Audiobook 017 – Overview of Hagerty’s History

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speakers: Lorenzo's AI Friends PROGRAM NOTES: For twenty years Martin Creagh taught American history from the approved textbooks, and then one Fourth of July he sat down in his basement and began writing a different book. In the left column, he recorded what power actually did. In the right column, he wrote about ways in which the people responded. President by president, from Washington to the present, he sets the official record beside the one the textbook left out, and draws a line under each account the way a bookkeeper closes a ledger, because a country, he comes to believe, is not what it says at its ceremonies but what it does between them, and what it will not stop honoring, and what it will not start recording. This is that ledger. It is documentary fiction in the fullest sense, every massacre and every statute and every buried testimony drawn from historical records, gathered into the voice of one retired schoolteacher who has decided, late in life, that the first primary source a person must learn to distrust is his own memory. It is a history of the republic told in two columns and which refuses, at every turn, the comfort of a single verdict, because the whole method depends on understanding both. FREE PDF - HAGERTY's HISTORY