here, had some cool people, but you're unique in the sense that not only do you cover all 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 high. 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. But what got you into American history in the first place? 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've been. 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. I saw the movie Gettysburg. You ever seen that one? Excellent. 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 schooler I 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 as a park ranger. At Gettysburg. At Gettysburg. No kidding.

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 section of it's called, but when you're standing on it.

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 a minute 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 yeah 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 fond memory of you know being with your family while you were there too so yeah absolutely yeah So, and you became a park ranger that you said? Yeah, 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 birdwatching, but everybody seeks a connection. And it's almost spiritual in how it resonates with people. So, yeah. Now, for people out there who aren't 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 war, right? Yeah, so 165,000 people fought there. 165,000.

165,000. So I teach at Penn State Altoona and how I always frame it for students, our football stadium holds about 110,000 people, you know, at 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. Yeah. It's wild to me that, you know, the country we enjoy now had these two moments, the first where it's like this should have never happened 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 is kind of the same way today, whether you look at it left or right. People often appropriate history to suit their own purposes. Absolutely. 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 it can 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 coming 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 is how I think of it. And the late great Robert DeValle kind of made a similar comparison. He said America is like this big-hearted, big muscular teenage football player who's kind of standing at the crossroads. You know, 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 in 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 putting at mel gibson oh huh mel gibson he was there on the table yeah that's my american evolution guy the guys wearing my uniform though decide to do this whole thing and create the country i i guess let's 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 behemoth 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 buildup 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.

Right. 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-spangly awesome ways, it's important to note the incredibly tragic consequences that it unleashed for untold thousands of people who experienced it. You have, on one hand, the patriot-minded folks who gain their freedom, they form a representative government, they embark on this great experiment, as you allude to. If you're a native person, though, 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, you know, 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. So it's incredibly complicated. It was very volatile. And I think for the 250th, people should try to have a more nuanced view of what our forebearers were going through. I found a different type of microdose I love last year, and it's a legal, psychoactive mushroom that doesn't make you trip out or see God. The mushroom I'm talking about is Omnita Muscaria, the red one with the white spots you see from every video game and fairy tale ever. But here's the thing, unlike psilocybin microdosing, Aminida doesn't push you into a psychedelic headspace.

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ON ON ONLY, please play responsibly. If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connects Ontario at 1866-531-2-6-00 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. As far as like there was just a lot of other things. 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 was also apparently a lot of loyalists that were like forced into Canada and everything. And effectively, the way I understood it, correct me if I'm 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 rent-a-soldiers, if you will. They are being brought here against their will, and many of them became Americans. They became U.S. citizens in the years after the war. And hence why many places like Pennsylvania have a very strong German ethnicity to this very day. Yeah, there's still obviously Germantown, famous neighborhood in Philadelphia. But I think that was even established like in the 17th century as far back as that, right? Yes. Yeah. And in fact, Germantown was the site of the first formal anti-slavery protest in American history in 1688.

know that. 1688. Yeah, so it goes, that's a 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 thy neighbor. as thyself. And even though many Quakers themselves owned 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 too, where that's at least one solidly large community doing it in America as it's being founded. Why do you think it took, other than just a 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. Slavery was like a drug. People were addicted to it. And even though many of them know, 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 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 elect to learn, they have this horrible odor, you know, 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. 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 on to it as well for fear of what it might do. So that's a kind of an interesting dynamic. See, now Thomas Jefferson, because he's also so famous and some, 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, well, these aren't humans, you know, and they just, it was passed down generationally, but you're saying there was a lot more nuanced than that. Yeah, no, 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. 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 human property. That's not universal. Not everybody does that. Some people wait until they pass away. That was the case with George Washington. his will. The catch there was is that his enslaved people were to be freed upon the passing of his wife, Martha. 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'm actually working through HW's latest biography of George Washington right now. I think I'm about halfway through.

It's amazing. People should 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 it relates to 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 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 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 Atkinson, 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 joke that that may have had something to do with his height. He would

always be the tallest man in the room. But even as he was a young officer, 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... off his... He didn't want the job, though. Yeah, no, 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. Republican Virtue. Small or Republican Virtue. Which I will also add was a key tenant of Rome as well. So we think about somebody like Maximus. All right, he is

driven by... Historically accurate to a team. Well, that's a different conversation for a different time. We're not doing that. 100% accurate. If you say so, if you say so, yeah, wink, wink. You're in New Jersey right now. Yes, absolutely. But I'll give you this. You know, we can think of George Washington in 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'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 setting 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. You know, I've done my service. I've helped save the country. In this case,

help save the world as well. I'm going to be a gentleman farmer, but the presidency came beckoning and interrupted that. That's how it goes sometimes. We'll talk about Ike, too. Yeah, 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 Banded Brothers, which I think is like, that might be the best miniseries ever made. I don't know if I'm biased, but like, we could do a whole session just on that. You know, we'll get to that. Maybe I'll have to lose the... I didn't bring a helmet. Yeah.

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, this is really capped an 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, stepping aside 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 all. because they still want to have power. You know, it's like there's a time and 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 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 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 as a county commissioner,

running for the state legislature, maybe running for the school board. 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.

Sure. 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. 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. Far from bar.

Word for word. Stealing his whole flow over here. Okay, yeah. Yeah, honestly, like this conversation has come up with different people in different contexts. I couldn't agree more, man. Yeah, and 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. Yeah.

Yeah. 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, where it be Mount Vernon or Monticello or Montpelier, what's one of the most impressive rooms that they have in their house? Their library. That was the internet of the 18th century. And 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. End of 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 he's all on Twitter. And it's not, it's not useful. But H.W. had a, he was talking about this. And he, you know, he's like a really just kind of report it like he sees a kind of guy 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 30 second quick hits, but he's like, everything is going to is digitized. So like people will get their information doing something different. And I'm like, well, what does that mean for like the future of how we function as a thinking society? And 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's a part of things. 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 reading his books and, you know, reading fiction as well from the time period. Yeah, yeah, I'm hopeful for that. I'll say, though, that 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. You know, 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 it's certainly an interesting conundrum. It's going to get interesting. But going back to the revolutionary time here, we have this sitting right here.

Yeah, a good memento. So the Patriots, one of my favorite movies ever, for sure. It's probably top 10 for me. 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 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 missed that call, that text, that follow-up, it sucks. It sucks. I know a lot about that. And you know what sucks more?

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You have this provincial who's just mining his own business. and the forces of empire meddle 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, as 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. Incredible. 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 swamp fox? 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, three. 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, a 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.

One of the big issues, though, is how the British are depicted in the film, almost Nazi-like. They were Nazi-like. Let's be honest, come on. Not universally. I know our Brits out there, you know the truth. But in any regard, it condenses things quite heavily. It villainizes quite heavenly. I mean, Jason Isaacs.

I mean, he's like one of the top 10 movie villains all the time. He's gangster in this movie. He is perfect. Yes. But the funny thing 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. In regard to authenticity. So it's kind of funny in that regard. But he was based on, so he was based on Tarleton, Bannister 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 known as 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 is dead. died or he is 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 officer emerges. So maybe that's 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, now they wouldn't have been executing wounded people like that, unfortunately.

But cinematically, it works as the perfect foundation for a story of revenge and retribution. It worked. 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

could pay. I'm like, oh, let's fucking go. Uh-huh, yeah. But like, there's There's such a after that scene where, you know, they execute all the people and then his spoiler alert, his one son is also killed. And then they go to take his other son to be hanged, 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 is 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 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 going to fucking kill all 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 this. Well, in reality, 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. And they probably would have gone after that British column together. Well, he did have his sons. Well, yeah. Some expertly trained marksmen, they were. Great. Not missing a single round hardly in the whole thing. But 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 bayoneted Mel Gippe, like a stuck pig before he got within six feet of okay 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 didn't you do like hatchets hacksaw rage with hatchet and shit like you seen him throw that thing yeah there's a there's a picture of it

in that book somewhere 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 what else did they allegedly get wrong in this movie? Oh boy, let me think. All right, that's not a good start. 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 to be. 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 Tavington's character rides up to Mel Gibson's farm, and he informs all the African Americans on the property that there is. now free and they can serve with the king. And one of them kind of timidly comes up and says, we work this land freedmen. Right. That would have been highly unlikely in South Carolina, where the enslaved population actually outnumbered the free population. At the time. Yes. Of white residents. Yeah, I would think South Carolina that wouldn't be it. Yes. And there you go. There's the picture.

Well, with the hatchet. Yeah. I'm saying, I can't shut out on screen YouTube. 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 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. So I 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. They don't even really alert you to that expansive time. Yeah. And so 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. Like Benedict Arnold and... Yeah, Benedict Arnold. The Quest for Quebec.

Canada almost becomes the 14th American colony when you think about it. Hey, you guys could... Maybe. Yeah. Maybe. Maybe 51. We'll see. And then the war drifts into the area where we are right now.

And it 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, Nathaniel Green, being prominent amongst them. And so that final phase of the war happens in the Carolinas. New York is occupied by the British for almost the entirety of the war. This is a loyalist city

for almost the duration of hostilities. Yeah, there you go. Yeah, you're right. And so there's just some really fascinating and 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 down what are 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 cements 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 it's 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 the role 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 Southwerect. Carolina, in 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 being 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 courier after courier. And so having eyes and ears on the ground amongst the people who live there is a crucial element of all of it. Now, I think a really overlooked part of the history during this time period is the lapse 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 Shay's 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 like, 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 who 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.

Yeah. 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. Yeah. Most, you know, we like to think of ourselves as the American experiment. Most experiments fail until you, you know, 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 of 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're going 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, our 13 colonies? All of that is taking place in the buildup 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 an 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 spirit. Yeah, that's crazy. 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 back field and you give them a keg of whiskey or you give them grain. And so they rose up in rebellion. And they were going, tarring and pitchforking, you know, 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 malcolm. into the Pennsylvania countryside to disperse these rebels who refused to pay their taxes. Shoes on the other foot. Yeah, and so the concern here was, people are thinking, have we merely replaced King George III for King George I? Hmm. People thought that George Washington had these monarchical or dictatorial aspirations because of how he was treating the Whiskey Rebels. 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 let 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 to the presidency of Washington and John Adams, who were both federalists. Wow, that's an underreported part of history right there.

Imagine that, like George Washington in full uniform. It's like, as president. It's like Jordan come back with the Wizards. That's a great parallel. He's like, all right, I'm going to drop 20 on you, motherfuckas. Here we go. Yeah, pretty much. Wow.

Pretty much. So something, that's what's crazy, though, because I, that's the part of, you know, when you look at history back then with something that's so new and spread out with all different colonies like we were 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 Zuliger always has a great quote, countries are just stories. You know, so like England, France, these are places have been established

for thousands of years. So you live 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 watched a 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 fury roads is pretty crazy it is and I think that's the allure 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 congealed 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 that these, the fact that 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 the feat. Sometimes it takes college students three months to just write a paper, you know, 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 and 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? Like, what were the ancient Greeks doing? What were the Romans doing? What were the Peloponnesians doing? You know, 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, 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. Hey, Ontario. Come on down to BetMGM Casino and see what our newest exclusive, the Price's Right Fortune Pick, has to offer.

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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 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, virtue comes from. Like 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, you know, over time. But, but. But, you know, 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 story, and this is a digression, but it's just a fun side story. 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 dump like the equivalent of close to 20 grand on alcohol. It was a keg-er. It was a kegher, you know. And, you know, they had rum punch and port and wine and Madeira and, you know, beer and, you you know, everything like that. There's nothing in the record about hookers. That sounds like historical protectionism right there. Yeah, perhaps. That wasn't on the receipt, at least.

We have the receipts for that. Well, you don't get a receipt for that. Yeah, it's true. It's true. So, well, 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, oh, 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-fifths clause 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 in upper-edge, numerically speaking, in 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 book. I don't want to give the whole speech and piss people off because I've done it before. But essentially, these historian sociologists, Strauss and Howe 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. And 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 II and was coming of age 21 to 42. during the time the war is happening and was fighting it, they're on the same exact cycle, like the same exact type of time period,

and in the same exact generation as the guys who fought the Civil War 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 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. 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 80, 85 years later, you have the Civil War, then roughly 80, 85 years, you have World War II. And where are we now? We're 85 years past World War II. Yeah, it gives me some cringe as an historian because historians notice patterns.

Yes. And yeah, you've got to wonder, like, what is it about that 85-year cycle? And 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 eras. Exponential means it 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, which is exactly what we're seeing right now. That's right. In Ukraine, the Middle East, the specter of war. in 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, will 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 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. of 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 cliff's notes version. Oftentimes, just because of time limitations, you know, 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. Because obviously you're like a movie buff and film expert as well.

I am a movie buff. What was the idea of that class where you'd focus in 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, with something like Gladiator, you know, 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? Yes. 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 coming out the millennium too, which is just so symbolic. People are like they're thinking about the course of history and a, like that leap is just like, whoa, now we're in 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 beast. 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 so people are like oh this guy's a soft man of nature who 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 yeah 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 closed. 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. Dief and I would nerd out on that like crazy.

It's a super fun class because we show some oldies as well. Good. And sometimes when students, you know, when you turn on like a black and white movie, you're like, oh 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 years ago. And so I'm a big classic movie fan on top of all on that. Yeah. What's your favorite classic film? I went my $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 A. My favorite classics are Godfather One and Godfather too. Because of the greatest movies ever made.

But then like I watched... Paper Moon. Oh yeah, Paper Moon. Yeah, like I watched after the first thing. Yeah. Ryan O'Neill. Great. Yeah.

Peter Bogdanovich 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 cars.

name Desire, incredible. On the waterfront, which was 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. 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 director. today, even the guys that are 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 is something I 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, 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. 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 got to go to the bathroom. This has been awesome so far. We got to talk. We got a lot to talk about. We'll see what we get to today. But I haven't said this yet. You got to 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, some of I want to say John Hancock, some of the others, like they were Freemasons.

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 Freemasons? Well, I think we can look at religion in the same way because Freemasonry, much like Christianity, was part of who these people were. They also, though, 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 Freemasons. 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 Freemasons in the first place in that time It was very much a status symbol. People of affluence and people with connection were members of the Freemasons. In the same way that certain clubs are clicks that people want to 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. Now, obviously, it was an international organization that were a lot of Freemasons in Britain and stuff like that. Was that ever, you know, a conflict of interest, I guess, to where, like, guys that maybe it could be as simple as guys that they were in the lodge with in America, you know, 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, you know, 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 is a freemason, 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 maintain those associations in relation. 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 government 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. And I think it's the ultimate representation of like from a visual symbolic perspective of the exact thing you're talking about here. But, you know, Franklin, he was, 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 going to 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 who's a flawed guy but i could never understand how he couldn't get over that one he saw it as a a betrayal and it was a cut that was just too deep to heal. Yet he loved his grandson.

Yeah. And in part, it's perhaps not only did he love his grandson, but it was also perhaps in part retribution. Yeah. To get back at his son as well. You betrayed me now. I'm going to take your son

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 New Jersey. He went back to Britain afterwards. Yeah, that's correct. Yeah, that's crazy. That's wild. H.W. wrote a great biography on Benjamin Franklin and Isaacson did one that was pretty amazing. Yeah.

It's like to get the full picture. Yeah, you got to check out the Ken Burns film on Ben Franklin as well. You know, while we're on the topic of film. Got to give Ken Burns some love. Yeah, Ken Burns is a gang. He's an OG. Yeah. Uh-huh. He's about that life. Yeah.

Ken Burns is like, you don't even got to like smoke weed to sit through those ones. You just got to like sit there and be like, I'm about to learn. Uh-huh, yeah. Now am I about to learn some about myself? You are. You are. So, this is an activity. An activity.

Yeah. Yeah. It sounds like a fourth grade nightmare. It's age appropriate for anybody. Okay. 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. I'm not going to be picking up that one. Okay. All right. So what I'm going to do, I'm going to ask you a question. And then I will raise one flag or the other to indicate what side you would be on. I'm going to get in so much trouble for this, trying to answer these the right way to be. on the right side. Okay. Just, I'm not a racist. Let me 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. That's not reflective of my beliefs. It's just if I were in the time. Okay. All right.

Let's go. Uh-huh. Yeah, don't pick it for the historical reason. I mean, just follow your gut. Hey, listen, that's, that's my gut. So, uh... But they should be giving casinos. I actually tricked you on that one.

So the, the British believed in that. Okay. Uh-huh. So do you believe that? Yeah, so... Well, no, I think the Native American 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. God, damn. Okay. 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 that I'm a hard no like I think we should be able to refuse okay so you should put a check under the Patriot line 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 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 mel gibson's they got a good navy though

they got they got a good navy to pay for yeah 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 that's that's a question okay so i'm british there as well uh the founders had a great fear of a standing army because they believe that it would lead to tyranny. Okay. Yeah. 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. Let's get that. Let's get that.

Yeah. He was saying instead of a federal currency. It just like if I'm trading. in 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 to... You want individual states that have their own currency? Because it's inherently more freedom at the end of the day. Once the Fed gets a whole...

Well, that's the thing. The Fed sucks. Yeah. I'm really torn on this one. I want one currency. I just don't want Jerome Powell to fucking go burr every day. Okay. It's a Tuesday. Okay, if you think individual states should have their own currency. You're a patriot. Yeah, it would 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. Damn right. Yeah, okay. So 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. That's the least you can do. Yeah. The British came up with that. The Americans eventually latch on to it. I knew what it was. Yeah. Not good.

Do you think soldiers should be able to move into our houses without asking permission? Absolutely. Fucking no. 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. evicted from their homes. Yeah, they should. Okay. Yeah, that was 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? Yes. Yes, I do think. 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. And this is only eight questions that you very willy-nilly picked.

There's another 80 that could be, you know, do I think we should have a standing militia to stand up against oppression of a foreign government that claims that this is their land? Yes. Do I think that, you know, we should form a constitution that's our own government and has nothing to do with Britain? Yes. 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 because they had a couple cold 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. It's an important, and all jokes aside, it's an important point because this has come up in a lot of contexts on a lot of different podcasts, talking 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 mean. 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 a lot. There's people who genuinely believe that online. It's like, oh. You know. And. to me, you have to look at things objectively and nuance when you look at history. Yep.

Seek out the gray area. Yeah. Does that get frustrating as a historian when you see like things just kind of whipsaw 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. Uh-huh. Yeah. How are our scores on it? Five to three for the Brits. Okay.

Yeah. I'm a true moderate. Yeah, true moderate. Yeah. So there you go. Because he liked currency by states. Okay. I just think that's inconvenient.

That said, like I said, this is interesting because you alluded to this earlier. We got off it. But like 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 formed yet, 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. Yeah. Right in New York. Uh-huh. Right here in Hoboken. Well, was it Hoboken? Yeah.

Wee Hawking nearby. Yeah. No shit. 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 longstanding 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 the French. You know, 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 the – like, whose idea was it to do the duel who called for it? I forget which one of them actually called it.

He just wasn't – he wasn't a good shot. Yeah. Hamilton's shot. It hit a tree branch above. Oh, no. And, yeah, 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 the 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. thief, 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

him being the president. Both men have been involved 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 who called it? Hamilton also claimed that he had, can we ask, like, AI? AIs would never lie to us, right?

Who called for the dole? between Burr and Hamilton. Burr called for it. Called his shot. Wow. But you know what he didn't get out of it? He didn't get on the $10 bill. That's what he's on, right? 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. It does change that. 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 100 years. ahead of the curve of what ends up happening with the fact. 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, are we going to raise rates, or we're going to lower them, or are we going to print more money, aren't we? Because it's like, you know, this is where I think like the hardcore Bitcoiner 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 being, without voting for it through inflation. Look at the charts, especially since we officially came off the gold standard in early 70s. It's kind of hard to argue with that. 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 doling 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 want to do, even if, even if it's with like a hardcore Bitcoiner just really knows the history well, I really want to do a podcast where we go through the entire history of currency in the United States and just cover it. Here's 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. That's how every war happens, how every, you know, how society falls or rises.

So it's interesting to look at it. 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 in 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 because of the developing economic system in 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. 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 Tidewater, 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 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 to describe exactly what you're talking about. Absolutely. Or any of the Hoovervilles. There's a great one of a Hooverville that was in Seattle.

Yeah, that's perfect. Yeah. 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.

Because, I mean, that was a brilliant political marketing, by the way. Yeah. Like FDR, like, look at all these Hoovervilles. Very much so. Don't mind my Hyde Park on Hudson. Damn. That's just, these are all like, it's like a shanty town. Yeah.

At the height of the depression, unemployment was around 20%. and at the worst on a weekly basis a sixth of the country face starvation a sixth one sixth of the country face starvation right after the roaring 20s yeah yeah and so louis zamparini who is unbreakable yeah from unbroken unbroken yeah he never liked the 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 Louis Zamperini said it best. He said, we were the hardiest. The hardiest generation. Like, you know, we put up with these two, we contended with these two great calamities back to back, the Great Depression. And the Great Depression made us stronger to embark on that next

great challenge, which was the Second World War. Because out of the Great Depression, you know, 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 tenets of what makes the World War II generation a unique generation. 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's now 102, and he's doing great. His name's John Homan. and he flew 34 combat missions with the 489th bomb group

in age 20. So he did that flying 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 you can, 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. Put yourself behind the controls of a B-24, flying at 20,000 feet over Germany,

getting ready to bomb a rail yard. That's powerful. Oh, yeah. 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 how to teach you.

history, you know, do it through, you know, 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. Oh, cool. I mean, he rode around in a jalopy and tried to do acrobatics with it and broke the axle on his dad's car. and got into the shenanigans that many teenagers in 20-somethings 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. And that's what I tried to incorporate. the classroom having it i like that have an empathy because you're judging people in their time too 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 that's that's interesting i think that's 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 I had two World War II veterans in here.

Had Jake Roosier 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, Jake, I have a meeting in the city. Like, he would have kept going.

And then I had Ernie Mowger in for episode 263 as well. And it's just like, and he gave me this. That's great. Purple heart thing right here, which is really cool. But it just hits home. It's like, you know, 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, whoa, 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. So 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 have crossed paths, though, at some point. But yeah, no, Jake's story is very special. Yeah. And I'm glad that you had time to chat with him.

Yeah, it gives me chills that, like, that connection is in here as well. And the fact that, like, now, because he's deceased, like, we have that on record. Yeah. Defe, can you go to my Instagram real quick and scroll down to summer 2024 when we weren't really posting videos or anything there? So Jake came with this kid Rishi, who's amazing. Yeah. Who just shout out Rishi. He does, you guys have probably seen him on TikTok and stuff. He has effectively traveled the world for the last, I don't know, nine, 10 years.

Right. who are still alive and he cares about these guys more than anyone I've ever seen. 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. Keep going deep. But they park out on the street out here and Rishi calls me up.

He goes, hey, 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.

He goes, yeah, yeah, I just brought 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 the city in New Jersey in front of a pretty public establishment and stuff. And he's just whipping this out. I'm like, whoa, whoa, 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 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 Italian dudes looking at me really. ripping buggs just like, Michael, I said, World War II veteran. But coolest thing ever, and that was the... That's a great story.

Is there another image? I think there's like a slide show there of like us, not that one. An incredible human being. Yeah, look at how big that thing is on him right there. And that's us with Rishi. He took it off a battlefield in Berlin and he was showing a lessee who's on my team here at 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, which is pretty, yeah, it was a German Mouser. That was it, not a Beretta, but really, really fucking cool. Yeah. 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 V-E-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 at VE Day. Yeah, they would have been down in the Munich area. 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 to depict different aspects of the World War II campaign specifically in Europe, starting with Saving Private Ryan. I know you've done a lot of work on that. 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 get, 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 and human. history. To me, as a non-historian, it seems like they did an amazing job. 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, has 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 uh when it came out i was only 11 years old 10 years old when that came out when that came out

So my parents were like, we're going to hold off on it. We've heard some rough things about it. Wait a few years until you can see it. I eventually did get to see it on the big screen. But for fellow historians of mine who took World War II veterans to 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.

There was a long drive spell. Between the movie Patton 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 because 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 it. Yeah. 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 coincide 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 storytime because of things going on in the real world where people were less enthused of 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 past Vietnam at that point. Desert Storm had been a few days in the early 90s, which was largely, I guess, 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. I 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 and the early 2000s, there was this sort of zeitgeist about American history and history in general that I think has waned in years since. I mean, in the 90s, you have dances with wool.

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 and the Patriot. I mean, that's when we're coming of age. It's little wonder we love these movies because there were so many of them. Yeah, I felt special at like a couple years after the Patriot. I was like nine years old watching it.

Yeah. And it's a style of movie that is sort of out of vogue now. Like the big historical epic, and unless somebody like Christopher Nolan is doing it, chances are there's not going to 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 thought, 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 on iverson didn't have social media he was just this superstar who three three nights a week showed up on my tv was five foot nine 150 pounds soaking wet and would drop 40 on check. 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 who they date. You know where they're at. There's like it makes them human, which is fine. Yeah.

But less magical. Less magical. Yeah. Couldn't say that any better. There's a mystique that's taken away. That's right. Yeah. 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. It makes you wonder, do people have the patience to sit through a three or four hour epic like they 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. at it. You know, 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 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 way. weapon of like TV being something it wasn't now in large part thanks to shows like soprano's miniseries like band and brothers and stuff because like you know band and brothers was what eight to ten episodes 10 episodes episodes 10 episodes so they got to show basically over call it nine to 10 hours a campaign of this one regiment 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 five of six parachute infantry regiment in the 100 first airborne now what made them the natural selection for hbo to be like this is the one we're making the series 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 Winters, 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-file cabinets in his home in Hershey, Pennsylvania. Wow.

And any time that he wrote a letter to one of his men and they wrote back, like he would make photocopies, 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 badass Dick Winters is. and then Winners 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, Banda Brothers, in 1992. And so after the success then of Saving Private Ryan, Hanks and Spilberg are thinking, let's do a mini-series. Let's do a World War II miniseries. We can do it on HBO. It gives us a far greater range in storytelling. And at first, Spilberg wanted to adapt the book Citizen Soldiers, which is also another book by Stephen Ambrose. And that was going to take a more anthology perspective, I suppose, like a more episodic. I think each episode was going to be a different soldier and you were going to follow. follow him throughout the war. But Hank said, no, no, no, no, no, no. Here is the book that you

want to use. Tom Hanks did it. Yeah. And, you know, 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 is the subject matter. Yeah, it's so cool seeing the evolution. 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. Uh-huh. 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? Camp decawa. And that's in America. Uh-huh. In Georgia. Yeah. How accurate was all that from like a draft and training perspective for them to come together. Yeah, they, the production company really went above and beyond in creating an authentic environment. Um, 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. 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, you know, I would rank it. No historical film's 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, you know, I've read some of the behind-the-scenes documents,

though, Winners had a pretty active conversation in relationship with Tom Hanks, who was also the executive 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 wouldn't talk to an officer in this way or that way, or, you know, this guy's wearing his stuff wrong or, you know, whatever. Tom's like, Hollywood. That's pretty much exactly what he's. said. He's like, major, look, here's how it's going to go. 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...

Set the bar low. Yeah, you know. And Winters appreciated that sort of candor. And 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. Two, incredibly authentic uniforms, costumes, props, and weapons. So much so 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 and a specific a specific moment so like we're going to try to even get down correctly what weapon you had what you wore you know did you have some you know special scarf

on your neck you know 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 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 in episode 5, which is my favorite, where winners is charging a German company along a dyke in Holland.

We got to mark that spot because 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, it's sad.

You got to bleep shit like that. I've literally had episodes demonetized because someone said they put their thumb in the... Oh. Yeah. Okay. Like the... Uh-huh. Yeah.

Yeah. Gotcha. Got you. Let me 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, the thing. Yeah. The moment where Winners is charging a German position in the Holland countryside, 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.

So once again, going to 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 like setting and battlefield elements and everything is how they showed the battle of the bulge. Yeah. And they're down in these literal foxholes like spread out like, you know, 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 the, whether it was the plane, 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 in a heavily wooded area known as the Blojax. Aren't there still 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 foxels are still there. That's crazy. And when veterans came back, they would identify 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 Band of Brothers tour or trip or something like that at some point, because 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 Band of Brothers guys standing in those spots in the woods, maybe going Yeah, Garnier and Heffron 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 survive, how you communicate with the other foxholes to even come up with a strategy.

It's insane. I mean, 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 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, you know, they were lieutenants, 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, uh-huh, or gets rejected from art school.

That's, yeah. Who was the dean? Yeah. Who was the dean of that school? We need to shame them. Yeah. Yeah. There's a what-if for you.

That's what if Hitler had been accepted in art school. would have bought that art like Hunter Biden's art. Like I would have been like, hey, whatever's going to keep you, I'm buying it. I've seen some of his art for sale. It probably sucked, right? It's not good. Yeah. Yeah, that's mediocre streetside water tellers. But he could have better if they let it in. Yeah, he could have. Could have 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. Like that the war's, World War I is so ignored. as well, which is crazy because it just, you know, how many people died and what it all entail,

but they're... At least in America. Maybe not so much in Europe where it's remembered a little bit more. Yeah, well, it happened there. It happened in their backyard and their Europeans are fairly active at commemorating the war that happened in their own region. So, yeah, something else worthwhile to check out if you're ever, ever there exploring those battles. Yeah, I would love to do that.

As a little side note, so Dief and I were just back in, and, Rome and Italy again. We were there in December as well. I used to live in Rome years ago. But like the thing that's always struck me about places in Europe, especially a place 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 forests that they still preserve over there when in fact in America, like the youngest country, one of them in the world, you know, our first president lived in three houses and they're all gone. You know, you know like we don't seem to have that appreciation here we're constantly just building shit and we're

like oh whatever it was nice take a picture call it a day like what is that like why do they focus on that much more than us yeah it's a good question um there's a counter argument to that too though because uh as far as like battlefields are concerned most european countries don't have our equivalent of national parks mm you know when when i've been to normandy i'm thinking man like i wish this was a national park because it's all owned piecemeal and you know museums and attractions are kind of privately operated and that's fine there's nothing necessarily wrong with that but no you're 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 um 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. I 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, you know, 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 plopped a 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 wild.

Yeah. They could 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 a soldier would recognize it. Oh, yeah.

If they were alive, would recognize it today. Yeah. That's pretty 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 did you think of that? You know, it is incredibly immersive. It's unreal. Yeah. It is unmatched in its artistry and its editing and its cinematography.

There's a few moments that kind of stretch believability. Damn. Why do you got to do this? Yeah. I mean, it's what I do. I'm sorry. It's just second nature. Have you seen this, Steve? Yeah. There were alternatives to sending couriers by foot. You could drop messages by plane. You could send pigeons, you know, so on and so forth. A little raven from your drums. 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 it's, 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 is so futile. I mean, it happens in the Mediterranean. It happens in Africa. It happens on the Western Front 2, 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, everything like Battlefield or 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 or sending a mass of men across an open plane,

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 lines starting even at the Treaty of Versailles, just setting off basically like the fuse to 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. 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. 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 awry 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 like that time and just how basic survival of like the future of the world was on the line, maybe we'd have some different perspectives and how we fight. about things today around the world it's not just in america there's political strife everywhere you know it's it's just you know i 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 nine 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 yeah 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 in that regard we have the the two world's biggest moats on our flanks exactly so how do you change society from getting complacent though when and they've had that as an advantage for generation upon 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 addressed a little bit earlier, when you have empathy toward people who you otherwise see as an other 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. 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. You're right. That's so true. I think that I couldn't agree more with all that. And like, you know, 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. all 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 worldview 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 people for three hours you don't agree on everything it's like you can understand

better where people come from I think that's a huge advantage of like 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 because 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 oh 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, I'm a lot. And then my world over time got opened up so much more doing this that I was like oh no 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 we're experts in certain things who 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 one thing I'm absolutely

I learned something new every day. And it ties in perfectly with what I try 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 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 question. I'd never heard someone talk about that before he teaches like in college. That's a great question to ask students.

And it gets the gears to talk. 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 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 worldview that's going to help them better prepared to do something in their job or interact with people in the future. Yeah. In the future. Yeah. History is the only subject where you can say that every other subject has its own history. And so I try to tackle it from that interdisciplinary stance because case and 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 really try. You do the reenactments and everything as well. Yeah, you're wearing some of it right now. I know. You got a whole... That's why it smells like gunpowder. Can we pull that box up you have down there, actually? I brought a just a whole crate full of like just clothing documents. I get excited when people bring this. So fucking Nicholas Cage over here stole the Declaration of Independence. Yeah, here's a... This is...

Here's the copy of the declaration. Yeah. This is, I guess, like, the fourth National Treasure movie coming pretty 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.

As 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 2,000 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? Are they more? Oh, yeah. Well, you know, some of them get really close to the beach because they pretend to like

strife it and, you know. Yeah, but are these like seat heater type planes that actually have like modern day stuff? No, they're vintage. Oh, yeah. They're vintage aircraft. I'll pass on that one. Yeah. They say they like creak, they got duct tape on the windshield or?

They're a little bit better than that. Okay. Yeah. That is cool, though. 2,000 people reenacting that. Yeah. Someone's got to play the Germans, right? Yeah, they do.

You got a good German accent? I don't do that. Spreckenzie dick. Yeah, yeah. You're shooting away. Those dudes tried to kill my grandfather. I'm not dressing up his name. So, all right, yeah, you have 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 so how do they decide the guys that are going to do that? Just go to German town?

Yeah, they do it on their own inclination. I'd like for that. Yeah. I want to check out there. That internal terror watch list? Maybe maybe those are some good candidates. I'm not in a hurry to be like I would have played SS-Skow-Schwobrary.

Yeah, I don't get near that. Okay. How often do you do this? Like a few times a year? Yeah, six or eight times a year. Six or eight? Holy shit. Yeah. You committed to the bit.

Yeah. So, yeah, I do 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 savage. Some people do. Some people actually retrace part of the march toward the Delaware River or on the opposite side of the Delaware River. In the winter. Yeah, in the snow. Yeah. Yeah, fuck that. Those guys were savages. 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 kept that one. Yeah, I've been there. They still have that very, very cool place, but that's where they wintered it. Yeah. Yeah, the Morristown encampment was just as brutal as Valley Forge. Yeah.

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 of. lot to do with it. Like, oh, we're going to go visit Independence Hall on the Liberty Bell. Let's go visit Valley Forge as well. It's sort of part and parcel of a connected story. I mean, Morristown's not too far from New York City. I mean, come on, 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 can take a train anywhere. And here it's like kind of limited. But that is also what built a lot of this country. 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

that 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 Norfolk 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 that effectively came out of the Industrial Revolution, but one of the episodes is obviously Vanderbilt. And then they tied 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 yet, 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'd be amazing. We should be able to do that. Yeah. This is America. Yeah. Yeah. You know, like we could figure. I feel like we could figure that out. Get Eli on it. It would be great. Think about that you wouldn't have to go through

all the airports. You wouldn't have to get connecting flights. Oh, 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? I don't know about the infrastructure being set up. Need a little eminent domain? Theoretically, yeah, probably. Sorry. That's for the greater good.

There's been a lot of things said that that goes the wrong way. Yeah, it's true. Great or good, you know, people die. It's true. We don't want to see that. Which is why we need to study history. That's right. Absolutely.

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. Damn it. But good, rich, like old school television style historical soap opera. It's a real throwback to like roots or north and south from the 1970s and the 19A sort of grand storytelling, devised for 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, both of them. Yeah, no. That was something that really struck me as I was watching 1883. You know, life was hard. Life was hard.

And it pulls no punches in articulating that. Yeah, they had to figure out how to kill dinner, you know, while 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 that we're 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.

Right. But it's also like 1883 is taking place at a time where they're going up. Oregon Trail, the West is still kind of being built. 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, 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. Can't go wrong with him. Sam Elliott. If he ever shaves that stash, fire him. 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 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 Western standoff. Pretty cool. And 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 you know and it it leads to all sorts of really fascinating conversations about conservation resource availability who's to use this land and of course

there's widespread conversations about that in the federal realm in regard to timbering, resource extraction, or do we preserve these federalians or do we make them open to corporatization, if you will? So those are the same sort of themes that are relevant in 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. That guy's a machine. I don't know how it does it.

It's insane, right? Turns it out. Yeah. 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 Sylvester Stallone? Yeah.

Crazy. Yeah. I mean, I got to see that Adderall prescription. There's something going on there. There's a lot of creativity. Something's happening in there. But what do you think, you know, across the 250 years, at least since we've been a country? What do you think the most ignored part of American history is that we haven't talked about?

Boy, the most ignored part of American history. You know, really, it's a great documentary that you just referenced, the men who built America. You know, we haven't had a counterpart to that of the women who built America. The story of the suffragists and people marching on behalf of civil rights and female and free Enchisement. I mean, can you name a movie about the suffragist? Not one. They did have an appearance of Borwalk Empire. Yeah, they did. They did. But the very fact that that very dramatic episode of American history, we can't think of, there, there is one called Iron Jod Angels that HBO made about 20 years ago. That's really the only one. And so I think it harkens back to the need. The

for like we as historian-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, I'm by heart a military historian. It's a very 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 I, they may not have had 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 whether you want to talk about monuments being taken down or certain content being stripped off panels in 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.

So, yeah, there's my answer for you. We need to look at the contributions of women in American society a little bit more. And I think your point is unbelievably well taken about, like, you just have to have good, well-intention, and 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 apart little things here and there. And it's like the old Bruce Lee quote, like take what's good, discard what's bad. That's a great quote. You know, like why not? And that's what history can do. And we can learn from it. But, you know, we've been hinting at 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. There's not a generation an American history.

history that hasn't had worries about the future. In the 1780s, in 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 endure? for those who went through the Great Depression, the darkest days in history since the dark ages, literally, 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 over the next 250 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 we'll, I think we'll be good. But I think like you said, you also got to you got to have a cautious eye on trends that you don't like for sure. But, Jad, this has 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 sometimes have your life ruin when he tells you Mel Gibson wasn't everything that he was in the movie. 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 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.

Amen. Cool shit. 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