Plain English with Derek Thompson - MEGAPOD: The Most Overrated American Who Ever Lived

Episode Date: July 3, 2026

To celebrate America's 250th birthday, Derek is joined for a history draft by three of the country's leading historians: Beverly Gage, H.W. (Bill) Brands, and Richard White. The goal isn't to revisit the familiar stories everyone learned in school. It's to uncover the people, events, and ideas that deserve far more attention. The historians make their picks for the most underrated president, the most overrated American, the historical figure who ought to be a textbook star, and the dark-horse event that changed the course of the country. Along the way, they debate what we get wrong about the American story, why some figures become legends while others are forgotten, and history’s most overlooked chapters. Subscribe to our YouTube channel here:https://www.youtube.com/@PlainEnglishwithDerekThompson If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [e-mail]. Host: Derek ThompsonGuests: Beverly Gage, H.W. Brands, and Richard WhiteProducer: Devon BaroldiAdditional Production Support: Ben Glicksman Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today's show needs very little introduction. It is, of course, America's birthday, the big 250. And when my producers asked me how I wanted to celebrate, I told them I had some very specific party requests. I wanted to invite over a group of eminent historians, and I wanted them to tell me stories, stories about the most underrated and overrated presidents, events, and dates in American history.

And since this is the ringer, after all, I wanted to do it as a bit of a draft. So on today's Megapod, we have not one, not two, but three guests, three eminent historians joining us at once to give you their selections in four categories. Most underrated American president. Most overrated American. Most pivotal under-heralded event that changed the course of history. And finally, a grab-back category of the one moment, fact, or person that every one-moment,

that every student of American history ought to know about, but too often doesn't know the first thing about. Today's guests are Richard White, Professor of American History Emeritus at Stanford University, perhaps the most eminent historian of the Gilded Age, author of such classics as Railroaded and The Republic for which it stands. Number two, H.W. Brands, Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin, and the author of more than 30 books, including the First American Pulitzer Prize nominated biography of Benjamin Franklin.

And finally, number three, Beverly Gage, professor of history at Yale University, and the 2022 Pulitzer Prize winning author of G-Man, a biography of Jay Edgar Hoover. I'm Derek Thompson. This is plain English. Beverly Gage, welcome to the show. Great to be here. H.W. Brands, welcome to the show. Hello. And Richard White, welcome back to the show.

Thanks, what there. So I cannot be more excited for the next hour to hour plus that we're going to spend together. I hope everyone has a really fantastic time. I want to go over the rules of what we're doing, and then we'll hop right into history raconteur time. There are four categories before us to celebrate America's 250th. These are not your standard American history trivia categories. I did not want to make this the 10,000th podcast that asked historians to rank the president. this is all about surprise.

These categories are about overturning our expectations, and I'm leaning on you to give us an uncommon view of American history where listeners can come away thinking, wow, I never realized how important that person or how overrated that person or event was to the flowering of our republic. The categories are as follows. Number one, most underrated president, who's gotten the short end of the stick,

reputationally speaking that we should know more about. Category number two, most overrated American, not just president, most overrated American. Who do we hear all about in history class who gets too much praise or too much attention? Number three, what event caused or changed the course of American history? And I think I told you all in the email that in this category I'm looking for under-heralded events. So, you know, if what I get is like, number one, the founding, number two, Civil War, number three, end of World War II? Like, that's fine. That's fine. I promise I won't cry. But I'm hoping we can lead on something that is ever so slightly more esoteric,

a little bit more off the beaten path. And finally, number four is a grab bag category, the one moment or fact or person that you think each student ought to learn about in history class, high school or college, but too often doesn't. And at the end of this, each of you will have a team, so to speak, of four selections, and maybe I'll go away and decide for myself who I think has the coolest team. But this is not so much about competition.

This is about having a good time. So as long as there are no objections to this, what I hope, incredibly entertaining and easy game, I think we should get started with the first category of most underrated president in American history.

Beverly, you are first up, and your selection is. My selection is I'm going to go with Richard Nixon. So Nixon often ranks pretty low in those famous and strange polls that you talked about of presidents. And of course, his legacy is overwhelmed by Watergate and rightly so. So this is not an attempt to say that Richard Nixon ought to be a great American hero. But it is an argument that Nixon did a lot of really, really important things.

that were subsequently overshadowed by the drama of Watergate for which he deserves credit. A lot of those in the foreign policy realm, the opening to China, above all, arms limitation talks, but also in domestic policy, you know, it was during the Nixon years that the EPA was created. It was these were the years in which Title IX came into force. I think the most interesting Nixon piece almost happened was that he was sort of a fan. of or interested in UBI and in something called the family, I think he called it the family assistance plan. At any rate.

So in funny ways, Nixon acted as a policy liberal. And then I would also say, if we're just talking about influence, you know, Nixon really is the president who put the map out for the kind of populist, somewhat reactionary, Southern Strategy mode that has been so central to the Republican Party ever since. So anyway, that's my bid for Richard Nixon. I don't want to make him a hero, but I think he's a lot more important than where he often ends up, which is as a punchline in our rankings of who really screwed up as president. I love that selection.

I will say that when Ezra and I were doing research for abundance, and we were writing our section on the history of environmental regulation in the United States, I was gobsmacked to see that, like, if you're just going by, what president has signed the most and the most consequential environmental laws in American history, I mean, Nixon is absolutely in the running. We got National Environmental Policy Act, NEPA, signed January 1st, 1970, the Clean Air Act of 1970, Endangered Species Act, 1973, the Marine Mammal Protection Act, 1972. I don't think most environmentalists today are wearing tricky dick pins. But, like, it's a sign of where America was at the time. And, I mean, a fact that Richard Nixon signed this legislation. And I agree with you that I think his legacy, despite the obvious corruption and the way that he, you know, resigned under so much corruption pressure, is an misunderstood legacy.

So I love having that selection on the table. Bill, the pick is yours. Most underrated president in American history is. I'm torn. I'm torn because I know I can outdo Beverly. I mean, I can under what I mean, I can undercut Beverly because the person that I'm really tempted to put forward is James Buchanan. And I'm taking the description at his word, the most underrated. He is the most underrated.

He is the most underrated. That's right. He's considered the worst president in history. And I'm not going to even try. to rehabilitate him the way Beverly very aptly did for Nixon because there's not a whole lot good to say about James Buchanan, but he's not as bad as people say, which is quite a backhanded compliment. He's generally blamed for allowing the South to secede and doing nothing about it. But the fact is, there was nothing he could do about it. He had been rejected. He was a lame duck.

He got absolutely no help from Abraham Lincoln, who kept Mum on what secession meant. So I would put him out there as just a reminder, don't blame people too much for things that they really couldn't have stopped. But my real answer is, I'm going to sneak in, too. My real answer is the elder George Bush. And the elder George Bush will always be ranked low among presidential historians for the simple reason that he tried for re-election and lost. And if you look at the ranks of top-rated presidents, they all tried for re-election and won. And that actually signifies something. really important because presidents get elected the first time on the promise. They get reelected on the performance. And it's the closest thing the electors have that we in our system have to a

referendum on a president, a federal referendum. And so if you get reelected, that's great. And if you try for re-election and you lose, you will always fall at least to 10, 12, 15 because the people have spoken and they spoke against you. But in the case of George H.W. Bush, he did two things that were really important, and I would argue that almost no one else in his time could have or would have done. Number one is he guided the world to a soft landing at the end of the Cold War, and this was something that was not automatic at all. He doesn't get credit for it. That usually goes to Ronald Reagan, who stood at the Brandenburg Gaden said Mr. Gorbacheck tear down this wall, a very dramatic thing, but that would have been absolutely counterproductive when the wall actually did fall.

What Bush did was he just kept quiet. And he realized that the worst thing he could do is to give ammunition to the un-reconstructed hardliners in the Kremlin who were looking at any excuse to strike out and prevent the reforms from going forward. So there was that. And the second thing was he essentially took his political life in his hands and agreed to tax cuts that – sorry, tax increases that caused the balancing of the budget during the – 1990s. This was something that Reagan wouldn't have done that no Republican since then could do, but he did. And he understood that it would probably lead to his defeat in 1992, which it did, but it left a legacy that Bill Clinton then dined out on during his second term when the federal government for the last time was, the federal budget was in balance. He was, George H.W.

Boyce was an extremely capable guy. He was a lousy politician, which is why he didn't get reelected. but I think he's always going to be underrated because I think he's a very good president, but he'll never be rated more than mediocre. I really like that answer. He was my backup, I just want to say. Oh, please, Beverly. I was just going to say he was my backup.

Okay, great. James Buchanan never made it. So this is like an MVP voting in the NBA where if you finish first on some people's ballots and second enough people's ballots, you're the overall winner. So maybe George H.W. Bush is, you know, going in to the final round here

as the overall winner. One thing I wanted to say, well, two things, I guess. One is, I guess, to make another basketball illusion. I like the idea of, like, there's this advanced stat in basketball of VORP, value over replacement player. And what you're saying about Buchanan is, like, not that he's a VORP star, but he's not a warp. He's at the bottom of VORP, right?

Like, his value over replacement president is not so low. Because if you put an ordinary person into office in 1856, the country's going to have a civil war in the 1860s, basically no matter what, I take that to be your fundamental argument. On George H.W. Bush, I think a really interesting point here, and I'm glad that we have them included, is that the U.S. has a major deficit in debt crisis right now. And just imagine a Republican president who runs for office saying, read my lips, no new taxes, raising the top tax rate on the richest wage earners by three percentage points, which is what George H.W. Bush did. I mean, you'd be seen as like some unbelievable figure of sort of political or fiscal courage.

And so the fact that George H.W. Bush did that, I think, is it seems like a moment in history that it's hard to imagine it being recapitulated by a Republican in the 2020s or 2030s. So really interesting selection there. Richard, the floor is yours. Most underrated president, not surnamed Nixon or Bush, is. I have probably the safest choice, which is a person who is actually never nominated to be president of the United States. And that's Chester A. Arthur, who usually ranks down with Buchanan. And Arthur comes in as probably the most notoriously corrupt man to be president until the recent past. And he ends up being a reformer.

He's an accidental president. He's associated with Roscoe, Conkling and an enemy of James G. Blaine, who are people equally as corrupt as he was. I mean, it's an era where Henry Adams writes in his novel democracy about somebody that couldn't identify because there were so many choices. He says that it's a senator who was, let me see if I can remember that get the quote straight. He was somebody who talked about vice and virtue, the way a colorblind man talks about red

in green, and that would have described Chester A. Arthur. He comes in, Garfield's assassinated, and he becomes the person who is first to tax fee-based governance, which is a way in which officeholders make their money by taking part of what they can bring in

in the federal government. He made the federal government and state governments for profit systems. He strikes at it with the Pendleton bill, which can be overrated as a civil service bill, but essentially he begins to be getting a tradition of civil service in the United States, which will grow slowly after him. He's somebody who, when Blaine is the Secretary of State, a much more

powerful man than him, and again, one of the most corrupt people in American history, he dismisses Blaine, who will get the nomination instead of him when his term is up. He's somebody who can bring about reforms that save the Republican Party. The Republican Party from Grant through Garfield, through Hayes, had been an absolute political disaster. I don't agree with everything that Arthur does. He, for example, introduces Chinese immigration restriction. But he is somebody who can come in and solve the issues that were splitting the Republican Party

and keep it in power at a time where it seemed barely able to hang on. So he is also, and finally, he's competent in a way that the other Republican presidents who were mostly a grab bag of Republican generals who come in, but Conkling for All his corruption knew how to run government, and Conkling proves, excuse me, Arthur knows how to run government, and he proves to be a very, very effective figure. All of this gets him nowhere, and he is loved by nobody.

Blaine gets the nomination, and Arthur disappears. But if you go through that string of Republican presidents who follow the Civil War, Arthur is probably the most confident of them, and he's also the most ignored. So he's hardly heroic figure. the bar is really low, but he doesn't deserve to be ranked down with Buchanan. Well, I love that we have Chesteray, Arthur, because I think if you sort of, you know, pull a typical American audience, even those who have read American history books in the last 20

years, he's probably one of the least famous American presidents. I think maybe it was, I think it was you who, in one of your books of the Gilded Age, said that it was the late 19th century was the golden age of facial hair when it came to American presidents. We know them more by their mustaches than by their accomplishments. But Chester A. Arthur is a fantastic choice. And for those who want to go deeper into the fallout of the 1881 assassination of James Garfield, we had Candice Millard on this show to talk about her wonderful and incredibly entertaining book, Destiny of the Republic, which is about James Garfield, his assassination, and the trials and tribulations of what was then considered modern science, because basically he was shot by a crazy person, but he was really killed by his doctor. who didn't know what the hell they were doing. And the person who came into office after Garfield died in the White House

was Chester A. Arthur, and he is forgotten for all of the accomplishments that you said, but I think rightly you should be remembered. So I love that we have him on the board. All right, we're done with the first category of most underrated president in American history. Now we're flipping the rating system and going to most overrated American,

not just president, but most overrated American. Richard, we are holding with you who is the most overrated American? I would say Andrew Carnegie. Andrew Carnegie has gotten a reputation for all the things he never really did. He is seen as one of the great immigrant success stories. He's seen as somebody who really recognizes

and promotes the triumph of Americanism after the Civil War, holds it up, against European standards. He's seen largely as a self-made man. He's seen for the gospel of wealth and redistributing what you get. And I would say each of those is either false or disastrous. Carnegie is a British immigrant,

and his major ambition in life into the 1880s was to become a member of parliament. He wasn't even an American citizen until 1885. He really maintains his basic loyalty to Great Britain as much as he praises the United States. He sees himself as somebody who is a product of evolution. I mean, he sees himself as the world is changing. He embraces Herbert Spencer.

He sees that his success is a master of his ability and the ability that's brought about by simply producing superior men as which he regards himself and the rest of the Gilded Age. He's not a creature of evolution. He's a creature of Tom Scott of the Pennsylvania Railroad. His career and most of the others is made by kind of insider dealing, which the Pennsylvania Railroad succeeds in. And without Tom Scott, Andrew Carnegie would have been nothing.

When he does achieve success, it's not so much because of his business ability, but oddly enough by his political ability. He is the one who gets the tariff which protects the American steel industry against British imports, and he's also going to be the person who will make sure that he maintains that advantage.

That's what gains him his fortune. He gets a reputation as being friendly to labor. his steel mills are probably the most dangerous places in the United States. By the early 20th century, the rates of death are going to be 25 rates of death and serious injury, or 25% a year for about three or four years. As for the gospel of wealth, basically it's one of the most undemocratic things that have ever been in the United States. It's now echoed in Silicon Valley philanthropy. The idea is that the rich deserve their money, and if they're going to give it away, they know how to give it, they should be the ones who determine what happens to it. It's, as Carnegie's workers

recognized, a lot of good it does them to public libraries when they're working 12 hours a day, seven days a week. So Carnegie, to me, is one of those figures who is all about, in a way very reminiscent of the present, all about a kind of publicity and hype, which you don't have to go very far beneath the surface to see how unreal it really is. Richard, I knew I was going to get a Gilded Age answer from you, and I'm very happy that I got one. I wonder, because we've had several conversations about this age that you've characterized to me as in terms of the growth of the railroads and the building of Standard Oil and, you know, U.S. Steel, you said in many cases, you know, these are somewhat extraordinary grand accomplishments, but often built by individuals who were much better at making

money than making things. And I wonder if there's one Gilded Age figure who you think is like the least underrated, because you do such a good job of, like, puncturing the myth of the great men of these time. Was there a gilded age figure who you think sort of earns his or her stripes in terms of the fame that they enjoy in the 2020s? Yeah, it's Rockefeller. Because Rockefeller was both very, very able, and he had no illusions about what was happening. I mean, Rockefeller, for me, is the first one to recognize it was supposed to be the age of individualism is really the death of individualism. He said, you know, individualism and competition, those days are over. This is about size and organization and a kind of ruthlessness, which you readily admitted,

and that the others who were struggling against it, it was they were pretty much the time had passed. And so Rockefeller has a hard-nosed reality, even though he saw himself as the chosen person of God. I mean, his wealth, he said, quite frankly, came from God. But he recognized what was happening to the American economy, and that's one of the things that allowed him to be so successful. So I'd say Rockefeller is the most stable of them. And there are others. James J. Hill, they're not particularly admirable men, but they were good managers, good organizers.

But that's not true of most of them. It's good then to get sort of separating the wheat from the chaff in terms of famous gilded age figures. Bill, moving on to you, most overrated American is. I'm going to give a collective answer, and I'm going to pick on a generation. Actually, I'm not going to pick on a single generation. I'm going to pick on every generation. And I say this because in American history,

in the history of other countries as well, especially in American history, there's this tendency for each generation to believe that it is the superlative. It is the best. It is the worst. In fact, you can take it right from Dickens's opening to The Tale of Two Cities.

It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. It was the age of darkness, age of wisdom, and all this stuff. And every generation thinks that history is pointing to itself. And we've got a single generation, the so-called greatest generation,

of the Great Depression in World War II, which has been dining out on that reputation for a long time. And I'm not going to discredit the things that they accomplished, but they left a lot undone. Then a generation of the 1960s, they could not, I mean, they thought they invented sex and music and drugs and everything else. Well, that stuff had been around. You know, our current generation thinks it is the most stressed.

It is dealing with the greatest change in the least amount of time. and that, you know, it's, and I say this as someone who teaches college students. I've been teaching college students for decades. And it's great that they all come in thinking this. But it is, it does tend to, it does tend to make them devalue history because I have to work pretty hard to remind them or to point out to them that they're not the first generation ever to walk the face of the earth. They tend to think that they are. And, and this is, it shows up in the fact that America, Americans, pay less attention to our history than to many other countries.

And there's a reason for this. The United States has been the country of the future. People came to America to leave the past behind and to strike out and create a new future. We don't have the deep, we don't have a thousand-year-old cathedrals and stuff like that in the United States. So it's understandable. But it's something that I think every generation needs to get past. It has the highest estimation of itself. and eventually that all gets knocked out of them,

but it takes a while. If each generation could arrive at it a little sooner, then we'd be better off. I like that. I'm writing it down on my list as the myth of generational providence. Maybe I hope that you're sort of generally okay with that description, but this idea that every generation considers itself a kind of end of history. It was all leading to now.

I think it's interesting because I do think that that spirit of providence that many generations feel, where many people think, you know, my generation is the greatest generation. I do feel like today, and I wonder if you see this among maybe your students or other young people you see, there's also a lot of nostalgia, even false nostalgia for the past. So you'll see this sometimes among, you know, conservative critics of modern cultural liberalism who say, God, you know, in 1953, that's when family values were really at their peak. and one guy could go to work for, you know, Ford Motor Company

and be able to buy an entire house with a perfect car with a perfect wife and five kids and the perfect dog. And it's like, yeah, I don't know. The 1950s had a lot of problems, a lot of paranoia, a lot of labor unrest, like it was not a perfect era. And so I wonder how in making this election, you think about sort of your thesis here, which is the idea that every generation considers itself special,

lives alongside what may or may not be a very modern feeling, I don't think it's that modern, that, God, there was a golden age in the past, and we've lost our way. And if only we were like the boomers, if only we were like the greatest generation, we could really, you know, take over the world and whenever sometimes, you know, reestablish the cultural norms that were true in the past. So how do those two ideas live alongside each other? Well, I think there actually is a close connection between the two of them because they're very self-centered and they're self-centered in the following way. Every generation thinks there was a golden age. And the golden age typically, and not coincidentally, is about the time that they were children. And so, you know, I'm a baby boomer.

So my golden age is the late 1950s and the early 1960s. And we think of it as a simpler time. And it was a simpler time because I was eight years old at the time. And eight-year-olds are taken care of. And they don't have to find jobs and they don't have to figure out where they're going to go to college. And so people think back on the times when life was simpler, and it was when they were kids. My father, however, was just as harried at that time as I would be when I was his age. So this idea of me, it's just natural. We all see the world through our own eyes.

I think it is incumbent on historians, authors of history, history teachers, to try to open those eyes and let each generation see the world as well through the of previous generation, just other people generally. So, yeah, there's a close connection. It's not just Providence. It's generational narcissism, I think, is what you're putting down. Exactly. Yeah, the only way that you're wrong, though, is that I was born in 1986, and the 90s, in fact, were objectively the best decade. So the music was better, the movies were better, and I'm sorry.

Like, all the other generations, they're wrong in exactly the way that you described them being wrong. I, however, am correct that 1999 was the best year for movies. One thing about this, is that you can see this when each generation, for something or other, it could be AI, it could be this, that or the other thing, they say, this time it's different. And as soon as you hear this time is different, start running for the door because the sky is about to fall. It's not different. Well, this is why I love talking to historians and reading history, precisely because it inoculates one against that tendency to say this time is different. Beverly, the floor is yours.

The category is most overrated American, or in the case of Bill, Americans. What is your selection? Well, I think my selection, which will be revealed momentarily, is very much in keeping with the theme that Bill introduced. And one thing that I noticed, I just wrote a book where I was traveling around the country, going to historic sites, trying to sort of retell American history through these sites. And it's very funny because many of our historic sites were created. by men who were trying to take their fortunes and then recreate the world of their childhood. So I will just mention John D. Rockefeller, Jr., helped to create Colonial Williamsburg.

Now, that wasn't really his childhood, but he did have a sense that, you know, there was a virtuous past, and we had lost it. We had to go back. Henry Ford built his own historic village that was very much based around the idea that the era of his childhood was great, and Americans ought to be able to go visit. And Walt Disney, Disneyland is built to recreate Walt Disney's childhood in Marcelline, Missouri at the turn of the century. And so that's the inspiration for Disneyland. So this is powerful. And I think it actually brings together what Richard and Bill were saying. Both the rich figures of the Gilded Age often went about trying to recreate their own childhoods.

But my selection is Robert Kennedy, the original one, not the one that we're all dealing with today. And when I said it echoes what Bill was saying, I think he is part of a generational mythos about greatness and transcendence and then loss and fracture that I don't think he actually, as a human being, lives up to her as a very good embodiment of at all. So it's worth remembering that Robert Kennedy's reputation in Washington when he was working on things like the McCarthy Committee or other congressional committees as a young lawyer was a kind of Prince of Darkness reputation. People really found him kind of obnoxious and offensive and didn't, were loathed to work with him. He became Attorney General in his mid-30s with very little experience other than

being the brother of the president. And this is, you know, one of the great acts of nepotism in American history. We tend to forget about that. But at the time, it was really quite controversial to make your brother the attorney general. He was as attorney general more sympathetic to civil rights than some people in the Kennedy administration. But I think it's a real stretch to say that he was the civil rights champion that he is later known as being. And then even when I think he really does go through a transformation in the mid to late 60s in advance of his bid to get the Democratic nomination for president, I think he is an example of someone who learned and changed and became, in that case much more progressive, much more outspoken on civil rights. It's also worth noting

that that was a lot easier to do by the mid to late 60s. He certainly wasn't the only person making that transition. Even when he was running for office, he was covering up some of his more nefarious record as Attorney General, such as the fact that he had actually been the one who signed off on the wiretaps on Martin Luther King when he was Attorney General. And then finally, and this is really poignant, but his assassination then along with his brother's assassination, but really made him this embodiment of lots of people's unrealized dreams. And I think, you know, people who die young in our political and cultural life, particularly

people who are assassinated, then they become sort of fixed. at a very particular moment in their lives, they become a way for other people to project, you know, if only, if only this hadn't happened, then we would have had a better future, a different future, one war in line. And I'm really not sure that Robert Kennedy would have been the vehicle for all of those hopes and dreams.

So he's my vote. Wow, an absolutely fearless selection. This is, we're at halftime now. And it's fun because I'm already seeing some temporal themes emerge. and the different teams that are being created. So with Professor Gage, you know, Richard Nixon being the most underrated president, Robert Kennedy, Sr. being the most overrated American. So we are in the 1960s, 1970s here.

With Professor Brands, we've got H.W. Bush and generational narcissism. So, you know, one can sort of get some boomer vibes here, some, you know, 1900s vibes there, 1990s vibes there. And from Richard White, just as I suspected, we're firmly in the Gilded Age with Chester A. Arthur. being the most underrated, and Andrew Carnegie being the most overrated. So let's move on to the category that I'm most excited by, which is what event, hopefully under-heralded event, changed the course of American history. And I'll just say this as a way of framing my enthusiasm for this kind of question. The Atlantic Magazine, where I worked for 17 years, had this back-of-the-book feature where they asked a bunch of people one question and then wrote down the responses.

And, God, maybe a decade ago, the question that they asked various experts, including historians, was, what is the date that changed the course of history? And we got some, you know, clever answers. Like I think someone said the date that the comet struck the Yucatan Peninsula. That was a pretty important date in the history of the human race. There might not be human beings if the dinosaur still roam the earth. One of my favorite answers, though, came from the history professor at maybe formerly at Yale, Tim Snyder. who said December 11th, 1241, is the date that the Mongol warrior Batu Khan was poised to take Vienna and destroy the Holy Roman Empire. No European force could have kept his armies from reaching the Atlantic, but the death of Ogadai Khan, the second great Khan of the Mongol Empire, forced Batu Khan to return to Mongolia to discuss the succession planning.

Had Ogadai Khan died just a few years later, European history, as we know it, might not. have happened. It's a counterfactual. Who knows if it's true? But I loved that. Having known that Kublai Khan, his descendants existed, having known that European history existed, had never quite thought that there was this hinge point where Mongolian history might have totally overrun European history on December 11th, 1241 AD. So most under-heralded history-changing event in the last 250 years in this country, Beverly, is. I'm going to go with one that should seem really big and might strike people as being quite heralded, but I think is under-heralded, particularly in the United States, and that is the First World War.

And the way that we tend to talk about the United States, there are sort of three big wars that matter. There's the revolution. There's the civil war. And then there is World War II. And those are wars that have a nice moral arts. They have lots of drama attached to them. And particularly for the 20th century, World War I sort of falls out of that story. And I'm doing this partly so I don't pick something in the 50s and 60s again. So we're moving back a little bit in time. But part of that is because the United States was not in the First World War for very long. It was really only about 18 months or so. It really wasn't, even in those 18. months directly involved on the battlefield for very long, and that's really more like six or eight months that actual American soldiers are playing a significant role. But I guess I also think

about it as being this kind of watershed for American government and politics at home. It causes a sort of huge buildup of the administrative state and is the first moment that you get all sorts of experiments with centralized government planning of varying sorts, a whole new models coming into being. It's, of course, the moment that the U.S. expands out to and then retreats from the world. And I think looking back from our own vantage point, it's also a moment of lots and lots of violent conflict in the United States that's going to have ramifications for a very long time to come. Some of that racial violence. Some of that kind of anti-capitalist violence, some of it, anti-immigrant mobs.

All of this kind of is fueled by the war. It brings about the first red scare after the war. And then it brings this period of real reaction in the early 1920s, particularly around immigration. The United States just slams the door shut on immigration in the 1920s, which is also a period that Americans in our quote-unquote nation of immigrants tend to forget about. that whole really dramatic story. It helps to produce the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in American politics. So I would say Americans tend to forget about it, both because it was a war that even in its day didn't seem to have the clarity of moral aims that ultimately some of these other conflicts came to have. And then also, its outcome was, you know, for a lot of Americans

pretty mixed. The last thing that I'll say is that there is no way to understand. the Second World War, which came not too long after, right? These wars are only about 20 years apart. There is no way to understand that without understanding the generational experience, the lived experience, the disappointments, the myths that were attached to World War I, because that's what shapes a whole set of U.S. decisions in this much more famous war that's going to happen. I really like that selection, and I really like the last answer that you gave for this election. Because if you think about the period of 1914 to 1945 being this 30-year war where

the outcome of World War I made inevitable some reaction within Germany that would trigger a second world war, well, there's lots of people who say, you know, the outcome of the Second World War launched America as this global spanning colossus that defined the brief American century in the second half the 20th century. But if you say, well, you know, the outcome of 1945 was essentially written in the early 1910s, well, then you have to say what's underrated in this story that so many people tell when they think of America reaching its kind of apotheosis as a global power. You have to start that story with World War I. And so I like that selection quite a bit.

Bill. I'm going to take Beverly's answer as opening the door to a loophole that I want to answer this question through. The question, as I read it, what event had the most effect on? American history. And I didn't read it as what event in American history, because like Beverly, I'm going to look at something that happened outside the United States. And World War I was outside the United States and was without the United States for most of the period. I'm going to look at events in British politics in the 1760s and 1770s that for reasons largely unconnected to events in

North America put in place a political administration that was so short-sighted, so stubborn, so stiff-necked that they managed to alienate people who were well-disposed toward the British government, towards the British Empire. Benjamin Franklin. Benjamin Franklin was an enthusiast of the British Empire, but the government in London managed to alienate Franklin. George Washington was the least likely revolutionary you could imagine. Revolutionaries are people who don't like the status quo, and the status quo in Virginia worked really well for George Washington. But the government in London managed to make a few mistakes, grossly underestimated the response, for example, to the Stamp Act, and then doubled down and made things worse, and things just got worse and worse.

If the British government had handled the troubles with America even a little bit more prudently, well, we wouldn't be having this conversation because there wouldn't have been an American Revolution. Now, would the United States still have been a colony of Britain? Of course not. But the United States would have become independent by means other than a violent war, by means other than something we call a revolution, historians have been debating forever, how revolutionary the American revolution was. Was it really just a fight for home rule?

And so Britain would have come to see something that Franklin saw as early as the 1750s, that the British Empire could go on and on. It could become this great thing if the British simply allowed room for the American colonies, to grow up into becoming an equal Western pillar to the eastern pillar in Britain. And in fact, this is where the world, this is where the United States and Britain wound up by the beginning of the 20th century, that they basically two pillars of this Anglo-American special relationship.

If the British had handled things better, if they hadn't been so short-sighted, then there wouldn't have been an American revolution. America would have evolved its way to independence. Probably, this is a case where we've got a counterfactual that we can argue there's something that actually happened. The United States might very well have become independent the same way Canada did. And Canada basically outgrew British tutelage. Now, arguably, of course, Canada evolved in the context of this very large independent United States. But there's some other elements of this.

For example, it's well known that slavery ended within the British Empire 30 years before it ended in the United States. And the reason it was able – the reason the British government was able to end it was that the slaveholders didn't have a dominant or a veto-proof position within British politics. The slaveholders all live somewhere else, and Parliament could overrule them. If the United States had still been part of the British Empire, slavery might have ended in the United States. and 30 years before it did, and without a civil war. So I think it's easy to imagine a different, a different world, a different history, if British politics had just been a little bit different in the 1760s and 1770s. Wonderful answer.

Can I ask you one follow-up question? What is the decision, the law, the proclamation in the 1750s or 1760s that you think was the most load-bearing in terms of, a terrible British decision that accelerated or made more likely the American Revolution. You talked about the response to the Stamp Act. You talked about various political movements that might have really disappointed George Washington and Benjamin Franklin. But if we're really trying to isolate a handful of or the single most consequential move

that a British politician made in the 1750s and 60s, what do you think that would have been? If you had to put it all on one thing, it was the declaratory act that was passed in conjunction with the repeal of the Stamp Act, where Parliament said, the Stamp Act wasn't such a good idea after all. It's hurting British merchants. But we declare, as a matter of law, that Parliament writes the law for the colonies in all areas whatsoever. So whatever you guys in America think, we're going to tell you what to do. And that really set the mood that London got itself stuck in and that Americans realize this is what we're up against.

That's great. Bill. Richard, most under-heralded, significant event in American history is. It's one that essentially has been invented by historians, and it goes back to the end of World War II. And historians have begun to speak of events that sprang out of it, and it's a constellation of events. It's a great acceleration. It begins in the United States, but it expands all over the world. It's affected everybody on the planet by now.

And that's this constellation of events that come out of government policy, technological innovation, changes in health care, which leads to a massive growth in world population, from about $2 billion to around $7 billion. The increase in carbon emissions, which comes largely but not entirely from the automotive industry, as automobiles takeover transportation, not just in the United States. but the rest of the world. A series of government policies which will drastically remake the infrastructure of the United States, the highway system, the irrigation systems, water systems, electrical systems.

All of these things come out of a moment at the end of World War II where the United States is simply hegemonic. Usually historians veto off into the Cold War into politics in the United States and they ignore this constellation of events which really have produced the modern world. There's a great irony in how this turns out, because even as this is, and again, this is

something you've talked about in abundance, even as they build, they are making their new infrastructure utterly unsuited for the world they're creating. The problem they create is that basically we create global warming. We change the entire climate, and we've created an infrastructure, which runs from highways to irrigation systems to power systems, which is utterly unsuited to the world we have in now. We have a massive infrastructure, and infrastructure is a place like California, utterly useless to the problems we create.

As a matter of fact, it makes those problems even greater. So this, to me, in many ways, is the greatest change in American history. Never has any place in this country, including the Civil War, including the World Wars, has the country changed so rapidly, so fast, grown so fast, and at the same time as undermined its own basic necessities of existence. So it's that moment, it's almost like a big bang theory of the late 20th and 21st century. None of it would have happened except that all of these things come together with American hegemonic power and the growth of corporations and government policies and technological

innovation and medical advances which together explode into the world that essentially, all of us sitting here is the only one we've ever lived in. But it begins at that moment. So that, to me, and it's not really an event. Nobody said, oh, now the great acceleration begins. Historians look back and they create the term. But it seems to me something quite real and probably as consequential as anything I know in American history.

If we think of the Great Acceleration, which is this explosion of human activity in the corporate world, this explosion of human activity that allows for more people, more building, more emissions, as a kind of like a delta, like a bayou delta into which many rivers are flowing, right? And you've got, you mentioned science. So just the fact that, you know, antibiotics increases the survival rate of mothers, that increases the number of, and young children, that increases, that helps to increase the number of children, right?

So you've got these long-term trends like the industrial, Revolution and science, sort of improvements in antibacterial technology and science that make it easier for people, for people to survive their childhood. You've got the growth of, as you said, the automotive industry, which, yes, is taking off the 1940s, 1950s, but really goes back to the 1910s with the assembly line and Henry Ford. If you were going to write like a book about the Great Acceleration in 2026, and you wanted to kick off that book with an opening chapter that introduce people to an event, a kind of microcosmic event

in the 1940s or 1950s, that contains within it the essence of this thing you're talking about, which is the great acceleration. What might be that decision, that political event, that corporate event, a technological event?

Like, what would kick off that book, do you think? They would be symbolic systems. It would be either naming two of them. One of them is going to be the GI Bill, which essentially, both send soldiers back, but also begins an investment in the American university system. And you cannot understand American science without this huge investment that goes into universities following World War II.

Because without it, that's where the science explosion comes from. This is this government-support of science through the universities. And, you know, the ramifications of that are only now dying back. I mean, oddly enough, we're speaking at a moment where that those cutbacks have begun. The other one would be probably something like Eisenhower's highway app. which comes a little later. But essentially, that is a government infrastructure that would not exist without the government coming in.

What I'm leading back to, and the same thing can go to Silicon Valley or other things in aerospace, these are all government programs. This is a capitalism which works with the government. And so each one spawns another one. Without the highway system, you would not have the automotive system.

And it's true, automobiles are date back the early 20th century, but their explosion across the world is all post-World War II. Something like 75% of all the carbon emissions in the United States or in the world in human history have taken place since the great acceleration. The great acceleration produces them. And that produces, of course, climate change.

So it's both these intended events and these unintended events. It's the way they come together. And if it's a delta that the rivers flow into, each of these rivers is actually changing the others. I mean, the whole system is dynamic and is changing all the time. So even though planning is part of it, what is the most interesting thing about the great acceleration? Planning works.

And the interesting thing about the system is for 30 or 40 years, most of my life, it seems all of this works. There's no questioning it until now where it doesn't work. Literally, we have moved into a place because of global warming and because of climate change and other things where the infrastructure we've created all these systems, electrical systems, irrigation systems, especially in a place like California where I live, they're all breaking down. They're breaking down right in front of you. And that is going to be also a consequence of these changes. So it's an incredibly complex series of events.

And we notice it. We still haven't figured out what we're going to do about it. One observation about this category as I look back over it, Beverly suggested World War I. Bill suggested the declaratory act and other British political layers than 1750s and 60s, Richard suggested the GI Bill, the Highway Act, and the great acceleration that contained this enormous growth of human activity post-World War II, is that these are all global selections, which is kind of cool, right? Like I asked about, you know, what's changed the course of American history, and all of your answers sort of draw on the fact that America, American history is an enormous part of global history, especially post this 1770s. And so I like that all these

answers are truly global in nature. All right, we have our final category, and this is a grab bag category. What I told you via email was, I want to hear about the one moment or fact or person that you think every student ought to learn about in history class, but too often doesn't. So this is about as grab baggy as it gets. And Richard, we are starting with you. Okay. Now, this was a tough one. I gravitated towards persons because I just did events. And, you know, I thought maybe France, Willard in the Women's Christian Temperance Union because, in fact, that was politically so significant. And then I thought Henry George, but I decided on somebody else, somebody who would never have considered himself an American, but is critical to American history.

And that's Tacomsa, who's a Shawnee Indian leader who, in fact, does not lead the Shawnees. Instead, what he is is a creation of the same world that produced the United States. And what he wanted to do was stop the expansion of the United States. And he wanted to stop it at a moment where, in fact, it could have been stopped, which was in the late 18th, early 19th century. And what Ticompson did is he realized in a way that's very American that the only way he was going to stop a revolution, such as came out of the United States, was have a revolution of his own.

And so what he did is totally transferred Native American understandings of how the world worked. There were no longer tribes and tribal territories in his world. This was the world in which all native people own the land in common, and no chief, no tribe could give away native land to the United States. He realized that, in fact, he could not rely on the older structure of native leadership. He, in fact, he and his brother took over both transforming native religion and also making Tacomsa and a series whose backing came from young men, not from older men, not from chiefs. He overturned that older hierarchy and became himself the dominant.

figure. And he realized, too, and this was the biggest chance he took, and he knew that it could go wrong, and it would go wrong on him. It depended on his alliance with the British Empire, and also less importantly with the Spanish Empire, that he could form a coalition which would stop American expansion at the Ohio with British backing. The United States could be constrained, and a native confederation would take over much of what became the old Northwest, and he wanted to see it in the southeast too. And the interesting thing is, he nearly did it. I mean, it was a moment where we have to think there was nothing inevitable about the expansion of the United States. There was nothing inevitable about the United States taking over the continent. The manifest destiny was this momentary

invention much later in the century to come to realize this can all stop. But he's American because so many of the things he does echo with American history. I mean, one of the things that always puzzled me living in the Midwest is how he's a very important. How many places in the Midwest are named Tecumseh. William Tecumse Sherman is Tecumse. Ticumsa becomes this figure who wants to stop the United States and at the same time become somebody assimilated into American culture. And for me, the useful to reason why students should learn about it

is what does American expansion, what does American success look like from the other side? What is the cost that comes with it? and how do people who then become incorporated into America really begin to see it? And it's true that Tecumseh is an utterly extraordinary figure, but he's a very, very useful one. So in the end, I'd wish they know something about Tecumse and what happened there. It's a wonderful answer. Henry George would have also been a wonderful answer. I would love to think that he'd be one of my selections for a list like this.

That's great. I'm not going back to the Gilded Age again, so I want to go before and after the Gilded Age. And I'm not asking you, too. I feel bad about shaming all of you for being too temporally consistent in your first two answers now. This is still great. Bill, the board is yours. So you asked, which should my students learn in history class? I'm going to define, redefine my class broadly to do something that would have been impossible, utterly impossible to do in a class, say, 20 years ago. But is almost possible now and we'll soon be.

And that is to go back in their own family history to find out how. how their ancestors got to America. And this is, and for everybody who's here, their ancestors came from somewhere else. Some came maybe, what was still know, 20,000 years ago. We don't know 30,000 years. That ancient history is being pushed back. Some people got here yesterday.

But I think it would be very enlightening, and first of all, because it would remind each of my students, and I would include older people as well, it reminds them they're part of this long historical tradition in their own families that and especially it's important in America where immigration has been such a hot button issue for so long we are all immigrants or the children or the great-grandchildren or something descendants of immigrants a few of the immigrants came cheerfully oh boy let's go to America most of them came under some form of duress either Andrew Carnegie's father couldn't get a job. So his mother says, we've got to go to America. The Puritans came because they couldn't practice their religion, the way they wanted to in England. Slaves came, of course, because they were chained across the middle passage.

But just to, and this sort of gets at my answer to the first question, I think it was, and that is this idea that young people, but people generally, tend to think of history as leading toward them. And it does, but in this case, they'll see what the long backstory of their own life is. And I think it will remind everybody who undertakes this exercise. Something is really important right now when we're celebrating the 250th anniversary of American independence. We are all part of this experiment in self-government. Can we make this work? And we've relied on generations before us to get here.

And I will say, I'll tell you what I tell my class on the last day of the spring semester when I'm finishing up. I'll hear a long course on American history from pre-colonial times to the present. I point out at the beginning that the students are about to embark on this 250-year-old experiment in self-government. And every generation before us has managed to keep pushing it forward. We had a big hiccup in the 1860s with the Civil War and it looked like it might collapse. But it didn't. We pulled it out. And so the last thing I tell him is you are now, participants, you're the air.

to this experiment, don't screw it up. I love that. Would a fair summary of this election be a quote, a brief quote? And the quote is something like, most Americans are the descendants of immigrants under duress. Is that the core of your idea? Because I love that. It's true of me. My maternal grandmother, Ellen Hertz, came to America in the 1940.

left Germany in 1938 was part of the kinder transport where Jewish children in Germany briefly lived in the UK and then moved to Pennsylvania and finally Michigan where she met my maternal grandfather. So, I mean, that's immigration under duress. I remember during COVID, I played around with Ancestry.com and clicked around and who even knows how accurate some of that ancestry work is.

But basically calculated that on my dad's side, the family has been here for hundreds of people. years and may have first come over in the 1770s. But who knows what kind of duress that might have been under? It could have been religious. It could have been ecological. It could have had to do with economic opportunity or a famine. And there's all sorts of reasons why Irish people have come to the United States or Western and Eastern Europeans have come to the United States. And so I love this idea, this theme that most of us are descendants of immigrants under duress. And I also love how it challenges this idea of

of triumphalism. Beverly, you can make the final selection now of the day. The person, the event, the fact that you wish most of your students learned about, but too often do not. I do often make my students do something. It's not quite like what was just being described, but I have them write their political autobiography. And so it's the challenge to them to think about. themselves in history and think about the forces around them, their region, their family, global events, something intensely local, their schools. What is it that makes them think about

the world in the way that they do so that they can see themselves as being shaped by history? So I love that answer. But I'm going to go a little more traditional and actually pick a person as well. And I'm going to get really out of my time period. and go back to the 1790s. And the person that I would like everyone to know about is Ona Judge. And Ona Judge was an enslaved woman in the household of George Washington.

She was born at Mount Vernon. And when Washington became president, at about 10 years old, she became a body servant to Martha Washington. So as an enslaved little girl, was there to attend to Martha Washington and her daily needs, addressing the whole thing.

When Washington was elected president, and he went first to New York and then to Philadelphia, he took several enslaved people from Mount Vernon with him to these places and finally settled in Philadelphia with eight or nine enslaved people, including ONA judge. So there are two things that I think are really particularly fascinating about her story. One is the way that Washington reacted to laws at the time in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,

right in the aftermath of the revolution that said enslaved people who came into the city of Philadelphia after six months' time of residence could petition for their freedom. And Washington, the great figure of this new Republic of Freedom, decided that he did not want that to happen. And so just on the six-month mark, he would rotate the enslaved people in his household out of Philadelphia, over to New Jersey, or back to Virginia, so that they would then have to return, reestablish residence, and the clock would start ticking again. And so I think that piece is a really fascinating way to lean into this fundamental founding contradiction about liberty and slavery and just see it playing out in the person of George Washington and see it playing out not in the places where we tend to think we go to find these stories, but in the city of Philadelphia itself. The second reason her story is interesting is that when the moment came for Washington, to end his second term as president, going back to Mount Vernon, and that meant a return to slavery for the people in his household. She decided she wasn't going to go.

And so she walked out the door. She fled. She ended up in New Hampshire. And Washington, for the few years that he lived beyond his presidency, tried very hard to get her back, to have her kidnapped and brought back to slavery in Mount Vernon. she ended up kind of evading that and living out a pretty difficult life. A lot of this comes from the work of a historian named Erica Armstrong Dunbar. And so we only have these little glimpses of what ONA Judge's life was like. But she too had to live out all the difficulties and controversies and contradictions of that moment.

And the last reason that I chose Ona Judge is that there is a historic site in Philadelphia called the President House, which is where Washington lived. We only have the foundations of it now. And for the last couple of decades, has been trying to tell ONA Judge's story, but it's one of the places that now is under enormous pressure from the Trump administration under federal policy. So they've had to strip down a lot of the displays that were once up.

And so that story is still in the heart of kind of controversy and conflict about this. important founding dilemma. I'm so glad that you introduced her to me. And what a great selection. This was an absolute blast. I am so glad that we did this. Just as a matter of review,

and hopefully for people who are watching on YouTube, we can put something up to remind people of the teams. But let's just review all of the selections, starting with Beverly. Most underrated president, Richard Nixon, most overrated American, Robert Kennedy, senior. most under-heralded but significant pivot point in American history, World War I, and who deserves to be a history star on a judge.

for H.W. Brands, most underrated president, George H.W. Bush, most overrated, the concept of generational narcissism, the pivotal event in American history, the declaratory act in other British political errors in the 1750s and 1760s, and finally deserving to be a history star, is the concept that most Americans are the descendants of immigrants under duress. And finally, we have Richard White, most underrated American president, Chester A. Arthur, most overrated American Andrew Carnegie, the pivot point in American history, the GI Bill Highway Act, and the great acceleration after World War II, and deserves to be a history star, Ticumse. These are rich teams, and I had so much fun talking to all of you and learning from history. So thank you all so much for doing this. I really, really appreciate it and happy fourth.