Show notes
Two hundred and fifty years ago this very day, a gallant-strolling cat named George Washington convened in Cambridge about as high a level Patriot meeting as you could muster: John Adams, two major generals, five brigadier generals, and arguably the most connected man among the Boston rebels, Joseph Warren. There, the commander in chief persuaded his War Council of the “indispensible necessity of making a Bold attempt” to kick the goddamned Redcoats out of Boston.
That plan, successfully executed seven weeks later, relied on three precursor acts of Yankee derring-do. Ranked in reverse chronological order, they were: 1) Henry Knox’s noble train of artillery, moving 60 tons of British cannon & artillery 300 miles from Fort Ticonderoga to Boston; 2) the rebel capture of Fort Ticonderoga before that, by Benedict Arnold, Ethan Allen, and the Soggy Bottom Green Mountain Boys; and 3) the legendary, gunpowder-saving, militia-rallying warning from arguably the second most connected man in revolutionary Beantown, Paul Revere. Who probably wasn’t invited to the War Council meeting because ... he wasn’t a gentleman.
I first learned about how strangely underrated and quintessentially American Paul Revere was last April by listening to a couple of sidebar episodes of Jack Henneman’s great The History of the Americans podcast. Henneman, not just a listener of The Fifth Column but a Never Fly Coacher, had to kind of cheat to do the Revere episodes, because his pod, which just celebrated its five-year anniversary, goes so meticulously through the timeline of “vast early America” that his most recent episode still only gets us to the 1680s. (Not that I’m there yet; this truly is a podcast you want to start from the beginning.)
We’re honored to have Jack for our second installment of The Revolutionaries miniseries; to talk both about Paul Revere and also his own fascinating backstory of how a successful “corporate tool” ends up doing the Mother of All retirement/Covid-madness projects, and why he’s so mad about “presentism.” Enjoy!
* The voice that puts me to sleep
* “In September of 2020, we were all still more or less losing our minds”
* England has one, why don’t we?
* Blue highways, dive bars: See America, people!
* Presentism: Bad, corrupting, cheap, boring
* “You will develop a real humility about how you look at the world that you live in”
* The insane story of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca
* Paul Revere, with or without the Raiders
* “Every red-blooded American should read” David Hackett Fischer’s Paul Revere’s Ride
* “This almost uniquely early-American American”
* An artisan is not a gentleman
* Cock-blocked by George W.
* The “walking LinkedIn guy” of rebel Boston
* A “lower talk-to-do ratio”
* Thomas Gage was actually kinda lenient?
* Dude’s on horseback
* Tattooed on Moynihan’s broken nose
* The powder alarms
* Whigs almost flipped
* “Some of the ethnic mix that gives Boston that reputation came subsequently to 1775, okay?”
* That amazing (and presentist!) poem
* “How Longfellow Woke the Dead”
* He “really hated politics, but he also hated slavery”
* “It presented Revere’s ride as an individual effort act of individual heroism. And it really wasn’t. The remarkable thing about it was quite the opposite.”
* Brown Beauty, “one of the great equine heroes in American history”
* Sorry, William Dawes fanboys
* “I don’t mean to mock anyone’s ancestry, but.…”
* Important junk in that trunk
* Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus, by Samuel Elliot Morrison
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