Welcome to the history of the Americans podcast, episode 25.

I'm your host, Jack Heneman.

And I'm recording this episode again, really early in the morning, on June 9, 2021 in Austin, Texas.

There's a lot of construction around our house, and it makes it impossible to get a clean recording.

So I've been getting up super early in the morning to do this before the men start showing up and grinding steel and running big machines up and down our street.

So anyway, that's why I do this early in the morning.

I'm defensive about it because I got a note that it sounded like I'd had a couple of drinks

before one of the episodes a couple weeks back. And it was exactly the opposite.

It was about five in the morning and I'm trying to get my voice limbered up before I get on and do this from now on.

So anyway, that's what's going on there. This episode is a sidebar, by which we mean a thematic

episode off our timeline. I'm in a busy stretch of paying work, the old struggle for the

legal tender and the immortal words of Jackson Brown,

and the sidebar episodes are much faster to pull together, so I'm going to use this one to take

stock, as it were. The history of the Americans is a labor of love and an entirely do-it-one-self endeavor.

So positive feedback is, in fact, very motivating.

Thank you all for listening and your reviews online and your supportive emails.

The volume of listeners has grown considerably faster than I had imagined and even hoped,

and that there have been well over 17,000 downloads and listens since I sent

around a first email to my friends in early February. Considering how scruffy the website is,

pretty good. Also motivating that I'm actually going to spend some coin on making the website

look at least semi-pro. Maybe I'll even

sell cool items like Cabezza de Vaca pint glasses. I sort of wanted to make one myself and I thought,

...